Waterloo Record, Canada

Turkey’s ‘deep state’ is doomed

100 years after the Young Turk revolution, this country is at a crossroads

July 05, 2008
GWYNNE DYER

The Ottoman Empire had already been in retreat for over a century when
the Young Turk revolution broke out in July 1908. Some of the Young
Turks hoped to save the whole empire; others wanted to abandon the
empire and rescue an independent Turkey from the wreckage. The latter
group won the argument, in the end, and although the rest of the
empire fell under European imperial rule 10 years later, Turkey itself
was saved.

Now, exactly a 100 years after the Young Turks, the country is plunged
into another constitutional crisis.

In March, the public prosecutor brought a case to Turkey’s highest
judicial body, the constitutional court, demanding that the ruling AK
(Justice and Development) Party, re-elected only last year with an
increased majority, be shut down for trying to subvert the secular
state. He also wants Prime Minister Tayyib Recep Erdogan and 70 other
senior AK party members banned from politics for five years.

Last week the government struck back, arresting two retired generals
and 23 other people on the charge of "provoking armed rebellion
against the government." One, General Hursit Tolon, was the former
second-in-command of the army.

Police allege those arrested were members of a state-backed gang that
is suspected of a number of murders of prominent public figures with
the aim of destabilizing Turkish society and forcing military
intervention.

But wait a minute. "State-backed?" Isn’t the government itself the
embodiment of the state? In Turkey, not necessarily. The conspirators,
it is claimed, belong to what Turks call the "deep state," the
alliance of senior judicial and military figures who still see
themselves as the guardians of the secular Turkish republic that was
ultimate result of the Young Turk revolution.

What the rebellious Young Turk officers demanded in July 1908 was the
restoration of the constitution suspended 30 years before. It brought
a rough kind of democracy to the multinational empire, but the various
ethnic nationalisms, Bulgarian, Kurdish, Greek, Arab, Armenian — and,
above all, Turkish — were already too strong for a unified state to
survive.

The Ottoman Empire went under at the end of the First World War,
leaving a decimated Turkish population (only eight million in 1918) to
fight for its independence against British, French, Italian and Greek
invaders who sought to carve Turkey up between them. The man who led
that independence struggle, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founded the Turkish
Republic in 1923, and he made it one of the most rigorously secular
states in the world.

Ninety-nine percent of Turkey’s citizens are Muslims, but political
parties are banned from appealing to religion. Even religious symbols
are seen as dangerous: women wearing "Islamic" head scarves are not
allowed inside state institutions, including universities.

Initially, this militant secularism was a tactic for wrenching a
largely illiterate and deeply conservative peasantry out of its
medieval ways and catapulting the country into the 20th
century. Turkey must never be weak again, and to be strong it must be
"modern." But as the decades passed, the reformers turned into a
self-selecting "republican" elite who justified their privileges by
claiming that they had a mission to defend the secular state.

What they have ended up defending the state against, in fact, is
democracy, which challenges their arbitrary power. Faced with a
democratically elected party that has Islamic roots (although it has
been staunchly loyal to the secular constitution), they have begun
waging an open war against it in the courts.

They have also launched a secret and violent struggle against it in
the shadows, a struggle that has already cost lives. Some fear that it
could end in a military coup, but that time has passed.

A hundred years after the Young Turk revolution, the Turks are again
at a crossroads. It is quite possible that the court will decide to
ban the AK Party later this year, just as it rejected the new law
allowing women students to wear the head scarf at university last
month. Many senior judges are part of the "deep state." But it is not
1908: the outlook this time is a lot brighter.

The 75 million Turks of today have about the same per capita income as
Russians or Romanians, and about the same range of social attitudes,
too. Turkey is not going to turn into a theocratic dictatorship,
because very few of them want such a thing.

However, quite a few of them do want a state that does not despise or
penalize them for being publicly pious. Quite a few others who are not
at all devout support the AK Party anyway, because they know that in
the current crisis it represents democracy, tolerance and the rule of
law.

It will turn out all right because the self-nominated defenders of
secularism are transparently cynical in their attempts to manipulate
popular opinion. And it will be all right because the AK Party leaders
have clearly decided that it’s not worth having a bloody political
battle now, when it’s obvious that they have already won the war.

If the court bans AK, they will all resign from power peacefully, in
obedience to the law.

Then those who are not banned from politics entirely for five years
will reform the party under another name, and fight and win another
election. And bit by bit, the "deep state" will wither away.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.