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The End Of The Kemalist Affair

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  • The End Of The Kemalist Affair

    THE END OF THE KEMALIST AFFAIR
    by Christopher Hitchens

    Slate Magazine
    August 1, 2011 Monday

    To read of the stunning news, of the almost-overnight liquidation of
    the Ataturkist or secularist military caste, and to try to do so from
    the standpoint of a seriously secular Turk, is to have a small share
    in the sense of acute national vertigo that must have accompanied
    the proclamation of a new system in the second two decades of the
    20th century.

    For example, today's vice president of Kemal Ataturk's historical
    political party, the Republican People's Party or RPP, was quoted on
    Friday as speaking of "a second Turkish republic" with a heavy heart
    "in the seaside city of Cannkkale," and not long after, it seemed that
    some high-ranking Turkish officers would now be arrested rather than,
    as previously reported, having had their resignations accepted. That
    famous seaside peninsula, as the New York Times did not emphasize, also
    bears the name of Gallipoli. It is the place where Gen. Mustafa Kemal
    inflicted the most bloody and tragic defeat on British imperial forces
    in 1915-16, while also convincing Rupert Murdoch's cocky colonial
    ancestors that their brave Aussie forebears had been used as cannon
    fodder by teak-headed British toffs. The apple of the notorious 1981
    Mel Gibson movie did not roll very far from the tree. Within a few
    years of Gallipoli, the same Turkish general had, in fact, reversed
    the local verdict of the 1914-18 war, and expelled Greek, French,
    and British forces from Anatolia.

    The historic weight of this is almost impossible to overstate: Ataturk
    (who was quite probably a full-blown atheist) could write his own
    secular ticket precisely because he had ignominiously defeated three
    Christian invaders. Yet for decades, Western statecraft has been
    searching feverishly for another Mustafa Kemal, someone who can
    jumpstart the modernization of a Muslim community under his own name.

    For a while, they thought Gamal Abdel Nasser might be the model. Then
    there was the Shah of Iran. They even briefly fancied the notions of
    Saddam Hussein, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and other characters who will live
    in infamy. But nobody ever came close to touching Ataturk for authority
    and authenticity. Under his power, the great caliphate was done away
    with, and the antique rule of the celestial and the sublime reduced to
    a dream in which only a few ascetic visionaries and sectarians showed
    any real interest. Until recently, modern Turkey showed every sign
    of evolving into a standard capitalist state on the European periphery.

    There was, however, an acid rivalry concealed within the new Turkish
    establishment. The nascent Islamist populist movement-the Justice and
    Development Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan-understood very well that,
    once in the European Union proper, Turkey would be prevented by EU
    law from submitting to another period of rule by men in uniform. We
    thus saw the intriguing spectacle of quite conservative and nationalist
    Turks (with a distinct tendency to chauvinism in Erdogan's case) making
    common cause with liberal international institutions against the very
    Turkish institution, the army, that above all symbolized Turkish
    national pride and prestige. This cooperation between ostensibly
    secular and newly pious may have had something to do with a growing
    sense of shame among the educated secular citizenry of big cities like
    Istanbul, who always knew they could count on the army to uphold their
    rights but who didn't enjoy exerting the privilege. The fiction of
    Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's complex Nobelist and generally liberal author,
    has explored this paradox very well. His novel Snow is perhaps the
    best dress rehearsal for the argument.

    Because of course Pamuk is also the most edgy spokesman for the rights
    of the Kurds and the Armenians, and of those whose very nationality
    has put them in collision with the state. He has been threatened
    with imprisonment under archaic laws forbidding the discussion of
    certain topics, and he must have noticed the high rate of death that
    has overcome dissidents, like Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink,
    who have exercised insufficient caution.

    But the sordid fact is that the "secular" military elite in Turkey had
    already sold out a number of the values that were real to Ataturk and
    necessary for Turkey's integration into the Eurosphere. The Turkish
    army not only allowed itself to become a participant in the dirty
    and illegal land grab that continues to offend all international laws
    and U.N. resolutions affecting the self-proclaimed colonial statelet
    in the north of the island of Cyprus, but in the early years of the
    occupation, the leader of Ataturk's party-Bulent Ecevit-was rounded
    up as a political detainee. This negation of free movement within EU
    borders has poisoned relations with Greece, driven tens of thousands
    of Cypriots into economic exile, and delayed the integration of
    two advanced economies-Turkey and Cyprus-at just the point when the
    Athenian economy cannot go it alone.

    Having for years provided a rearguard at Incirlik Air Base for the
    humanitarian relief of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite populations,
    the Turks were offered the opportunity to lend a "northern front"
    and to finish the job of Operation Provide Comfort in 2003. The strong
    impression received by some of us who sat in the waiting rooms outside
    the discussions of this policy was that the Turkish army was declining
    the honor mainly because the bribe or inducement wasn't large enough.

    It also seemed that the same army was hoping for a chance to project
    its own power in the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq. To be waging
    another dirty war on the soil of a foreign state, and to be paying
    for it by using money supplied by the foreign aid budget of the U.S.

    Congress, looked like bad faith of a very special kind.

    In 1960, the Turkish army held the ring by intervening to execute two
    powerful political bosses-Adnan Menderes and Fatin Zorlu-who according
    to my best information had instigated vicious pogroms in Istanbul and
    Nicosia and even tried the provocation of bombing Kemal Ataturk's
    birthplace in Salonika. (See, if interested, my little bookHostage
    to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.) But this long,
    uneven symbiosis between state and nation and army and modernity has
    now run its course. In its time, it flung a challenge to the injustice
    of the Treaty of Versailles, revived regional combat on a scale to
    evoke the Crusades, and saw the American and Turkish flags raised
    together over blood-soaked hills in Korea in the first bellicose
    engagements of the Cold War. That epoch is now over. One wonders only
    whether to be surprised at how long it lasted or how swiftly it drew
    to a close and takes comfort from the number of different ways in
    which it is possible to be a Turk or a Muslim.

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