There is a considerable difference between looking at Turkey from inside and outside the country. From which foreign country one looks towards Turkey also matters greatly. When we are in Turkey, we often view ourselves as people capable of criticizing their country and as a nation that yearns for a better political system, better democracy and more transparent institutions. However, from the outside, the image we portray is sometimes quite different.
On the other hand, when one visits a festival area full of Turkish food and culture in a far-away country, the Turkish people's warmth and friendly approach becomes more striking than ever. It's easy to see how our human relations and social ties are blended with our country's historical and cultural heritage. That's the feeling which encourages us to analyze Turkey's present and past rulers and the ordinary people separately from each other.
A number of US congressmen made inaugural speeches at the festival. It was pleasant to observe that the Turkey they were describing is very different from the old Turkey. They emphasized that in the past, while talking of our countries' bilateral relations, it was sufficient to explain how we are close strategically and how important NATO is. Today, however, they insisted much more on the human and social dimensions.
The Pacifica Institute cooperates with a group of Turkish citizens living in the US along with companies active in Turkey. They don't have a lot of money but instead an unwavering determination to interconnect divergent civil society organizations, and they have managed to reach many US politicians on both the state and federal level. They have two major objectives: first, to promote Turkish-Americans' social rights, and second, to improve Turkey's image in the US by correcting negative prejudices. Needless to say, the debate on Islam, terrorism and the Armenian issue feature at the top of the prejudice list.
In order to fight against these prejudices, and to prove, for example, that not all Muslims are terrorists by definition, the Pacifica Institute believes that bringing people to Turkey is more productive than making great speeches. That is why several US politicians have already been invited to Turkey. Secondly, they try to explain to US politicians and opinion makers that every coin has a flipside, which means that if there are problems between Turkey and Armenia or Cyprus, one should listen to both sides of the story in order to assess the situation.
These efforts have already borne concrete results. One of the US congressmen we met at the festival told me that he met a Turk for the first time in his life only three years ago and that he was now here to discover the society, the nation and the country that person is from.
Published on Today's Zaman, 11 October 2011, Tuesday
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