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TURKEY: "SURREAL, MENACING...POMPOUS"
December 19, 2013
Issue
Christopher de Bellaigue
Osman Orsal/Reuters Antigovernment protesters at Taksim Square,
Istanbul, July 20, 2013
Now, more than ever, it is harder to argue for the compatibility of
political Islam and democracy. The ejection of the Muslim Brotherhood
from the government of Egypt has delivered a heavy blow to the
prospects of an accommodation between the two. The Brotherhood came
to power democratically, governed dismally and repressively, and
was toppled in a bloody military coup. Many Egyptian Islamists now
associate democracy with pain, humiliation, and death.
The effects of the Egyptian debacle have been widely felt. Saudi
Arabia and Jordan feel more politically secure than at any time
since the start of the Arab Spring, although Jordan has the heavy
burden of absorbing some 500,000 Syrian refugees. The prospect of
a democratic Syria has in any case long since disappeared behind
the blood and smoke. But now another nightmare may be emerging in
Turkey, the Middle East's most prominent proponent of what might be
called Islamic democracy. The stability and prosperity that Turkey
has enjoyed over the past ten years had associated the country with
a type of political arrangement known flatteringly as the "Turkish
model." This summer, the model came unstuck.
On May 27, small numbers of environmentalists occupied Gezi Park,
in Istanbul's Taksim Square, protesting against plans to replace the
park with a shopping center inspired by the design of an old Ottoman
barracks. Over the next few days they were joined by others expressing
dissatisfaction with what they regard as the government's meddlesome
Islamist agenda. The police responded violently and the agitation
grew; by the time of the brutal eviction of a huge crowd from Taksim
Square, more than two weeks later, some 3.5 million people (from
a population of 80 million) had taken part in almost five thousand
demonstrations across Turkey, five had lost their lives, and more
than eight thousand had been injured. Clearly, the "Gezi events"
were about more than trees.
The unrest of this summer divided Turks on the same issues that have
caused civil strife elsewhere in the region: among them political
Islam, ethnic and sectarian divisions (involving the Kurdish and Alevi
minorities), and authoritarian rule. Although a meltdown on Egyptian
lines is implausible, a transition to Islamic authoritarianism is not.
That would do further injury to the idea that Islam and democracy can
share the public sphere. It would also be the end of an experiment
of which Turks are justifiably proud.
The reforms that Turkey embarked upon in the mid-2000s were long
overdue. For decades, the country's pious majority had been suppressed
by a secular elite claiming to uphold the values of the republic's
founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In 1923, Ataturk set up the
Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; he spent the
rest of his life secularizing institutions and propagating European
education, mores, and dress. Ataturk was a visionary and a genius,
but Kemalism, the credo built around his memory, had degenerated
into ancestor worship long before I was first able to observe it,
after moving to the country in 1996. Ataturk's picture and sayings
were everywhere; the country's leaders made countless pilgrimages to
his tomb and used his memory to defend measures such as a ban on the
Islamic head-covering in state institutions, which effectively denied
millions of young women a university education.
The country's powerful generals were the ultimate Kemalists. They
kept the elected politicians to heel by using the threat of a military
coup. (The army overthrew four governments between 1950 and 1997.) All
the while, a dirty war against Kurdish rebels fostered a sense of
beleaguerment that excused human rights abuses. Torture, miscarriages
of justice, state-sponsored assassinations--Turkey was a leader in all.
And in little else. The country was an economic basket case. Foreign
diplomats saw the capital, Ankara, as a hardship posting. There,
amid the brutal architecture of the ministries, under a severe
Anatolian sky, one had the sense of a secular elite's loathing for
the people it claimed to represent--their Islamic modes of dress,
their guileful provincialism, and above all their belief that religion
was the answer to the country's problems. "Two-legged cockroaches,"
some of my secular friends called the fundamentalist women in their
black sheets.
Kemalism started to drain away with the victory of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP). in the general election
of 2002. In not the least of Kemalism's follies, Erdogan had been
jailed for declaiming a poem that could be interpreted as an Islamist
call to arms; but the message he conveyed after he was released
and became prime minister was not one of revenge. On the contrary,
in the aftermath of September 11 and amid the widening perception in
the West that Islam equaled jihadi Islamism, his stress on moderation,
democracy, and the rigors of the free market was welcome not only to
waverers inside Turkey, but also to the United States and its allies.
Over the next several years, in election after election, the will
of the pious majority was reflected at the ballot box; political
stability brought investment and wealth creation. At the same time,
the AKP pushed through important pro-democracy reforms. Torture and
extrajudicial executions declined. The dirty war lost intensity as
Kurds were granted some cultural rights, and Kurdish nationalists,
long denied parliamentary representation, became a voluble presence
in the Ankara assembly. All the while, the army was being stripped of
its political authority, a process that concluded this August with the
jailing of dozens of retired officers, including a former chief of the
general staff, on charges of plotting against the government. The case,
known as "Ergenekon" after the mythical Central Asian home of the
Turkish nation, was based on the claim that there was a widespread
conspiracy, involving not only the army but also sympathizers in
parliament and the media, to destabilize the government and overthrow
it in a coup.
Some experts who have scrutinized the relevant court documents believe
that the conspiracy was greatly exaggerated and used by the government
as a means of destroying the old Kemalist elite and severing its
ties with the public.1 And this is what seems to have happened, as
the muted public reaction to the Ergenekon verdicts suggests. Back in
the 1990s, polls had shown the army to be the institution most trusted
by Turks. Its final humiliation this autumn elicited hardly a murmur
from a population that has now rejected the old presentation of the
army as embodying a virile, honorable Turkishness essential to the
country's survival.
Although Erdogan came from a political tradition, that of Turkish
Islamism, that was hostile to the West, his government pursued
good ties with Europe and the United States, notwithstanding some
prickliness over the question of Turkey's long-standing application for
membership in the European Union. (France and Germany are against, and
Turkey's chief negotiator recently acknowledged that the country will
probably never join.) Previous Turkish governments had cold-shouldered
the Muslim Middle East. No longer; rather than contain neighbors such
as Syria and Iran, theAKP government penetrated them using trade
and engineered a rapprochement with the Kurdish region of northern
Iraq. Erdogan also pleased many Turks by allowing his country's
historically good ties with Israel to deteriorate.
Naturally, the people who benefited most from Erdogan's rule were
his own supporters, not only because specific measures like the
headscarf ban fell into partial disuse--universities now admit women
in headscarves, as do many courts--but because the tenor of public
life became more pious. Erdogan and his ministers did not conceal
their links to religious orders--such as the Nakshibendis--that the
Kemalists had regarded as a major threat to the state. God, rather
than Ataturk, was invoked at groundbreaking ceremonies; new mosques
rose in the big cities. All the while, the prime minister's friends
in the private sector--often pious businessmen from the interior
of the country who bankrolled his election victories--were rewarded
with contracts for building, improving infrastructure, and producing
energy. Turkey gained a new elite, both brassy and devout.
The army fought several unsuccessful rearguard actions, including
a threat--empty, as it turned out--to launch a coup in 2007, but
the secular rebellion that some had anticipated didn't happen. An
important reason for this was that other, non-Islamist groups were also
benefiting from the dismantling of Kemalism. The old establishment
had given protection but no dignity to members of the Alevi sect,
who practice a highly eclectic version of Shiism and make up between
15 and 20 percent of the population. Fearing assimilation, the Alevis
have long demanded recognition of their separate status; these efforts
were stepped up during the 2000s and Alevi organizations increased
in size and visibility.
Human rights groups had been another bugbear of the Kemalists, who
regarded them as special pleaders for the Kurds or, more generally, a
carrier of Western values in their dissolute, morally degenerate form.
Such groups multiplied under the AKP; Turkey now has the most exuberant
feminist, gay, and environmentalist movements in the Middle East. In
the new atmosphere it became more possible for people to argue--as
did a small but growing number--that the massacre of Armenians in
1915 was a case of genocide. That, too, had been taboo.
Perhaps most important of all, Erdogan's Kurdish policies marked the
end of the state's policy of denying legitimacy to the Kurds.
Ministers I had visited in the late 1990s had been unable to utter
their name, referring to them as "our brothers in the southeast." Now,
no one would dream of denying Turkey's multiethnic, multicultural
composition. This March, the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK,
according to its Kurdish acronym), which began its bloody war against
the Turkish state in 1984, announced what may end up being its final
cease-fire. A peace process between the government and the PKK has
been slowly and fractiously advancing since then.
The most remarkable thing about the diversification of Turkey is that
it happened under a socially conservative Islamist. When Erdogan
became prime minister, the question being asked was whether this
highly effective and popular leader would use his new authority to
impose an Islamist vision. As the 2000s wore on and the economy grew
by an average of 5 percent a year, attracting some $100 billion in
foreign investment, Erdogan felt able to voice a different kind of
aspiration: to regional leadership and a level of prestige that Turks
had not enjoyed since the Ottoman heyday.
Naturally, many citizens were pleased by the rise in the national
fortunes, but others felt unease at the prime minister's increasingly
hubristic manner. This unease was strong among the minorities and
interest groups that had benefited from Erdogan's reforms but felt no
affinity with the man or his ideals. Together, these people--including
members of the Alevi and Kurdish minorities, as well as secular-minded
journalists, entrepreneurs, and many young people--made up something
Turkey had not had before: a liberal constituency.
It was this liberal constituency that clashed with Erdogan last May,
and that now continues its campaign of opposition and dissent.
Small-scale protests have been taking place every week since the
beginning of September, some of them violent, and armed police are
present in big numbers in the country's big cities. The government
continues with its policy of limiting freedom of expression. The
government, its media supporters, and the judiciary combine their
efforts against people and groups associated with the opposition;
the latest target is the Koc Group, a secular-minded conglomerate
whose hotel in Taksim Square opened its doors to protesters during
the Gezi events. Since then, the Koc Group had to give up a defense
contract it had won, and it is being investigated for fraud and
plotting against the government.
Riccardo Venturi/Contrasto/Redux Supporters of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul, June 7, 2013
One of the most disturbing aspects of the government's intolerance
of anything it perceives as a challenge to its authority is its
repressive treatment of the press. Around sixty journalists are
currently behind bars. Most of them have reported favorably on
the Kurdish nationalist movement, the PKK, and are victim to the
country's draconian terror laws. At least twenty journalists received
prison sentences of between six and thirty-four years as part of this
summer's Ergenekon verdict. For the most part, they are accused of
activities such as gathering news from sources close to the PKK and
expressing hostility to the government in telephone conversations,
actions that have been interpreted as "aiding and abetting" terrorists
or "attempting to change the constitutional order by force."
In many cases denied bail and access to the charge sheet that has
been prepared against them, these allegedly pro-Kurdish prisoners are
presumably being held as political hostages by the government for use
as the peace process with the PKK inches forward. But others, writing
on non-Kurdish issues, have also been indicted, not least by Erdogan
himself, who has issued writs against several journalists who have
made fun of him. Self-censorship is the result. It is directed from
the boardroom, as newspaper owners try to avoid the fate suffered by
two antigovernment newspapers, Milliyet and Sabah, which lost control
of their well-known publications as a result of government pressure.
(A company run by Erdogan's son-in-law bought Sabah at auction--he
was the sole bidder.)
Equally insidious is the widespread use of intimidation to pressure
newspapers and their employers. Columnist friends of mine have lost
their jobs as a result of a phone call from the prime minister's
office. One well-known broadcaster and columnist, Nuray Mert, told
the Committee to Protect Journalists last year that her career had
effectively been ended as a result of the prime minister's criticism
of her in a public speech. The huge court case that ended recently
with the jailing of the former army chief of staff, along with many
other retired officers, journalists, and politicians, was held under
similar highly politicized conditions, its fairness compromised by what
human rights advocates regard as the misuse of protected and partisan
witnesses and the lengthy pretrial detention of many of the accused.
A vindictive authoritarianism is taking hold of Turkey. To the prime
minister's supporters this is regrettable but necessary; many I have
spoken to think that the protest at Gezi Square was organized by
foreign agitators, and that the protesters should have been crushed
more harshly than they were. In a democracy, these people believe, the
will of the majority is determined at the ballot box and then carried
out. This, they say, is what had been happening quite successfully
until the liberals, realizing they were too few to win an election,
turned to seditious activities instead. The idea that the beliefs of
liberal minorities should be legally protected and might actually have
an influence on policymaking has not been accepted by the government,
which claims to speak for the majority.
But the architect of Turkey's polarization isn't the liberals; it's
Erdogan. He has read into successive election victories a license to
involve himself in every aspect of the nation. His abrasive, physical
style of oratory betrays no self-doubt. Opening his arms to his
audience, bringing his hand over his heart, he criticizes the lives
of his subjects, and his views are rarely less than vigorous. All
drinkers are alcoholics; every family should have three children;
wholemeal flour is best ("our children will be stronger...the bonds
of trust between us will increase"); abortion is murder and Caesarean
sections should be avoided. Twitter is a "menace" and those opposed
to road-building should go and live in a forest. The prime minister
appears to dislike expertise when it disagrees with him. "You have
nothing to teach us about sociology," he told a politely dissenting
social scientist.
As much as the tear gas, water cannons, and plastic bullets, it was
Erdogan's contemptuous way of addressing the Gezi demonstrators that
hardened feelings against him. Liberals are skeptical of a leader who
commands slavish adulation from his followers--a former adviser to the
prime minister told me there is no "mechanism of self-criticism" in
Erdogan's entourage. The government is touched by paranoia; Erdogan's
chief adviser has accused foreign powers of using telekinesis to try
to kill his boss. The government creates an aura that is surreal,
menacing, and insufferably pompous. Unsurprisingly, it was the butt
of humor during the Gezi protests. "Enough!" ran one graffito after a
night of brutality by the security forces. "I'll call the police." A
gay group unfurled a banner that said: "You have nothing to teach us
about sodomy."
Erdogan has encouraged a species of conservatism that is now the
dominant mode of life throughout Turkey. The culture is pietistic,
implicitly anti-Alevi, and materialistic. This last factor is new,
for until quite recently virtue was associated with austerity and
self-reliance; now the faithful demand rewards in this world in
the form of high-performance cars, iPads, and so forth--acquired
using the family credit card.2 Following a pattern that American
conservatives would recognize, these Turks are both in sympathy
with the conservatives in the government and growing more detached
from it in their everyday lives. Private schools and hospitals have
proliferated and the middle classes prefer to live in the private
housing communities that have sprung up in Istanbul and elsewhere.
One can understand why minorities like the Alevis associate these
gated developments with social and sectarian homogenization. While
visiting a colossal housing colony in Istanbul, for instance, I met a
woman of Alevi origin who had become a devout Sunni through marriage
into a Sunni family and vigorously criticized the Gezi protesters.
>From the AKP's point of view, however, Istanbul has improved greatly
under its rule. The city has indeed boomed, with new infrastructure
and a housing price bubble to rival any in the developing world.3
Among the recent constructions are homes for the poor; the spectacle
of unregulated shanties clinging to the hillsides is rarer. Over
the next few years Istanbul will have the world's biggest airport,
a gargantuan bridge over the Bosporus, and two cities in the greater
metropolitan area of one million inhabitants each. Each day seems to
bring a new discovery for the city's taxi drivers. "Lovely," said one
as we drove through a tunnel that had opened that very morning. "It's
all owing to Tayyip," he went on--"lion of a man!"
By contrast, I have spoken to architects and planners whose relations
with the government have broken down over what they describe as the
haphazard and unplanned nature of the city's expansion, inadequate
oversight, environmental damage, and mass evictions of the poor to
make way for the middle class. The new bridge over the Bosporus,
a very senior planner told me, could permit the urbanization of a
huge stretch of old forest--on which, he said, the city's fragile
ecology depends. Work has now started on an enormous neo-Ottoman
mosque that Erdogan wants to be visible from everywhere in Istanbul,
and that will have the tallest minarets in the world. At the same
time, his deputy prime minister has hinted that the great domed space
of Hagia Sophia, formerly a church, then a mosque, and now a museum,
would be reconverted into a mosque.
Erdogan's opponents publicly celebrated the International Olympic
Committee's rejection of Istanbul's bid to host the 2020 Olympics.
(Tokyo won.) I have heard liberals express satisfaction that
Turkey's boom now seems to be slowing--the consequence of falling
confidence in emerging markets in general, and the effects of the
Gezi demonstrations. (The stock exchange dropped sharply following
the unrest.) Anything that tarnishes the prime minister's self-image
is welcomed by Turkish liberals.
On September 30, the prime minister announced new pro-democracy
reforms. Under these, instruction in Kurdish will be allowed in private
schools (though not in state schools) and an electoral threshold that
has had the effect of limiting Kurdish representation in parliament
will be abolished. A long-standing ban on women in hijab working as
civil servants is also to be lifted--except for some judicial and
military personnel.
Erdogan's pro-Kurdish measures were designed to revive the peace
process. Politicians close to the PKK have described the new reforms
as inadequate, and thousands of Kurdish nationalists remain in jail
under Turkey's anti-terror laws, but Erdogan is the best Turkish prime
minister the Kurds have ever had; a return to violence is unlikely.4
An injection of pious women into the civil service will advance the
prime minister's plan to make the state more religious. But he will
do nothing that would help his opponents. The jailed journalists stay
jailed. And there will be no recognition for the Alevis.
To many Sunnis, the Alevis are wayward Muslims who should be
encouraged to return to the true faith--not encouraged in their
heresies. The Alevis had a prominent part in the protests in Gezi
and the prime minister has hardened his tone against them. He has
made disparaging asides about them in speeches and the new Bosporus
bridge is to be named for an Ottoman sultan who slaughtered Alevis by
the thousands. Erdogan's Sunni supporters and the Alevis also differ
on Syria, the country's main foreign policy challenge.
Turkey's Alevis have only a hazy affinity with Syria's Alawites,
but they felt acutely threatened when it looked as though Bashar
al-Assad would fall quickly and be replaced by a Sunni regime
supported by the AKP government. This is what Erdogan had in mind
when he became an early proponent of regime change in Syria back in
2011, receiving opposition leaders and facilitating the transfer of
arms to rebel groups. But Assad did not fall and the price of this
policy has been high. Half a million Syrian refugees have arrived in
Turkey, the border areas are unstable, and the Erdogan government has
been embarrassed by accusations that it has been helping opposition
groups linked to al-Qaeda, accusations it may have been trying to
answer when the Turkish army shelled fighters from one such group,
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, earlier this month. In May,
fifty-three people were killed in attacks, believed to have originated
in Syria, on the Turkish town of Reyhanli (The prime minister pointedly
noted that the dead were all "Sunni.") Erdogan has not concealed his
frustration at the United States's refusal to topple Assad; but he
has been unable to do so on his own. These are all points made by
Erdogan's liberal opponents, Alevi politicians in particular.
Erdogan is Turkey's most powerful leader since Ataturk, but the Gezi
events have been a serious challenge to him, and their effects will
continue to be felt. By picking fights with those who disagree with
him and encouraging sectarianism, he is condemning his country to
a period of turbulence, while undermining his own reputation as a
path-finding democrat in the Muslim world.
--November 20, 2013
1
The Turkey analyst Gareth Jenkins is one of the few outsiders to
have studied the Ergenekon case, as it is known, from all the angles,
and his 2009 report on the subject depicted it partly as the product
of a fevered prosecutorial imagination. "The indictments," he wrote,
"are so full of contradictions, rumors, speculation, misinformation,
illogicalities, absurdities and untruths that they are not even
internally consistent or coherent." See Gareth Jenkins, "Between Fact
and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation," Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute and Silkroad Studies Program, July 2009. â~F©
2
Erdogan's Islamism is nothing if not pragmatic. The economy remains
dependent on interest-charging loans that are banned under Islam.
Erdogan insists that a global network of financiers (by which he
means Jews) is trying to weaken the country, but he has done more
than anyone to expose Turkish consumers to what he calls the "interest
rate lobby." The country's foreign debt has nearly tripled since the
AKPcame to power. â~F©
3
The flat I bought in 1999 for $28,000 is now worth around $800,000.
Alas, it is now owned by someone else. â~F©
4
The government had been hoping to convince Kurdish nationalists in
parliament to support proposed changes to the constitution that would
attach new executive powers to the post of the presidency. Erdogan is
expected to run again for president next summer. Kurdish acquiescence
in these plans now looks less likely. â~F©
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/dec/19/turkey-surreal-menacing-pompous/?pagination=false
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
December 19, 2013
Issue
Christopher de Bellaigue
Osman Orsal/Reuters Antigovernment protesters at Taksim Square,
Istanbul, July 20, 2013
Now, more than ever, it is harder to argue for the compatibility of
political Islam and democracy. The ejection of the Muslim Brotherhood
from the government of Egypt has delivered a heavy blow to the
prospects of an accommodation between the two. The Brotherhood came
to power democratically, governed dismally and repressively, and
was toppled in a bloody military coup. Many Egyptian Islamists now
associate democracy with pain, humiliation, and death.
The effects of the Egyptian debacle have been widely felt. Saudi
Arabia and Jordan feel more politically secure than at any time
since the start of the Arab Spring, although Jordan has the heavy
burden of absorbing some 500,000 Syrian refugees. The prospect of
a democratic Syria has in any case long since disappeared behind
the blood and smoke. But now another nightmare may be emerging in
Turkey, the Middle East's most prominent proponent of what might be
called Islamic democracy. The stability and prosperity that Turkey
has enjoyed over the past ten years had associated the country with
a type of political arrangement known flatteringly as the "Turkish
model." This summer, the model came unstuck.
On May 27, small numbers of environmentalists occupied Gezi Park,
in Istanbul's Taksim Square, protesting against plans to replace the
park with a shopping center inspired by the design of an old Ottoman
barracks. Over the next few days they were joined by others expressing
dissatisfaction with what they regard as the government's meddlesome
Islamist agenda. The police responded violently and the agitation
grew; by the time of the brutal eviction of a huge crowd from Taksim
Square, more than two weeks later, some 3.5 million people (from
a population of 80 million) had taken part in almost five thousand
demonstrations across Turkey, five had lost their lives, and more
than eight thousand had been injured. Clearly, the "Gezi events"
were about more than trees.
The unrest of this summer divided Turks on the same issues that have
caused civil strife elsewhere in the region: among them political
Islam, ethnic and sectarian divisions (involving the Kurdish and Alevi
minorities), and authoritarian rule. Although a meltdown on Egyptian
lines is implausible, a transition to Islamic authoritarianism is not.
That would do further injury to the idea that Islam and democracy can
share the public sphere. It would also be the end of an experiment
of which Turks are justifiably proud.
The reforms that Turkey embarked upon in the mid-2000s were long
overdue. For decades, the country's pious majority had been suppressed
by a secular elite claiming to uphold the values of the republic's
founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. In 1923, Ataturk set up the
Republic of Turkey from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire; he spent the
rest of his life secularizing institutions and propagating European
education, mores, and dress. Ataturk was a visionary and a genius,
but Kemalism, the credo built around his memory, had degenerated
into ancestor worship long before I was first able to observe it,
after moving to the country in 1996. Ataturk's picture and sayings
were everywhere; the country's leaders made countless pilgrimages to
his tomb and used his memory to defend measures such as a ban on the
Islamic head-covering in state institutions, which effectively denied
millions of young women a university education.
The country's powerful generals were the ultimate Kemalists. They
kept the elected politicians to heel by using the threat of a military
coup. (The army overthrew four governments between 1950 and 1997.) All
the while, a dirty war against Kurdish rebels fostered a sense of
beleaguerment that excused human rights abuses. Torture, miscarriages
of justice, state-sponsored assassinations--Turkey was a leader in all.
And in little else. The country was an economic basket case. Foreign
diplomats saw the capital, Ankara, as a hardship posting. There,
amid the brutal architecture of the ministries, under a severe
Anatolian sky, one had the sense of a secular elite's loathing for
the people it claimed to represent--their Islamic modes of dress,
their guileful provincialism, and above all their belief that religion
was the answer to the country's problems. "Two-legged cockroaches,"
some of my secular friends called the fundamentalist women in their
black sheets.
Kemalism started to drain away with the victory of Recep Tayyip
Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP). in the general election
of 2002. In not the least of Kemalism's follies, Erdogan had been
jailed for declaiming a poem that could be interpreted as an Islamist
call to arms; but the message he conveyed after he was released
and became prime minister was not one of revenge. On the contrary,
in the aftermath of September 11 and amid the widening perception in
the West that Islam equaled jihadi Islamism, his stress on moderation,
democracy, and the rigors of the free market was welcome not only to
waverers inside Turkey, but also to the United States and its allies.
Over the next several years, in election after election, the will
of the pious majority was reflected at the ballot box; political
stability brought investment and wealth creation. At the same time,
the AKP pushed through important pro-democracy reforms. Torture and
extrajudicial executions declined. The dirty war lost intensity as
Kurds were granted some cultural rights, and Kurdish nationalists,
long denied parliamentary representation, became a voluble presence
in the Ankara assembly. All the while, the army was being stripped of
its political authority, a process that concluded this August with the
jailing of dozens of retired officers, including a former chief of the
general staff, on charges of plotting against the government. The case,
known as "Ergenekon" after the mythical Central Asian home of the
Turkish nation, was based on the claim that there was a widespread
conspiracy, involving not only the army but also sympathizers in
parliament and the media, to destabilize the government and overthrow
it in a coup.
Some experts who have scrutinized the relevant court documents believe
that the conspiracy was greatly exaggerated and used by the government
as a means of destroying the old Kemalist elite and severing its
ties with the public.1 And this is what seems to have happened, as
the muted public reaction to the Ergenekon verdicts suggests. Back in
the 1990s, polls had shown the army to be the institution most trusted
by Turks. Its final humiliation this autumn elicited hardly a murmur
from a population that has now rejected the old presentation of the
army as embodying a virile, honorable Turkishness essential to the
country's survival.
Although Erdogan came from a political tradition, that of Turkish
Islamism, that was hostile to the West, his government pursued
good ties with Europe and the United States, notwithstanding some
prickliness over the question of Turkey's long-standing application for
membership in the European Union. (France and Germany are against, and
Turkey's chief negotiator recently acknowledged that the country will
probably never join.) Previous Turkish governments had cold-shouldered
the Muslim Middle East. No longer; rather than contain neighbors such
as Syria and Iran, theAKP government penetrated them using trade
and engineered a rapprochement with the Kurdish region of northern
Iraq. Erdogan also pleased many Turks by allowing his country's
historically good ties with Israel to deteriorate.
Naturally, the people who benefited most from Erdogan's rule were
his own supporters, not only because specific measures like the
headscarf ban fell into partial disuse--universities now admit women
in headscarves, as do many courts--but because the tenor of public
life became more pious. Erdogan and his ministers did not conceal
their links to religious orders--such as the Nakshibendis--that the
Kemalists had regarded as a major threat to the state. God, rather
than Ataturk, was invoked at groundbreaking ceremonies; new mosques
rose in the big cities. All the while, the prime minister's friends
in the private sector--often pious businessmen from the interior
of the country who bankrolled his election victories--were rewarded
with contracts for building, improving infrastructure, and producing
energy. Turkey gained a new elite, both brassy and devout.
The army fought several unsuccessful rearguard actions, including
a threat--empty, as it turned out--to launch a coup in 2007, but
the secular rebellion that some had anticipated didn't happen. An
important reason for this was that other, non-Islamist groups were also
benefiting from the dismantling of Kemalism. The old establishment
had given protection but no dignity to members of the Alevi sect,
who practice a highly eclectic version of Shiism and make up between
15 and 20 percent of the population. Fearing assimilation, the Alevis
have long demanded recognition of their separate status; these efforts
were stepped up during the 2000s and Alevi organizations increased
in size and visibility.
Human rights groups had been another bugbear of the Kemalists, who
regarded them as special pleaders for the Kurds or, more generally, a
carrier of Western values in their dissolute, morally degenerate form.
Such groups multiplied under the AKP; Turkey now has the most exuberant
feminist, gay, and environmentalist movements in the Middle East. In
the new atmosphere it became more possible for people to argue--as
did a small but growing number--that the massacre of Armenians in
1915 was a case of genocide. That, too, had been taboo.
Perhaps most important of all, Erdogan's Kurdish policies marked the
end of the state's policy of denying legitimacy to the Kurds.
Ministers I had visited in the late 1990s had been unable to utter
their name, referring to them as "our brothers in the southeast." Now,
no one would dream of denying Turkey's multiethnic, multicultural
composition. This March, the Kurdistan Workers Party (or PKK,
according to its Kurdish acronym), which began its bloody war against
the Turkish state in 1984, announced what may end up being its final
cease-fire. A peace process between the government and the PKK has
been slowly and fractiously advancing since then.
The most remarkable thing about the diversification of Turkey is that
it happened under a socially conservative Islamist. When Erdogan
became prime minister, the question being asked was whether this
highly effective and popular leader would use his new authority to
impose an Islamist vision. As the 2000s wore on and the economy grew
by an average of 5 percent a year, attracting some $100 billion in
foreign investment, Erdogan felt able to voice a different kind of
aspiration: to regional leadership and a level of prestige that Turks
had not enjoyed since the Ottoman heyday.
Naturally, many citizens were pleased by the rise in the national
fortunes, but others felt unease at the prime minister's increasingly
hubristic manner. This unease was strong among the minorities and
interest groups that had benefited from Erdogan's reforms but felt no
affinity with the man or his ideals. Together, these people--including
members of the Alevi and Kurdish minorities, as well as secular-minded
journalists, entrepreneurs, and many young people--made up something
Turkey had not had before: a liberal constituency.
It was this liberal constituency that clashed with Erdogan last May,
and that now continues its campaign of opposition and dissent.
Small-scale protests have been taking place every week since the
beginning of September, some of them violent, and armed police are
present in big numbers in the country's big cities. The government
continues with its policy of limiting freedom of expression. The
government, its media supporters, and the judiciary combine their
efforts against people and groups associated with the opposition;
the latest target is the Koc Group, a secular-minded conglomerate
whose hotel in Taksim Square opened its doors to protesters during
the Gezi events. Since then, the Koc Group had to give up a defense
contract it had won, and it is being investigated for fraud and
plotting against the government.
Riccardo Venturi/Contrasto/Redux Supporters of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul, June 7, 2013
One of the most disturbing aspects of the government's intolerance
of anything it perceives as a challenge to its authority is its
repressive treatment of the press. Around sixty journalists are
currently behind bars. Most of them have reported favorably on
the Kurdish nationalist movement, the PKK, and are victim to the
country's draconian terror laws. At least twenty journalists received
prison sentences of between six and thirty-four years as part of this
summer's Ergenekon verdict. For the most part, they are accused of
activities such as gathering news from sources close to the PKK and
expressing hostility to the government in telephone conversations,
actions that have been interpreted as "aiding and abetting" terrorists
or "attempting to change the constitutional order by force."
In many cases denied bail and access to the charge sheet that has
been prepared against them, these allegedly pro-Kurdish prisoners are
presumably being held as political hostages by the government for use
as the peace process with the PKK inches forward. But others, writing
on non-Kurdish issues, have also been indicted, not least by Erdogan
himself, who has issued writs against several journalists who have
made fun of him. Self-censorship is the result. It is directed from
the boardroom, as newspaper owners try to avoid the fate suffered by
two antigovernment newspapers, Milliyet and Sabah, which lost control
of their well-known publications as a result of government pressure.
(A company run by Erdogan's son-in-law bought Sabah at auction--he
was the sole bidder.)
Equally insidious is the widespread use of intimidation to pressure
newspapers and their employers. Columnist friends of mine have lost
their jobs as a result of a phone call from the prime minister's
office. One well-known broadcaster and columnist, Nuray Mert, told
the Committee to Protect Journalists last year that her career had
effectively been ended as a result of the prime minister's criticism
of her in a public speech. The huge court case that ended recently
with the jailing of the former army chief of staff, along with many
other retired officers, journalists, and politicians, was held under
similar highly politicized conditions, its fairness compromised by what
human rights advocates regard as the misuse of protected and partisan
witnesses and the lengthy pretrial detention of many of the accused.
A vindictive authoritarianism is taking hold of Turkey. To the prime
minister's supporters this is regrettable but necessary; many I have
spoken to think that the protest at Gezi Square was organized by
foreign agitators, and that the protesters should have been crushed
more harshly than they were. In a democracy, these people believe, the
will of the majority is determined at the ballot box and then carried
out. This, they say, is what had been happening quite successfully
until the liberals, realizing they were too few to win an election,
turned to seditious activities instead. The idea that the beliefs of
liberal minorities should be legally protected and might actually have
an influence on policymaking has not been accepted by the government,
which claims to speak for the majority.
But the architect of Turkey's polarization isn't the liberals; it's
Erdogan. He has read into successive election victories a license to
involve himself in every aspect of the nation. His abrasive, physical
style of oratory betrays no self-doubt. Opening his arms to his
audience, bringing his hand over his heart, he criticizes the lives
of his subjects, and his views are rarely less than vigorous. All
drinkers are alcoholics; every family should have three children;
wholemeal flour is best ("our children will be stronger...the bonds
of trust between us will increase"); abortion is murder and Caesarean
sections should be avoided. Twitter is a "menace" and those opposed
to road-building should go and live in a forest. The prime minister
appears to dislike expertise when it disagrees with him. "You have
nothing to teach us about sociology," he told a politely dissenting
social scientist.
As much as the tear gas, water cannons, and plastic bullets, it was
Erdogan's contemptuous way of addressing the Gezi demonstrators that
hardened feelings against him. Liberals are skeptical of a leader who
commands slavish adulation from his followers--a former adviser to the
prime minister told me there is no "mechanism of self-criticism" in
Erdogan's entourage. The government is touched by paranoia; Erdogan's
chief adviser has accused foreign powers of using telekinesis to try
to kill his boss. The government creates an aura that is surreal,
menacing, and insufferably pompous. Unsurprisingly, it was the butt
of humor during the Gezi protests. "Enough!" ran one graffito after a
night of brutality by the security forces. "I'll call the police." A
gay group unfurled a banner that said: "You have nothing to teach us
about sodomy."
Erdogan has encouraged a species of conservatism that is now the
dominant mode of life throughout Turkey. The culture is pietistic,
implicitly anti-Alevi, and materialistic. This last factor is new,
for until quite recently virtue was associated with austerity and
self-reliance; now the faithful demand rewards in this world in
the form of high-performance cars, iPads, and so forth--acquired
using the family credit card.2 Following a pattern that American
conservatives would recognize, these Turks are both in sympathy
with the conservatives in the government and growing more detached
from it in their everyday lives. Private schools and hospitals have
proliferated and the middle classes prefer to live in the private
housing communities that have sprung up in Istanbul and elsewhere.
One can understand why minorities like the Alevis associate these
gated developments with social and sectarian homogenization. While
visiting a colossal housing colony in Istanbul, for instance, I met a
woman of Alevi origin who had become a devout Sunni through marriage
into a Sunni family and vigorously criticized the Gezi protesters.
>From the AKP's point of view, however, Istanbul has improved greatly
under its rule. The city has indeed boomed, with new infrastructure
and a housing price bubble to rival any in the developing world.3
Among the recent constructions are homes for the poor; the spectacle
of unregulated shanties clinging to the hillsides is rarer. Over
the next few years Istanbul will have the world's biggest airport,
a gargantuan bridge over the Bosporus, and two cities in the greater
metropolitan area of one million inhabitants each. Each day seems to
bring a new discovery for the city's taxi drivers. "Lovely," said one
as we drove through a tunnel that had opened that very morning. "It's
all owing to Tayyip," he went on--"lion of a man!"
By contrast, I have spoken to architects and planners whose relations
with the government have broken down over what they describe as the
haphazard and unplanned nature of the city's expansion, inadequate
oversight, environmental damage, and mass evictions of the poor to
make way for the middle class. The new bridge over the Bosporus,
a very senior planner told me, could permit the urbanization of a
huge stretch of old forest--on which, he said, the city's fragile
ecology depends. Work has now started on an enormous neo-Ottoman
mosque that Erdogan wants to be visible from everywhere in Istanbul,
and that will have the tallest minarets in the world. At the same
time, his deputy prime minister has hinted that the great domed space
of Hagia Sophia, formerly a church, then a mosque, and now a museum,
would be reconverted into a mosque.
Erdogan's opponents publicly celebrated the International Olympic
Committee's rejection of Istanbul's bid to host the 2020 Olympics.
(Tokyo won.) I have heard liberals express satisfaction that
Turkey's boom now seems to be slowing--the consequence of falling
confidence in emerging markets in general, and the effects of the
Gezi demonstrations. (The stock exchange dropped sharply following
the unrest.) Anything that tarnishes the prime minister's self-image
is welcomed by Turkish liberals.
On September 30, the prime minister announced new pro-democracy
reforms. Under these, instruction in Kurdish will be allowed in private
schools (though not in state schools) and an electoral threshold that
has had the effect of limiting Kurdish representation in parliament
will be abolished. A long-standing ban on women in hijab working as
civil servants is also to be lifted--except for some judicial and
military personnel.
Erdogan's pro-Kurdish measures were designed to revive the peace
process. Politicians close to the PKK have described the new reforms
as inadequate, and thousands of Kurdish nationalists remain in jail
under Turkey's anti-terror laws, but Erdogan is the best Turkish prime
minister the Kurds have ever had; a return to violence is unlikely.4
An injection of pious women into the civil service will advance the
prime minister's plan to make the state more religious. But he will
do nothing that would help his opponents. The jailed journalists stay
jailed. And there will be no recognition for the Alevis.
To many Sunnis, the Alevis are wayward Muslims who should be
encouraged to return to the true faith--not encouraged in their
heresies. The Alevis had a prominent part in the protests in Gezi
and the prime minister has hardened his tone against them. He has
made disparaging asides about them in speeches and the new Bosporus
bridge is to be named for an Ottoman sultan who slaughtered Alevis by
the thousands. Erdogan's Sunni supporters and the Alevis also differ
on Syria, the country's main foreign policy challenge.
Turkey's Alevis have only a hazy affinity with Syria's Alawites,
but they felt acutely threatened when it looked as though Bashar
al-Assad would fall quickly and be replaced by a Sunni regime
supported by the AKP government. This is what Erdogan had in mind
when he became an early proponent of regime change in Syria back in
2011, receiving opposition leaders and facilitating the transfer of
arms to rebel groups. But Assad did not fall and the price of this
policy has been high. Half a million Syrian refugees have arrived in
Turkey, the border areas are unstable, and the Erdogan government has
been embarrassed by accusations that it has been helping opposition
groups linked to al-Qaeda, accusations it may have been trying to
answer when the Turkish army shelled fighters from one such group,
the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, earlier this month. In May,
fifty-three people were killed in attacks, believed to have originated
in Syria, on the Turkish town of Reyhanli (The prime minister pointedly
noted that the dead were all "Sunni.") Erdogan has not concealed his
frustration at the United States's refusal to topple Assad; but he
has been unable to do so on his own. These are all points made by
Erdogan's liberal opponents, Alevi politicians in particular.
Erdogan is Turkey's most powerful leader since Ataturk, but the Gezi
events have been a serious challenge to him, and their effects will
continue to be felt. By picking fights with those who disagree with
him and encouraging sectarianism, he is condemning his country to
a period of turbulence, while undermining his own reputation as a
path-finding democrat in the Muslim world.
--November 20, 2013
1
The Turkey analyst Gareth Jenkins is one of the few outsiders to
have studied the Ergenekon case, as it is known, from all the angles,
and his 2009 report on the subject depicted it partly as the product
of a fevered prosecutorial imagination. "The indictments," he wrote,
"are so full of contradictions, rumors, speculation, misinformation,
illogicalities, absurdities and untruths that they are not even
internally consistent or coherent." See Gareth Jenkins, "Between Fact
and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation," Central Asia-Caucasus
Institute and Silkroad Studies Program, July 2009. â~F©
2
Erdogan's Islamism is nothing if not pragmatic. The economy remains
dependent on interest-charging loans that are banned under Islam.
Erdogan insists that a global network of financiers (by which he
means Jews) is trying to weaken the country, but he has done more
than anyone to expose Turkish consumers to what he calls the "interest
rate lobby." The country's foreign debt has nearly tripled since the
AKPcame to power. â~F©
3
The flat I bought in 1999 for $28,000 is now worth around $800,000.
Alas, it is now owned by someone else. â~F©
4
The government had been hoping to convince Kurdish nationalists in
parliament to support proposed changes to the constitution that would
attach new executive powers to the post of the presidency. Erdogan is
expected to run again for president next summer. Kurdish acquiescence
in these plans now looks less likely. â~F©
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/dec/19/turkey-surreal-menacing-pompous/?pagination=false
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress