18
Mar
Turkish Prime Minister threatens to expel 100,000 Armenians.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish prime minister, has been in London, with a photo-op next to Gordon Brown, his British opposite number, on the steps of Downing Street. The ceremony, the courtesy, goes with the job. In return, Erdogan did something extraordinary. He threatened to expel 100,000 Armenians from Turkey. “They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country.” My citizens? My country? Mass expulsion? This is the mind-set and the language of a dictator.
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This is another stage in Turkey’s changing political stance, whereby it is dropping out of the West and moving over to Islamism. The Erdogan government has trumped up charges of conspiracy against the secular military, and is purging the judiciary and academia. In London now, Erdogan has said that to suspect Iran of developing a nuclear weapon is to fall for a fiction. A commentator in the Times points out that Turkey is a member of the U.N. Security Council and can do its bit for Iran in that forum.