A BATTLE FOR THE FUTURE
Economist, UK
July 19 2007
Ankara, Diyarbakir and Istanbul
The importance of this weekend’s election goes well beyond Turkey
itself
AP ON JULY 22nd Turkey, still an adolescent democracy, goes to
the polls. The event is being followed carefully far from its own
borders. For one thing, the country is of huge strategic importance.
It borders the European Union to the west and the Caucasus, Iran,
Iraq and Syria to the east and south. Iraq is especially crucial, as
Turkey’s army is threatening to invade its northern region to root
out Kurdish terrorists there. Outsiders are also monitoring Turkey
as one of the Muslim world’s rare examples of a working democracy.
The election contest has been joyless if feverish, marked by huge
rallies and demonstrations that suggest there will be a big voter
turnout. Only this week an independent candidate was shot dead as he
was being driven away from a TV studio in Istanbul. But underlying
the tensions is a battle over which way Turkey’s democracy will go.
The first fusillade in this battle was fired on April 27th when the
army, claiming to detect a dangerous slide towards Islamic radicalism,
threatened to intervene against the government. In a late-night
statement posted on the general staff’s website, it spoke ominously
of risks to Ataturk’s secular republic. In a country with a history
of military coups, the so-called "e-coup" promptly sparked a political
crisis that led to the early election. Since then, it has cast a pall
over the entire campaign.
The proximate trigger for the army’s threat was the decision by Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and leader of the ruling Justice
and Development (AK) Party, to nominate his foreign minister, Abdullah
Gul, to replace President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, a former judge who was
due to step down on May 16th. Like Mr Erdogan, Mr Gul once dabbled in
political Islam. More to the point, both men’s wives wear the Muslim
headscarf, which in accordance with Ataturk’s secular tradition is
banned in all public buildings.
The army, always suspicious of the AK Party because of its Islamist
roots, deemed the prospect of such a president a threat to the
secular republic. Despite the government’s big parliamentary majority,
Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party
(CHP), managed to stop Mr Gul’s election by dubiously claiming in the
constitutional court that parliament lacked a quorum of 367 deputies
in its first round of balloting. Egged on by the generals, the court
came down on Mr Baykal’s side. Meanwhile, millions of secular Turks
took to the streets to protest against the government. Many were urban
middle-class women, plainly fearing that their carefree lifestyles
were at stake.
The combined pressure proved too strong: Mr Erdogan withdrew Mr Gul’s
candidacy and called a general election before the scheduled date
of November 4th. But in a burst of defiance, he also rammed through
a constitutional change to let the people elect the next president
themselves. Mr Sezer, who has continued in office as a caretaker,
vetoed this. Mr Baykal, who has built a career on trashing rivals
without producing ideas of his own, lodged a fresh complaint with
the constitutional court. Unexpectedly, however-or perhaps because
it wished to salvage its reputation-the court this time backed the
government.
The new parliament must now decide whether to go for a direct election
of the president or to stick with the present rules. Under these,
if parliament fails to agree on a president within 45 days, it will
have to dissolve itself and call yet another election. Thanks to
Mr Baykal, a quorum is now needed, a complication that may allow
opposition parties to paralyse the whole process. Mr Gul has hinted
that he will re-present himself as a presidential candidate, but
Mr Erdogan has also talked of putting together a possible list of
nominees in consultation with the opposition.
Checking the record To most Turkish voters, however, the election is
about much more than the presidency and secularism. It is, in effect,
a referendum on the AK Party’s record in office, which is strikingly
good (see chart 1).
Never previously in power at national level, Mr Erdogan and his fellow
Islamists have done more to transform and modernise Turkey than any
of their secular predecessors except Ataturk and perhaps Turgut Ozal,
a visionary prime minister in the 1980s. From the hardscrabble Kurdish
provinces to the shiny new suburbs of Istanbul, the effects of AK’s
"silent revolution" are evident everywhere.
In the Kurds’ unofficial capital, Diyarbakir, Kurdish women were
recently ululating appreciatively as Mehdi Eker, the farm minister,
reeled off the government’s achievements and goals: average annual
growth of 7.3% (nearly four times the EU figure), a record $20 billion
in foreign direct investment, $40 billion in tourism earnings by
2013. "We gave your children free textbooks, brought the internet
to their schools, and water to all your villages," said Mr Eker. He
was speaking the most common Kurdish dialect, Kurmanji. Until the AK
Party passed a raft of constitutional and judicial changes, he might
have been jailed on separatism charges for doing so.
It was largely thanks to these constitutional changes, as well as to
an improving economy, that the EU agreed to open membership talks
with Turkey in 2005, a goal that most previous Turkish governments
aspired to but none came close to achieving. Many European and
American diplomats agree that Mr Erdogan is the man most fit to lead
Turkey. Their views are plainly shared by millions of Turkish voters,
who recall the protracted squabbles, economic mismanagement and massive
corruption of the string of secular coalitions that crippled Turkey
before AK.
Indeed, opinion polls suggest that the voters may give AK quite a
bit more than the 34% that catapulted it to single-party rule in
the November 2002 election (when only one other party, the CHP, got
above the 10% threshold for parliamentary representation). The polls
suggest that at least one other party, the Nationalist Action Party
(MHP), will enter parliament this time, along with some 30 candidates
from the Kurdish Democratic Turkey Party (DTP), who are running as
independents to get round the 10% threshold.
Thus, even if AK gets a bigger share of the vote than in 2002, it will
probably have a smaller majority and it might even be unable to rule
alone. On the other hand, if it were to win a sufficiently big majority
(two-thirds of the 550 parliamentary seats) to change the constitution
and force through its own choice of president, the army might well step
in. "This [election] is a stick with shit at both ends," says one AK
bigwig. "The choice is between a weak government or a military coup."
That may be an exaggeration. Yet, looking back, some AK officials
concede that they could have handled the row over the presidency
better. As commander-in-chief of the armed forces, the president has
considerable power. He can approve the expulsion of overtly pious
officers, and he appoints judges and university rectors. He can also
veto legislation deemed to violate the secular constitution. To the
generals, as to the millions of secular demonstrators, no AK man can
be trusted in this role. They argue that Mr Erdogan (who originally
wanted the job for himself) should have reached out to the opposition
and agreed on a candidate outside his own party.
Secular suspicions of the AK government had already been fanned,
not least by the controversial education minister, Huseyin Celik. Mr
Celik, who is said to have close links to the powerful Islamic Nur
fraternity, has been accused of injecting Islam by stealth. He has
overseen a revision of textbooks to promote creationism and the
recruitment, as teachers, of hundreds of graduates of imam hatip,
Islamic clerical-training schools. There has also been "an explosion
in enrolment at Koran lessons, especially among girls," says Alattin
Dincer, president of Turkey’s largest teachers’ union. No wonder
Mr Celik had to explain himself in a meeting with the chief of the
general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, shortly after the army’s e-coup.
Attempts by a few AK mayors to create booze-free zones, as well as
Mr Erdogan’s own failed effort in 2005 to outlaw adultery, have not
helped the party’s image with secularists. Yet none of this amounts
to a tilt towards sharia law. Indeed, even the AK’s fiercest critics
are hard-pressed to point to a single act that violates secularism.
If anything, most pundits reckon that the army’s salvoes may have
boosted Mr Erdogan’s support. Banking on continued stability under a
second term of AK government, foreign investors have been propelling
the Istanbul stock exchange to record highs.
In truth, many AK reforms have upset the party’s own conservative
constituents-especially the scrapping of a law that put husbands in
charge of their households. Plenty are disgruntled by the government’s
failure to loosen restrictions on the headscarf. All 62 female
candidates fielded by AK are bareheaded. "We can’t put our democracy
at risk just for the headscarf, so we’ve frozen the issue for now,"
explains Ayse Bohurler, an Erdogan party chief who sports a tightly
wound scarf.
What is more, Mr Erdogan has dropped some 150 deputies, many of them
Islamist firebrands who in March 2003 voted against letting American
troops invade Iraq through Turkey. He has replaced them with an array
of new faces, among them a high-flying Kurdish investment banker, a
writer from the liberal Muslim Alevi faith and a famous cartoonist’s
wife. Ever the pragmatist, "Erdogan drew the right lesson from those
[pro-secular] rallies," asserts a senior Bush administration official.
Unimpressed in Istanbul Behind the walled privacy of Istanbul’s oldest
social club, the scions of Turkey’s moneyed class are unimpressed. They
cling to the spectre of a battle between Islamic radicals and Ataturk’s
disciples.
"This election is about the survival of the republic. I will vote for
Ataturk’s party [the CHP]," squawks a septuagenarian socialite. Like
fellow members of the Cercle d’Orient, her aversion to the Islamists
is profoundly snobbish. The real worry is the shift of wealth from
an old industrial elite towards a new bourgeoisie made up of pious
Anatolian entrepreneurs, who have thrived since AK came to power.
AFP
Another bouquet for Erdogan?The generals have different concerns.
Among the reforms that earned Turkey its prized date to open
membership talks with the EU were provisions to trim the influence of
the army. The National Security Council, where the generals used to
bark orders to the politicians, has been reduced to an advisory role.
Civilians can no longer be tried in military courts. The generals’
powers would be shorn further if Turkey ever joined the EU.
Yet that prospect seems to be receding. The election of Nicolas
Sarkozy as France’s president is a blow, because he is strongly
against Turkey’s EU membership. The French recently blocked the
opening of a chapter in Turkey’s negotiations with the EU on the
ground that it was relevant only to full membership, not some form
of looser association. French doubts are widely shared in Europe:
only Britain and Sweden are now forthright in pressing the case for
admitting Turkey. The impasse in Cyprus, to which Turkey refuses
to extend its customs union with the EU so long as Turkish northern
Cyprus is ostracised by the rest of the world, has become an excuse
for all who want to slow down or stop Turkey’s membership talks.
Not surprisingly, popular support in Turkey for the EU has fallen
back from the highs of two years ago. Yet although the EU is one of
Turkey’s two big foreign-policy problems, it has hardly been mentioned
during the election campaign. "The EU doesn’t sell in Anatolia,"
comments Murat Mercan, an AK deputy.
The EU’s focus on issues such as free speech and minority rights has
also helped to feed a dangerous nationalism. This was most chillingly
demonstrated in January when a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor,
Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old because he had "insulted
the Turks". Three months later a group of youths in the eastern city
of Malatya slit the throats of three Protestant missionaries after
torturing them. This week the Istanbul-based Armenian patriarch, Mesrob
Mutafyan II, said he had received threats to blow up his headquarters.
"Testosterone-driven nationalism is the biggest problem in Turkey,"
says one foreign banker in Istanbul. Ali Babacan, the economy minister,
agrees. "Our biggest failure has been to create jobs for around
700,000 Turks who enter the labour market every year," he adds. Mr
Babacan is also Turkey’s top EU negotiator, and he still aims to be
ready for membership by 2013. "Sarkozy will change," he says. "The
EU cannot violate its obligations."
The Iraq conundrum Renewed nationalism is also affecting Turkey’s
other big foreign-policy issue: northern Iraq. Sitting in his offices
in Washington, DC, Qubad Talabani, the youthful representative of
the Kurds’ quasi-independent state in northern Iraq, says that he
and his kin are "bracing for a storm". Mr Talabani, who happens to
be the son of the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, is talking about
what may follow Turkey’s election. For the new political landscape
is likely to determine whether the army makes good on its repeated
threats to attack separatist guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers’
Party (PKK) who are based in northern Iraq.
An invasion by NATO’s second-biggest army would not only destabilise
the only fairly calm bit of Iraq. It would also wreck Turkey’s
relations with America and the EU. Worse, it might not succeed:
the Turks, too, could easily end up bogged down and unable to defeat
an insurgency.
An upsurge in PKK attacks has killed over 200 Turkish soldiers since
the start of the year. Each new Turkish casualty is bringing votes
to the MHP, which is led by an enigmatic former economics professor,
Devlet Bahceli. Even his most avid supporters were unnerved when Mr
Bahceli flung a hangman’s noose at his audience during a rally in the
eastern city of Erzurum. The MHP leader has vowed, if he becomes prime
minister, to reintroduce the death penalty and execute the imprisoned
PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan.
Like the generals, Mr Bahceli is also keen to clobber some 3,500 PKK
militants who are sheltering in northern Iraq. America’s failure to
do the job is the biggest cause of rampant anti-American feelings
in Turkey. Support for America is now down to 9%, lower even than
in the occupied Palestinian territories, according to a Pew Global
Attitudes Survey (see chart 2).
Many Turks reckon that America is reluctant to attack the PKK because
it secretly wants to establish an independent Kurdish state in northern
Iraq, which would encompass the oil-rich province of Kirkuk and,
possibly, chunks of south-eastern Turkey. Mr Gul has complained that
PKK fighters are carrying American-made weapons. America has denied
responsibility. Meanwhile, Turkish troops continue to mass along
the Iraqi border. Iraqi Kurdish leaders say their fledgling entity,
not the PKK, is Turkey’s real target.
Turkish sensitivities are perhaps best explained by their imperial
past. Between 1878 and 1918 the Ottoman empire lost 85% of its
territory and 75% of its population. "The fear of obliteration was
a constant presence throughout the empire’s long demise," notes an
Ottoman historian, Taner Akcam. The belief that Western powers are
bent on dismembering Turkey remains strong. Gunduz Aktan, a former
ambassador who is running on the MHP ticket in Istanbul, argues that
Turkey’s very survival as a nation-state hinges on preventing a Kurdish
one emerging. "If the Americans don’t stop this, we will have to go in
[to northern Iraq] ourselves," he says.
Mr Erdogan, who has resisted the army’s calls for a cross-border
incursion, has a different view. Over the past two years he has been
quietly testing the ground for what Henri Barkey, a Turkey follower
at America’s Lehigh University, calls a "grand bargain". Turkey would
recognise the Iraqi Kurds’ semi-independent status; the Iraqi Kurds
would coax PKK fighters to give up their guns and pledge to respect
Turkey’s borders. Relieved of the pressure of having to choose between
its Turkish and Iraqi Kurdish allies, America would be delighted,
as would Turkey’s own Kurds.
But the generals refuse to play along. They still hope that, after the
election, they will get the nod to stomp into northern Iraq. It is not
only the future of Turkish democracy that is at stake this weekend;
it may be the future of the whole region.