The fall of the Turk­ish lira, infla­tion, the hyper-Pres­i­dent, the purges come and go. One piece of news gives you the jee­bies, chased by anoth­er. Today, there is a smell of gas.

A piece of the big pipe with the pret­ty name of Turk­ish Stream was inau­gu­rat­ed by Vladimir Putin and the Reis him­self in Istan­bul. A sec­tion of the gas pipeline sched­uled to open in 2020 appeared just in time for the tying of a rib­bon and the demon­stra­tion of the good rela­tions between Rus­sia and Turkey.

No, Turkey has­n’t dis­cov­ered gas sup­plies, the oppo­site is clos­er to the truth. The great pipe will cross under the Black Sea and will cov­er a dis­tance of a bit more than 1000 km. It will trav­el from South­ern Rus­sia in order keep rela­tions warm and cozy.

Once again, the media under the Reis’ orders state that Turkey will become “a strate­gic base for ener­gy sup­plies.“Per­haps the Pres­i­dent thinks he will be able to resell the gas behind Putin’s back, just as he boast­ed this sum­mer con­cern­ing nuclear pow­er plants. In short, we will be eye­ing Syr­i­an gas a bit less appar­ent­ly… Although… It seems the pipeline will be run­ning through Turkey in order to avoid the Ukrain­ian frost and in order to sup­ply Europe. The pipeline is sup­posed to allow the flow of 31,1 bil­lion cubic meters of Russ­ian gas. There’s anoth­er faucet for you, allow­ing for var­i­ous black­mail­ing gam­bits in the future. Nonethe­less, I don’t think Putin will accept pay­ment in rubles or Turk­ish liras. Did I hear you men­tion Turkey is not a part of Europe?

In any case, the face of Bachar’s best sup­port­er was in full dis­play on our pro-Pres­i­den­tial rags and the hand­shake had every appear­ance of a contract.

The Reis was so pleased he for­got the Euro­pean Human Rights Tri­bunal had an item on the stove for him. Two, even. Our love­ly Repub­lic “con­sid­ered Ottoman” is decid­ed­ly receiv­ing con­tra­dic­to­ry sig­nals. On the one hand, French and Ger­man Euro­pean lead­ers show up with Putin to remind Erdoğan he can do what he wants in North­ern Syr­ia, as long as he keeps a low pro­file and does­n’t release any migrants, Trump both agrees with the Reis about the PKK but does­n’t miss a chance to spit on him, and the Euro­pean Tri­bunal deliv­ers two judg­ments declar­ing that the Kur­dish strug­gle for recog­ni­tion is “ground­ed in law.”

I’m at a loss to under­stand any­thing, or this is part of the great hag­gling that blows both hot and cold. The wind could come from Syr­ia. From a table in the North, notably.

As usu­al, of course, I did­n’t read all this in the rag wrapped around the potatoes.

Sela­hat­tin Demir­taş must be released”. Thus speaks the Court. “We’ll put an end to that, you’ll see”, Erdoğan respond­ed. “The PKK had no busi­ness appear­ing on the lists of ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions in 2017” says the Court. “This is 2018”, Erdoğan answered. And your Macron and your Merkel, bare­ly recov­ered from the ayran at the recep­tion, do not move an inch. The first is pre­oc­cu­pied by yel­low non-iden­ti­fied objects and the oth­er with the fas­cists who no longer both­er dis­guis­ing them­selves. As our favorite Kemal­ists over here aren’t in much of a hur­ry to budge either, the Court will prob­a­bly need to send more smoke sig­nals before any­thing hap­pens, unfortunately.

But, hey, we will have gas.

It’s mind-bog­gling to see the speed at which one sol­dier replaces a new purge in the uni­ver­si­ties, gas push­es aside infla­tion, one speech by the Reis replaces anoth­er, news of the open­ing of a new Sau­di halal butch­er shop replaces the tri­al of a Gulenist. We have nev­er had so few media and from one day to the next, the hand­ful we have man­age to make us dizzy with disinformation.

Come to think of it, the arrival of gas may be noth­ing else but a wind.


Dans l’hiv­er de la Turquie, ça sent le gaz… Cliquez pour lire

Translation by Renée Lucie Bourges
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