The reality of Erdoğan in Turkey and Kurdish peace


An example about the collapse of the Soviet Union is frequently given:People would fly from Moscow to Kiev for 10 rubles, yet they had to wait for a month to have their tap repaired as small private property and job holding were banned. Even plumbing was controlled by the state. Here is what has happened in Turkey since 2010: People can fly from Istanbul to Diyarbakır for $25, and they can call a plumber who has come back from military service in good health thanks to the reconciliation process and opened up a plumbing shop in the neighborhood.In particular, as of 2013, Turkey started to give signs of having adopted a new economic policy, which was actually brought about by the lack of a new stand-by agreement with the IMF in 2008 and the Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) Action Plan. The government transferred $25 billion in the first stage thanks to the GAP Action Plan to the region where the skirmishes and a low-intensity war lasted for years.One of the biggest political targets of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Kurdish peace is based on the restructuring of GAP, which was in fact an old project from the 1970s. However, governments of that period, especially the military, made GAP investments just to control the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and thus use them as a trump card against neighboring countries. Of course, the production-consumption relations in the region in that period were of a semi-feudal nature, and the investments served the feudal landowners who are called "Agha" in Turkish.This situation created the basis of the Kurdish revolt in the 1980s. Erdoğan's government, after getting rid of the IMF pressure on it, targeted changing this distorted socio-economic structure in Kurdish cities. To that end, every city was equipped with a state university; thus, there would be no cities without a university.University medical faculties were converted to well-equipped public hospitals to provide health services for the local people. Until recently, roads would be blocked by snow in those cities, and pregnant women would bleed to death. Apart from that, social projects were brought to life with the cooperation of universities and nongovernmental organizations in order to provide permanent jobs and occupations to unemployed youth, primarily women.Especially since 2008, Turkey has transferred a huge amount from the budget to this area. As a matter of fact, it was not a random political act that Erdoğan made with an eye to being elected. This meant getting away from the impoverishing fascist governance based on a single race, which had generated regional inequalities in development since the foundation of the republic. Turkey started to come out of the dark tunnel of Kemalism for the first time with these investments in Kurdish cities.Some circles that enthusiastically support the idea that the neo-liberal paradigm is indispensable in the West for their self-interest, immediately recognized this new and original development. They started to ask, "Where is Turkey heading with Erdoğan?" In fact, they named it "Erdoganomics." Undoubtedly, when this axis shift was combined with the new foreign policy approach established by Ahmet Davutoğlu, Tea Party circles and Republicans in the U.S., Germany's conventional capital in pursuit of the fourth Reich and of course trillions of dollars in funds and banking capitals that manage the dirty finance of the played out military-industrial block in London are now developing a strong opposition against Erdoğan.Let me underline this fact: Today a new process of market sharing has started in the world just as in the period after the Great Depression in 1929. However, this process is not between the West and the West like before World War II, rather it is between the West and the East. It is obvious from global growth trends. Export-dense growth in countries has been on the rise since the end of 2012, and growth in developing countries has been on a downward trend since 2010. The most significant reason for this is that Asian countries, especially China, ended growth based only on exports, trade surpluses and financing the West with these surpluses and have entered a new phase that also gives importance to the internal economy.Therefore, the decline in growth is temporary.A qualified high rate of growth will prevail again in Asia. Yet, the situation of the EU is much worse than thought. Unemployment in the Eurozone is rising more rapidly than in England and the U.S. Under such circumstances, we have to take the signals of expanding from the European Central Bank seriously.If this happens, countries like Turkey will have many significant advantages.In the U.S., as Fed chairman Janet Yellen remarked, there is no strong recovery in conventional sectors that is able to reestablish the situation that existed before the crisis.The employment curve shows a downward trend, and the reason for this is the condition of conventional sectors like automotive and construction. Human capital mobility-input in developed countries, including the U.S., is very dense because of the southern and eastern countries. It develops hand in hand with the unlimited leap in technology and the equalization of education. Until very recently, we theoretically determined this and envisaged such a development; yet, we can now observe it in employment graphics. All in all, growth both in strategically developing countries like Turkey and the world may end up being much higher than expected. Developed countries and now the developing ones have to accept leaders like Erdoğan whether they like it or not.