Middle East Online, UK
May 12 2007
Turkey: Nationalists Threaten Secular and Islamist Alike
The presidential nomination of Abdullah Gul provoked massive
demonstrations in Istanbul and Ankara, aborting the vote. The
confrontation between secularists and the neo-Islamic and popular
Justice and Development party (AKP) is complicated by a `Turkishness’
nationalism and the EU candidacy, says Andrew Finel.
A friend of mine, Ipek Calislar, couldn’t come to dinner the other
night. She doesn’t have a car but she does have a police bodyguard
and crossing from the other side of Istanbul on public transport
would have been too complicated. She needed protection because of
something that now affects many lives in Turkey and threatens many
more. She didn’t testify against the mob, or blaspheme against any
Islamic orthodoxy. She wrote a bestseller that was sold
shrink-wrapped in plastic with an accompanying DVD. It offended not
against God but against Turkey.
It was a biography of Latife Usakizade, briefly married to Mustafa
Kemal Ataturk, and it elevated into a feminist heroine a woman whom
official history had dismissed as a harridan who tried to steal
Turkey’s founder from his one true love, the republic. The author
described, among other surprises, how Latife cannily saved her
husband from waiting assassins by swapping clothes; she donned his
uniform and he a black chador. The idea that the father of today’s
secular state a) did not laugh at death, b) dressed in women’s
clothing and c) religious drag at that, was too much for some, who
applied to the public prosecutor to open an investigation.
The case against Calislar, under article 5816, which is designed to
protect Ataturk’s reputation, was feeble and collapsed last December,
as you would expect in a country determined to break into the
European Union. Calislar is among several Turkish authors who have
been unsuccessfully pursued under statutes that many inside
government find embarrassing. The prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan,
phoned to congratulate another friend of mine whose prosecution under
article 301 of the penal code, forbidding insults to Turkishness, was
dropped. As far as I know, he never phoned to commiserate with Hrant
Dink, the Turkish Armenian editor who was given a suspended sentence
under the same law. But to his credit, Erdogan did pay a condolence
visit to Dink’s widow after a 17-year-old shot her husband dead in
January.
His death is the reason that Calislar and others now have a police
guard. It worries us all; when you ask how someone is, and they reply
with a sigh and a shrug, you know exactly what they mean. When people
ask who killed Dink, they don’t mean who pulled the trigger. The
17-year-old killer is now behind bars along with members of an
ultra-right wing nationalist gang who sought to avenge the inaccurate
headlines in the mainstream press claiming that Dink had `cursed the
Turkishness in his blood.’ The question really asks how far up the
food chain the conspiracy went.
Turkey has a history of covert operations organised by an entrenched
old guard who have manipulated ultra-nationalist gangs to get rid of
Kurdish activists or create chaos when the elected government was
going in a direction that the `deep state’ didn’t approve. In 1996 a
gangster, his moll, a chief of police and a pro-government Kurdish MP
were in a car that ran into truck in the town of Susurluk, providing
evidence of links between the security forces, politics and organised
crime. Some suspect that Dink’s death was plotted by the same dark
forces trying to discredit the government in this double election
year.
The army speaks
The presidential election had once seemed a foregone conclusion. The
ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), aware of the military’s
distrust of its neo-Islamic tinge, had nominated soft-spoken foreign
minister Abdullah Gul for the post and, as parliament does the
voting, the outcome had seemed in the bag. But the opposition, weak
and divided and struggling to find its voice, chanced upon a clever
tactic to sabotage the vote. They asserted, with no real precedent,
that a quorum of three-quarters of MPs had to be in the chamber for
the vote to proceed and took their objection to Turkey’s
constitutional court. The court annulled the first round of voting on
1 May. After parliament again failed to elect Gul as president five
days later, he withdrew his candidacy. The standoff between
secularists and the AKP — provoking massive demonstrations in
Istanbul and Ankara — has opened the way for early general
elections, from which the AKP is expected to emerge as the largest
party. Whether it will have enough support to enact constitutional
reform to enable direct elections for the presidency remains to be
seen.
The constitutional court had seemed to be consulting the political
weather vane as closely as its law books. The Friday before its
decision, the military had taken the nation by surprise by posting on
its website what amounted to an ultimatum to the government to
abandon a presidential election which it said risked compromising the
secular character of the republic. The Turkish chief of staff,
General Yasar Buyukanit, had already hinted at what was to come in a
rare press conference in Ankara on 13 April when he said that that he
hoped the next president would not simply pay lip service to Turkey’s
secular constitution but respect it to its core.
The military have always had a heavy hand in politics but it was
never likely they would seize the radio station or put tanks on the
streets. Turkey entered its worst economic crisis since the second
world war in 2001 after a minister hurled a copy of the constitution
at the now outgoing president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer. The army’s
internet memorandum did not produce panic on the same scale. Turkey’s
financial institutions and bill of economic health have radically
improved after several years of fiscal prudence under the AKP (with
direct foreign investment expected to reach $30bn this year). But
many suspect that there would be a far worse crisis than in 2001 if
the military started throwing its weight around more openly, and the
military would have to take the blame for any dip in the economy.
It had been to avert just such a crisis that Erdogan had chosen not
to stand as president himself. To avoid a confrontation with his own
AKP party he chose Gul, a man liked and respected abroad, rather than
a figure more appealing to Turkey’s secular elite; Gul’s wife wears
an Islamic headscarf, the covering which the Kemalist hardline want
to see banished from public life.
There is an unpleasant irony in the military’s resort to the
worldwide web to express its views. The internet is the medium of
choice for sending messages of hate, but ultra-nationalist rhetoric
has seeped into popular culture in Rambo-style films and violent
television series in which Turkish commandos in Iraq pursue sadistic
American killers of women and children. To return to Hrant Dink,
there is another explanation for his death that is more probable and
just as worrying; that the ultra-right in Turkey has become a
collection of ideologically committed cells more inspired by a sense
of malaise than ordered by any rogue intelligence officer in
green-tinted glasses. An al-Qaida-like quality of diffusion is
implied.
Similar rhetoric blares from the press. Turkey’s most profitable
newspaper, Hürriyet, has for years carried on its front page the
motto `Turkey for the Turks’ beneath a 1930s-style cameo of Ataturk
(imagine the fuss if the Frankfurter Allgemeine ran `Deutschland für
die Deutschen’ on its masthead or The Times of London printed `Don’t
try this unless you’re English’ on the crossword page). Yet Hürriyet
is Fox News-like in shameless flag waving and was vociferous in
targeting Dink. It snidely suggested that the novelist Orhan Pamuk
was sympathetic to Armenians massacred in 1915 only to ingratiate
himself with the Nobel literature prize committee.
A changing mood
One of the last times I saw Dink was at Pamuk’s trial in December
2005, a sinister event with a phalanx of ultra-nationalist lawyers
parading into the overcrowded courtroom, claiming to represent the
injured party — insulted Turkishness. They were being egged on by a
noisy claque in the corridors and jeers in the street outside. Dink,
there to show solidarity, was also threatened with prosecution and it
was heart-breaking to watch so generous a man, who saw the decent
side of everyone, provoke so much ignorant anger from the crowd.
I think he shrugged it off. Roughhouses are part of the job for
writers in Turkey. I was prosecuted back in 1999 for a column for a
Turkish language newspaper that was deemed to be insulting to the
military. The offence carried a maximum six-year prison term and I
recall the smiles and knowing pats on the back I received at a
gathering of journalistic colleagues after the news broke. And the
comments. `Prison A is passé and besides, the food’s better at prison
B’… `They’re only trying you in the criminal court. I was tried in
the state security court’… The case was dropped, but by then I had
been through a ritual of fraternity hazing. A fellow American said
kindly: `I know what it’s like to be unexpectedly rejected by a
country you’ve begun to think of as home.’ Puffing my chest, I
replied: `You don’t understand. This is Turkey’s way of embracing me
as its own.’
Even before Dink’s death the mood had changed and although
prosecutions almost never end in conviction, they have become
occasions for bullies to take to the streets. The police are
defensive because of criticisms that they did nothing to protect
Dink, while some might have sympathised with the motives of his
killer (there is footage of the arresting officers having themselves
photographed next to him as if he were a celebrity). So they now
assign guards to anyone who might remotely be in the
ultra-nationalists’ sights.
A retired colonel, Fikri Karadag, told me: `Hrant Dink had a very
comfortable life here. It was only when he started badmouthing
Turkishness that he got into trouble. He was victim of his own
racism.’ Karadag has been in the news recently after organising a
nationwide patriotic league that seems more like a network of
vigilantes. Its members swear an oath upon a Qur’an and a gun (`It’s
only an air pistol’). It is named after the Kuvay-i Milliye (national
forces), local resistance units that fought against invading Greek
armies after the Ottoman empire failed as a state at the end of the
first world war. Karadag and many like him would like to fight
Turkey’s 1919-22 war of liberation again.
Ultra-nationalist views
The enemies this time would include the United States (come to divide
Turkey by creating havoc in Iraq), Zionists, imperialists, wealthy
Turks who sell their country short then smuggle the profits abroad,
Europeans talking a lot about human rights — and religious zealots
with their scruffy beards and headscarved wives. `What happiness to
the one who says `I am a Turk’ ‘ is the Ataturk adage posted in the
Kuvay-i Milliye Association’s HQ, but there is little that is happy
about Karadag’s vision of the world. We briefly argued after I
questioned his assertion that the Prophet Muhammad had really been a
member of a Turkic tribe. Karadag has no time for the current
government, which he sees as a US ploy to promote its own brand of
Muslim politics and implement its vision of a Greater Middle East.
He also felt passionately that the Iraqi city of Kirkuk has always
been Turkmen and that it is being ethnically scrubbed by the
US-backed Kurdish administration. He is certain that if a `sham’
referendum to determine its administrative status goes ahead at the
end of this year, Ankara will have no option but to go to war.
Turkish elite troops have been based in the north of Iraq since
before Saddam was ousted, so they won’t have far to go.
The temptation is to dismiss this as the posturing of a supremacist
Ku Klux Klansman. But many of these attitudes have entered the
political mainstream. Turkish hardline secularists take it for
granted that the United States is promoting Erdogan’s party as a
moderate model for the rest of the Islamic world — despite the AKP’s
refusal to allow the US to open a northern front from Turkish
territory in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The AKP has also taken an
independent line from Washington (or at least one closer to the
Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report) since it believes it must
keep a dialogue going with Tehran and Damascus. Erdogan recently did
a little soccer diplomacy with Bashar Assad in a box at a
Fenerbahçe-Al-Ittihad friendly match in Aleppo. It’s hard to imagine
him at a Washington Nationals baseball game any time soon.
The AKP’s reputation for economic prudence won it the support of
international markets. But it owes its popularity (30-40% of the
electorate, far more than any other party and enough under the
electoral system to give it a working parliamentary majority), not to
backing from abroad but to the inability of preceding administrations
to break a cycle of incompetence and corruption. The main opposition
Republican People’s party is a member of the Socialist International,
yet it is caught up in nationalist rhetoric and its policies are less
New Left than antique. Those opposed to AKP dominance have only one
weapon, the claim that they have the nation’s true interests at
heart. The distant danger is that this will drag Turkey into a
foreign adventure neither it nor the region can afford.
Closed session on Iraq
The day that Dink was buried in Istanbul, parliamentarians gathered
in Ankara in a rare closed session. The meeting was so secret that
the ushers were specially appointed deaf-mutes and no stenographer
making a record was allowed to stay in the chamber for more than a
few minutes. We do know the subject was Iraq, the key source of
conflict between Turkey and the US and yet also the one issue on
which they agree, since Ankara is afraid that Iraq will become a
failed state or splinter into ethnic-based autonomous zones. An
independent Kurdish entity would fuel irredentist claims to Turkey’s
Kurdish population. Turkey does not want the US to pull out of Iraq,
it wants to see US troops deal with Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)
members who shelter in the north of Iraq. The PKK’s power to foment
rebellion was much diminished after their leader Abdullah Ocalan was
sentenced to life imprisonment in 1999. The US is reluctant to offend
its only reliable ally in Iraq, the Iraqi Kurds, or to add to the
list of enemies by going against the PKK.
Parliament would also have discussed the status of oil-rich Kirkuk.
Ankara fears that if Kirkuk opts to join the Kurdish administration,
this would precipitate Iraqi Kurdish independence. No one really
expects the Turkish army to go in – but how, in such a charged
atmosphere, can it beat a retreat?
At his 13 April press conference General Buyukanit had urged the
government to give him the political licence to deal with the PKK in
northern Iraq. He said, more or less, we can do it, we want to do it
and we think it’s worth the trouble, but it would have to be a
political not a military decision to invade Iraq. Even though the
armed forces have in the past launched hot pursuit operations across
the borders, Buyukanit believed it was now up to parliament to
legitimate such an operation. He did not mention that this diplomatic
decision would require the tacit support of Turkey’s most powerful
ally, the US, whose troops are in Iraq. The Turkish military has
previously issued warnings against its government safe in the
knowledge that it had the Pentagon’s support. This time it appeared
to be telling the politicians to be wary of the US.
A more serious challenge
The more serious challenge Turkey faces is not on its borders with
Iran, Iraq and Syria, but in its relationship with Europe.
Nationalism has become a potent force just when Ankara has been
fighting for the right to negotiate away its sovereignty in accession
talks with the European Union. Those inside the EU who complain of
the tyranny of Brussels are surprised that many Turks still think
membership promises better rule. EU accession not only appeals to the
Ataturk dream of modernisation, but as an instruction manual (the
80,000 page EU treaty, the acquis communautaire) on how to modernise.
Just the proposal for EU membership has helped transform Turkish
economy and society, but not everyone feels a beneficiary of more
liberal trade and free flow of ideas. There is a rearguard alliance
of those who’ve had enough already.
Turkish ultra-nationalists are more than Eurosceptics. They are
sceptical about the whole world. Their watchword is that `Turks have
no friends other than themselves,’ which they try to make into a
self-fulfilling prophecy. The strategy is less to convince Turks to
renounce Europe than to act in such a way, including prosecuting
noted authors, that Europe will reject Turkey first, so that they can
capitalise on the resultant resentment. Many in the Brussels
bureaucracy refuse to join the game but a new crop of
anti-enlargement and anti-immigrant European politicians, led by
France’s newly-elected president Nicholas Sarkozy, are willing to
play. German Christian Democrats ask in stage whispers whether Muslim
Turks can ever be European in the same way that US neo-conservatives
ask if Muslims can ever be democratic. It’s the wrong question. It’s
not the Islamists who are scary but the nationalists. Like the
remnants of the communist parties in eastern and central Europe they
mourn the passing of the cold war and fear the changes ahead.
In this Turkish election year, progress with Europe is on hold. No
Turkish politician wants to be seen to be seeking admission to a club
that treats its application without enthusiasm. The political reality
is that no one in Turkey, including the military, wants to take the
blame for officially scuppering the European project. Even the
far-right National Action party ceded to EU pressure in 2002 while
serving in a coalition that abolished the death penalty, thus saving
the life of Ocalan.
As has happened in Central Europe, the big boost to the economy is in
the run-up to membership, not when the country has to abide by all
those expensive rules. The Turkish economy is mending nicely after
the economic crises that helped bring the current government to
power. Foreign banks from Citicorp to Paribas are falling over
themselves to grab a Turkish partner, lured by the prospect of
business as this economy of more than 70 million people grows. From
their perspective Turkey is already inside the Euro-economy, since
Turkey has had a customs union with the EU for more than a decade and
manufactured goods already go in and out duty free.
`It would take three to four years to complete all the technical
negotiations,’ said Ali Babacan, an economics minister who is in
charge of talks with Brussels, although he knows that Turkey cannot
enter the promised land for another decade at least. As a politician
he measures time by how often key member states have to go to the
polls before it is necessary to sign off on Turkish admission. In
some countries, that would be two or three governments from now.
The mood is insecurity
Insecurity is therefore the mood in Turkey. It was accustomed to
deference during the cold war, when it bartered its strategic
importance for yet another standby agreement with the International
Monetary Fund which it had no intention of keeping. I estimate that
the cold war (and its security) ended late for Turkey, on 1 March
2003, when it renounced its military importance as its parliament
voted to refuse US troops invading Iraq access through its territory.
Europe has since turned in on itself while the US thrashes about in
Iraq, with perhaps Iran and Syria next.
Turkish secularists are nervous that a new Islamic-leaning political
elite may be transforming society. The massive demonstrations by
Turkish secularists, first in Ankara and then at the end of April in
Istanbul, were not so much Nuremberg rallies as a show of solidarity
in the face of forces they are struggling to understand. The military
chiefs who squirm at the sight of a headscarf in public life are
reacting like some US colonel whose daughter’s boyfriend has long
hair. And just like a teenager off to get a tattoo or a piercing, I
am sure many wear a headscarf just to annoy.
At the same time, the Ankara and Istanbul demonstrations against the
AKP’s control of the presidency will have had a cheering effect on
Turkish secularists, encouraging them not to underestimate their own
strength. Turkey consumes $1.5bn dollars worth of raki (the national
tipple) a year and even more wine and beer. Its coastal cities rely
on a summer tourist invasion of bikinied Finns, Spaniards and Czechs,
with the big spenders being the Russians and the English. There is no
enthusiasm for sharia law.
There are sensible and self-critical voices. Turkish liberals,
followers of the country’s European vocation, believers in the power
of civil society to move mountains and people’s minds, also have
their battalions. `We realised we were not alone,’ a professor friend
said as she and a hundred thousand others, maybe more, walked the
route of Dink’s cortege the day of his funeral. There were Kurdish
dissidents, trade unionists, an ordinary mother and daughter who live
near me. Why Dink’s life provoked so spontaneous a display is hard to
say. He was respected for speaking out, and held in affection because
you could see, even on television, that he spoke from the heart.
Many Turks want to talk openly about the past and he was brave enough
to engage them in that conversation. People marched because they felt
the bullies shouldn’t win. There is another story, an insight into a
society that even at the most painful moments tries to do the decent
thing. The father of Dink’s young assassin recognised the wanted
photo on the television news as his son. He phoned the police.
Andrew Finel is a freelance journalist in Istanbul.
© 2007 Le Monde diplomatique