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Turkey could’ve been prosperous
by Scott Gilbreath ~ November 17th, 2008
Turkish academics maintain that Turkey would now be a prosperous member of the European Union if only the Greeks had not been forced out and the Armenians killed in the early 20th century. A public argument has broken out after Defence Minister Vecdi Gönül defended the expulsions of Greeks and Armenians.
Gönül’s remarks defending the deportations of Greeks and Armenians from Anatolia at the beginning of the 20th century have been met with harsh criticism from intellectuals and civil society organizations. Some academics, such as Professor Doğu Ergil, a Sunday’s Zaman writer, have argued that if these ethnic groups were still living in Turkey people, like Gönül could never become state ministers.
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Academics such as Soli Özel, Ferhat Kentel, Baskın Oran and Ayhan Aktar stress that if the minorities had not been expelled, Turkey would be a different place in terms of the Kurdish question, the economy and secularism.Aktar says there were two nations that eradicated their own bourgeoisie, the Russians in the 1917 revolution and the Turks, first by killing them and second by exchanging them. “This means that during the 1923-1934 period the bourgeoisie was liquidated. It was not possible to reach the export level of the Ottomans until 1928. Then there was the 1929 crisis, which introduced statism to Turkey,” he says.
According to Kentel, statism created the bureaucracy and the new capitalist segment supported by it got richer but, because they didn’t know how to invest, they fed off of the resources of the state. This attitude brought all kinds of evils: corruption, a tolerance for mafia-style business and the legitimization of all types of immoral trade rules.
Oran stressed that the ability to invest, produce, export and find markets totally disappeared in 1915 and 1923.
The academics argue that Turkey’s industrial economy needed over 50 years to recover from damage caused by the deportations, while the country’s cultural environment has suffered permanent harm.
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November 19th, 2008 at 06:13 PM
[...] JUST ANOTHER semi-failed state: Turkey could’ve been prosperous– “Turkish academics maintain that [...]