In Newsweek Magazine
Erdogan 1, Ataturk 0
Rosemary Righter
Walking the walk: Erdogan (right) and many of Turkey’s military commanders who resigned last month., Cem Ozdel / SIPA
Flush with his
third and most resounding electoral victory, Recep Tayyip Erdogan
bestrides the Turkish stage like a colossus. That victory was his
alone: polling shows that more than half of the 50 percent of Turks who
cast their votes for the piously Islamic ruling Freedom and Justice
Party (AKP) last month were voting for the ruggedly populist prime
minister himself, not his party. His electoral pitch looked far ahead,
to 2023—the 100th anniversary of the founding, under Kemal Atatürk, of
the modern, and secular, Turkish state following the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire. He makes no bones about intending to be in charge from
now until then, as a president endowed with greatly expanded powers
under a new Constitution that will refashion Turkey on the model of
what he calls “democratic conservatism,” but that his political
opponents grimly characterize as Islamo-fascist.
Last week marked another milestone in Erdogan’s march to power, with
the appointment by him and President Abdullah Gül of new commanders
across the entire span of Turkey’s once all-powerful armed forces, the
first time that civilians, not the military, have had the final say.
The military itself cleared the field: on Friday, July 29, the entire
Turkish high command—Gen. Isik Kosaner, chief of the general staff,
plus the commanders of the ground, naval, and air forces—simultaneously
tendered their resignations.
The news shook
Turks but not Turkey’s friends abroad—to whom the military SOS signal
was primarily directed. In Washington, the State Department affirmed
its “total faith” in all Turkish institutions, civilian and military.
Ria Oomen, the European Parliament’s Turkey rapporteur, was positively
gushing: “Turkey is getting more democratic by the day.”
The very opposite is the case; that was the farewell message General
Kosaner was trying to get out. He was resigning, he wrote, in protest
at the lengthy detention on remand of 250 generals, admirals, and
lower-ranking commissioned and noncommissioned officers, 173 of them
still serving, arrested without due regard for “legal rules, rights,
justice, or conscientious values” and accused of membership in a
conspiracy that they insist never existed. Earlier that Friday the
prosecutors had demanded the arrest of a further 22, including the
commander of the Aegean forces, the head of Army intelligence, and the
military’s judicial adviser, this time for setting up a “hostile”
website. Kosaner stood down, he said, because he had been prevented
from protecting the legal rights of people who had not even been
formally charged, let alone faced trial, in the twin “Ergenekon” and
“Sledgehammer” cases. (The former refers to an alleged clandestine
secularist group, the latter to an alleged coup plot.) And he accused
the authorities of dragging out the investigations “to keep the Armed
Forces continually in the news, thereby creating the impression in
public that it is a criminal organization.”
That is how it increasingly looks to many troubled Turks who initially
welcomed the pursuit of the once untouchable military as an overdue
move against the “deep state” it had dominated and as a guarantee
against further military coups. The European Commission has blandly
described the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials as “an opportunity for
Turkey to strengthen confidence in the proper functioning of its
democratic institutions and the rule of law.” But the way the
investigations have been conducted, and the ever-swelling list of
detainees, suggests not so much a democracy resolutely confronting
malign forces from the past as Stalin’s military show trials of 1938
and Hitler’s systematic crushing of all opposition after coming to
power in 1933. As the supposedly “pragmatic” Erdogan stealthily
undermines the separation of state and religion that was Atatürk’s key
reform, there is a reek of totalitarian sulfur in the Turkish air.
Not only the military but journalists, academics, businessmen, and even
jurists are vulnerable: anyone who criticizes the AKP; champions equal
rights for Turkey’s large Kurdish minority; or, still more perilous,
probes the penetration of Turkish schools, universities, media, and
bureaucracy by the AKP’s own “deep state” ally, a wealthy and powerful
Islamist movement directed from luxurious self-exile in the U.S. by
Imam Fethullah Gülen, Erdogan’s friend and mentor. This was
dramatically highlighted in March by the arrest of Ahmet Sik and Nedim
Sener, radical award-winning reporters renowned for investigating
abuses of power by the military. Both are now, preposterously, accused
of complicity with Ergenekon. Sik was about to publish a book, The
Imam’s Army, on the Gülen movement’s saturation of police ranks. As he
was led away, he shouted: “If you touch them, you will burn.”
Turkey now tops the world in jailing its journalists, surpassing China
and Iran. Nearly 70 are in prison, thousands more are under
interrogation, and courts have imposed draconian sentences—dual life
sentences or even, in the case of two journalists from the Atalim
newspaper, 3,000 years each. The Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) reports that it has never before seen such
a “pervasive, indiscriminate assault” on freedom of expression, and
further adds that the government has exploited law 5651—enacted in 2007
purportedly to protect minors from Internet pornography—to block at
least 3,700 websites, including YouTube. Phone tapping is so ubiquitous
that no one, but no one, I met in Turkey last month dares to talk
openly on cell phones. Thousands of homes and offices are bugged—even
an office in the Court of Appeals. The OSCE reports with concern that
the government—emulating Chinese practice—is developing a
state-supported Turkish search engine that will reflect “Turkish
sensitivities.”
“The message is don’t write, don’t read, don’t do anything, and our
democracy won’t harm you,” says a young hotelier. A television producer
elaborates: “Erdogan shuns religious language and peppers his speeches
with the D word, but by ‘democratic,’ he means that the AKP reflects
the ‘popular will.’ He once said that democracy was like a bus, useful
to get to your destination. If his popularity wavered, he’d hop off
that bus.” And he adds: “I met some Iranian journalists the other day.
They said, ‘We used to look on Turkey as a model. Now we pity you.’ ”
The AKP plays to perfection the role of devout protectors of the poor,
under constant threat from dark forces in the Turkish elite.
Conspiracies, as Hitler demonstrated with the Reichstag fire, can be
power multipliers. The investigation into the alleged Ergenekon
armed-terror organization started in 2007, when police found 27 hand
grenades in a shanty belonging to a retired noncommissioned officer.
From that small beginning, prosecutors have spun a web of conspiracy
charges, with an indictment stretching to 8,032 pages, and detained
more than 400 military and civilian defendants.
The web stretched still wider last year after an unknown person
deposited with a journalist a suitcase of documents and CDs purporting
to contain proof of a coup code-named Sledgehammer, allegedly planned
in 2003 under the leadership of the First Army commander, Gen. Cetin
Dogan, for which nearly 200 officers face trial. The “evidence” is
highly suspect. What is genuine in the dossier—an official recording of
the Army seminar that was allegedly the plotters’ “dress
rehearsal”—contains no trace of a conspiracy. The single incriminating
CD containing detailed plans of the alleged coup, dated 2003, is a
demonstrable fake created no earlier than 2009; it lists ships not then
built, hospitals that did not exist, organizations not yet founded,
vehicle license plates issued in 2006, and nonexistent military units.
The alleged authors of other documents in the case got their own titles
wrong, misspelled their own names, or magically contrived to use
computers to which they had no access. Few Turks doubt that some in the
military would dearly love to oust the AKP—but not a tenth of the
entire military command, plus many more forced into early retirement.
Erdogan can now pack the military with AKP loyalists—as he has already
packed the Constitutional Court (a “reform” astutely included in a
referendum package last year) with 110 new judges. The government’s
repeated insistence that it is merely letting justice take its course
is wholly unconvincing.
The question is, why go to such lengths? Turkey’s political opposition
is fragmented, and a military coup implausible. Here is a crowd-pulling
demagogue who is a hero among Turkey’s rural and urban masses, and who
has solid accomplishments to boast about. In 2002 the AKP inherited a
broke country, politically fractured and rumbling with resentment over
glaring inequalities. Erdogan’s “forward democracy”—which he defines as
a strong economy, a strong government, and, above all, a “strong
party”—may not be remotely liberal, but it is efficient. Not only have
health reforms given the poor access to high-quality care, but he has
wrought a smile-or-you’re-fired transformation of the public sector,
compelling bureaucrats to treat ordinary people not with contempt, but
courteously. Slums are being razed in a massive and heavily subsidized
state housing program (enriching “loyal” contractors in the process).
He peppers his speeches with long lists of roads paved, clinics opened,
and gigantic new projects.
Living standards have been boosted by a tripling of the Turkish
economy: this year’s growth rate of 11 percent may look dangerously
like overheating to foreign investors, but after decades in the
doldrums, Turks are not complaining. But the price in freedoms forgone
has been ever higher, and Erdogan’s absolute intolerance of criticism,
even from within his party, more and more obvious. What does this
strongman want, and what will he do with what now seems unassailable
power? Atatürk changed Turkey from top to bottom and turned it
westward. Erdogan is changing Turkey from bottom to top, and turning it
toward its Islamic neighbors. If by your friends ye shall know them,
Erdogan’s chums have, somewhat embarrassingly just now, been Muammar
Gaddafi (from whom, last December, he received the El Gaddafi
international peace prize), Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, and Iran’s Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad. Hamas and Hizbullah are his soulmates; Israel, in a stark
reversal of Turkish foreign policy, his enemy. In Egypt the Islamists
already refer to him as a caliph, the leader of a postmodern Islamic
umma, an Ottoman empire without borders.
Yet abroad this dictator in the making is still credited with restoring
democracy to Turkey, albeit with an Islamic hue. The AKP benefits from
Turkey’s strategic importance as a bulwark for stability in a nasty
neighborhood, and also from the West’s desire, post-9/11, to befriend
“moderate” Islamism. Governments do not care to inquire into the
crushing of Turkey’s dissenting voices and the erosion of personal
freedoms. They should think again. In Turkey last month I encountered
not just anxiety but great bitterness. When it was a question of
Kurdish rights in Turkey, they say, we in the West screamed blue
murder, yet now that intellectual and political freedoms are being
suppressed clean across society, there is total silence. We should wake
up, they say, before the only question left is, who lost Turkey?
Righter is associate editor of The Times of London.