City lights
Mar 17th 2005
>From The Economist print edition
For Turks who want to get ahead, the places to be are Istanbul or
Ankara
TURKEY is divided into two parts. There is Istanbul and its political
appendage, Ankara, and there is the rest. This “other” Turkey, most
of it in the east, is a vaguely defined area from which the
cosmopolitan inhabitants of Istanbul and Ankara carefully insulate
themselves. Until very recently they would have travelled there only
under firm instructions from the armed forces or the government.
Conversely, people from the eastern regions hardly ever made it to
positions of power. Now, however, there are some easterners in the
ministerial team. Burhan Yenigun, the mayor of the remote eastern
city of Van, says some ministers in office today were at school with
him. In a country where whom you know still matters at least as much
as what you know, that is helping Turkey’s disadvantaged east feel
more involved in the democratic process.
The east also happens to be home to many millions of Kurds, whose
alienation from the mainstream of Ataturk’s republic has been a cause
of dissension and violence almost since the republic was born. When
one Istanbul company’s salesmen go to Diyarbakir, a large Kurdish
city in the east, the locals say (and not in jest): “The men from
the republic have arrived.”
Istanbul, home to up to a fifth of Turkey’s population, is a
microcosm of Turkey itself, with migrants from particular regions
clustering in specific areas. Migration has also made it the largest
Kurdish city in the world. At the same time it is home to some of the
trendiest boutiques in Europe. Meandering beside the Sea of Marmara
and across the Bosphorus for some 40 miles, it houses the
headquarters of every Turkish company of substance. Even Is Bank, a
commercial bank set up by Ataturk and his Republican Party in Ankara,
his own creation, recently moved its headquarters there.
Istanbul is a handsome, ancient place and a magnet for the rest of
the nation. It has an air of noisy, amiable chaos. In far-off Rize, a
city on the Black Sea coast near the border with Georgia, in the
heart of Turkey’s wealthy tea-growing region, an improbably large
number of cars have Istanbul registration plates, recognisable by the
prefix “34”. The locals explain that anybody in the area who makes
money immediately goes to Istanbul to spend it.
Ankara, on the other hand, is a modern place sadly lacking in
man-made beauty. Many a Turkish civil servant has silently rued the
day that Ataturk decided to plonk his republic’s capital in a
treeless expanse of Anatolian wasteland, in the interest of shifting
the nation’s centre of gravity away from Istanbul. So devoid was
Ankara of any structure of note in the early years of the republic
that civil servants had to live in dormitories.
Beyond these now lively metropolises lies the “other” Turkey, vast
tracts of mountainous land stretching from the city of Edirne in the
west, where Ottoman architecture had its finest flowering, to Kars,
once capital of the long-defunct South-West Caucasian Republic, now
wasting near the end of the cul-de-sac leading to Turkey’s closed
border with Armenia.
The typical inhabitant of this other Turkey today lives in a town,
not a village, in a standard apartment that is one-quarter of a floor
in a six- or seven-storey concrete block. These uniform buildings,
sometimes painted in pastel shades to break the monotony, creep
across the hillside scrub on the fringes of fast-growing towns from
Edirne to Sanliurfa. Everywhere the countryside has a half-finished
look, littered with abandoned buildings.
Europe’s new neighbours
Around its eastern and southern edges this landmass touches Georgia,
Iran, Iraq and Syria. With Turkey inside the EU, these will be
Europe’s new neighbours, a Europe whose highest mountain will be
Mount Ararat, not Mont Blanc; a Europe that will include the northern
areas of Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers, often considered the cradle of civilisation.
Turkey’s mountainous hinterland is tightly controlled from Ankara,
which allows the regions little financial autonomy. Ataturk inherited
the Ottoman system for imposing law and order and for gathering taxes
and redistributing revenues. At its heart is the vali, the governor
appointed by the Ministry of Home Affairs in Ankara who is sent out
to the regions much like ambassadors are to foreign postings.
Every vali has a huge office, which reflects its occupant’s status
both by its size and by the number of black leather armchairs it
contains. The great men are surrounded by acolytes in dark suits who
interrupt continually with requests to sign pieces of paper. In
Turkey today, as in Ottoman times, little can be done without a
governor’s signature. If a vali is absent or ill, official life-from
granting a pay rise to a junior employee to authorising a new office
block-simply goes on hold until the governor can resume signing.
The middle of nowhere
The vali system suits a geography in which towns and cities sit in
bowls surrounded by mountains, isolated and self-contained. The towns
are joined by long asphalt strips with only the occasional petrol
station as a diversion. From time to time a village appears in the
distance. But there is no rural aristocracy or country life of the
sort you find in western Europe. Turks live in villages not because
they have chosen to escape to them, but because they have been unable
to escape from them.
The other power in town is the local mayor, an official elected for a
five-year term. Unlike the vali, who comes from many miles away, the
mayors are usually local folk from the town they represent-often
local tradesmen, in Trabzon even a former professional footballer.
Both the mayor and the deputy mayor of Diyarbakir are Kurds. Their
responsibilities are for the most part limited to transport, drains
and water, and their revenues come from building permits, local
property taxes and central-government grants.
Urban aspirers
It is now government policy to decentralise control and budgets away
from the huge and inefficient ministries in the capital. This year
the “Village Services Department”, a 42,000-strong cohort of civil
servants in Ankara who oversee administration of the villages, is due
to be disbanded. But this is only a drop in the ocean. Turkey’s
public administration still employs more than 2m bureaucrats.
Trying to decentralise further, the government says it would like to
shift power from the vali to the local mayor. Part of the plan is to
send a different sort of individual to these outposts. Efkan Ala, for
example, the governor of Diyarbakir, was appointed to the job last
year at the age of 39. His approach is more informal than that of his
predecessors. He clearly disapproves of the minder from the security
services who attends the meeting with your correspondent and takes
copious notes.
Last autumn the government was due to transfer large chunks of
treasury property to the local authorities. Much of it-such as
sports centres and museums-earns rent and could make a big
difference to the mayors’ budgets, says Volkan Canalioglu, the mayor
of Trabzon. But the plan was shelved. Perhaps the central
government’s success in getting its own budget under control has made
it reluctant to let go. “We don’t want to end up like a Latin
American country,” says Mr Babacan, the economy minister, “where
they don’t know what their budget is.” But the government, he says,
is still “working on how to share revenues with the regions”.