By Gareth H. Jenkins (vol. 5, no. 11 of the Turkey Analyst)

On May 12, 2012, Istanbul rivals Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray played out a goalless draw in the final match of the Turkish 2011-2102 soccer season, handing the national championship to Galatasaray. After the match, Fenerbahçe fans took to streets and to social networking media such as Twitter to protest that they had been robbed. Much of their ire was directed at the Gülen Movement, the followers of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, who has been living in exile in Pennsylvania in the U.S. since 1999. It was the Gülen Movement, they claimed, that was behind a massive investigation into match-fixing first launched in July 2011 that had been primarily directed primarily at Fenerbahçe, severely disrupting its on-field and off-field activities and resulting in club chair, Aziz Yıldırım, spending the entire season behind bars.

By Osman Ulagay (vol. 5, no. 11 of the Turkey Analyst) 

Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is demonstrating an unwillingness to leave any room in society – be it in the public administration, in the universities, or in the business world, to those who are not its supporters. Although the AKP enjoys broad support, religiously inspired social conservatism nonetheless alienates a substantial part of society, provoking  serious tensions in the process. One could thus argue that Turkey is approaching a critical moment.  What Turkey needs at this critical juncture is a political alternative that transcends the divides of society and seeks to reconcile differences instead of exacerbating them.  

By Richard Weitz (vol. 5, no. 10 of the Turkey Analyst)

Relations between the governments of Iraq and Turkey continue to deteriorate. For now the animosities remain primarily personal, with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki engaged in a vicious feud with both Iraqi and Turkish leaders he considers his enemies. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and other Turkish officials have focused their criticisms on the Iraqi Prime Minister, and have sought to uphold the rights of Iraqi Kurds and Iraqi Sunnis without antagonizing Iraq’s Shiites. But these personal tensions reflect real differences between Ankara and Baghdad over the need for democratic governments in Iraq and Syria. And these divergences are in turn reinforced by ethnic and sectarian tensions as well as a competition between latent neo-Ottoman tendencies and Iranian ambitions to fill the vacuum created by the power vacuum in the Middle East resulting from the Western withdrawal and Egyptian paralysis.