Turkey Jerky

Since the outbreak of the Gezi Park protests, which began in May 2013, there has been an inordinate amount of commentary in the newspapers of record, opinion magazines, policy journals, and blogs about Turkey. The vast majority of it has been overwhelmingly negative. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have responded in a fairly typical fashion: They have sought to mint nationalist political gold from this bad press. In a calculated effort to derive the most political benefit from a cascade of critical editorials and articles, the Turkish government has vowed to fight what it considers to be an international smear campaign. The Turks deserve a lot of criticism, but to be fair, there is also a good deal of it that is either the result of malign intent or ignorance.

In the interest of good analysis, it is important to understand the issues about which the Turks can be fairly criticized and those where assailing them does not make a lot of sense.

Let’s begin with the topics about which it is acceptable to criticize Turkey:

All that said, it is not acceptable to criticize Turkey for the following:

No doubt I am missing some reasons to criticize Turkey and I have probably left out reasons to refrain from assailing Erdogan. Still, readers get the idea. The Turkish government has proven to be a problem in a variety of areas, let’s be clear about what they are.