TURKEY’S RED LINES
MARKAR ESAYAN
Today’s Zaman
Sept 30 2012
Turkey
When the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) began its
Kurdish initiative in 2010, it, along with the government’s Armenian
and Cyprus initiatives, was perceived as a decisive move to remove
the trump cards from Turkey’s ages-old deep state, which recently
came to be known as Ergenekon — a clandestine organization nested
within the state trying to overthrow or manipulate the democratically
elected government.
What was obvious was that the real power was wielded by the Turkish
Armed Forces (TSK), i.e., the military of this country. The military
had always seen itself as superior to the parliamentary system,
forcing civilians to pursue a policy delineated by red lines. By
analogy, it can be argued that most civilian governments had worked
like municipalities since the introduction of the multi-party party
system in Turkey in 1946. The military wanted to keep civilian
governments within the “services” department, and those who raised
objections to this system were either sent to the gallows, like the
late Prime Minister Aydın Menderes, or to prisons, as was the case
in the wake of the 1970 and 1980 coups.
Under this iron sledgehammer of the military, a specific type of
politician developed in Turkey. Such politicians accepted the military
as the boss and would never imagine diverging from military-imposed
lines of thought. The most famous of these politicians is Suleyman
Demirel. For years, he traded the general public’s yearning for
civilian politics for submission to the army. He was a master demagogue
and really a boon to the tutelary system.
In the 1983 elections, held in the wake of the 1980 coup, Turgut
Ozal managed to appeal to the general public’s vast common sense
despite two rivals openly backed by the military and immense pressure
from military generals. Ozal introduce revolutionary changes to the
country, helping it crack its hard shell. He was so self-confident
that he removed the chief of General Staff from office. After this
successful move, however, it seems that Ozal began to underestimate
the military and slackened his reforms. He gradually became alone and
ineffective. An attempt to assassinate him was a deep state operation
as it was known that he had intended to settle the Kurdish issue
through reasonable, fair methods. Whether they wanted to kill or
just intimidate him (he survived the attempt with a minor wound to
his finger), we will never know. Indeed, he was already ill during
his presidency, and, after returning from a long visit to several
Central Asian countries, his health deteriorated while at the Cankaya
Presidential Palace. Without any emergency medical intervention,
he died a suspicious death. Recently, prosecutors have decided to
exhume Ozal’s remains from his grave in Ä°stanbul. Hopefully the
doubts surrounding his death will be resolved.
However, I must also note that if politically motivated murders are
committed in this country and if these murders remain unexplained,
this means there is still a deep state in the country and that it
wields the true power. This is a universal criterion. Today, there
are still many unsolved, politically motivated murders, such as that
of journalist Hrant Dink. According to the above criterion, there
is still a deep state in Turkey, which, although it may have grown
weak and inched back, is still nested within the state and powerful
enough to keep those murders from being solved.
With the postmodern coup of Feb. 28, 1997, staged against religious
politics and religious economic enterprises, the AK Party’s senior
leaders — Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arınc and
others — seemed to have come to understand the style of rule that
started with the Committee of Union and Progress’ (CUP) B-team player
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and continued with his single-party Republican
People’s Party (CHP). The true bosses and owners of this country
were the CHP and its elite supporters, and the general public was
not how the CHP imagined it to be. So, it first tried to create the
public of its dreams. To this end, it aggressively meddled with daily
life. Soon, however, it realized that its social engineering efforts
were ineffectual. So it changed its tactics and, in collaboration with
the elite, tried to keep the general public away from the country’s
administration and riches.
It made the TSK the watchdog of politics so that the public would
not be able to get close to the country’s governance. It formulated
policies marked by red lines, such as those concerning the 1915
Armenian massacres, the Cyprus issue, the Kurdish and the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK) problems, the Alevi issue, income inequality
and many more matters. Indeed, it derived its power from leaving
these issues unresolved, and this deadlock would justify the TSK’s
supremacy over civilian politics.
Having understood this scheme, the AK Party, I think, concluded
that the country must get rid of these burdens in order to start
democratization and that it is the state which is the main source
of problems.
Unfortunately, however, they relied solely on public support —
understandably, but without any serious preparations for tackling the
problem of the deep state. So their approach was pragmatic but lacked
any serious forethought. All of their initiatives eventually ended
up in smoke. They negotiated the rights of Kurdish people with the
PKK; this was both unethical and is attributable to the organization
gaining more representative power than it had previously enjoyed.
Today, all anti-AK Party groups seem to invest their hopes in the
government’s armed struggle with the PKK. The country is being
seriously fractured and the government has to learn its lesson from
the past.