Most European Union bureaucrats are still reeling from the bluster of Great Britain’s June 23 referendum to terminate its membership in the 28-state club.
But what the EU should really be worrying about is not London’s impending fare thee well, but rather the growing tyranny of its next door neighbor and wannabe member Turkey.
Since the attempted coup against his government on July 15, the already authoritarian Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has given himself a free license to ransack his own army by purging more than 9,000 officers and foot soldiers, depose of the last vestiges of law and order by firing 3,000, and totally revamp public education. (What’s that old saying? History is written by the victors, not the vanquished.)
He has also thrown over 30 journalists into prison and closed down media outlets that have dared to publish stories against him.
And now Erdoğan wants to nullify the country’s parliament by squelching its authority and giving himself even greater political powers.
Why does all this matter to Europe (besides the fact that any semblance of democracy has basically gone out the window in Turkey)?
Because with shackling of Turkey’s once-powerful military (it was the second-largest in NATO, with nearly 640,000 service personnel before Erdoğan began paring it down), Erdoğan has made sure that there is no political counterbalance to fundamental Islamism.
Since first coming to power in 2002, Erdoğan and his ruling Development and Justice Party (AKP) have bent over backwards to court fundamentalists with the construction of 17,000 new mosques and the refurbishing of several thousand others from the Ottoman era.
He has also lifted bans on the use of hijabs in schools and state institutions and encouraged education at Imam-Hatip schools, Turkey’s modern-day equivalent of madrasahs. (In 2002, there were 65,000 Imam-Hatip students; today there are 1 million.)
Moreover, religious education — basically the teachings of the Quran and the life of Muhammed — are now compulsory in all public and private schools.
The sale of alcohol is severely restricted (which may not necessarily be a bad thing), and Islamic banking institutions are edging out their Western counterparts, with the tacit blessing of Erdoğan.
In short, the stage is set for an Islamic religious regime in Turkey based on sharia law.
And Turkey’s military, which has in the past intervened when the nation’s politicians would start to stray from the secular state created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, is now hamstrung by Erdoğan and his merry religious cohorts.
Clearly, what Europe needs now is not a fundamentalist Islamic state on its doorsteps.
Erdoğan is banking on his leverage of the three million Iraqi and Syrian refugees that Turkey now shelters to keep Europe from interfering with his country’s Islamic transformation.
But the deal the European Union made with Turkey last March to stem the tide of refugees may soon sour and turn out to be a pact with the devil.
In addition to more than $3 billion a year to help support the misplaced Iraqis and Syrians, Europe promised to open its doors to Turks for visa-free travel within its territories.
That means that the Turks who flee the authoritarianism of Erdoğan and the AKP may lead to a surge in refugees to Europe, rather than an abatement.
Moreover, Erdoğan has openly warned that if Europe reneges on its side of the bargain, he will “unleash the refugees” he is now containing in his borders.
And if the European Union keeps its word to open its borders to 78 million Turks, it may face an even graver problem, since there have been countless incidences of fraudulent Turkish passports being handed over to Iranians, Iraqis and Syrian. (Just last September, a stash of 10,000 fake passports was discovered by Bulgarian authorities in the possession of a covert operative for the Islamic State. All of those passports were produced in Turkey.)
Right now, Erdoğan is milking the European refugee treaty for all he can get out of it, but the truth is that he is a megalomaniac who cannot be trusted and whose alliances historically have not been with the West.
The West needs to see Erdoğan for what he real is and stop pandering to his despotism before his tyranny gets too far out of hand to be reeled back in.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at therese.margolis@gmail.com.