President Barack Obama and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hold a press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House, 2013. Wikicommons/Chuck Kennedy. Some rights reserved. In 2009, Obama’s first trip as president to a Muslim country was to Turkey. Washington kept talking about a “Turkish model” of Islamist democracy with huge potential for setting up an example for the Middle East. After six years of despotic rule, Turkey is now far from being a model for anything but a mélange of foreign policy failures, a hub of perpetual domestic unrest and ever-diminishing respect for its human rights record.
One would think this kind of deterioration would jeopardize Turkey’s EU bid. Disregarding European norms and values should have caused several blocks for Ankara’s road to EU, in theory. However, it’s more than obvious that Europe is desperate to make a deal to turn off the flood of migrants, and almost ready to sign off anything to make it happen.
Meanwhile, human rights abuses occur every day. These days, the name of the game is “insulting the president” and the last victim of that is Barış İnce, former editor of the leftist daily Birgün. İnce is sentenced to 21 months in prison while the newspaper Birgün is trying to deal with around 40 investigations. Pressure on the freedom of the press has been going on for so long that is basically normalized.
