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“TODAY,” one of Turkey’s greatest modern poets requested his wife in verses composed in his prison cell in 1945, presumably anticipating a visit, “Nazim Hikmet’s woman must be beautiful/ Like a rebel flag…” Last Sunday, one could have been fooled into thinking that a vast meeting space in Istanbul was awash with rebel flags.
The mammoth gathering was a sea of red. The effect was caused, though, by a crowd estimated to be more than a million strong waving the national emblem. It was strictly a loyalist gesture rather than an indication of rebellion, the grand finale of a series of rallies throughout Turkey in the wake of the abortive coup of July 15-16, which supposedly came close to toppling the established order. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking to the crowd, declared he would endorse the restitution of the death penalty if it were sanctioned by the requisite parliamentary majority.
It’s a chilling thought, given the vindictiveness that has been on display since the failure of the still somewhat mysterious military coup attempt. There is little cause to doubt that some kind of a takeover was indeed intended, and one of the explanations for its poor timing and execution is that the conspirators were on the verge of being unveiled. It’s nonetheless exceedingly odd that Erdogan, who was on vacation at the time and therefore a relatively easy target, was not only spared but able to fly back unhindered to his citadel of power.
A chill has descended on all dissenters.
Furthermore, despite the presumed urgency of their action, could the coup-makers not have waited for a bit and attempted their takeover in the early hours instead of showing their hand late in the afternoon? Given Turkey’s 20th-century history of repeated military coups, it is no doubt extremely fortuitous that last month’s putsch did not succeed. Its consequences could have been considerably more offensive than the backlash of the past few weeks.
There are, nonetheless, significant questions that remain unanswered, or at least the responses stop well short of being entirely satisfactory.
The Erdogan government has blamed the entire episode on exiled spiritual leader and educationist Fethullah Gulen and his Hizmet movement, justifying its thorough purge of the military, the civil service, the judiciary, academia and journalism on the basis that action is being taken exclusively against adherents of a terrorist movement more terrifying than the militant Islamic State group, and one whose tentacles have bored into every facet of Turkish life.
That isn’t necessarily as nonsensical as it seems. The part that is often left out of the official narrative is the role Erdogan once played in making it so. He and Gulen were effectively allies until three years ago, united in the goal of superseding Turkey’s 20th-century secularism, and most of the Gulenists who insinuated themselves into the body politic did so with the connivance of Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). The final break came when apparently Gulenist judges and prosecutors began targeting Erdogan aides over corruption charges in 2013.
Since then, the split between the rival Islamist brands has steadily widened. It’s worth asking, though, why Erdogan waited until now to banish Gulenists from military and state structures, if he had known all along precisely where they were ensconced. After surviving the events of July 15-16, the Turkish president described them as “a gift from God” (and it is surely no coincidence that Erdogan himself was hailed in the same terms by participants in Sunday’s rally), but surely he and his loyalists — not least in the military — could have pre-empted this particular ‘gift’?
There can be little doubt that Erdogan enjoys a huge amount of support in Turkish society, but there is also plenty of opposition, and much of it isn’t Gulenist in nature. The president’s authoritarian tendencies, the drift towards religious fundamentalism and his generally uncompromising attitude towards the Kurdish minority have until now been resisted by substantial segments of Turks. In the wake of the coup attempt, though, a chill has descended on all dissidents, as any criticism of Erdogan runs the risk of being tagged as terrorism.
Erdogan was scheduled to meet Vladimir Putin yesterday, after having mended his fences somewhat with Russia as well as Israel, amid suggestions that the coup attempt was sponsored by the US. That’s unlikely, albeit not out of the question. Erdogan’s Turkey has pursued a muddled course in neighbouring Syria, long serving as a conduit for recruits to the jihadist cause. It hosts millions of Syrian refugees, meanwhile, and post-coup critiques from Europe may well prompt Ankara to unleash once more the flow of asylum-seekers into Greece.
There are, for the moment, red flags all over Turkey, in the sense of danger signals. There are indications every day that even as it failed, the botched coup may well have facilitated the nation’s descent into dictatorship.
Published in Dawn, August 10th, 2016
