Today’s Zaman: "Turkey is on the verge of a territorial division"

The Turkish newspaper Today’s Zaman wrote about what would happen to Turkey if the Justice and Development Party attains a majority in the upcoming parliamentary elections. According to European analysts, if President Recep Tayyip Erdogan consolidates all power in his hands, the Turkish Republic will have to pay a huge price for this. On the eve of the parliamentary elections the main objective of the current Turkish leadership is to do everything possible so the people of the Republic could not  see the difference between the People's Democratic Party (HDP), representing the Kurdish population, and the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which uses military methods of struggle for the independence of the Kurdish people.

The anti-Kurdish propaganda that has been conducted over several months has borne fruit eventually: racist-nationalist sentiment has begun to grow in Turkish society. People in different parts of Turkey are being attacked just because they are Kurds. Many have been persecuted because they speak Kurdish. There are two reasons why Turkish society is experiencing such a crisis. The first reason is the campaign of the AKP against the NDP, which was purely political in nature at first, but received a nationalist hue as a result. The second reason is the constant cleansing of the Kurdish population, the victims of which are both military and civilians on both sides, who are dying every day.

Perhaps such a policy will bear fruit, and the party of the president of the Turkish Republic will win the parliamentary elections and obtain a majority of seats in the government. But where will this lead the Republic finally? This will lead to the fact that the crisis in Turkey will go beyond the controlled process. The values ​​and principles that hold Turkish society together will be destroyed, and Erdogan is unlikely to have the will or resources to stop the chaos that is going to begin. According to the majority of analysts, Turkey is now on the verge of a territorial division; the unity and integrity of the country are under threat, due to the fact that a large part of the population of Turkey, the Kurds, demand autonomy. Most likely, a one-party parliament under the leadership of the President’s party will not be able to keep such a powerful force under its control in the country, and this in turn will lead to even greater problems than those that exist in Turkey today.

The US analytical publication Politico wrote about the way the sanctions against Iran are being lifted. The agreement on the Iranian nuclear program is at the final stage of consideration in the US Congress, and it is obvious that the transaction will be declared valid. But today there is still one of the main unresolved issues: how soon and in what way will the sanctions be lifted?

The US, UN and EU say that they will decide to lift the sanctions against Iran gradually, if the Republic provides all the necessary evidence that its nuclear program is suspended. However, such a scenario of the gradual lifting of sanctions is not satisfactory for the Iranian leadership, which has already announced that if the restrictions are not lifted at the same time and after the approval of the transaction, they will assume that the negotiations on the Iranian nuclear program have failed. The sanctions regime against Iran was introduced in 1979 after the revolution in Iran. For decades, restrictions relating to the supply of oil, investment, production of ballistic missiles and weapons supply, have been the reasons for significant damage to the Iranian economy

From the very beginning of the negotiations the Iranians were trying to make sure that that the deal has a high level of reciprocity, meaning that after the freezing of the nuclear program, the Iranian leadership is awaiting an uncompromising and immediate lifting of sanctions. However, the US does not intend to see the rapid rise of Iran, which is why sanctions would be lifted gradually, and this will give America the illusion that it controls the process for some time. In fact, the leadership of the Islamic Republic will not tolerate any infringement of its interests, and if the claims of Iran are not met, it is quite appropriate to say that the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program, which was intended to celebrate President Barack Obama’s triumph, will be his biggest foreign policy failure.