guardian.co.uk, UK

Turkey crisis: Hopes of democracy are hanging in the balance

Maureen Freely, The Observer,
Sunday July 6, 2008 – Article history

It is too soon to know how the battle between the AKP and the secular
establishment will play itself out, but, while we wait, spare a
thought for Turkey’s beleaguered democrats.

They include the scholars who have questioned the very foundations of
official history, the lawyers who have challenged its infamous penal
code, the writers, journalists, translators and publishers who have
refused to be intimidated by that code, the nationwide alliances of
feminist and human rights activists, and the musicians and memoirists
who defy official ideology by celebrating their multicultural roots.

I could go on. These are loose-knit networks: though many go back
several decades, it was when EU accession began to look like a real
possibility, in the mid to late 1990s, that they came into their
own. What they saw in the EU bid was a chance for a bloodless
revolution – a measured reform of its repressive state bureaucracies,
a democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem, and an end to what
polite political scientists call tutelary democracy.

In the Turkish context, they mean a democracy in which the army has
the last word, involving itself in the day-to-day running of
government and stepping in to shut it down whenever it deems it to
have strayed from the righteous path.

Many of those who would like to see Turkey become a real democracy are
veterans of its political prisons. Some did time after the 1971 coup,
others were imprisoned after the much more brutal coup in 1980. A
significant number did two stints in prison and/or were forced to
spend time in exile. Quite a few bear the marks of torture. By and
large, they are secularist in background, education and temperament,
but in the past decade they have worked in parallel with Islamist
groups that support democratic pluralism and oppose militarist
secularism. Whatever their views on religion, a large number of
Turkey’s democrats supported the AKP in the last two elections. They
did so because they saw it as the party most likely to challenge the
status quo.

And so it has. Not since the founding of the republic has any
government challenged the military with such daring. But its defence
of free expression and the rights of others has been patchy. In 2005
and 2006 it largely condoned the prosecution of more than a hundred of
Turkey’s most prominent writers, publishers and scholars.

It did not speak against relentless media hate campaigns that have
resulted in most of the Turkish public seeing the 301 defendants as
public enemies. It did not offer any protection to the
Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. After Dink’s assassination, it
did assign round-the-clock protection to the most prominent 301
defendants. But do not assume that they are safe. They put their lives
at risk every time they speak, wherever they speak. A casual aside in
Kansas City one day will appear under bold and distorting headlines in
the Turkish press the next, alongside pleas for civil society to
‘silence them for good’.

Does democracy have a future in Turkey? A lot depends on the Ergenekon
indictment; a lot more depends on the outcome of the case against the
AKP. But for me the litmus test is whether or not Turkey’s democrats
can press for change without facing prosecution, persecution and (all
too often) death.

· Maureen Freely is a novelist and writer. She translated ‘Snow’ by
Orhan Pamuk