Levent Kenez/Stockholm
The US ambassador to Turkey was insulted during a meeting of the Turkish Parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee on April 7 that included a discussion about the growing number of political appointees in the Turkish Foreign Ministry.
After opposition deputies criticized the appointment of Deputy Foreign Minister Yavuz Selim Kıran as ambassador to Zagreb, ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) deputies and their ultra-nationalist allies from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) issued statements of support for Kıran one after the other. Kıran, who is not a career diplomat, had previously been a candidate for parliament from the AKP.
MHP deputy Kamil Aydın said the number of political appointees for ambassadorial posts in other countries is much higher than in Turkey and gave the US as an example. Aydın, who described the questioning of ambassadors by a Senate committee during the appointment process as a show, incorrectly claimed that more than 50 percent of the appointments at the US State Department were political.
He mentioned US Ambassador Jeff Flake as having met with the İstanbul mayor from main opposition party and described him as a politician who had changed sides and betrayed his cause. He also described Flake as a man who appeared to be a Republican but was not. According to Aydın, Flake sold out his fellow Republicans, sided with the Democrats and was given an embassy as a reward.
The ruling party and MHP deputies usually use potential presidential candidate and İstanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu’s meetings with foreign ambassadors as a tool for defamation in an effort to present the mayor as a candidate supported by “foreign powers.”
Minutes of Aydın’s speech in parliament:
Former Arizona senator Flake was known as an opponent of former US President Donald Trump. During the Access Hollywood tape scandal that emerged in 2016, he argued that Trump should withdraw from his candidacy after his insulting remarks about women.
In October 2017 Flake delivered a speech in which he said he would not seek another term.
“I didn’t want to leave the Senate. I wanted to do another term at least. But the thought of standing on a campaign stage with Donald Trump and laughing at his jokes and staring at my feet while he ridiculed my colleagues – I just could not do it. There’s nothing worth that. But I look and think going off and leaving the party or starting a third party that just doesn’t – we need two strong parties in this country. I think that we’ll be back, I hope that we will. I want to be part of that,” he told The Guardian in a February 2021 interview.
Flake was nominated by US President Joe Biden as ambassador to Turkey in June 2021.
It is quite interesting why a member of a nationalist party allied with an Islamist party is so uncomfortable with a politician who parted ways with a former president who was accused of being Islamophobic and supporting the Kurds in Syria, which the MHP was against.
Another interesting fact is that the AKP was founded by politicians who announced that they had abandoned the deep-rooted Islamist line of the National Vision movement in 2001 to pursue a more liberal and pro-Western policy. Former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, one of the symbols of Islamism in Turkey, described the politicians who left his Islamist party as traitors and called them Byzantine children. However, the AKP has embraced a much more Islamist line over the years.
Meanwhile, the appointment of Deputy Foreign Minister Kıran as ambassador to Zagreb was a surprise to many. According to Turkish Foreign Ministry tradition, a bureaucrat at the level of deputy minister or undersecretary is usually appointed to head one of Turkey’s permanent representations at the United Nations, for example in Paris (UNESCO), Geneva or New York. Political experts say Kıran’s efforts to be more visible in the public eye were influential in his demotion.
Kıran came to public attention in a scandal last September during Erdoğan’s visit to the UN General Assembly. The pro-Erdoğan Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC) and the little-known Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce (OJC) on September 19, 2021 signed a joint declaration to “cooperate for the common good of Turkish Americans and Jewish Americans and to support relations between our homeland the United States and our respective motherlands, Turkey and Israel” through initiatives such as the Abraham Accords, a series of US-brokered agreements in 2020 aimed at normalizing relations between Israel and some Arab states. Erdoğan had at the time described this as a betrayal of the Palestinian cause. TASC later announced that due to the lack of proper consensus, it was withdrawing from the Joint TASC-OJC Declaration. TASC also apologized to Deputy Minister Kıran, who was present at the signing ceremony. Kıran faced harsh criticism, including from people close to the ruling party.
