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  • Erdogan, The Anti-Ataturk

    ERDOGAN, THE ANTI-ATATURK

    The National Interest
    September 2013 - October 2013

    by Aram Bakshian Jr.

    THIS NOVEMBER 10, at precisely 9:05 a.m., for the seventy-fifth time
    in the history of the Turkish Republic, the nation will grind to a
    halt. In Istanbul, for sixty seconds sirens will drone, ferryboat
    horns will blare in the Golden Horn and traffic will freeze.

    Throughout the country, millions of ordinary Turks will stand still
    and mute to mark the death anniversary of their nation's founding
    father. It is an impressive moment, and deservedly so. Mustafa Kemal,
    known to history as Kemal Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), was an
    indomitable blend of soldier, diplomat, politician, intellectual and
    nation builder. One of the twentieth century's most remarkable leaders,
    he was a man of iron will and incredible vision.

    A war hero even as the Ottoman Empire he served crumbled around him,
    Ataturk was instrumental in defeating an invading British army at
    Gallipoli. At the end of World War I, when the victorious Allies
    occupied Istanbul and began to partition Ottoman territory, he
    took to the Anatolian heartland, forged a new citizen army, routed
    Greek forces that had seized Smyrna (now Izmir) and much adjoining
    Turkish territory, and then drove the Allied occupation forces out
    of Istanbul. But that was only the beginning. As president of his
    own newly minted, custom-designed Turkish Republic, with inspired
    eloquence and brute force, he dragged his fellow countrymen,
    many of them literally kicking and screaming, into the twentieth
    century. The Turkish language was modernized and systematized. The
    Latin alphabet replaced an archaic Arabic script. Massive industrial,
    education and infrastructure initiatives were launched and a new
    sense of Turkish identity-part authentic, part invented in rewritten
    history textbooks-replaced the old Ottoman way of thinking. In
    most respects, this was a great plus for the vast majority of poor
    urban and rural Turks. Under the Ottoman Empire, even in the glory
    days when it ruled large chunks of Europe, Asia and Africa, and was
    mistress of the Mediterranean, most ordinary Turks were part of the
    impoverished peasant masses. Commerce, finance and other professions
    were monopolized by a small, educated elite, many-in some cases,
    most-of them non-Muslim Greeks, Armenians and Jews.

    The end of the empire changed all that. At times it was not a pretty
    picture; transforming the truncated remains of the multiethnic Ottoman
    Empire into a cohesive, racially rooted nation-state was achieved at
    great human cost and more than a little tampering with historical
    truth. While Ataturk had condemned the extermination of Armenians
    during World War I by his Young Turk predecessors, calling it a
    "shameful act," he presided over a brutal but less horrific forced
    mass transfer of populations in which Anatolian Greeks-who, like the
    Armenians, had lived there for centuries before the arrival of the
    first nomadic Turkic invaders-were driven from their homes. The same
    fate, it is worth noting, awaited a smaller number of ethnic Turks
    living in Greek territory.

    The only substantial minority that remained in modern Turkey were
    the Kurds, fellow Muslims but with their own language and customs,
    who are still a source of considerable friction today. Even they were
    subjected to a clumsy attempt at what might be called bureaucratic
    assimilation. The republic invented a new name for them: until a
    few years ago, they were officially classified as "mountain Turks,"
    denied a legitimate identity of their own.

    A charismatic speaker and popular hero, Ataturk stumped the republic,
    defining a new sense of "Turkishness" and denouncing anything and
    everything he considered divisive or reactionary-from fez and veil
    to traditional Ottoman music and religious orders. Like Peter the
    Great in Russia two centuries before, he was determined to overcome
    centuries of backwardness and decline, by brute force if necessary-and
    it often was. Also like Peter the Great, he had seen the greater world
    outside his homeland, and he liked what he saw. Once firmly in power
    in the mid-1920s, he would declare:

    "~SI have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the
    bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold
    his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My
    people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates
    of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go."~T

    Only it didn't. Today, many informed observers feel that Ataturk's
    achievement is at risk, threatened by a rising Islamist tide led by
    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an unashamed-and historically
    uninformed-admirer of an idealized version of the Ottoman-Islamic past
    that exists mainly in his own imagination. It is both significant and
    ironic that the mass anti-Erdogan protests that swept Turkey this
    June were initially triggered by his arbitrary decision to destroy
    Gezi Park, one of Istanbul's few remaining green areas, to replace it
    with a "replica" of Ottoman-era military barracks and a shopping mall.

    Other plans included building an enormous new mosque in adjoining
    Taksim Square, site of the Monument of the Republic.

    Why this nostalgia for a romanticized, not to say imaginary,
    Ottoman-Islamic past? Perhaps it begins with a deep sense of grievance
    on the part of Turkish Islamists, shared by their brethren throughout
    the Middle East-the belief that a golden age of Islamic dominance
    was destroyed by the forces of Western Christianity and Western
    technology. Whatever is driving this nostalgia for a romanticized past
    of Islamic vibrancy and power, it has become a compelling force in
    modern Turkish politics. The late Samuel P. Huntington of Harvard,
    a leading political scientist of our time, called Turkey a "torn
    country"-a nation belonging culturally to a particular civilization
    but whose leaders wish to redefine it as belonging to another. Hence,
    any effort to understand the dynamics of Turkish politics today must
    begin by probing the rise to power and remarkable national stewardship
    of Kemal Ataturk, as well as the leadership vacuum that ensued upon
    his death.

    HE WAS one of many bright, young Ottoman officers of his generation
    who had been posted as military attaches in Europe before World War I.

    These young men often came home dazzled by Western society and
    technology, with a newfound contempt for traditional Ottoman culture
    and religion and with an indiscriminate zeal for all things Western
    and modern. At the dawn of the twentieth century, this often meant
    embracing fashionably "enlightened" free thinking, anticlericalism,
    and the rather naive belief that science and rational materialism
    could solve all of society's ills if only the right people (i.e.,
    themselves) could take charge from their elders.

    In 1908, they did, pressuring the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II
    to hold parliamentary elections and embrace constitutional government.

    When he tried to renege a year later, Young Turk officers and their
    troops deposed him, replacing him with Sultan Mehmed V, an elderly
    nonentity who served as a ceremonial figurehead. But rather than
    arresting the imperial decay, the Young Turks actually accelerated
    it, suffering a string of humiliating defeats in the first Balkan
    War, losing most of what was then European Turkey. The humiliation
    only ended when the Christian victors-Serbia, Greece, Montenegro
    and Bulgaria-turned on each other in the second Balkan War and the
    Turks managed to reclaim some of their lost territory. Total disaster
    followed after the Young Turks plunged their creaky old empire into
    World War I on the side of the Central powers, proclaiming a jihad
    against the ultimately victorious Allies.

    Unlike Enver Pasha and the other members of the Young Turk junta,
    Kemal Ataturk put no stock in jihads. While he would sometimes invoke
    the name of Allah to rally the masses during the early days of the
    republican struggle following World War I, his mission was modernizing
    and Westernizing Turkey.

    While a new class of privileged, Westernized Turks rose to the top of
    republican society and replaced most of the old minority-dominated
    commercial and professional elites, millions of poor city dwellers
    and the vast majority of the rural peasantry remained poverty
    stricken, uneducated and, for better or worse, true to their old
    customs and Muslim faith in a quiet, low-key way. The shallow tide of
    Western modernity swept over them but did not carry them with it. If
    Ataturk-who played as hard as he worked and was a notoriously heavy
    drinker-had not died early, he might have completed his modernizing
    mission by sheer force of character. But his passing in 1938 at
    the relatively young age of fifty-seven left a void no successor
    could fill. His loyal wartime aide, Ismet Inonu-a brave soldier and
    a staunch patriot, but a leader of limited vision-succeeded him,
    but Ataturk's initial reforms froze in place.

    When he died on the morning of November 10, 1938, in his small, modest
    bedroom in Istanbul's vast old Dolmabahce Palace, all the clocks
    in the building were stopped. They remain so to this day. Like the
    static moment of mourning each year commemorating Ataturk's death,
    the stopped clocks in the Dolmabahce Palace serve as an unintentional
    reminder of what that premature death meant to Turkey: the beginning
    of a long era of suspended animation, of social and political inertia
    bordering on stasis.

    Even with the strongest of wills and best of intentions, Ataturk's
    successors would have had a hard time continuing his work. He had
    died at the worst possible time. In 1938, the Western democracies
    were still reeling from the Great Depression. To many politicians
    and intellectuals, Communism and fascism-both with a heavy emphasis
    on police-state tyranny and centrally managed economies-seemed to
    be the wave of the future. Europe was also about to plunge into a
    disastrous Second World War, and Turkey's leaders would have their
    hands full simply protecting the sovereignty and neutrality of their
    impoverished, militarily vulnerable nation.

    Ataturk's whole life had been spent broadening his understanding and
    seeking sensible new solutions. The Turkish future he envisioned
    was one of expanded education, opportunity and prosperity for the
    poor, uneducated Turkish masses with gradually evolving democratic
    institutions as progress was made. While his rhetoric remained in
    place, most of his vision died with him. Until free-market economic
    reforms were ushered in by Turgut Ozal, who served as a genuinely
    reformist prime minister and then president from 1983 to his suspicious
    death in 1993, Turkey did remain a secular state-but it also remained
    a 1930s-style corporate state based on crony capitalism, government
    corruption, and a senior military and moneyed class that defended
    its own special privileges at least as zealously as it protected
    the secular state. When politicians-Islamist or otherwise-got in
    the way, they were removed by force. One of them, Adnan Menderes, an
    economic reformer who courted religious voters by promising to remove
    restrictions on the traditional Arabic-language call to prayer and
    to allow new Muslim schools and the building of new mosques, was not
    only removed in a coup d'etat but also hanged by the military after
    a hastily improvised trial.

    The sad case of Menderes-a genuine reformer but also a rabble-rousing
    populist who jailed opposition journalists and politicians and openly
    appealed to voters on religious lines-starkly illustrates the fault
    line in modern Turkish politics. On the one hand, all too often
    the advocates of needed economic and social reform have also been
    political demagogues willing to play the religion card and trample
    on the rights of their political opponents. On the other hand, when
    the republic has been "rescued" from such men by the military, and
    the secular nature of the state has been preserved (along with the
    special privileges of the "rescuers"), desperately needed economic
    and social reforms have been either tabled or rescinded.

    This pattern is far from unique to Turkey. The same scenario has played
    out repeatedly in Muslim countries as different as Egypt, Pakistan and
    Bangladesh. What makes it particularly tragic in the case of Turkey
    is that-unlike new postcolonial nations with artificial borders and
    no strong patriotic tradition to draw on-it possesses most of the
    raw materials for a healthy, modern civil society. Indeed, Turks
    have been trying to "modernize" since at least the last quarter of
    the eighteenth century.

    Admittedly, the results have been mixed at best. Sultan Selim III,
    who reigned from 1789 to 1807, attempted to revive the empire and
    modernize the obsolete Ottoman military system only to be overthrown
    by the traditional Janissary corps and murdered shortly afterward.

    Sultan Mahmud II, who reigned from 1808 to 1839, managed to establish
    a "new model" army of sorts, abolish the Janissaries and modernize
    the civil service. But the empire had already begun to disintegrate,
    with Greece gaining full independence and Egypt remaining nominally
    Ottoman but autonomously ruled by its own hereditary dynasty of
    Khedives. The Western-oriented technocrats of the "Tanzimat" reform
    era of the mid-nineteenth century and the later Young Turk movement
    that overthrew the reactionary Sultan Abdul Hamid II had both tried to
    inject new life into the Ottoman Empire to little or no avail; indeed,
    it was Young Turk leader Enver Pasha's insistence on entering World
    War I on the side of the Central powers that sealed the empire's fate.

    Only with the death of the empire, which left a smaller but more
    cohesive core Turkish nation, was Ataturk able to succeed where
    the best and brightest of Ottoman soldiers, sultans and statesmen
    had failed. And yet a strong residue of sentiment remained in the
    country that resisted any impulse toward Westernization and longed
    for a return to that golden age of Islam that lit up the world before
    the West's inexorable rise.

    A SUPERFICIAL glimpse at the medieval world would seem to bear
    out this wistful view of history. As the doyen of Near and Middle
    Eastern historians Bernard Lewis has pointed out, "In the course of
    the seventh century, Muslim armies advancing from Arabia conquered
    Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa, all until then part of
    Christendom, and most of the new recruits to Islam, west of Iran and
    Arabia, were indeed converts from Christianity." Further gains would
    be made in Spain, much of which was overrun by Muslim North African
    Arabs and more recently converted Berber tribesmen. Eventually other
    non-Arab converts to Islam, most notably primitive but tough Tartar
    and Turkic nomad warriors, would carve out Muslim empires in large
    parts of Eastern Europe, Russia, the Levant, India and the Balkans.

    More important than this military success was the fact that, in the
    early years of the Muslim surge, cities like Baghdad, Damascus,
    Alexandria and, to a lesser extent, Cordoba were centers of a
    cultural flowering that preceded and-by preserving, recovering
    and building on classical knowledge lost in most of the surviving
    Christian West-helped make possible the brilliant achievements of
    the European Renaissance. This, in turn, led to the development of
    the modern Western civilization that would, in a few centuries,
    leave the Islamic world behind in the dust. Was the rise of the
    Christian West responsible for the decline of the Muslim East? Or was
    the relatively short period during which Muslim-conquered cities in
    the formerly Christian world of antiquity became centers of progress
    and learning a mere blip on the screen, a temporary, albeit benign,
    "hijacking" of more advanced, more populous societies by a primitive,
    desert-sprung society of warrior-conquerors that overran them?

    Surely it is no coincidence that nearly all of the cultural blossoming
    under early Islamic rule occurred in places far from Mecca and Medina
    (the cradles of Islam), and with centuries of history rooted in the
    Greco-Roman and early Christian past. Other centers of high Islamic
    culture like Persia and Mughal India were also homes to ancient
    civilizations long predating Islam. Thus, the intellectual, spiritual
    and aesthetic roots of the short-lived golden age of Islamic culture
    were almost entirely pre-Islamic in their origins and nature. Even
    the system of "Arabic" numerals that revolutionized mathematics was
    not really Arabic at all; it was borrowed from India by Arab traders.

    The decline of Islam's golden age occurred as Islam tightened its
    grip on the cultures it had overrun and, in the case of Europe,
    as a rapidly progressing Christendom began to push back the Islamic
    advance. The more pervasive Islam became in the territories it had
    conquered, the more those territories fell behind, perhaps because
    of the Islamists' belief that their religion contains a complete,
    hermetically-and prophetically-sealed formula for the running of every
    aspect of human society. Such a mind-set has a built-in hostility to
    the spirit of inquiry and the desire to subject prescribed notions
    of faith and fate to the tests of intellectual rigor. Ask no new
    questions and you will discover no new answers.

    The decline of the once-mighty Ottoman Empire mirrored the earlier
    decline in the rest of the Islamic world, culturally, militarily,
    economically and intellectually. "The Ottoman experience," writes
    Turkish historian M. Sukru Hanioglu in his Brief History of the
    Late Ottoman Empire, "provides a superb opportunity to examine the
    impact of modernity in a non-European setting." Leaders like Ataturk
    who lived through the imperial collapse attempted to build a modern
    Turkish alternative. It was a daunting task, and even its partial
    success was a remarkable achievement, remaining so to this day.

    AT THE height of the Cold War, it used to be said that Vienna, which
    had repulsed a Turkish attack at the height of Ottoman power, was
    two different cities. Approached from the Communist-dominated East,
    Vienna was a bustling, modern metropolis compared to anything Hungary,
    Poland or Czechoslovakia had to offer. But approached from the West,
    Vienna seemed more like a charming but antiquated relic than a living
    center of modern commerce and culture. Earlier this year, while
    reviewing Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's novel Silent House,
    it occurred to me that the same is true, though in a very different
    way, of contemporary Turkey:

    "~SStraddling the great divide between Europe and Asia, Christendom
    and Islam, Turkey wears two faces. Viewed from the East, it looks
    like a prosperous pillar of stability and civic order, especially
    when compared to any of its Muslim neighbors. Viewed from Western
    Europe, however, it presents a different picture, that of a country
    dangerously divided: on the one hand, a pampered and often corrupt
    pseudo-Western economic and social elite relying on the Turkish
    military to protect both its privileges and its secular values; on the
    other hand, a growingly militant and sometimes violent mass movement
    of Islamists-many of them poor urban immigrants from the backward,
    neglected countryside-determined to purge their country of alien
    "impurity" and turn it into a theocracy by whatever means necessary."~T

    For ten years now the latter of these two flawed factions has had the
    upper hand, thanks mainly to one man-the determined, driven visionary,
    Erdogan, who wants to remake Turkey in his own image and his own
    imagination. A powerful orator and skilled political organizer with
    a strong autocratic streak, boundless energy and an obsessive sense
    of his (self-perceived) historic mission, Erdogan was described by
    one observer I spoke with in Istanbul this May as

    "~Sa strange joke played on Turkey by history. If Kemal Ataturk had
    had an evil twin, it would have been someone exactly like Mr. Erdogan.

    Most of his views are mirror opposites of Ataturk's, but he is the
    first overwhelming, larger-than-life figure in Turkish public life
    since the Ghazi [Ataturk] himself."~T

    Like Ataturk, whose father was a minor government official, Erdogan
    rose from obscure origins through intelligence, drive and unbounded
    ambition. But there the similarity ends. Ataturk was, at most, an
    agnostic who felt that Islam, as practiced in the Ottoman Empire,
    was an enemy of progress; Erdogan is a devout Muslim who often waxes
    nostalgic about the good old imperial days. But that was after his
    party-the Justice and Development Party (AKP)-came to power in 2002
    with a 34 percent plurality in the national parliamentary elections.

    On his way to the premiership, Erdogan had run as a democratic
    reformer, promising to fight entrenched corruption, open up the economy
    to competition and growth, and bring basic services such as improved
    schools and sanitation to the poorer regions of the country, just as
    he had done to Istanbul's poorer neighborhoods as a reforming mayor.

    Erdogan kept many of his promises. Government graft and cronyism
    still exist, but the swag is no longer the privileged preserve of a
    small, old elite. Corruption has not been eliminated, but it has been
    democratized. And Erdogan has devoted billions of lira to development
    projects, especially in poor, rural areas where they are most needed.

    As a self-made business millionaire himself, he also understood-and
    delivered on-economic and regulatory reforms following the
    earlier example of Turgut Ozal, mentioned above. Under Erdogan's
    leadership-although not entirely due to it-in less than a decade
    the Turkish economy became the eighteenth largest in the world and
    per capita income nearly tripled, which helps to explain the AKP's
    strong showings in the 2007 and 2011 elections (it received nearly 50
    percent of the vote in the latter). It can truly be said that, as prime
    minister, Erdogan delivered on much of his public agenda. The problem
    is with his private agenda. According to Der Spiegel he once said,
    "Democracy is like a train. We shall get out when we arrive at the
    station we want."

    After his party's record victory in the 2011 elections, Erdogan seems
    to have decided he was approaching his station. Wall Street Journal
    correspondent Joe Parkinson summed it up rather neatly:

    "~SSince [the 2011 elections], the prime minister has sought to
    impose further restrictions on alcohol consumption and abortion and
    repeatedly called for all women to have at least three children to
    grow Turkey's population. He has held forth on what citizens should
    eat at the family dinner table, and intervened to censor sex scenes
    in prime-time television series. His government has sought to muzzle
    the press; Turkey now jails more journalists than Iran or China."~T

    He has also denounced raki, an anise-based liquor similar to the Greek
    ouzo-Turkey's alcoholic beverage of choice for centuries-declaring
    ayran, a drink made from diluted yogurt, the new national beverage. He
    has even declared war on white bread, his personal preference being
    the brown variety. On the brighter side, unlike the unhinged Latin
    American dictator in Woody Allen's comedy classic Bananas, he has
    yet to order everyone to wear their underpants over rather than under
    their trousers.

    More significantly, Erdogan has pushed for constitutional changes that
    would reduce parliamentary powers-and those of the prime minister-while
    transforming the office of the president from a largely ceremonial post
    to an "imperial" presidency his friends liken to that of Charles de
    Gaulle and his opponents liken to that of Vladimir Putin. If he can
    get the desired changes, he intends to run for the presidency and,
    if elected, would be eligible to run again for a second five-year
    term, giving him ten years as an elected autocrat. As Ilter Turan,
    a political scientist at Istanbul's Bilgi University, told the New
    York Times, Erdogan "has a highly majoritarian understanding of
    democracy. He believes that with 51 percent of the vote he can rule
    in an unrestrained fashion. He doesn't want checks and balances."

    ALL OF these factors help to explain how what began as the protest
    of a few environmentalists to save a small wooded park in Istanbul
    metastasized in hours into mass protests involving hundreds of
    thousands-possibly millions-of Turkish citizens in major cities
    across the country. In Washington before my recent trip to Turkey,
    and in Istanbul days before the demonstrations began and were brutally
    suppressed, I talked with Gareth Jenkins, a British journalist who has
    resided in Istanbul since 1989. Jenkins is an expert on the Erdogan
    government's mass arrests and show trials of civilian and military
    critics of its regime, as well as its mounting efforts to intimidate
    journalists by arresting and trying reporters and applying economic
    pressure-fines, litigation and the threat of the same-to newspaper
    and broadcast owners.

    Some of the allegations of planted evidence and rigged trials would be
    funny were it not for the human price paid by the innocent victims. In
    one case, a retired general returned to his home to find it had been
    ransacked and to learn he was about to be charged with conspiring to
    overthrow the state. He knew he was innocent, but he was told that
    investigators had found incriminating documents in his home that named
    him as a plotter. It turned out that the "evidence"-which must have
    been planted and was probably concocted-had nothing to do with him,
    but contained the similar name of another retired general who was
    probably innocent as well: two cheers for the gang that couldn't frame
    straight. When I asked Jenkins why Erdogan's power plays seemed to
    be growing more and more blatant, he mentioned that in November 2011
    the prime minister underwent emergency surgery for the removal of a
    malignant growth in his intestines, that he had a second operation in
    February 2012, and that he is now heavily medicated and subject to
    frequent health checks-with a distinct possibility that his cancer
    will return. Heavy medication could explain some of Erdogan's odder
    statements in recent weeks, such as his declaration that "there is now
    a menace which is called Twitter. . . . To me, social media is the
    worst menace to society" and that "the death of 17 people happened"
    during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in New York. (The latter
    was a totally false claim; there were no fatalities at all.) He also
    repeatedly has claimed that anti-Erdogan demonstrators desecrated an
    Istanbul mosque by smoking and drinking beer in it, even after the
    imam of the mosque insisted that no such thing happened and that
    the demonstrators had been invited to take shelter in the mosque,
    suffering from police-inflicted injuries and tear-gas inhalation.

    Whatever Erdogan's physical life expectancy may be, the mass
    demonstrations made it clear that time is not on his side. The
    prodemocracy demonstrators, overwhelmingly nonviolent and well
    behaved, were also overwhelmingly young, the vanguard of a rising
    generation of Turks who care about personal freedom and will not be
    bullied into silence. They represent a new political demographic that
    can't be pinned down as strictly right wing or left wing, observant
    Muslim or secular. And they are a generation of young people with
    access to electronic communications no tyranny can fully block, with
    a strong awareness of their rights and of those who would deny them
    those rights.

    But you can't beat something with nothing. The absence of strong,
    credible opposition leaders has left the political stage to the
    highly skilled Erdogan, who sometimes reminds this observer of a
    cross between Huey Long, Margaret Thatcher and Juan Peron. In the
    short term, growing doubts and divisions among his parliamentary
    followers may put more of a brake on his aspirations than any number of
    peaceful demonstrators. But, as Jenkins points out, even if most of the
    protesters represent a specific section of society, the demonstrations
    that swept the country "are arguably Turkey's first ever spontaneous,
    grassroots political movement . . . the participants [are] feeling
    empowered, determined but also bewildered by what is happening. They
    have never been here before. And neither has Turkey."

    One thing is certain. Except for the ones in the Dolmabahce Palace,
    the clocks in Turkey have started ticking again.

    Aram Bakshian Jr. is a contributing editor at The National Interest.

    He served as an aide to Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan and writes
    frequently on politics, history and the humanities.

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