The ? new ? constitution for Turkey moves the majority of power to the President. The legislature is subject to the President's review.
The idea the constitution can be changed by a mere majority is not conducive to legitimacy.
In order to congratulate such a drastic change in a country's constitution is to know and understand and consent to all it intends. I sincerely don't believe Mr. Trump understands what occurred here.
April 19, 2017
Rachael Revesz
Official cited inadequate legal framework and late changes in ballot counting (click here)
The referendum in Turkey did not live up to standards set by the Council of Europe, according to a representative from the European human rights organisation’s observer mission.
Officials pointed to an inadequate legal framework and last-minute changes in counting the ballots, as well as a "skewed pre-vote campaign" in favour of the "yes" vote and intimidation of the opposition.
The remark followed 51.4 per cent of Turks voting in favour of changing their constitution and granting President Tayyip Erdogan sweeping new powers, including re-introducing the death penalty and personally appointing ministers and half of the judicial body...
It is so ironic. Turkey's history paints an interesting picture, from one Sultan to another. (click here)
Turkey fears it's diversity and the possibility of power falling into the hands of those who would remove the democracy. I think that is why Erogan is being crowned with this new constitution. The process is flawed and the vote is flawed, the new constitution (which Mr. Trump probably admires) is dangerously unstable.
Turkish nationalists (click here) insist everyone in their country is a Turk whether they like it and admit it or not. The Kurds, according to them, are not a separate people. Rather, they are “mountain Turks who lost their language.” But Turkish nationalism, like Arab nationalism, scarcely existed until the waning days of the Ottoman Empire, which expired at the end of World War I. And the truth is that Turkey, as the rump state of that multi-ethnic empire, is a mélange of different identities. With its Kurdish, Arab, Zaza, and Alevi minorities, it’s no more homogeneous than the rump state of the Soviet empire with the Tatars, Ingush, Sakha, Chechens, and other large numbers of non-Russian peoples on its periphery.
When Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic in the ashes of World War I, Turkish nationalists attempted to unite everybody under a single identity for the sake of national unity and to prevent any more territorial loss, but the Kurds refused to join up because the Western powers had promised them a state of their own. To this day, they remain the largest stateless people on earth. Many feel far more kinship with their fellow Kurds in Iran, Iraq, and Syria than with their nominal countrymen in Turkey....
The Ottoman Empire was loosely confederated, with a space for the Kurds, but modern Turkey was founded as a strong Western-style republic with a powerful center, and the Kurds were forcibly conquered, colonized, and integrated.
The government’s response to Kurdish nationalism was tantamount to attempted cultural genocide. Ethnic Kurds were forcibly relocated from the eastern parts of the country, while European Turks were moved to the Kurdish region in the farthest reaches of Anatolia. Even speaking the Kurdish language was forbidden in schools, government offices, and in public places until 1991. Simply saying “I am a Kurd” in Kurdish was a crime, and it’s still considered scandalous in official settings. In 2009, a Kurdish politician created a huge controversy by speaking just a few words of Kurdish in the nation’s Parliament building.
Despite the fervor of this repression, Turkey’s problem with its Kurdish minority is more political than ethnic....
...Most of the dead are Kurdish. The Turkish military dished out unspeakable punishment in the east of the country. Nine years ago, I drove from Istanbul to northern Iraq and was shocked to discover that Iraqi Kurdistan is a vastly more prosperous and pleasant place than bombed-out and repressed Turkish Kurdistan....
From mid-2013 to mid-2015, the Turkish state and the PKK enjoyed a period of relative calm under a cease-fire, but in late July the army bombed PKK positions in northern Iraq, and the PKK in Turkey declared the cease-fire void....
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...The Turkish establishment has been alarmed by the existence of an autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq since the day it was founded and has repeatedly threatened to invade if it declares independence from Baghdad. (That may be the only reason the Iraqi Kurds haven’t yet done it.) And it’s doubly alarmed now that the Kurds of Syria have cobbled together their own autonomous region, which they call Rojava, while the Arabs of Syria fight a devastating civil war with each other....
...Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—like most of his ethnic Turkish countrymen—is terrified that an independent Syrian Kurdistan will help Turkish Kurdistan wage a revolutionary war against Ankara...
