The UN Secretary General could not have been better off. Monday, April 25, Antonio Guterres flew to Europe for the first time since the start of the war in Ukraine. Direction Moscow and kyiv, but before that… Ankara. The United Nations representative came in person to salute the diplomatic work of Recep Tayyip Erdogan in this crisis, he who had already been applauded by the Russian-Ukrainian delegations to the peace negotiations. No doubt, the Turkish president appears as the new pope of diplomacy.
The Kavala case, “a spectacular parody of justice”
On Monday, as Guterres congratulated the king in his palace of a thousand rooms on the heights of Ankara, a very different scene was taking place at the same time in a court in Istanbul. After less than an hour of deliberation, under the boos of the room, a judge condemned the businessman Osman Kavala to life imprisonment. His crime, according to this magistrate member of Erdogan’s party? Seeking to “overthrow the Republic of Turkey” in 2013.
In reality, the philanthropist Kavala is paying for his defense of democracy and minority rights. His detention had already been deemed illegal by the European Court of Human Rights in 2019, but Turkish justice did not hesitate to make the businessman an example: more and more, a single man decides in Erdogan’s Turkey. “This judicial decision defies all logic, reacts Nils Muiznieks, European director of Amnesty International. The prosecution failed to produce a single tangible proof supporting this accusation of overthrowing the government. We have witnessed a spectacular travesty of justice. ”
Kavala’s life sentence, along with seven other defendants (activists, artists, intellectuals, etc.), confirms Turkey’s autocratic drift, one year from a tight presidential election. In the context of the war in Ukraine, with Erdogan serving as a transmission belt between NATO and the Kremlin, international reactions have been very discreet. “Turkey plays a key role in getting out of the conflict,” said a French diplomat, confirming the inescapable character taken by Erdogan in Ukraine.
In Paris, the hope of a new relationship with Turkey
Emmanuel Macron also sees in this war and the Turkish president’s mediation efforts a way to “reset” the relationship between Paris and Ankara, after years of intense tension. The two men had long talks one-on-one during the NATO summit at the end of March and decided to organize a humanitarian corridor together for Mariupol. “We can take a position of principle and say that we are not talking to autocrats, but we still have to know who they are and how we define them, judges an adviser to the Elysée. that of the greatest possible efficiency.”
As a result, Paris softly “deplored” the sentence imposed on Osman Kavala, six months after unleashing Erdogan’s anger on the same subject. Last October, the Turkish president resolved to expel ten Western ambassadors, including those from France, Germany and the United States, for having demanded a “fair and rapid” settlement of this legal case. At the last moment, the West had apologized.
Today, Erdogan no longer has anything to demand: a member of NATO, master of the passage of warships to the Black Sea, economic ally of Russia… His Turkey is unavoidable, and the West does not has no choice but realpolitik. It will be up to Turkish voters alone, in June 2023, to sanction or not the drift of their king.