PROTOCOLS OF THE INTEREST RATE LOBBY
Whether it’s shadowy bankers, America, Israel, or Iran, there’s no
end to the conspiracy theories spun by the Turkish prime minister’s
supporters — and their opponents.
BY PIOTR ZALEWSKI | JUNE 26, 2013
ISTANBUL – Thick, boisterous crowds poured into Kazlicesme, a
neighborhood miles away from Istanbul’s city center, where Turkey’s
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was due to deliver a speech at a
rally on Sunday, June 16. Three weeks into a wave of anti-government
demonstrations and riots that began as a small sit-in against the
planned demolition of a small public park and quickly swelled into
the biggest challenge to Erdogan’s rule in years, the rally, dubbed
“Respect for the National Will,” was meant as a show of strength
and defiance by the prime minister’s supporters. To judge by the
numbers alone, it did the job. By the time Erdogan began speaking,
the crowds had reached an estimated 300,000. Pro-government media
kindly put the figure at over a million.
Near Kennedy Avenue by the shore of the Marmara Sea, where the Turkish
leader’s supporters had been ferried in by hundreds of specially
enlisted municipal buses, Kemal Karabacak, a craftsman, marched toward
the rally site, flanked by his sister Emine and two neighbors. All
four had arrived from Eyup, a conservative neighborhood best known as
the burial place of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions. All had
donned flat paper facemasks featuring the image of a smiling Erdogan.
Kemal said of the protesters half a city away, “These groups, they’re
completely marginal, they have no support from their own citizens.
They are our brothers and sisters, but they should understand what
they’re doing is wrong.”
Emine, clad in a flower-patterned blue headscarf and turquoise
overcoat, nodded excitedly. “They’re provocateurs,” she said. “We love
life, we love friendship and brotherhood. They love blood, separatism,
and military coups.” If the protests turned out to be the work of
foreign powers, as she suspected, “those countries trying to divide
us will pay the price, just as they did in World War I.”
Her friend, Gulcan Bayram, weighed in. “I’m angry with the
international media,” she said. She wore the Erdogan mask like a
visor; a pair of dark sunglasses shielded her eyes from the searing
afternoon sun. “The things they write, they distort, they exaggerate,
as if people were being oppressed, as if the government was going
to fall.” She grew more agitated, her eyebrows rising high above the
sunglasses. “It’s all a lie, and I don’t want anyone to believe it,”
she said.
In Turkey, conspiracy theories are to politics what kebabs and baklava
are to an evening meal. That goes for supporters and opponents of
Erdogan alike, often with the same targets in mind. Of the dozens of
Gezi protesters I talked to over the past weeks, many earnestly claimed
that the United States had parachuted Erdogan and his party into power
in 2002, that the Obama administration retained a Pennsylvania-based
Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, in order to bolster its aims in the
Middle East, and that it and the European Union continued to support
the militants of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in a bid to
divide Turkey.
The tendency to cry “plot” is as old as the Turkish Republic itself,
understandable in a part of the world where the West’s armies
and intelligence agencies have intervened on a regular basis —
particularly so in a country that faced the very real prospect of
Allied partition after World War I. Well into the 1990s, rare was the
national crisis that Turkish politicians and army generals refused
to blame on Greece, the United States, the EU, the Armenian diaspora,
or Turkey’s own Kurdish minority.
Refreshingly, during Erdogan’s first decade in power, the conspiracy
reflex appeared to be ebbing. The economy boomed, the prime minister’s
Justice and Development Party (AKP) ruled uncontested, confidence was
sky-high, and relations with neighbors were better than ever. Even if
it continued to sense domestic plots around every corner, the AKP, with
a few notable exceptions, saw no use in banging on about global ones.
That era ended with the Gezi Park protests this month. With the
government still very popular but increasingly on the defensive, and
with Erdogan raising the temperature with every speech, conspiracy
theories have once again boiled to the surface. The prime minister
and his allies in government and the media, rather than acknowledge
the depth of the resentment fueled by some of their policies and by
the scale of the police crackdown, have begun pinning the popular
unrest on a cabal of international actors.
Since the protests erupted in late May, Erdogan has repeatedly
lashed out at a wide range of alleged culprits, including Israel
(“Those against whom we said ‘one minute’ are now delighted”), Western
financiers (“We will make the necessary sharp responses against the
interest-rate lobby”), and Twitter (“a scourge to society”). Lately,
he has taken to slamming the foreign press, which he accuses of
misrepresenting the protests. “If the international media wants
a picture of Turkey, here is your picture,” he said at the June 16
rally, pointing to the sea of people massed around the stage from
which he spoke. “CNN, Reuters, BBC, hide this picture too, and go
on with your lies. Turkey is not a country on which international
media institutions can conduct operations.” A week later, he alleged
that the same forces that had sparked the protests across Turkey were
at work in Brazil, where widespread protests had also broken out in
several cities. “It is the same game, the same trap, the same goal.”
Others have dug even deeper. During a TV appearance on June 5, Yigit
Bulut, a pro-government commentator, accused Lufthansa, Germany’s
national air carrier, of conspiring to prevent Erdogan from building
a new airport in Istanbul. “The airport would divert a hundred
million passengers from Germany to Turkey,” Bulut reasoned. “One
of the protesters’ demands is to stop it from going ahead, so it is
obvious that Germany has its finger in the pie.” Appearing on the same
program, Bulut later likened the protests themselves to the so-called
“post-modern coup” that toppled the AKP’s predecessor, the Welfare
Party, in 1997.
A few days later, Sedat Laciner, a prominent academic, opined in a
newspaper column that the West was using the protesters to get even
with Turkey. “Turkey had criticized NATO, the Security Council, the
EU, Germany, the United States, and Israel,” he wrote. “This was not
easy to swallow. The biggest mistake Ankara made was to think this
would remain unanswered.”
On June 16, AKP spokesperson Huseyin Celik pointed the finger at the
American Enterprise Institute, the Washington-based conservative think
tank which, he alleged, had drawn up scenarios for a possible “Istanbul
rebellion” during a meeting in February with Turkish activists. A
newspaper run by followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Erdogan ally,
subsequently reported that Turkish police had arrested “a dozen
Iranian agents” in connection with the anti-government protests. The
Islamic Republic, one of its columnists concluded (unwittingly making
bedfellows of Iranian fundamentalists and American neocons), had been
caught red-handed trying “to derail an environmental protest and try
to turn it into social upheaval.”
Another Gulen outlet, Samanyolu TV, took a generous spoonful of some
of the conspiracy theories floated by the AKP and its supporters,
added the government’s narrative of the protests, and whisked both
into an episode of Ekip 1, one of the station’s soap operas. Onscreen,
it went a bit like this: a calm and docile police force meets a group
of violent, confused protesters; a foreign agent lurks amid an army
of provocateurs; while an old auntie’s trust in the state can survive
any amount of inhaled tear gas.
Unfortunately, the conspiracy theory narratives have progressed beyond
the sound-bite stage: they’re being acted upon. In the past 10 days
alone, the ministry of interior has announced that it would begin
work on a law allowing it to investigate and prosecute those who
publish “false and provocative” posts on the Internet; the national
intelligence agency has launched an official investigation into
“foreign links” to the Gezi protests; and the mayor of Ankara has
taken to Twitter to launch a hashtag campaign against a BBC journalist,
Selin Girit, whom he accuses, on the basis of a quote that wasn’t even
her own, of being a British agent. Finally, Turkey’s Capital Markets
Board has launched a probe into brokerage transactions concluded at the
height of the protests — presumably to expose, once and for all, both
the identity and the secret machinations of the “interest rate” lobby.
The plot rumors appear to be falling on fertile ground. At the June 16
rally, Adem Demirel, 62, pulled me aside after I finished speaking to
Kemal Karabacak and his sister. “Our people have to know,” he said,
speaking hurriedly, the words ramming into each other like cars in
a frenzied pile-up. “They’re giving agents a million dollars each
to stir things up here, and in the region.” It was only a month ago,
he said, that Turkey had paid off the last of its $23.5 billion debt
to the International Monetary Fund. “We paid $1.5 billion in interest
rates, and now we don’t want to pay any more interest. That’s what
this whole fight is about.”
ADEM ALTAN/AFP/Getty Images
SUBJECTS: TURKEY, DEMOCRACY, ARAB WORLD
Piotr Zalewski is an Istanbul-based freelance writer for Foreign
Policy, Time and The National, among others. Follow him on Twitter
@p_zalewski.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/06/26/protocols_of_the_interest_rate_lobby_turkey_protests_conspiracy_theories?page=full