Photographer offers glimpse into Lebanon’s paradise lost

By Harry van Versendaal

Two black IKEA-style chairs sitting empty on a balcony overlooking a bombarded apartment building, a black Mercedes, partly covered by a tablecloth in an empty lot next to a derelict building, a tangle of trees sprouting through the floorboards of a bullet-riddled church.

Demetris Koilalous does not pretend to be a documentary photographer. “My style of photography is intrinsically connected to the way I see the world. A beautiful landscape, for example, does not interest me — I don’t even lift my camera,” he says, sitting on the sofa of his colorful apartment in the northern Athens suburb of Halandri.

This jagged juxtaposition of the mundane with the war-torn is what the 50-year-old photographer seeks to bring out in his photo exhibition of present-day Lebanon currently on display at the Museum of Photography, located in a former warehouse designed by Eli Modiano in the northern port city of Thessaloniki and the only Greek institution exclusively dedicated to the medium.

Koilalous spent 18 hectic days last year in the Land of the Cedars on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He was on a photographic assignment commissioned by the museum which sent five professionals to the Middle East as part of a Greek Culture Ministry program. Featuring some 200 images shot in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Qatar, Lebanon, Palestine and Saudi Arabia, “Oriented and Disoriented in the Middle East,” will run through May 13.

Intrigued by the delicate balance found in Mideast societies, Koilalous went to Lebanon intentionally seeking out places that would illustrate a country on the brink — “a rather European preconception,” he admits. Carrying a Canon DSLR camera, he looked for places where battles took place, where massacres occurred, where people were driven out of their homes, places that formed the border between different minorities.

“At some point during the second day, I was in the center of Lebanon and I happened upon this church that was totally pockmarked by bullets; you know Beirut, it’s all cement, ruins, torn-down houses, rebuilt houses, there are really modern buildings and not much green at all. And so suddenly I see this incredible anarchic greenery. It was an old church, it didn’t have a roof, and when you walked inside it was like walking through a forest. And that’s when I remembered another photographer’s project called ’Paradise Lost.’ And it just kept going through my mind that there is a lost paradise over there. This country that’s living its very own anti-paradise,” he says, explaining the inspiration behind the somewhat awkward project title.

Conflict-prone Lebanon is split along sectarian lines that dictate not only politics but also living arrangements and standards of living. The 15-year civil war that ended in 1990 cost an estimated 150,000 lives while many more were wounded or displaced. Originally fought between Christian militias and leftists allied with the Palestinians, the conflict triggered a wide array of clashes as Syria, Israel and others stepped into the fray. Social peace remains fragile and contemporary events are so disputed that school history books stop at independence from France in 1943.

Understandably, time pressure was not the only problem Koilalous had to deal with. Security guards were constantly monitoring his movements and the photographs he was taking. He was armed with documents from the Greek Embassy in Lebanon, the Museum of Photography, and Greece’s Culture Ministry. He also had written permission from Lebanon’s Information Ministry, police force and military to take pictures in public spaces. But often he would find out these were not enough.

“There’s this hotel called the Monroe with a great view of the sea where I wanted to take a shot. So I showed them all my papers. The guy responds that the paper says I am allowed to take pictures inside Beirut but nothing about overhead shots,” he says, explaining that it was not army officials but private security guards that would give him the most trouble.

“If I were his cousin he would have let me in — just like in Greece. But because I took the legal route he wouldn’t let me. Some people find an excuse to exercise the little power they have left. A security guard trying to impose his own interpretation of a ministry document in order to legitimize his position.”

Born in Athens in 1962, Koilalous initially studied urban planning in Edinburgh and geography at the London School of Economics before gravitating to photography. It was only after he started to teach the craft about 10 years ago, he says, that he began to take good photographs. First noticed thanks to the dreamlike quality of the black-and-white panoramic landscapes of “Deja vu,” showcased in the 2008 PhotoBiennale, Koilalous has steadily evolved with more sharply focused work. His open-ended “Growth” project, a rather lyrical commentary on the changing landscape along Greece’s national highways, has shown him to be a good master of color and symbolism.

Koilalous keeps no secret of his wide range of influences — from the activist photojournalism of Sebastiao Salgado and the iconic images of Magnum master Josef Koudelka, to outsider photographer Diane Arbus and Joel-Peter Witkin, to Andreas Gursky and Thomas Struth of the Dusseldorf school. “It’s a lot of contrary things. But I gradually came to appreciate the simplicity of photographers like [Andre] Kertesz.”

However, as his experience working as a teacher has shown him, no amount of quality influences and hard work can match a generous dose of talent. “The outcome is a matter of hard work, but instinct is a question of talent. There are people out there who can see through walls. It’s incredible. Some things can be cultivated, particularly some stereotypes — but instinct cannot.”

Skeptics often complain that contemporary art, particularly its conceptual genre, has lowered the bar to the point where actual talent is made redundant. If you want to succeed, the argument goes, make sure you have good market connections. The argument seems to strike a rather emotional chord with Koilalous, who is ready to defend his more conceptual counterparts.

“I am not denying the fact that the market defines things to a certain extent, but it’s bulls**t to say that art is determined by curators. The price of an artwork is one thing, its value however is quite another. It’s good that a photograph can sell for a lot of money. The more people want a photograph, the more its price will rise. Something that nobody wants to buy will never sell,” he says before going on to deconstruct a couple of Gursky photos from a Dusseldorf school photo book.

The German artist’s “Rhine II,” a picture of the gray river under gray skies, last year fetched a record 4.3 million dollars at a Christie’s auction in New York. The image, described by Gursky as “an allegorical picture about the meaning of life and how things are,” was digitally manipulated to leave out elements that bothered him. Many found the photo “overrated.” Writing for the Guardian, Maev Kennedy called it a ”sludgy image of desolate, featureless landscape.”

“It’s immature to say that Gursky, whose works hang in MoMa, Berlin and the Tate Modern, is a creation of marketing. Only someone with an inferiority complex would claim that.”

It’s not easy being a pioneer. If you want to use photography to talk about new things, Koilalous suggests, you have to overcome the huge obstacle that is reality. As a photographer who is an artist, you have to make use of what is commonly perceived as reality and illustrate it in a subjective way, but still communicate it to the audience, he says. “This is an important part in photography that you need to get used to.”

One of the “anti-paradise” pictures depicts a pair of empty armchairs flanking a little round table with decorative objects — including a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle. His intent, Koilalous explains, was not a comment on religiosity or kitsch, but rather an allegory on the absence of dialogue in the divided country. “This is what I am trying to say. I am not sure if this will resonate with the audience at all. But I want my images to make people think twice.”

Gas deposits fuel old and new rivalries

By Harry van Versendaal

Things have never been too tranquil in this corner of the Mediterranean, and the recent discovery of large deposits of gas beneath the waters off Israel and Cyprus hasn’t made things any easier.

You can almost hear the tectonic plates of regional politics shifting — and Nicosia’s recent decision to drill for hydrocarbons off the divided island’s southern coast has only accelerated the process.

Ankara’s once-hyped “zero-problems” policy with its neighbors these days sounds more like a bad joke as Turkey’s warnings for retaliation against Cyprus and Greece keep coming thick and fast. The dispute has meanwhile deepened Turkey’s rift with Israel, once a close economic and military partner.

Turkey, which does not recognize the Republic of Cyprus in the island’s south, opposes any drilling, insisting the profits from any discoveries must be distributed between the two communities on the island. But Ankara — which alone recognizes the breakaway state established in the north following the Turkish invasion of 1974 in response a Greek-backed military coup — will hardly find any support for its argument away from home.

“If we are talking from a strictly UN legal point of view, the arguments of an occupying country should not count much,” Burak Bekdil, a columnist for the Hurriyet Daily News, told Kathimerini English Edition.

Cyprus has signed an agreement with Egypt and Israel to delineate exclusive economic zones so that the neighboring states can exploit any hydrocarbon deposits within their boundaries. Block 12, the area said to contain the reserves, lies within Cyprus’s exclusive economic zone.

“Even according to Turkey’s logic, there is absolutely no legal basis [for opposing the drilling],” political analyst Stavros Lygeros said.

Noble Energy, a Texas-based company, launched the drilling work this week. Turkey responded with a warning that unless Cyprus halted the project, it would send warships to protect its claims to undersea resources in the area. This was the latest in a series of rough-edged statements that have gone as far as to suggest that Turkey will resort to military action to defend its cause.

Most analysts have downplayed the Turkish warnings as formulaic chest-thumping designed to scare off potential foreign investors (in a not-so-well-disguised attempt at blackmail, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Wednesday threatened to blacklist any international oil and gas firms that chose to work on the new Cypriot project) and prop up its image as top dog in the region.

“Turkey will try more to maintain an assertive posture for domestic consumption rather than really try to block the drilling. Physically, harassment may be possible, but intervention with the aim of prevention is not,” Bekdil said.

“I would rather expect a lot of retaliatory moves from Ankara which, in a way, would be a sign of its inability to block the Cypriot drilling,” he added.

After signing a continental shelf pact with the breakaway state so as to conduct drills of its own earlier this week, Turkey on Thursday announced that Piri Reis, a research ship, would leave for gas exploration off Cyprus on Friday. But a senior US official who wished to remain anonymous told Kathimerini that Erdogan assured US President Barack Obama that Ankara has no intention of escalating the situation further.

Hugh Pope, an Istanbul-based expert with the International Crisis Group think tank, also doubts that the tiff will escalate into an actual clash.

“You will observe that Turkey is making its point with military support for its activities in what are effectively Turkish-Cypriot waters — that is, a place where the Turkish armed forces have worked unimpeded for 37 years,” he said.

Turkey is pretty much on its own as the EU (keen to minimize dependence on Russian gas), the US and Russia have all given Nicosia the go-ahead with the drilling. But it may still take action to defend its status as nascent hegemon in the Muslim world — especially since Israel, its newfound antagonist, is part of the equation.

Israel’s relations with Turkey — once its sixth-largest trading partner — have soured as Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted administration has opted to sacrifice the longstanding alliance with the Jewish state for the sake of brandishing Turkey’s image as the primus inter pares in the Arab world. (Much to Washington’s dismay, the Arab Spring seems to have taken a toll on another strategic partnership — that between Israel and Egypt.)

Earlier this month, Turkey expelled the Israeli ambassador after Tel Aviv refused to apologize for last year’s Gaza flotilla incident that resulted in the death of nine Turkish citizens. Ankara said it would send naval vessels to escort any future aid envoy.

“The ‘zero-problems’ policy has officially collapsed after tension with Syria, Iran, Iraqi Kurdistan, Greece, Cyprus and Israel. Now the Egypt link will flourish for some time, like the Syrian link did once, and it too will collapse,” Bekdil said.

“This volatile region has not spent the last two millennia waiting for [Ahmet] Davutoglu to bring peace. He is a dreamer,” Bekdil said of Turkey’s ambitious foreign minister who likes to see Turkey as the natural heir to the Ottoman Empire that once united the Arab world.

Bekdil nevertheless thinks Ankara will maintain its assertive stance for two reasons: “There is Turkish and Arab demand for that; and Erdogan and Davutoglu see Turkey in a self-aggrandizing mirror,” he said.

Tel Aviv turnabout

Athens has sought to capitalize on the Turkish turnabout and, in a sign of shifting loyalties — and in stark contrast to the late Andreas Papandreou’s pro-Arab legacy — it prevented a fresh group of Gaza activists from sailing from the Greek coast earlier this year.

Greece, says Lygeros, is naturally adapting to geopolitical developments — and to Cyprus’s interests — meaning that support for Palestine is now on the back burner. “After all, no matter how hard it tries, Greece could never be a match for Turkey in the Arab world,” Lygeros said.

Israel has its own reasons to go Greek. From a geopolitical perspective, the Athens-Nicosia route is now the only politically safe and culturally friendly passage to the West. Greece and Cyprus are secular democracies and members of the European Union at a time when reluctance among Europeans to take Turkey on board is soaring.

A closer relationship with the Jewish state comes with an economic reward. For natural gas to be shipped to the West in a cost-effective manner, it has to be condensed to a liquid. Cyprus seems a safe alternative to the Israeli coast, which lies within range of Hamas rockets. An Israeli energy company has reportedly offered Nicosia a deal to build a facility on the island for processing and exporting natural gas.

Greek Cypriots, who recently saw an explosion knock out the island’s main power station, are naturally tempted by the idea of becoming a regional hub for exporting natural gas.

“At the same time, a closer alliance with Israel will allow Cyprus to avoid some of Turkey’s bullying,” Lygeros said.

‘Nail in the coffin’

Recent developments will unavoidably impact on peace negotiations on the island which the UN would — rather optimistically — like to wrap up by mid-2012, when Cyprus takes the helm of the EU’s rotating presidency.

“It is a near nail in the coffin for reunification talks,” Bekdli said of the energy-related squabble, although he admits realpolitik may dictate new parameters next year.

Turning the argument on its head, Pope says the drilling episodes show how the gradual seizing up of the talks is leading to deeper tendencies of divergence between the two communities.

“If the two sides do not choose to work for reunification, the alternative will be a slide towards partition, and while both sides can live with this trend, the long-term costs could be greater than any riches from the seabed,” Pope said.

A fuming Erdogan on Wednesday slammed the drilling as a “sabotage” of the negotiating process.

Bekdil choses to remain cynical. “I never believed Erdogan et al genuinely wanted reunification. They faked, knowing they could deceive a willing chorus of Greeks and EU optimists,” he said.

Fruit of conflict

By Harry van Versendaal

It’s easy to tell Eyal Sivan likes his craft and that he put lots of heart into it. Sipping coffee and puffing on a roll-up cigarette on top of the hotel’s roof terrace on a sunny Saturday morning, the Israeli filmmaker, a gray curly-haired man in his late forties with a heavy accent that contains traces of French, looks more like a Left Bank intellectual as he chats away about politics, philosophy and his latest project.

Not for the first time, Sivan has made a controversial film. “Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork,” a feature-length documentary looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the history of the fabled citrus fruit. Drawing on a huge wealth of material including archive footage, paintings, posters and poems, Sivan tries to deconstruct the history of Jaffa the orange, Jaffa the brand, Jaffa the city and, eventually, of Israel itself – a history which, he claims, is a one of expropriation.

Sivan, who these days shares his time between London and Paris, traveled to Greece for the screening of his movie at the “Middle East” section of the 13th Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Speaking to Kathimerini English Edition, the director talked about capitalism, Stanley Kubrick and why Israel “is one of the biggest advertizing successes in the world.”

I asked a couple of colleagues “what is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear ‘jaffa orange’? And they both said: ‘Israel’. Would you say it’s a sign of the effectiveness of Israel’s spin machine, as it were?

It’s more than a spin machine. It confirms the fact that Israeli colonialism in fact succeeded. It’s not just colonialism of the land, it is colonialism of mentalities. It is also colonialism of mentality, of image. The big success was to erase the memory of Palestine. And it’s more than spin. It’s a whole ideology, an effort, an investment on many levels to transform Palestine and the image of Palestine into what became Israel and to erase Palestine and the memory of Palestine. So, yes, it’s a big success and it’s one of the biggest advertising successes in the world maybe after Coca Cola.

You describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a ‘colonial’ conflict.

Yes, because first of all we are talking about an immigrants’ movement that comes and takes the land from an indigenous society – and it does so in order to create something that is not genuine from that place; in order to create a European country in the Middle East. And in this sense it’s a colonial conflict because the conflict is not just about how much land I will have but it’s also about the fact that we are talking about an occupation – an ongoing occupation and an ongoing process of ethnic cleansing of the land.

Your movie draws heavily on archive footage, paintings, posters, songs, even poetry which suggests a strong interest in the power of imagery and metaphor. Is politics the management of symbols?

Politics is about how you imagine transformation, how you imagine management. Image is by definition a tool of the imaginary. I think it’s interesting in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that Zionism and the moving image are born basically at the same time, so there is a very tight link. If there is something that characterizes modernity it’s the moving image. Zionism is a modern movement and modern politics deals not only with symbols but also with the recreation of an image. In this sense, Israel is at the forefront.

In terms of reading and rereading the past and reconstructing it in the present?

Yes, I would say even by reading, rereading and erasing the past in order to allow the establishment of a new image that comes to erase the older one. This is what image is about. Image is about hiding; not about showing. Image has a frame, and the frame is hiding more than it is showing. It’s a permanent game about hiding, showing, hiding again and so on. This is the dynamic.

Your views do not sound very mainstream – not by Israeli standards, at least.

If you think about the history of the twentieth century, horror came from the mainstream, not from the extreme.

Did you have problems making your documentary?

I shot most of my films in the past in Israel or in Palestine but I never had any Israeli support, nor did I ask for any Israeli support. Sometimes you have to avoid what other people want to give you because of their interests. But in the case of the Jaffa project, because I was living in Israel at the time, and it’s a project that started with an Israeli producer who is a friend so we decided to apply for a grant in Israel, which I got. But it was canceled because of a campaign that was started by a journalist from a popular newspaper. More than that it was a kind of blasphemy and a campaign against me and against the project, which did not allow the Israeli people to see the film as a film but only to watch it through what was already said about it.

What was the reason you picked this specific topic?

I read an article in the 1990s about the privatization of Jaffa oranges. Until the 1990s they were controlled by the Israeli citrus board which was a government agency but after the Oslo agreements, there was a move to privatize different elements of the state and the economy. I read this article about the privatization of Jaffa and I thought that it was a fantastic metaphor about this idea of taking a national symbol and transforming it into a product. But there is one more reason. One of the key things in documentary cinema is to find the structuring device of the film. So you have a lot of films that deal with a main character or with a space and so on. I thought that the orange is a fantastic structuring device. It can play as a permanent metaphorical element.

Why did you choose to invert the title of Stanley Kubrick’s famous film “A Clockwork Orange” to provide the title for your documentary?

For years we were working on the project under the title “Jaffa, Story of a Brand.” While editing, my editor of 15 years said that the whole thing was in fact about the mechanics of the orange. In French Kubrick’s title is “Orange Mecanique” – mechanical orange, and this is what my film tries to do: to dismantle the image, watching it again, showing it to people, analyzing and dismantling the process. Meanwhile, I was also thinking about Walter Benjamin’s ideas on the mechanical duplication of the image found in his famous article about photography. So by translating it into English it became the inversion of Kubrick’s title. We are talking about the mechanics of violence using image – so I found it just perfect.

How has the movie been received so far in Israel and outside?

The movie has been beautifully received. But that does not mean that we can sell it to television networks. Even for European channels, it’s a controversial film. Sure, many films critical of Israel are shown but they usually don’t ask this deep rooted question about colonialism. Which is not an Israeli question, it’s a European question. The film is a lot about how Europe built the image of Palestine through image. The film is all over the world in festivals and in some countries, like France, Germany and Belgium, it was released in cinemas. It’s a surprise to many people of course. Jaffa is a well-known brand. People in countries like the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries are familiar with Jaffa oranges but suddenly discover that behind this innocent thing, which is the nice, sweet orange that comes from the sun, there is a history of expropriation. It can be quite a shock. Many people don’t know that Jaffa oranges are in fact Palestinian. In Israel the film got a few specific screenings, and it was shown on a cable documentary channel.

You have said that you don’t believe in “objective” films – a rather controversial statement for many documakers, at least. I mean, many may actually admit that they cannot achieve it, but this is the goal they are striving for. Can you elaborate on this?

If the goal is to make objective documentary, I don’t understand why make documentary in the first place. The only point of being a creator or an artist is to try to give a vision, your own subjective vision, of reality. The idea that we can all see the same thing is a totalitarian idea. This is exactly what totalitarian and fascist regimes have tried to do. This is television. Television news pretends to be objective. This is rubbish. The fact that there is one person with one identity, with his own story, that is doing and watching the world and deciding what to put inside the frame and what to leave outside the frame this is what makes it subjective and this is the fantastic thing about documentary; that it is subjective. I am not interested in objective documentary. Objectivity is not a notion that is linked to any form of individual creation or art. Objectivity is for science.

I guess it’s a philosophical question – whether you actually believe in truth with a capital T.

I think that it comes from the idea that objective is good and subjective is bad. But this is what capitalism is about. Capitalism is about the attempt to annihilate any subjectivity. There is no individual, no people, just segments of consumers. And here is a struggle; a struggle against this attempt for objectivity. Objectivity is simply not interesting. This festival has a program about disabled people that features some 50 films. If there are 50 films about disabled people, it’s because there are 50 different persons that are thinking they have 50 different visions. What makes plurality, what makes the richness of us all is that we are the accumulation of subjectivities. But I think that all this discussion about subjective and objective is a bad discussion. It implies that there is this idea of good and bad.

It’s Plato’s fault.

Yes, it’s Plato’s fault. Exactly.

The expensive cost of cheap water

Photo by GenBug/Flickr

By Harry van Versendaal

From drinking to cleaning, from making newspapers to automobiles, water is used in ways that escape our awareness. Water, in other words, is too precious to be wasted, but this is exactly what’s happening, prompting a number of groups to promote ways of conserving it. One way, say some, is raising its price — as the argument goes, cheap water comes with a hefty price tag.

Experts meeting in Madrid late February warned that governments in the northern Mediterranean must phase out irrigation subsidies to farmers or risk a ballooning threat to the environment and food security.

“There are increasing incentives to produce more and to use more irrigation, because there is a very attractive market out there waiting for these same products,” said Kevin Parris, an economist at the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), pointing a finger at developing markets in India and China.

Growing demand, as a result of rising world populations and changing dietary habits, and the climate change wild card are putting a strain on water resources and intensifying the need for more efficient management of this, a precious albeit long-squandered resource.

Data is often fragmented, but the pattern is there. Some 47 percent of the world’s population will live under severe water stress by 2050, the OECD predicts. Meanwhile, farmers will need to produce nearly 50 percent more food up to 2030 and double output by 2050 to match soaring demand, according to the Paris-based organization.

Things will only get worse as a result of global warming. That, most scientists predict, will increase irrigation needs by 26 percent while exacerbating the consequences of desertification, deforestation and soil erosion — especially in the southern hemisphere.

Thirsty farmers

Agriculture is the main user of the world’s freshwater withdrawals, accounting for almost 70 percent. Eight percent goes to urban use. It is often missed that H2O is used to make everything from electricity to automobiles. So industry consumes about 22 percent of resources. Water demand among factories and domestic users has quadrupled over the past 50 years.

Water is a finite resource, which means there is only a certain amount of it out there. It is used, but it is never really used up. Water evaporates from the ground or transpires from foliage to become cloud before falling back to the earth as rain. Although humans have found a way to remove salt from seawater, a practice known as desalination, the technology, which is gaining ground in Spain, Israel and Australia, comes with a poor environmental record. It damages the coastline while using up big chunks of energy which adds to the greenhouse effect.

There is no easy way, it seems, when it comes to protecting the environment.

“There is not much to do on the supply side,” Parris said, adding that efforts should instead focus on curbing demand. And there is no better way to accomplish this, most experts agree, than by introducing a price for water that reflects its true cost.

Most governments provide financial support for irrigation — allowing farmers to pay far below market prices. Policymakers do so to serve social and political objectives, such as food security and regional development in poorer areas, but they remain deaf to the collateral damage caused by underpriced water.

Undercharging for irrigation water, Chris Charles, project manager of Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI), told the Madrid conference, has dire environmental and economic repercussions such as groundwater depletion and pollution, as it encourages intensively farmed and pesticide-intensive crops, while at the same time distorting international markets.

No transparency

A recent study by the GSI, which is a chapter of the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) found that Spain spends an estimated 1 billion euros a year on irrigation subsidies. Other countries in the northern Mediterranean — Greece, Italy, France and Portugal — the report said, also provide generous aid but the true magnitude is hard to determine as governments are wary of sharing too much information.

“That money could be better used in other parts of the economy,” said Charles of the Geneva-based outfit set up to monitor government subsidies and their impact on sustainable development.

In most cases, farmers only pay for the operation and maintenance costs for water, while shunning their due share of capital costs for hydro projects like dams and canals.

On top of discouraging the switch to water-wise technologies such as surge flow irrigation, low pressure sprinklers, drip-irrigation and moisture sensors, subsidies is the thick wall obstructing the eco-signal. “There is no scarcity message in the price of water,” Nuria Hernandez-Mora, president of the New Water Culture Foundation (FNCA), a Spanish non-governmental organization, told the conference.

Advocates of subsidies say that slashing state support is going to push up commodity prices for consumers and drive many farmers out of business. But those concerns, critics say, are not backed up by evidence. “The rise in water prices does not increase food prices at the supermarket,” Parris said, drawing on past experience in Australia and Israel.

Some people argue that the out-of-whack economics of the EU’s common agricultural policy (CAP), a system based on mammoth subsidies and artificially cheap exports, has not helped much toward conservation either. “Most aids go to intensive farming systems,” said Eva Hernandez of WWF Spain’s freshwater program.

CAP subsidies gobble up over 40 billion euros a year, i.e. more than 40 percent of the bloc’s budget. The biggest chunks of aid, Parris said, go to the richest farmers in the north who produce more water-intensive goods such as dairy, sugar beets and beef. “In the EU the richest farmers get the bulk of the subsidies. It’s bizarre and unfair,” Parris said.

Tampering with subsidies, of course, is always a tricky one for politicians who are wary of disaffecting their voters. Aid is systematically used as a tool to benefit specific groups of people which is why governments can be quite laconic about the allocation of handouts.

“Subsidies themselves create a pool of money out of which recipients can influence the very political process that channels money to them in the first place,” a recent GSI report notes. The problem is that, particularly in the southern European world of corruption-prone politicians, petulant unions and vested interests, government aid has come to be seen as natural. “Subsidies thus metamorphosize into entitlements and any attempt to curb them becomes politically hazardous,” the report says.

Greeks know a thing or two about entitlements. Local farmers have repeatedly blocked major highways with their tractors to press with their demands — and they have in most cases gotten away with it as governments pay the price for the salience of patron-client relations. This scene was repeated in early February when hundreds of farmers, from northern and central Greece, threatened to block the border with Bulgaria in a bid to pressure the socialist government into giving them tax-free gasoline, compensation and subsidies.

Know your rights

In recent years, alternative concepts have been put forward to improve water management. One of these plans is water trading, whereby users buy and sell water rights. The idea is to direct water toward high-value uses, and the scheme has found success in Australia where water rights are in some places transferred on a temporary or permanent basis between stakeholders. The recycling of water also holds promise, but low water prices do not make recycling very interesting to farmers.

Others advocate the introduction of a water footprint to track the amount of water that goes in the production of each good. According to calculations by Water Footprint Network, a Dutch-based non-profit foundation, an apple requires 70 liters of water, one glass of beer 75 liters, and one hamburger 2,400 liters. But numbers like these are unlikely to change our increasingly demanding dietary habits, especially as more and more people around the world rise into the middle class (2 billion people currently stand on the threshold, according to a recent Economist report). “Times have changed. My daughter these days wants to eat strawberries in midwinter,” Parris said.

To make things a bit more complicated, some people hold that water is a natural right and should thus be provided free of cost. That’s a cultural, economic and, perhaps, philosophical question. But even if water came from god, the standard counter-argument goes, it did so without the dams and the water pipes.

Those wasteful Greeks

Agriculture in Greece uses 87 percent of water resources — a staggering figure that is close to the average in developing countries. Low water prices have made local farmers shy of technological innovation (outdated sprinkler systems, often seen wetting neighboring plots of land or the asphalt road, are still very widespread) while encouraging water-intensive crops such as cotton.

Cotton farmers in Greece, one of the main beneficiaries of EU funds, have in the past been subsidized by up to four times the market value of their crop, but CAP reforms over the previous year have made things harder for freeloaders.

Management has never been the Greeks’ forte and management of water, too, leaves a lot to be desired. Agriculture is heavily dependent on groundwater and access is often ensured via illegal wells. Due to overpumping of groundwater, withdrawals are being extracted faster than they are recharged.

The excessive use of water is evident in the heavily farmed plain of Thessaly. A controversial project to divert the country’s second-longest river, the Acheloos, from Western Greece to the area was recently suspended by Greece’s highest administrative court citing environmental concerns.

An OECD report published last year put total subsidies for Greece over 141 million euros. “No significant effort has yet been made to make farmers pay for the important rehabilitation and maintenance costs,” the report said. The country’s landscape and the economic significance of the agricultural sector (the contribution to Greek GNP is one of the highest in Europe), it said, “are factors which explain the delay in implementing water pricing reforms.”

The EU water framework directive, launched about a decade ago, was designed to reform water pricing and financing policies toward full cost recovery. But it has yet to make an impact on Greece, where, according to an assessment published by the Greek environment ministry in 2008, the cost recovery level ranges between 1.78 and 56.25 percent.

Current trends are clearly unsustainable, but little can be achieved unless we all come to realize the true price of water. “If you ask how much a liter of gas costs, most people will know,” said Parris. “If you ask them the price of water, nobody knows.”

Smokescreen

Photo by Yaşar Kadıoğlu

 

By Harry van Versendaal

The administration of Recep Tayyip Erdogan is using the military as a smokescreen for its own policies in the region, says Ankara-based analyst Burak Bekdil, ahead of a visit here by the Turkish prime minister. Bekdil, a journalist for the Turkish Daily News, however says western governments are finding it hard to believe that the political administration is manipulated by the deep state.

Asked about Turkey’s expected removal of Greece from the list of national security threats, Bekdil sees a bid to keep up with the newly-launched zero-problems-with-neighbors strategy – although he admits Ankara does not really anymore view Greece as a potential military threat. If there’s one thing to raise eyebrows among Turkish officials, he points out, that is Greece’s warming ties with their newfound enemy, Israel.

Speaking to Skai television on Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that the Turkish airforce overflights in the Aegean have not been instigated by his government, instead putting the blame on the Turkish military. Is this an attempt by Erdogan to duck the issue or is there really a split between his government and the military?

The split between Erdogan’s government and the military does not include the military’s operational manoeuvres like air raids into northern Iraq, or overflights in the Aegean. This is part of his strategy: When he feels squeezed – especially by the West – he tends to put the blame on either the military or the judiciary. As for the overflights, the case is simple: The prime minister can give orders to the General Staff to give orders to the Air Force to stop! Smart westerners no longer buy the cliche argument that Erdogan’s government is helplessly under pressure from the deep state. Perhaps that was the case eight years ago. It no longer is, and Erdogan’s propaganda machinery has been abusing it excessively. Please note that all defense procurement decisions, including the purchase and upgrade of frigates, corvettes and submarines, carry Erdogan’s signature. Remember what happened in February 2008: There was immense public pressure for a cross-border military operation into northern Iraq, and Erdogan was mute, hoping the military would act on its own so that he could put the blame on the military – both at home and abroad – if things went wrong there. The military HQ did a wise thing and said it would act only on orders from the government. That killed the ‘abuse plan’ at that time. But you cannot expect the military to announce that it is awaiting Erdogan’s orders to stop overflights in the Aegean.

Ankara recently suggested it would change its national security policy to remove Greece from its threat list (dropping the “casus belli” clause) but it quickly backpedalled, saying Greece would in return have to give up its claims in the Aegean (extension of its territorial waters to 12 miles). Was Ankara’s move genuine or just a public relations stunt?

Don’t confuse two things here. Removing Greece (and others) from the security threat list (officially called as the National Security Policy Document) is different from dropping the ‘casus belli’ clause. The first one, now in draft form, awaits Erdogan’s endorsement, and I am pretty sure it will come. The second issue requires a parliamentary decision, and I don’t think Erdogan is keen on that. It looks tricky that Ankara both maintains the casus belli clause and removes Greece from foreign threats list. More tricky is multibillion dollars weapons programs that exclusively (or almost exclusively) target Greece, especially naval systems. I therefore assume your question (was Ankara’s move genuine or a PR stunt) involves the decision to drop out Greece from the threat whitepaper. And my answer is, it’s both genuine and PR-related. Genuine because the government does not really view EU-member Greece as a potential country with which Turkey could in the foreseeable future have a military confrontation. But it is also a PR stunt because it fits FM Ahmet Davutoglu’s zero-problems with neighbors doctrine. Davutoglu could not have hoisted the peace flag with Iran, Syria and Iraq while keeping Greece on the list. The same goes for Russia. The revised document will be used as a PR tool to promote Davutoglu’s doctrine.

In the Skai interview Erdogan said that he does not want to talk with his Israeli counterpart and he will boycott a climate change conference in Athens on Friday if Benjamin Netanyahu attends. How does the rift between Turkey and Israel affect Greece’s relationship with Ankara and Tel Aviv, bearing in mind Athens has been pursuing closer relations with the Israelis over the past few months?

It’s true. This [Tuesday] evening Erdogan said that he will go to Athens for the conference “because Netanyahu is not going there.” The Isreali-Greek rapproachement has already raised eyebrows in Ankara, although many analysts tend to downplay it. Erdogan’s men don’t like it because it goes contrary to their plans to isolate/punish Israel. At the moment the Greek-Israeli warm-up is not a parameter on the Ankara-Athens axis. But if it evolves into phases which Ankara could perceive as threathening, then it may become one. I think [Greek Foreign Minister Dimitris] Droutsas was doing the right thing when he assured everyone that the Greek-Israeli ties do not target any third country.

Facing the frenemy

Linocut illustration by Manos Symeonakis

By Harry van Versendaal

Ankara’s recent rapprochement with Tehran is probably the most emblematic sign of Turkey’s newfound assertiveness in the Middle East, but experts agree that the true motivations behind this tectonic foreign policy shift are not easy to fathom.

“Turkey’s love affair with Iran cannot be explained with single-parameter equations. It’s a mixture of several factors at work with different weights that cannot be measured,” Burak Bekdil, an Ankara-based analyst, told Athens Plus. Bekdil singles out a number of factors, including natural gas, ideology, domestic politics, regional foreign policy ambitions and bilateral trade – “some selective deals that must be benefiting companies friendly to Erdogan and the AKP,” he said in a reference to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s mildly Islamic Justice and Development Party.

It’s certainly a tough equation. But Stephen Kinzer, a former Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, prefers to stick with the more obvious constants. “They are the two major non-Arab states in the Muslim Middle East,” he told Athens Plus in an interview. “Both are big and powerful, their history has been intertwined, and each needs much of what the other has,” said Kinzer, who has just authored a book called “Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future.”

Turkey, along with Brazil, in May signed a nuclear fuel swap deal with Iran meant to help end Tehran’s standoff with the West over its atomic program. Compounding Washington’s dismay, Ankara went on to vote against UN sanctions on Iran the month after. Turkey, which gets a third of its natural gas from Iran, recently also defied a US ban on gasoline sales to Tehran and is expected to remove Iran from a watch list of nations it considers a specific threat to national security.

Turkey’s engagement with Iran reflects a broader Turkish repositioning on the Mideast chessboard allegedly masterminded by its foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. Ankara has sought to re-brand itself as a soft power broker in formerly Ottoman territories by using its economic, diplomatic and cultural power. But although its policy of “zero problems with neighbors” saw a drastic improvement in ties with Iraq and Syria, Turkey’s relations with Israel, Washington’s other principal ally in the region, have deteriorated rapidly since Israel’s Gaza offensive in early 2009, hitting a low following the raid on a flotilla of humanitarian aid in late May that left nine Turkish citizens dead.

Confusion

The approval this week in a public referendum of a controversial package of constitutional reforms to reshape the judiciary and curb military power – traditionally under the influence of the secular establishment – will no doubt strengthen Erdogan’s hand also in foreign policy. But more confidence has not always come with more clarity. Turkey’s eastward realignment is perplexing friends and foes alike. Some analysts say that the increasing diplomatic activism of his administration is welcome in Washington and Brussels provided it does not run against the core interests of the Western alliance.

“Anything that promotes the Turkish example of capitalist democracy also promotes stability and weakens radicalism,” Kinzer said, warning however that too much dancing to the Western tune does not go down well with the man on the Arab street. “If Turkey is seen as not always following Washington’s policies reflexively, that could even help Turkey project its influence.”

That unique role could weaken if Turkey were to lose America’s trust. Americans want to believe, Kinzer says, that after all the daily bickering is over, the Turks remain fundamentally pro-NATO and sympathetic to US security goals. Should that fade, the relationship will inevitably weaken.

Israel is the obvious litmus test. Ties to the Jewish state have traditionally been seen as a counterweight to Islamic extremism, allowing Turkey to focus on NATO and its EU ambitions. The AKP obviously deems it can get away with some Israel-bashing now and then, much of it for domestic consumption, but some analysts warn Israel and Iran will put this notion to the test.

“Pushing Israel into a corner and isolating and punishing it may redeem understandable emotions, but it does not serve the cause of peace. After making your point, it is often good to extend the hand of reconciliation,” Kinzer said. Recent reports said the US warned Ankara it will shun joint air drills next month if Israel is not invited.

Bekdil too fears Turkey may be overplaying its hand. “The AKP thinks they can play both camps. Pro-eastern on the public front but pro-Western when the AKP messengers meet with US and EU officials,” he said, pointing out that so far the policy has worked without any major damage to the AKP. “No punishment from the West. No cost. So why not follow a popular route that is also economically beneficial?”

Some beg to differ. Hugh Pope, an analyst for the International Crisis Group, thinks that fears of “losing Turkey” are overrated and does not hesitate to hail Turkey’s overtures eastward. Speaking to Athens Plus, Pope welcomes Ankara’s efforts to head off sanctions and other potential disruption in the region, which would be very costly to Turkey, and to solve the problem by diplomatic means, if possible. “Turkey has different tactics and priorities to its Western allies, and firmly believes in engaging Iran, but it shares with the West the goal of ensuring that Iran does not acquire nuclear weapons,” he said.

Pope, one of the authors of the just-published ICG report “Turkey’s Crises over Israel and Iran,” is keen to note that tension with the West is not necessarily of Turkey’s making alone. “The EU and the US also share the blame for alienating Turkey over the past years, notably because of Germany and France’s public hostility to Turkey’s EU ambitions and the US invasion of Iraq,” he said.

Same ends, different means

But there is another element to the geopolitical game. Some observers hold that the shift of Sunni Turkey, worried about Shiite Iran’s influence over Iraq following the American pullout, is actually driven by an attempt to contain Iran, it’s most serious rival in the race to lead the Islamic world. Skeptical about the effectiveness of UN sanctions, the theory goes, Ankara is trying to appease its “friend” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, out of his nuclear ambitions.

It’s a stance the West should encourage, suggests Iranian-born analyst Meir Javedanfar, as a rapprochement between the two states could be the safest way to ensure a nuclear-free Iran. Renewed tension, on the other hand, will only fuel Iran’s temptation to become a nuclear power.

“When it comes to economic power, when it comes to military power, when it comes to diplomatic position, Iran is inferior to Turkey,” Javedanfar recently told Radio Free Europe. “So they are going to look at areas where they are superior and the only other one where they can gain an edge over the Turks, one of the very few areas, is the nuclear program.”

The end of the affair?

By Harry van Versendaal

After the “golden era” of the 1990s, a number of incidents in the past few years have left Turkish-Israeli ties seriously impaired, but these appear to be the symptoms of a deeper geopolitical trend rather than the cause.

Driven by a yen to consolidate its place in the Western camp in a cold war security environment and its poor relations with Arab states like Iran and Syria, Turkey became one of the first states to recognize the state of Israel in the late 1940s. Bilateral relations peaked in the 1990s with the signing of a number of business, intelligence and military agreements. Ankara gave Israeli fighter jets permission to use Turkish air space as training ground and, in turn, gained access to Israeli military technology – including unmanned drones that could be used in the fight against Kurdish militia in the southeast. Meanwhile, Turkish resorts were packed with Israeli tourists.

However, relations have deteriorated rapidly over the past decade. Israel’s 2008 raid on Gaza sparked a fuming reaction from the Islamic-rooted administration of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. After dressing down Israeli President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the Turkish premier went as far as to brand the Jewish state as “the principal threat to peace” in the region.

Relations reached a new low in late May after Israeli commandos raided a Turkish ship leading a Gaza-bound aid flotilla, killing nine Turkish civilians. The two sides, both close American allies, have sought to repair at least some of the damage and Israel earlier this month agreed to cooperate with a UN investigation into the fatal operation. But, though Israel has taken most of the flack for the bloodshed, there are ample signs that the Turkish Justice and Development (AKP) government, which is reportedly close to the NGO that sponsored the flotilla, could have done more to prevent the disaster.

Both incidents however seem to fit into the pattern of Turkey’s “neo-Ottoman” foreign policy realignment. Propelled by growing self-confidence and frustration with EU stonewalling over Turkish membership in the 27-member club, Ankara is increasingly pulling its weight in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, expanding trade and assuming mediator status in chronic regional disputes. It has impressively fixed most of the damage in its ties with Iraq and Syria, but this diplomatic turnaround has not always sat well with Ankara’s friends in the West. A report in the Financial Times this week said that Washington has warned Ankara that its veto of UN sanctions against Iran, a nuclear wannabe power but also a chief energy provider for Turkey, could cost it its chance to obtain US-made drone aircraft to quell Kurdish guerrillas after the US withdrawal from Iraq at the end of next year.

Erdogan’s Israel-bashing may find a sympathetic ear on the Arab street, but he should know that turning his back on Israel and the West is a non-starter. If Turkey is putting on a regional show to impress the US and the EU, it is certainly using the wrong tricks. Breaking ranks with the West over Iran and escalating tensions with Israel will not make Turkey more European.

Turkey veers into the East, clumsily

By Harry van Versendaal

Ankara is increasingly asserting itself in the Middle East but a series of clumsy moves threaten to damage its relationship with the West, the cornerstone of Turkey’s security policy over the past 90 years, analysts warn.

The dramatic deterioration in ties with Israel, a long-time economic and military ally, is seen as emblematic of this trend. Last month Israeli commandos raided a Turkish ship leading an aid flotilla that sought to break the blockade of Gaza. Nine Turks died in the operation. Ankara has threatened to sever diplomatic ties altogether unless Israel offers a public apology and agrees to a UN-led investigation into the incident.

Although Israel has taken most of the flack for the carnage, many analysts agree that Turkey did not do enough to prevent the disaster. “There are indications that the Turkish government rather than stopping the flotilla, had actually – and privately – encouraged it,” Burak Bekdil, an Istanbul-based commentator, told Athens Plus.

“The Turkish government saw in the flotilla a convenient tool to embarrass the [Benjamin] Netanyahu government and bring international attention to the embargo on Gaza,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a columnist for the Turkish Milliyet daily, adding that neither side predicted the magnitude and violence of events.

Can Turkey-Israel ties recover from the latest shock? “Not in the foreseeable future,” said Bekdil, who expects even more tension and confrontation in the near future. “As long as either or both governments stay in power, things can only further deteriorate,” he said.

Muscle flexing

Israel’s attack on Gaza in late 2008 was a major blow to ties with Turkey but, at the same time, it presented Ankara with an opportunity to flex its muscle in the Mideast region. Propelled by its visionary Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey has sought to establish itself as a regional soft-power broker in the lands of the one-time Ottoman empire. It has mended ties with Iraq and Syria ending years of tension over water management in the Tigris-Euphrates river system and over alleged protection of Kurdish militia. Diplomatic fervor has come with impressive economic overtures. Over the past 10 years, Turkish trade with the Middle East has outgrown that with Europe.

Critics however have slammed Ankara’s alleged cynicism, knowing that slapping Israel is the safest way to make friends in the Arab world. It is in this light that Bekdil sees the flotilla incident as a sign of Ankara’s determination “to go forward with neo-Ottoman ambitions,” a common reference to Davutoglu’s strategic vision.

On top of distancing itself from Israel, Turkey has been cozying up with the Jewish state’s nemesis in the region, Iran. Earlier this month Ankara, which depends on Iran for a big chunk of its energy, voted against UN sanctions on Tehran, raising eyebrows among its western allies who are wary of Iran’s nuclear program.

“There is nothing wrong with Turkey being more active in the Arab world, delving into frozen conflicts there or boosting trade and other ties with our Arab neighbors,” Aydintasbas said. “But there is everything wrong with re-entering the Middle East hand in hand with [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad and Hamas. On that we need to do some fine tuning and, yes, we are deviating from the West,” she added.

Some say Turkey, a NATO member, is already paying a price for it. Military analysts have warned that Turkey’s shift undermines its fight on PKK rebels. Turkey has depended on US intelligence and Israeli drones to track down Kurdish guerrillas. As nine Turkish soldiers died in an attack on a military outpost last weekend, speculation grew whether the US withheld intelligence.

Lost cause?

Meanwhile, Turkey will find it hard to convince European leaders about its loyalty to the EU cause. Breaking ranks with the western powers in the Security Council and escalating tension with Israel “does not make Turkey more European,” Aydintasbas explained. “It makes us look like we are trying to be the leader of another camp – not the EU.”

But is Turkey’s Mideast activism really compatible with its European ambitions? Aydintasbas believes there is no necessary connection between the two. “It should not technically jeopardize our EU status. But it doesn’t necessarily guarantee a place in the EU either,” she said, rejecting the view that Turkey should try to impress the West, as it were, by becoming a big player in the Middle East.

EU membership, she says, is about fulfilling EU criteria, raising democratic standards and internalizing core European values. “We cannot enter the EU just by being able to mediate between troubled Arab states. That is a fantasy,” she said.

Turkey’s nascent engagement in the Middle East is not troubling the West alone. Turkish flags can be seen waving in the Arab cities (a recent survey found that 43 percent of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank see Turkey as the strongest champion of their cause) and Erdogan, a devout Sunni, is even drawing comparisons to the late Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. But despite Erdogan’s popularity on the Arab streets, it is also true that certain Arab elites are watching the emergence of an unofficial Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas-Turkey axis with great concern, said Aydintasbas.

But it is not all grim. A positive side-effect of Turkey’s growing influence is that leaders in Arab countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt and some Gulf states is that it challenges their authoritarian style of government. “Arab leaders are not quite happy with the emergence of public movements be they in favor of Erdogan or any other political cause,” Bekdil said. “Any public movement is usually viewed by leaders as a potential uprising and risk to their autocratic rule.”

Turkey rediscovers the Middle East, but at what cost?

Illustration by Manos Symeonakis

By Harry van Versendaal

Driven by growing self-confidence and a yen to impress the West, Turkey is increasingly engaging itself with the Arab world but analysts warn that too much Middle East activism could backfire.

Under the stewardship of its mercurial Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and its mold-breaking foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey has over the past several years sought a more prominent role in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, assuming mediator status in chronic regional disputes and – somewhat paradoxically – taking a more assertive posture toward one-time ally Israel.

The true motives behind Turkey’s shift are not always easy to pin down. EU coldness over the prospect of full membership has certainly pushed the predominantly Muslim nation eastward, but analysts are not sure whether the reorientation signifies contempt about the snub or rather a desire to render itself more significant in Western eyes.

“The activism is both partly a reaction to the EU cold shower and partly an attempt to make itself more important,” said Hugh Pope, an Istanbul-based analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG), an independent think tank that recently published a report on Turkey and the Middle East.

“Turkey has always been opportunistic in search of greater exports at times of high buying power in the Middle East, and Turkey has always been less outgoing to Israel when the Arab-Israel peace process has been stalled,” he said.

‘Zero problems’

Inspired by Davutoglu, Erdogan’s longtime foreign policy guru often dubbed the “Turkish Kissinger,” Ankara has pursued a soft-power policy of “zero problems with neighbors.” Over the past 10 years, Turkish trade with the Middle East has outgrown that with Europe. According to the ICG report, while Turkey’s total exports rose fourfold between 1996-2009, exports to the 57 nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) increased by seven times, reaching 28 percent of total exports in 2009.

In a major diplomatic turnaround, Turkey has made stunning improvement in ties with Syria and Iraq, long strained over water management of the Tigris-Euphrates river system and the alleged backing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militia.

The realignment has come at a price. Relations with Israel have deteriorated. Following decades of close military and intelligence cooperation, Turkey’s public language is now more in tune with pro-Palestinian man-on-the-street sentiment. Israel’s raid on Gaza last year drew the ire of Turkish officials – most infamously Erdogan’s broadside against Israel President Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. During a recent visit to Paris, Erdogan branded Israel “the principal threat to peace” in the region.

There’s more that Western powers have found hard to swallow. In a gesture prompted more by dogged pragmatism than Islamic solidarity, Turkish officials have resisted US-backed sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. Turkey, a nonpermanent member of the United Nations Security Council buys a third of is gas exports from Iran and seeks to further reduce imports from Russia, currently at 65 percent. Recently Erdogan dismissed allegations that Tehran wants to develop nuclear weapons as “mere rumors.”

In one of his most controversial gestures up until now, the Turkish premier defended Sudanese leader Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur, on the grounds that “no Muslim could perpetrate a genocide.”

Loyalty

Is Turkey drifting away from the West? Analysts are reassuring of Ankara’s loyalty.

“I don’t think it’s fair to say that Turkey is turning its back on the West,” said RAND global policy think tank analyst Stephen Larrabee. He said the switch is all about change in the post cold-war security environment as the Middle East has replaced the Soviet Union as the Number One hot spot.

“What you’re seeing is a process of diversification and broadening of Turkey’s foreign policy, which, during the cold war period, was oriented almost solely toward the West. It still wants strong ties with the West but it’s not solely reliant on those ties,” Larrabee said.

Pope agrees that Ankara’s realignment does not signify any chill toward the West. “The twin pillars of Turkey’s foreign policy remain the same: its EU convergence process and the political/military alliance with the USA,” he said. “There has been a tendency by some in Turkey to overstate the ability of its Middle East policy to take the place of these fundamental pillars. This is unrealistic. Good relations with the world’s superpower are obviously vital,” Pope said, adding that it is precisely Turkey’s ties to the West that make the county attractive to the Arab world.

The same goes for Europe. The Middle East has never taken more than a quarter of Turkey’s exports and supplies only 10 percent of its tourists, while Turkey does half its trade with Europe and gets 90 percent of its foreign investment from EU states, said the ICG expert.

Too big for its boots?

However, experts warn that an overstretched Turkey risks losing sight of its priorities, spending precious diplomatic energy and capital in the Mideast when it should be working to solve problems closer to home.

“It is certainly a risk. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is badly overstretched in terms of its capabilities, plus the record is clear: limited progress on thorny issues such as Cyprus and Armenia,” said Wolfango Piccoli, a Turkey expert based in London.

A settlement on the Cyprus issue, made less likely following the victory of hardliner Dervis Eroglu in leadership elections in the Turkish-occupied north on Sunday, is a prerequisite if Turkey wishes to keep EU convergence on track. Meanwhile, smoothing relations with Washington means that Ankara must find a way to implement the recently signed protocols with Yerevan, long at loggerheads with Turkey over the killing of Armenians in the crumbling Ottoman Empire.

Ankara has scrambled to prevent the full US House of Representatives from passing a resolution approved by a US congressional committee that has called the 1915 massacres of Armenians genocide.

EU unimpressed

Experts disagree over the extent to which Turkey’s Middle East activism could bolster its chances of joining the EU. For Piccoli, an analyst for the Eurasia Group, there is “a basic misunderstanding from the Turkish side: the belief that the EU can appreciate Turkey’s growing importance in the region and thus decide that it is an indispensable partner,” he said.

The problem is the EU has no coherent foreign policy and is not a credible actor in the international arena, especially in the Middle East. “The risk for Ankara is that those EU countries that are opposing Turkey’s bid for membership will exploit the issue to strengthen their anti-Turkey positions,” Piccoli said. EU heavyweights Germany and France have both grown allergic to the idea of full Turkish membership, offering vague talk of a “special partnership” instead.

Pope too sees a threat from skeptical European politicians playing to popular fears. “Some are exaggerating Turkey’s improved relations with the Middle East as a sign that Turkey is somehow not European. The reality is quite the other way round,” he said drawing parallels between Turkey’s policies in the Middle East – like visa-free travel and free trade – and postwar European peace-building measures.

“Turkey is trying to introduce EU-style ideas into the region like those that brought peace to Europe after the Second World War,” he said.

Lebanon

By Harry van Versendaal

Only a few minutes after descending into the guts of “Rhinoceros,” an Israeli armored tank, for the first time, gunner Shmulik freezes at the sight of an incoming suicide bomber that ends up killing a fellow soldier. A few moments later, he makes another mistake, blowing up the pick-up truck of an innocent civilian.

Not a great way to start your day.

War is hell; we all know that. And, yet, we tend to forget, particularly as we watch war movies from the cozy comfort of our couch at home or at our local popcorn-littered, shopping-mall multiplex.

Not this time. “Lebanon,” Samuel Maoz’s autobiographical tour-de-force about Israel’s “Operation Peace for Galilee,” is not your typical gung-ho patriotic war movie. There is no big budget, no flashy special effects. No politics. No audience/actor identification. No good-versus-bad guys, no heroes, no redemption. As far as “Lebanon” is concerned, less has certainly proved to be more.

June 6, 1982. Four Israeli soldiers stuck in an armored vehicle back a paratrooper unit on their way to an enemy village that has already been flattened by Israeli bombs. A routine exercise, in theory, the mission soon turns into a quagmire as the troops realize they have been lured into a lethal trap.

Nightmare sets in. And it is an extremely uncomfortable one to watch. Virtually all the action is confined inside the bowels of the tank (excellent camera work and repeated retina close-ups convey the tension on the crew’s sweaty, grime-covered faces) and the only visual contact with the outside world is through the cross-hairs of the gunsight. The tank’s gunsight and the director’s camera become one.

Scalding realism gives “Lebanon” an almost documentary feel: The sweltering heat, the deafening noise from the engine, the violent jerking, the dizzying fumes from the engine and gun. Hell on tracks.

“Man is steel, the tank is only iron” reads the jingoist motto inside the dark, filthy, claustrophobic war machine. But there are no ubermenschen here; just usual men in unusual situations. Disoriented and in a state of panic, the soldiers yield to baser human feelings and cravings. War dehumanizes.

But not all is lost. In an unlikely climax, we see a man helping another, an enemy captive, urinate into a tin box – a glimpse of human compassion.

“Lebanon,” which won the Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice film festival last year, is not your usual war-as-spectacle, war-as-entertainment cinematic experience. It is suffocating and stifling; nerve-racking and emotionally draining. Unlike the recent “Waltz With Bashir” (which together with Joseph Cedar’s “Beaufort” make a trilogy of introspective Israeli films about what became known as “Israel’s Vietnam”), Ari Folman’s beautifully-crafted animation-memoir that spoke to the minds of audiences, “Lebanon” has a different target.

“I knew if I made the film political and tried to talk to people’s heads, it wouldn’t work,” Maoz has said of his film. “I attacked from another angle. I talked to the stomach, to the heart.”

And there is good reason to trust what he has to say. Like Shmulik, his stand-in, the director was just 19 when he climbed down into that tank. A gunner who had only practiced on barrels until that day, Maoz was suddenly “plunged into a reality where I must kill somebody.”

And this he did.

The film ends, early morning on June 7, with Shmulik popping his head up from the turret of the wounded Rhinoceros now resting in the middle of a sunflower field, drenched in sunlight.

Even walking onto Syngrou Avenue from the tucked-away Mikrokosmos theater gave you a sense of release and relief.