Wall Street Journal
March 12 2010
A Nation of Conspiracies
Coup plots and growing extremism. Why the West can’t ignore Turkey’s paranoia
By CLAIRE BERLINSKI
Last fall, having observed that few women in Istanbul took
martial-arts classes, I conceived the idea to work with local
instructors on creating a women’s self-defense initiative. My project
met with initial enthusiasm, particularly among women concerned with
the high rate of domestic violence in Turkey. But other martial arts
instructors in the city grew uneasy, sensing a plot to swindle them
out of their small pieces of the martial-arts pie. Istanbul quickened
with lunatic rumors that the initiative was a conspiracy to disparage
the other instructors’ martial prowess and steal their students.
Martial-arts cliques consumed themselves with plotting and
counter-plotting. Secret tribunals were held, covert alliances formed,
poison-pen letters sent, friends betrayed. I gave up in disgust.
An April 2009 protest against the arrests of university professors and
other secularists accused of plotting to topple the Turkish
government.
No one familiar with the prominent role of conspiracies and paranoia
in Turkish social and political life will be surprised. Last month,
more than five dozen military officers were arrested and charged with
plotting a coup. The detained stand accused of planning to bomb
mosques and down Greek fighter jets as a pretext for toppling the
government. Whether it is true, I don’t know. But either way, the
country is drowning in persecutory theories.
Turkey’s strategic and economic significance to the West is
massive’and American-Turkish relations took a turn for the worse
earlier this month when a U.S. congressional committee recommended the
full House of Representatives take up a vote on a resolution
condemning the slaughter of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as
genocide.
Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East, a democracy with a secular
constitution. It has the second-largest army in NATO; it provides a
crucial energy route to Europe. The Incirlik air base is a crucial
staging point for the US military. Turkey has made a sizable
contribution to the coalition forces in Afghanistan. It has a seat on
the U.N. Security Council, and could be a vital diplomatic partner’or
a vexed antagonist’to America throughout the Middle East and Islamic
world.
The West, understandably, is concerned about the trouble in Turkey.
Particularly disturbing is the growing anti-Israel animus of Turkey’s
foreign policy and its growing intimacy with the most extremist
regimes and parties of the Islamic world. Turkey’s trade with Iran is
galloping. Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the first
international figure to host Hamas. He has called for the expulsion of
Israel from the U.N. while offering diplomatic support for the denial
of genocide in Darfur.
Turkey has seen three military coups in the past half century’by
definition, you can’t have a coup without a conspiracy. The military,
which conceives itself as the guardian of Turkish democracy and
secularism, has intervened, most recently in 1997, to unseat prime
ministers who have veered too far off the secular rails.
A Bitter Century
The ruling Justice and Development Party, known as the AKP, came to
power in 2002. Its senior figures rose from the ranks of virulent’and
banned’Islamist parties, but the AKP claims to be moderate.
Almost everyone in Turkey subscribes to one of two conspiracy
narratives about this party or its antagonists. In the first, the AKP
is a party of religious deception that seeks to bring all elements of
the government under its control. Its hidden goal is the eradication
of the secular state, the wrenching of Turkey from the West, and,
ultimately, the imposition of Islamic law. In this narrative, the
specter of the sect leader Fethullah Gülen, who has undefined ties to
the party and has taken exile in Utah, arouses particular dread. His
critics fear he is the Turkish Ayatollah Khomenei; they say that his
acolytes have seeped into the organs of the Turkish body politic,
where they lie poised, like a zombie army, to be awakened by his
signal.
The second version holds that the AKP is exactly what it purports to
be: a modern and democratic party with which the West can and should
do business. Mr. Gülen’s followers say the real conspirators are
instead members of the so-called Deep State’what they call a demented,
multitentacled secret alliance of high-level figures in the military,
the intelligence services, the judiciary and organized crime.
Neither theory has irrefragable proof behind it. Both are worryingly
plausible and supported by some evidence. But most significantly, one
or the other story is believed by virtually everyone here. It is the
paranoid style of Turkish politics itself that should alarm the West.
Turkey’s underlying disease is not so much Islamism or a military gone
rogue, but corruption and authoritarianism over which a veneer of
voter participation has been painted.
The system does not look too undemocratic on paper. Turkish political
parties are structured, in principle, around district and provincial
organizations. There is universal suffrage, but a party must receive
10% of the vote to be represented in Parliament. Party members elect
district delegates, district presidents and board members. Yet Turkish
prime ministers have near-dictatorial powers over their political
parties and are not embarrassed to use them.
It is the?party members, not voters, who pick the party leader.
Members of Parliament enjoy unlimited political immunity, as do the
bureaucrats they appoint. The resulting license to steal money and
votes is accepted with alacrity and used with impunity. Corruption and
influence peddling are the inevitable consequence. Business leaders
are afraid to object for fear of being shut out.
Conspiracies flourish when citizens fear punishment for open political
expression, when power is seen as illegitimate, and when people have
no access to healthy channels of influence. They give rise inevitably
to counterconspiracies that fuel the paranoia and enmity, a
self-reinforcing cycle. Throughout Turkey is the pervasive feeling
that no one beyond family can be trusted.
The common charge that the AKP is progressively weakening the
judiciary and the military is objectively correct, as is the claim
that this concentrates an unhealthy amount of power in the hands of
the executive branch. Yet the prime minister and his intimates insist
that their actions are defensive. "For 40 years, they have kept files
on us. Now, it is our turn to keep files on them," AKP deputy Avni
DoÄ?an has said.
Their enemies voice the same worldview. "When you look at Turkey
today, it is as if the country has … fallen under foreign
occupation," the leader of the opposition CHP party Deniz Baykal has
said.
Paranoia is inevitably also grandiose. When the House Committee on
Foreign Affairs passed up the recent resolution to describe the
massacre of Armenians in the First World War era as a genocide, Suat
Kiniklioglu, the spokesman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the
Turkish Parliament, explained Turkey’s outrage thus: "I think the
Americans would feel that same if we were to pass a resolution in our
parliament talking about the treatment of [native] Indians in this
country."
Mr. Kiniklioglu speaks fluent English; he has spent years in the West.
Yet he is blind to the most obvious of facts about American culture:
No one in America would give a damn.
Meanwhile, discussion of Turkey’s most serious social and economic
problems’corruption, poverty, unemployment, and a legal system held in
contempt even by its attorneys’has been eclipsed. Reports of economic
miracles under the AKP have, as everyone now understands, been
exaggerated by statistical legerdemain. This is all too easy to do,
because Turkey has one of the largest underground economies in the
world, worth somewhere between one-third and two-thirds of the
country’s GDP. Every major economic sector in Turkey is largely
off-the-record. No one can say confidently whether these sectors are
growing or shrinking, and even officially, Turkey now has the
second-highest rate of unemployment in Europe. This is hardly the mark
of an expanding middle class.
Among the most serious of Turkey’s problems, ignored in the constant
din of mutual accusations, is the grave seismic risk to Istanbul. The
city’s position on a highly active fault line and the prevalence of
shoddy construction make it not only possible but probable that it
will be the world’s next Port-au-Prince. The death and displacement of
half a million Turks in an earthquake would clearly be the end of any
hope of stability and peace in this region.
The failure to prepare for this predictable event is a betrayal of
trust, like so many the Turkish people have suffered. Each deepens the
paranoia. Each citizen believes that to survive, he must lie and
conspire. Everyone assumes everyone else is lying and conspiring
against him because he himself is lying and conspiring.
Turkish Ambassador Namik Tan recently said that the West "must
understand that in this region, two plus two doesn’t always equal
four. Sometimes it equals six, sometimes 10. You cannot hope to
understand this region unless you grasp this."
Psychiatrists are typically advised to attempt to form a "working
alliance" with the paranoid patient, avoid becoming the object of
projection, and provide a model of non-paranoid behavior. This is also
sound advice in diplomacy.
?But paranoia is known to be a particularly intractable disorder.
Those who experience it do not trust those trying to help them. The
West should keep this, too, in mind, for the paranoid spiral here
could easily do what spirals are known to do: spin out of control.
‘Claire Berlinski is a journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the
author of "There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters."
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