Since the tendency in Turkey is to see the diplomatic elite as “Westernized,” after the Ankara meeting, the ambassadors are taken on a tour of Anatolia. This is the way the AKP government has come up with to train this group of people, who are seen as removed from national values or over cosmopolitan because of their Westernized orientation to the realities of their homeland.

This time, the ambassadors first met in Ankara Jan. 15 before traveling to the Adana and Mersin provinces, not far from the Syrian border. The feature of this sixth session that set it apart from earlier ones was Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's lecture, which sounded like an appeal for help from the ambassadors.

Erdogan faces lots of dilemmas these days. Although he uprooted and reassigned thousands of policemen in the middle of the winter in reaction to the graft probe launched in December, an investigation he labeled a "coup" against his government, and took suppressive and restrictive actions against prosecutors and judges and reassigned some prosecutors, the prime minister has not been freed from his troubles.