TURKEY ARRESTS GENERALS, CONFRONTS INNER DEMONS
The Daily Maverick
/2010-02-23-turkey-arrests-generals-confronts-inne r-demons
Feb 23 2010
In the past several days, Turkey’s long-simmering military/Islamist
tension surfaced yet again. On Monday night, dozens of serving and
retired officers were arrested, including some of the country’s
highest-ranking former generals and admirals. But while Turkey’s
precious stability may have been temporarily endangered, not everything
is doom and gloom.
The arrests were part of a broader government movement against
a shadowy ultra-nationalist movement accused of plotting the
overthrow of the country’s current secular, but Islamist-inspired
and orientated government. According to government sources, the
plotters hoped to undermine the now-ruling Justice and Development
Party and eventually create an atmosphere that would support a new
coup. Turkey’s Taraf newspaper says that last month it gave criminal
prosecutors a cache of some 5,000 documents, along with CDs, tapes
and PowerPoint presentations all documenting the purported details
of the plot, as well as lists of journalists – alternatively to be
relied upon as supporters or arrested in a coup.
Speaking separately about the plot and the arrests, Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan (on a visit to Spain) and President Abdullah Gul
took pains to wave off any claim of the ruling government’s involvement
in the arrests, putting the responsibility for the investigations
and arrests back on criminal prosecutors.
These most recent arrests and the accusations of a military plot
point to a sharp split in Turkish opinion. According to analysts,
many Turks see this as something that is long overdue – bringing to
heel the unelected officers who have carried out coups, assassinations
and repression over decades. Others, however, see these charges as the
way the government will undermine the key institution that established
and now protects modern Turkey’s secular foundations.
Contemporary Turkey’s political life is in turmoil, but the country
lies on ground that has been home to a progression of some of the
world’s great civilisations. These include the Hittites, Assyrians,
Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, and, finally,
the Seljuk Turks and Ottomans. When the Ottoman star dimmed in the
17th century after the 1683 siege of Vienna was repulsed by Saxon and
Polish armies, the once resplendent, powerful Ottoman Empire began
its downward spiral to become the "sick man of Europe".
Territory after territory was sliced away by its Russian and
Habsburg rivals, independence movements in Greece – and then the
rest of the Balkans – shrank the Ottoman Empire further. The UK,
Italy and France took much of what remained in Ottoman hands. By the
early 1900s, after several traumatic military defeats, the so-called
"Young Turk" movement attempted to re-energise the Sublime Porte’s
flailing government, moved closer to Germany and then disastrously
joined the Central Powers in World War I.
In defeat, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire were handed over to the
Allies. Facing virtual occupation, one of the country’s few successful
generals, Mustafa Kemal (then, later, renamed Kemal Ataturk, "Father
of the Turks") led the effort to establish a modern, secular nation.
He outlawed the traditional fez hat and imposed modern western
dress as a symbol of the country’s break with the past. The Roman
alphabet replaced a mixed Arabic/Persian script and a full range of
western-style governmental institutions were established. Turkey has
evolved since then into a Near East anomaly: a Moslem nation with no
established state religion; a non-Arab nation and ally of Israel;
a Nato member with the alliance’s second-largest military; and a
would-be EU candidate member.
But long-term political stability continues to elude Turkey,
with unresolved issues deeply etched into its social fabric. Turkey
continues to be split between modern secularists and devout Muslims who
press for a religious texture to their state. The continuing effect of
Turkey’s long-term repression of its Kurdish population (derisively
labelled Mountain Turks by the government), a deep, centuries-old
suspicion of Greece and the attendant conflict over Cyprus, and a
continuing animosity between Turks and Armenians that reaches back
(at least in the modern era) to Turkish pogroms against its subject
Armenian population during World War I are further problems.
Foremost, of course, is the unresolved political question of
how to achieve a convincing national consensus on the role of the
country’s military in the contemporary nation – nearly 100 years after
Ataturk’s system was installed. The Turkish military clings to its
role as protector of the modern Turkish state against domestic and
international enemies, intervening to depose three elected governments
and executing prime minister Adnan Menderes, the leader of Turkey’s
first opposition party, in 1961.
The origins of today’s Turkey – economically growing and increasingly
diverse – reach back 30 years to the era of prime minister Turgut
Ozal. Ozal opened up the Turkish economy, creating a manufacturing
boom and encouraging more traditional rural Turks to the cities for
jobs. This population shift, together with growing wealth among the
traditional Muslim middle class, strengthened democracy and reduced
the forces for radicalism.
As a result, Turkey’s key political fissure now is between politicians
from the older, traditional and more pious middle class, and an elite
bureaucracy and increasingly cosmopolitan population in big cities.
The latter argue Turkey has outgrown the need for the military to
intervene in politics, while the military’s supporters continue to
maintain that politicians cannot be trusted to keep Islam out of the
running of the state.
But this time around, assuming the plot was real, elements of the
military may well have fatally overreached themselves. The swiftness
and emphatic way the state dealt with those involved could well
mean that, in future, this will be remembered as the moment when
the political balance of power in Turkey decisively moved from the
soldiers to the civilians.
By J. Brooks Spector
Read more at the New York Times here and here, the AP, the CIA World
Fact Book and Wikipedia
Main photo: Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul (R) talks to Land Forces
commander General Ilker Basbug (L) during the funeral of Turkish army
officer Major Ercument Turkmen at Kocatepe Mosque in Ankara April 26,
2008. REUTERS/Umit Bektas