THE END OF THE KEMALIST AFFAIR
Christopher Hitchens

Slate

August 1, 2011

To read of the stunning news, of the almost-overnight liquidation of
the Ataturkist or secularist military caste, and to try to do so from
the standpoint of a seriously secular Turk, is to have a small share
in the sense of acute national vertigo that must have accompanied
the proclamation of a new system in the second two decades of the
20th century.

For example, today’s vice president of Kemal Ataturk’s historical
political party, the Republican People’s Party or RPP, was quoted on
Friday as speaking of “a second Turkish republic” with a heavy heart
“in the seaside city of Cannkkale,” and not long after, it seemed that
some high-ranking Turkish officers would now be arrested rather than,
as previously reported, having had their resignations accepted. That
famous seaside peninsula, as the New York Times did not emphasize, also
bears the name of Gallipoli. It is the place where Gen. Mustafa Kemal
inflicted the most bloody and tragic defeat on British imperial forces
in 1915-16, while also convincing Rupert Murdoch’s cocky colonial
ancestors that their brave Aussie forebears had been used as cannon
fodder by teak-headed British toffs. The apple of the notorious 1981
Mel Gibson movie did not roll very far from the tree. Within a few
years of Gallipoli, the same Turkish general had, in fact, reversed
the local verdict of the 1914-18 war, and expelled Greek, French,
and British forces from Anatolia.

The historic weight of this is almost impossible to overstate: Ataturk
(who was quite probably a full-blown atheist) could write his own
secular ticket precisely because he had ignominiously defeated three
Christian invaders. Yet for decades, Western statecraft has been
searching feverishly for another Mustafa Kemal, someone who can
jumpstart the modernization of a Muslim community under his own name.

For a while, they thought Gamal Abdel Nasser might be the model. Then
there was the Shah of Iran. They even briefly fancied the notions of
Saddam Hussein, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and other characters who will live
in infamy. But nobody ever came close to touching Ataturk for authority
and authenticity. Under his power, the great caliphate was done away
with, and the antique rule of the celestial and the sublime reduced to
a dream in which only a few ascetic visionaries and sectarians showed
any real interest. Until recently, modern Turkey showed every sign
of evolving into a standard capitalist state on the European periphery.

There was, however, an acid rivalry concealed within the new Turkish
establishment. The nascent Islamist populist movement-the Justice and
Development Party of Recep Tayyip Erdogan-understood very well that,
once in the European Union proper, Turkey would be prevented by EU
law from submitting to another period of rule by men in uniform. We
thus saw the intriguing spectacle of quite conservative and nationalist
Turks (with a distinct tendency to chauvinism in Erdogan’s case) making
common cause with liberal international institutions against the very
Turkish institution, the army, that above all symbolized Turkish
national pride and prestige. This cooperation between ostensibly
secular and newly pious may have had something to do with a growing
sense of shame among the educated secular citizenry of big cities like
Istanbul, who always knew they could count on the army to uphold their
rights but who didn’t enjoy exerting the privilege. The fiction of
Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s complex Nobelist and generally liberal author,
has explored this paradox very well. His novel Snow is perhaps the
best dress rehearsal for the argument.

Because of course Pamuk is also the most edgy spokesman for the rights
of the Kurds and the Armenians, and of those whose very nationality
has put them in collision with the state. He has been threatened
with imprisonment under archaic laws forbidding the discussion of
certain topics, and he must have noticed the high rate of death that
has overcome dissidents, like Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink,
who have exercised insufficient caution.

But the sordid fact is that the “secular” military elite in Turkey had
already sold out a number of the values that were real to Ataturk and
necessary for Turkey’s integration into the Eurosphere. The Turkish
army not only allowed itself to become a participant in the dirty
and illegal land grab that continues to offend all international laws
and U.N. resolutions affecting the self-proclaimed colonial statelet
in the north of the island of Cyprus, but in the early years of the
occupation, the leader of Ataturk’s party-Bulent Ecevit-was rounded
up as a political detainee. This negation of free movement within EU
borders has poisoned relations with Greece, driven tens of thousands
of Cypriots into economic exile, and delayed the integration of
two advanced economies-Turkey and Cyprus-at just the point when the
Athenian economy cannot go it alone.

Having for years provided a rearguard at Incirlik Air Base for the
humanitarian relief of the Iraqi Kurdish and Shiite populations,
the Turks were offered the opportunity to lend a “northern front”
and to finish the job of Operation Provide Comfort in 2003. The strong
impression received by some of us who sat in the waiting rooms outside
the discussions of this policy was that the Turkish army was declining
the honor mainly because the bribe or inducement wasn’t large enough.

It also seemed that the same army was hoping for a chance to project
its own power in the Kurdish provinces of northern Iraq. To be waging
another dirty war on the soil of a foreign state, and to be paying
for it by using money supplied by the foreign aid budget of the U.S.

Congress, looked like bad faith of a very special kind.

In 1960, the Turkish army held the ring by intervening to execute two
powerful political bosses-Adnan Menderes and Fatin Zorlu-who according
to my best information had instigated vicious pogroms in Istanbul and
Nicosia and even tried the provocation of bombing Kemal Ataturk’s
birthplace in Salonika. (See, if interested, my little bookHostage
to History: Cyprus From the Ottomans to Kissinger.) But this long,
uneven symbiosis between state and nation and army and modernity has
now run its course. In its time, it flung a challenge to the injustice
of the Treaty of Versailles, revived regional combat on a scale to
evoke the Crusades, and saw the American and Turkish flags raised
together over blood-soaked hills in Korea in the first bellicose
engagements of the Cold War. That epoch is now over. One wonders only
whether to be surprised at how long it lasted or how swiftly it drew
to a close and takes comfort from the number of different ways in
which it is possible to be a Turk or a Muslim.