BARACK OBAMA has said he will try to forge a “model partnership” with Turkey that could serve as a template for the West’s relationship with the Islamic world.
During his first visit yesterday to a predominantly Muslim country as US president, Mr Obama said: “America’s relationship with the Muslim world cannot and will not just be based on opposition to al-Qaeda.”
He told lawmakers and dignitaries in Turkey’s parliament in Ankara: “We seek broad engagement based upon mutual interests and mutual respect.” The United States, he added, “is not, and never will be, at war with Islam”.
Repeatedly applauded, the US president’s words came as a balm to many in this secular Muslim country whose long-standing strategic relations with Washington have been buffeted in recent years.
Staunchly opposed from the start to the US-led war in Iraq, Turks have been dismayed by what they perceived as the divisive regional policy of the Bush administration.
Mr Obama’s two-day visit, which ends an eight-day tour of Europe, appears to have papered over many of the cracks.
“We had become used to the jargon of ‘either you are with us or against us’,” said Murat Mercan, head of the parliamentary foreign relations committee and a deputy with the Islamic-rooted AK Party that has ruled Turkey since 2002.
“In the sense that he dispensed with that, Obama’s speech marks a very important turning point.”
Yet, while Mr Obama’s comments about Islam were perhaps the most striking aspect of his speech, he also made gestures to Turkey’s secular heritage.
Writing in the guest book at the mausoleum of Turkey’s revered founder, he praised Kemal Ataturk’s “vision of Turkey as a modern and prosperous democracy”. His description of the US as a “mainly Christian country” built around a secular concept of citizenship was roundly applauded by secular deputies and military officials listening to his speech.
“The Bush administration tended to put emphasis on only one aspect of Turkey’s identity – its role as a model Muslim democracy,” said Murat Yetkin, Ankara bureau chief for the liberal secular daily Radikal. “Obama appears to have a more rounded, realistic view of Turkey – secular, Muslim, an economic power, ethnically diverse.”
Given a hero’s welcome earlier on in his European tour, Mr Obama faced more muted responses from the Turkish public.
While anti-American demonstrations were few – limited to small groups of left-wingers in Ankara and Istanbul – many ordinary Turks seemed decidedly unaffected by analysts’ talk of a historic affirmation by Washington of Ankara’s growing regional clout.
“Turkey is one of the few countries where you don’t have Obama-mania,” said Sinan Ulgen, a foreign policy expert at the think- tank Istanbul Economics.
He puts Turkish scepticism of the new president down to promises he has made to recognise the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire as genocide.
At a joint news conference with President Abdullah Gul yesterday morning, Mr Obama sidestepped the issue, emphasising instead increasingly cordial relations between Turkey and Armenia.
“If they can move forward and deal with a difficult and tragic history, I think the whole world will encourage them,” he said. An uneasy silence fell over parliament later when he cast an implicit comparison between the fate of the Armenians and the US’s Native Americans.
Many analysts think one of the key policy issues discussed behind the scenes during Mr Obama’s visit was Afghanistan.