Norman Stone

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The aggressiveness of Turkish foreign policy is something new. It goes back to 2009 when, at Davos, President Erdoğan insulted Shimon Peres, then Israel’s president, using the Turkish form of “you” that is normally used for dogs, and accusing him of atrocities in Gaza. That went down very well with his home constituency, less well with Turks who think about things, and it also went down well in the Arab world.

Erdoğan was lionised, and cut a big figure in the Arab spring that followed. In particular he tried to bring about change in Syria, and was much put out when President Assad did not respond to his urgings for reform, a reform that would have applied some version of Erdoğan’s own “Muslim democracy”.…  Seguir leyendo »

The best thing said about the Armenian tragedy was a sermon delivered in the main church in Constantinople in 1894, more than 20 years before it happened. Patriarch Ashikyan had this to say: “We have lived with the Turks for a thousand years, have greatly flourished, are nowhere in this empire in a majority of the population. If the nationalists go on like this [they had started a terrorist campaign] they will ruin the nation.”

That Patriarch was quite right, and the nationalists shot him (and many other notables who were saying the same thing).

Now a US Congressional committee has had its say, by voting to recognise as “genocide” the mass killing of Armenians by Turkish forces that began in 1915, during the First World War.…  Seguir leyendo »

Vladimir Putin's victory in the Duma elections on Sunday was widely foreseen, but the result has been grudgingly received in the West. The official election-observing worthies wagged their fingers: there were rumours of ballot-stuffing, or of intimidation in workplaces, and they complained that the Russian media had presented an almost uniformly glowing report of the Government for weeks before the elections. No doubt there are elements of truth in this.

A Russian electorate is still rather a strange animal, a hybrid of old and new. In the old Soviet days, elections were an excuse for a party - an event in some provincial, dead place.…  Seguir leyendo »