By Pelin Turgut
October 24, 2007
Istanbul – For as long as I can remember, I have been taught — in school, on TV, by taxi drivers — that Turkey has "red lines" that cannot be crossed, sacrosanct rules dictating foreign policy that have been passed down through generations as if written in stone. At their anxious heart, these rules are the legacy of the 1920s, when — following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire — Europeans were trying to carve up the country. But a ragtag bunch of Turkish volunteers, poorly armed, famously surviving on a slice of stale bread a day, rallied under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk to fight a war of independence. Against tremendous odds, they won, and from their struggle, modern Turkey was born. But the paranoia of having almost been conquered runs strong — gut-wrenchingly strong, summed up in the popular saying "A Turk has no friend but the Turks." The world, if you ask a Turk, is out to get us, and our challenge is to remain steadfast against enemies real and imagined. Hence the red lines on everything from vigilant secularism to Kurdish autonomy. Full Text
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