WAVING ATATURK’S FLAG; TURKISH NATIONALISM
The Economist
U.S. Edition
March 10, 2007
istanbul and washington, dc Nationalism on the march
There has been a lethal upsurge in ultra-nationalist feeling in Turkey
SITTING in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits
of Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says
his mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from "Western
imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us".
In the past two years Mr Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists’ Union
have launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under
article 301 of the penal code, which makes "insulting Turkishness"
a criminal offence.
Mr Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But
elsewhere new ultra-nationalist groups, some of them led by retired
army officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran
to make Turks "the masters of the world" and even "to die and
kill" in the process. In January one of Mr Kerincsiz’s targets,
a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a
17-year-old, Ogun Samast, because he had "insulted the Turks". The
murder, in broad daylight on one of Istanbul’s busiest streets, was
a chilling manifestation of a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism
aimed at Turkey’s non-Muslim minorities and the Kurds-plus their
defenders in the liberal elite.
The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by
the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed,
it is partly in response to these reforms-more freedom for the
Kurds, a trimming of the army’s powers, concessions on Cyprus-that
nationalist passions have been roused. The knowledge that many members
of the European Union do not want Turkey to join has inflamed them
further (the EU partially suspended membership talks with Turkey
in December because of its refusal to open its ports and airspace
to Greek-Cypriots).
Another factor is America’s refusal to move against separatist PKK
guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States
Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the
mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey’s
relationship with its ally would suffer "lasting damage", says the
foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.
Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by Mr
Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist nationalism
espoused by the "Young Turks" in the dying days of the Ottoman empire
(who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian subjects), and the
siege mentality gripping Turkey today. The perception, now as then,
is that Western powers are pressing for changes to empower their local
collaborators (ie, Kurds and non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up
the country. "This social Darwinist mindset that implies it’s OK to
kill your enemies in order to survive" has been perpetuated through
an education system that tells young Turks that "they have no other
friend than the Turks," says Mr Belge. And it has been cynically
exploited by politicians and generals alike.
Mr Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican
People’s Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000
Turks gathered at Mr Dink’s funeral chanting "We are all Armenians",
Mr Erdogan opined that they had gone "too far". Both he and Mr Baykal
have resisted calls to scrap article 301, though there have been
hints that it will be amended.
The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up
to November’s parliamentary election. Mr Erdogan also hopes that
burnishing his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing
from Turkey’s hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely
secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.
Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar
Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more
threats to its national security than at any time in its modern history
and added that only its "dynamic forces" [ie, the army] could prevent
efforts to "partition the country". These words, uttered during an
official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct warning to Mr
Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.
Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist
elements within the army and retired officers who are organising
new ultra-nationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist
youths in Trabzon, where Dink’s alleged murderers came from). "The real
purpose is to sow chaos, to polarise society so they can regain ground
[lost with the EU reforms]," argues Belma Akcura, an investigative
journalist whose recent book about rogue security forces known as the
"deep state" earned her a three-month jail sentence. It would not be
surprising if their next target were a nationalist, she adds.
Meanwhile prominent writers and academics, including Mr Belge,
continue to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police
protection. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author whom Mr
Kerincsiz took to court over his comments about the persecution of
the Armenians and the Kurds, has fled to New York.
Where will matters go from here? This week one court banned access to
YouTube after clips calling Ataturk gay appeared on it; and another
sentenced a Kurdish politician to six months’ jail for giving the PKK
leader, Abdullah Ocalan, an honorific Mr. But a private television
station also withdrew a popular series, "The Valley of the Wolves",
that glorifies gun-toting nationalists who mow down their mainly
Kurdish enemies, after the channel was inundated with calls for the
show’s axing. The battle for Turkey’s soul is not over yet.