"Turkey is emerging as the crucial power in the Muslim world." But after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's recent walkout from a Davos panel discussion and his confrontational words to Israeli leader Shimon Peres, some wonder whether Turkey is forfeiting its role as a peace-broker, attempting to smoke-screen its own oppressive actions against press, intellectuals, and ex-military, and possibly hurting its chances for full EU membership.
posted by terranova on Feb 3, 2009 - 32 comments

In case you still thought there was still anything even slightly rational, even-handed and non-ideological about the Nobel Peace Prize: Members of the NPP committee that gave Shimon Peres the Prize in 1994 are now attacking him for not singlehandedly putting a stop to Israeli reoccupation of Palestinian territory, even though here's only a member of the cabinet, not the leader of the country. (Alternatively, they say, he should have quit.) Which would be okay, since what's going on now isn't very peaceful ... except that they've said not a peep about about the actions of one of the other two men that shared the prize that year, one Yassir Arafat. (The third, Yitzhak Rabin, apparently gets off the hook since he's already dead.)
posted by aaron on Apr 5, 2002 - 12 comments