TURKEY’S HIDDEN REVOLUTION
Slate Magazine
August 26, 2013 Monday 5:03 PM GMT
How Prime Minister Erdogan accidentally fostered a generation of
Turkish liberals.
by: Christopher De Bellaigue
Why Turkey Has the Liberals Egypt Needs
On Aug. 5 a court in western Turkey handed down life sentences to a
score of retired military officers, including the former chief of the
general staff, as well as politicians and media figures, for plotting
attacks that would have hurled the country into chaos in preparation
for a military coup. The trial was widely regarded as flawed, but the
verdicts did not provoke big protests in a nation that until a few
years ago held the Army in higher esteem than any other institution. A
few days later, at the end of Ramadan, the cities emptied as usual
and the resorts were packed. Amid the festivities, the decapitation
of the country’s former ruling establishment was largely forgotten.
To an outsider it might seem as though the Islamist prime minister,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has achieved what his former counterpart in
Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, failed to do: boot the generals into irrelevance
and impress on his opponents the fullness of their defeat.
But that impression is incomplete. Over the past decade, emboldened
by impressive mandates from the electorate, Erdogan has indeed done
much to subordinate the Army to the civilian authorities, but he
has had help from an unlikely quarter: a generation of Turks who,
although secular and deeply opposed to political Islam, no longer want
the generals to fight their battles for them. These Turks are young
(or youngish), and what they know of modern countries tells them
that it’s not a good idea to have the Army running things behind the
scenes. Nor has the military always contented itself with remaining
behind the scenes; since 1960 the generals have staged three coups
(four if you include the “soft” coup of 1997), befriended gangsters and
neofascists, and sabotaged efforts to end a decades-old war against
Kurdish insurgents. So, the silence of these younger, secular Turks
after Aug. 5 was meaningful. It was a silence of disassociation.
Who are they, and what do they stand for? For the answer, look at the
protests that swept Turkey this June, starting around some threatened
sycamores in central Istanbul, spreading to no fewer than 60 of the
country’s 81 provinces, and ending with five dead and many thousands
injured. Amid the chaos and tear gas, new elements in society were
discernible; these elements will be prominent in the political and
cultural struggles of the future.
The old Turkey-the Turkey I came to know after moving to the
country in 1996-was dominated by big, obvious blocs: left, right,
and Islamist, each with its own culture, leaders, “look,” and
foundation myths. Each bloc was subject to an internal tyranny, with
leaders-for-life and the common foot soldier shielded from truths he
wouldn’t understand. The media, academe, and the huge public sector
bought into this system. It was hard to get on without being a client
of one bloc or another. Everyone knew where he stood.
This summer’s agitation was suggestive of a different Turkey,
variegated, harder to classify. The old blocs are gone. There is now a
concatenation of groups, interests, forums, and individuals-different
shades of identity and belief. Over the past decade, the country has
gained the most sophisticated green, feminist, and gay rights movements
in the Muslim world. A large, overwhelmingly secular minority, the
proto-Shia Alevis, have emerged from semi-hiding, while the Kurds,
long reviled and detested, enjoy greater prominence and freedom than
at any time since the Ottoman era.
All of these groups were represented on the streets in June-rallied not
by tub-thumping leaders or powerful editors, but by fellow protesters
using Twitter and Facebook. Not forgetting the housewives banging
pots at their windows, the students, private-sector workers, and
football fans who joined the protests, and the celebrities who were
photographed cleaning up the mess. Turkey has a new bloc, betrothed
to none of the established political parties, loyal readers of no
single newspaper: a liberal bloc.
The irony is that the person who did the most to bring liberal
Turkey into existence is now its adversary: Erdogan himself. It seems
outlandish to recall, but he is the man who authored some of the most
comprehensive pro-democracy reforms the country has known. Erdogan’s
measures were designed above all to benefit his own, Islamist
supporters who had been persecuted by the old secularist elite. But
Alevis and gays and the others also came up for air. A forgotten
group, the Armenians-a group that almost symbolises Turkey’s troubled
historical conscience-shot back into prominence. When the Armenian
newspaper editor Hrant Dink was murdered by a Turkish nationalist
in 2007, hundreds of thousands of Turks marched in protest. “We are
all Hrant!”
All the while, Erdogan presided over an unprecedented expansion
in material prosperity, lifting millions into the middle class,
where they enjoyed greater mobility, educational opportunities,
and freedom of choice. The result was a more diverse, complicated,
and irreverent culture than Turkey had seen for many decades.
Erdogan does not seem to like this Turkey, or the liberals who inhabit
it. He has criticized their drinking habits and their abortions;
opponents in the media have been silenced through a combination of
behind-the-scenes pressure and the courts. The prime minister supports
radical changes to Istanbul’s already much-abused skyline-a mammoth
hilltop mosque, the world’s biggest airport, a new bridge across
the Bosporus, and endless shopping malls, all approved with little
oversight. The sycamores were the last straw.
Erdogan’s reaction to the June protests was neither thoughtful nor
generous. He called the demonstrators “looters” and social media a
“plague” spread by “social delinquents.” He congratulated the police,
whose brutality had been deplored by human rights campaigners around
the world, on writing “an epic of heroism.” Now he is lashing out,
suing critics and complaining of an international conspiracy led
by a sinister “interest rate lobby.” False modesty is not among the
prime minister’s faults; he speaks of himself in the third person,
when not using the royal “we.” He hopes to end 2014 as the occupant
of a much-empowered Turkish presidency.
Erdogan still has the numbers-pious, commercially minded Turks
who constitute the country’s new establishment, and who share his
conservative views. But his opponents are also a formidable force.
There should be a way for liberals and conservatives to coexist-it’s
the norm in many countries. Can Erdogan be the leader of all Turks,
even those who disagree with him? The auguries are not hopeful.