Turkey and the army
Paper soldiers
Jun 26th 2008 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL
The Economist print edition
A leaked document exposes the army’s campaign against the ruling party
ON THE evening of March 4th, a black Mercedes swept into the Ankara
headquarters of Turkey’s land-forces command. It was carrying Osman Paksut,
the second-highest judge on the constitutional court. His assignation with
the land-forces commander, General Ilker Basbug, was meant to be secret-all
the security cameras were cut off as he entered and left the building-for it
came at a highly delicate moment. The secular opposition had just petitioned
the court to overturn a law passed by the ruling Justice and Development
Party (AKP) to allow women to wear the Islamic-style headscarf at
universities.
Less than four weeks later, on March 31st, the court said that it would take
a case brought by the chief prosecutor to ban the AKP and 71 named
officials, including the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the
president, Abdullah Gul. The case rests on the claim that the defendants are
trying to impose sharia law in Turkey.
This decision makes the meeting between Mr Paksut and General Basbug, who is
tipped to replace Yasar Buyukanit as chief of the general staff when he
retires in August, all the more suspicious. Indeed, it reinforces the view
of many Turks that lying behind the case is an attempt by the generals to
use the courts to overthrow Turkey’s mildly Islamist government in a
"judicial coup". This follows the generals’ threatened "e-coup" of April
2007, when they tried unsuccessfully to stop Mr Gul becoming president.
Few Turks would have known of the meeting had news of it not been broken by
a small daily newspaper, Taraf. Since its launch last November under the
motto "to think is to take sides", Taraf (which means side in Turkish) has
published a string of stories exposing the army’s efforts to undermine the
AKP government. It has thus become even bigger than "the most honest and
prestigious newspaper" that was the dream of its 39-year-old owner, Basar
Arslan. Amid speculation that the army may be preparing a direct coup, Taraf
has become a standard-bearer for the rising numbers of young and
increasingly vocal Turks who say the people, not the generals, should
determine the country’s future. Last week 7,000 of them gathered in central
Istanbul in a rally against coups, many of them brandishing Taraf.
The paper, whose news coverage remains spotty, made its biggest splash so
far when it recently published a document detailing alleged plans by the
general staff to mobilise public opinion against the government and its
sympathisers. The blueprint was drawn up after the AKP was returned to power
for a second five-year term in July 2007. In a limp rebuttal, the top brass
said it had "not approved" any such document, but stopped short of denying
its existence. Indeed, much of the paper’s information comes straight from
disgruntled "deep throats" within the army.
Such leaks have dented the army’s image and fuelled debate over a possible
rift within the high command. Internal divisions surfaced last year when
Nokta, a weekly, published excerpts from the diary of a former navy
commander in which he described two abortive coup attempts in 2004. Soon
afterwards, the magazine was forced to close and its editor prosecuted for
libel. Might Taraf suffer a similar fate?
Taraf is already a stronger institution than Nokta. "We are changing the
rules the mainstream media work by in this country," declares Yasemin
Congar, its combative deputy managing editor. Circulation, now at an average
24,000 copies every day, is growing. And this comes in the teeth of a smear
campaign accusing Taraf of being financed by a powerful Islamist fraternity
close to the AKP and of taking its orders from the United States.
Yet it would be easy to overstate the influence of Taraf, as indeed of civil
society as a whole. "Turkish civil society barely has the strength to
redirect major roads, let alone stop the generals from acting if they see it
as in the national interest," argues Howard Eissenstat, a New York-based
historian. "Moreover, the high regard for the military and the particular
tone of Turkish nationalism suggest that public reaction to a hard coup
would be more of a ripple than a wave." Then again, as Ms Congar noted in a
recent column, "there are a few good men" in the army, whose view of Turkey’s
national interest tends to favour democracy, and who will keep leaking
information to Taraf.