TIME OF MELANCHOLIA
By Matein Khalid
Khaleej Times, United Arab Emirates
June 16 2007
THE Rumali Hissar is a medieval castle on the Bosphorus from where
the Ottoman armies of Sultan Mehmet Fatih mounted his last, successful
siege against Byzantine Constantinople in 1453.
Six centuries have passed, the secular Turkish Republic has replaced
the Ottoman Empire, yet the battle of ideas for the soul of the
state still grips the Turkish people. Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s literary
icon, writes that his memories of Istanbul are suffused with a deep
melancholia (huzn), a feeling of deep spiritual loss amid the elegant
Ottoman architecture and the wistful beauty of the Bosphorus and the
Sea of Marmara.
I too felt melancholic as I wandered the neon wasteland of Taksim
in the heart of Istanbul, depressed at the number metal detectors
and security checkpoints in luxury hotels after the Ankara suicide
bombings, at the mile after grim mile of apartment blocks in
neighbourhoods like Lalaji teeming with Anatolian and Kurdish
families whose women all wear headscarves, not Chanel and Donna
Karan. Melancholia, after all, has defined the human condition in
the ancient, ethereal streets of Istanbul for millennia, just as the
ghosts of a lost empire and a vanished time seem to swirl in the mist
of Topkapi Serai, the palace of the sultans that was Turkey’s White
House, Kremlin and Versailles during the Ottoman centuries.
The Turkish elections are now scheduled for July 22. The cognoscenti
of Turkey’s political and financial elite assure me that AKP will
increase its seats in Parliament and compromise with the military
on a president acceptable to the secular guardians of the state. But
what if AKP again miscalculates or its local party activists provoke
a confrontation with the generals who fear an Islamist encroachment
on the secular symbols and institutions of Mustafa Kemal’s Republic?
After all, AKP tried to criminalise adultery and ban alcohol in
municipalities it controls, to appease its core constituency of the
orthodox Anatolian urban petit-bourgeoisie. Inevitably, Turkey’s
westernised secular establishment hit back at Erdogan’s AKP. The
General Staff issued a warning to the government not to covet the
presidency, a secular bastion. This was Turkey’s first E-coup but
the armed forces have overthrown four elected prime ministers since
1960, including the Islamist ideologue Necmettin Erbakan in 1997,
whose Welfare Party was the progenitor of AKP.
I found it surreal that petty issues like Mrs Abdullah Gul’s headscarf
or bikini billboards dominated the political debate in Turkey. What
about AKP’s track record? As an investor in the Istanbul stock
exchange, I was stunned by the sheer success of AKP’s economic and
financial policies. After all, Turkish inflation and interest rates
have plunged, its economic growth is the highest in the OECD, its
banks and insurance companies purchased the crème de la crème of Wall
Street and the City, its sovereign risk spread in the Eurobond market
compressed to historic lows, its successive IMF agreements the model
of monetary orthodoxy.
Reccip Tayeb Erdogan and Abdullah Gul gave Turkey political stability
after a generation of violence, bitterness and hyperinflation. AKP
restructured Turkey’s economy and political governance to accelerate
Ankara’s tortuous path to EU membership, attracted more FDI in the
past three years than the last three decades. By any criteria, the
AKP government was a spectacular economic success. Turkey’s economic
achievements can so easily be derailed by its multiple political swords
of Damocles, that a simple headscarf could tear open the existential
fault lines between secular, Kemalist elites who have a Louis XIV
idea of ‘I’ etat, cèst nous’ and the pious Anatolian masses enriched
by AKP’s economic experiment.
Turkey’s political and constitutional crisis is not just between the
military and AKP, between the Kemalist praetorians and the Islamist
politicians, it is a contest for power between Turkey’s traditional
westernised elite and the immigrants of Anatolia. Religion is just code
for an epic battle over social class, economics and political power.
The recent violence in Turkey’s political life has also exposed the
fissures in the Kemalist state and its secular, nationalist culture.
An Armenian editor in Istanbul was gunned down by an ultra-nationalist
assassin from a Black Sea town. When 100,000 people attended his
funeral, their chant ‘we are all Armenians’ was a subversive act in
the Kemalist ideological pantheon. The PKK has sent a suicide bomber
to gut an Ankara shopping mall and attacked Turkish gendarmerie posts
deep in the Anatolian heartland. As in 1996, the Turkish military
had amassed 100,000 troops on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan.
Mustafa Kemal’s presence haunts Dolmabache Palace, where he died
sixty nine years ago. Yet as I gazed spellbound at the ancient domes,
spires and minarets of Istanbul from Galata Tower, an unseen muezzin’s
familiar call to prayer proved that a religion far older than the
Kemalist dogma also existed in Turkey. Any collision between the two
religions of Turkey, as the military’s E-coup, people power protests
and AKP’s reckless legislation threaten, could well prove fatal to
the future of the Republic.
A decade ago, Turkey invaded northern Iraq with a green light from
the US whose CIA agents used the Kurds in a botched coup to overthrow
the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. But any Turkish invasion will
inflame relations with Washington, Baghdad and the Arab world. Yet
the Turkish military is convinced that the Kirkuk referendum and
the US handover of Arbil, Sulemaniyah and Dahuk to Massoud Banzani’s
peshmerga is a prelude to a de facto Kurdish state with PKK bases and
territorial claims against Turkey. The Kemalist ideologues brand the
Kurds ‘mountain Turks’ and view the PKK as terrorist. But Washington
uses the PKK’s sister party in CIA plots to destabilise the Ayatullah’s
Iran. War, coups, murder, protests, suicide bombers, racial hatreds,
the politics of violence. This is a time of melancholia in Turkey.
Matein Khalid is a Dubai-based investment banker and economic analyst.
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