- Sunday July 6, 2008
- Article history
It is too soon to know how the battle between the AKP and the secular establishment will play itself out, but, while we wait, spare a thought for Turkey’s beleaguered democrats.
They include the scholars who have questioned the very foundations of official history, the lawyers who have challenged its infamous penal code, the writers, journalists, translators and publishers who have refused to be intimidated by that code, the nationwide alliances of feminist and human rights activists, and the musicians and memoirists who defy official ideology by celebrating their multicultural roots.
I could go on. These are loose-knit networks: though many go back several decades, it was when EU accession began to look like a real possibility, in the mid to late 1990s, that they came into their own. What they saw in the EU bid was a chance for a bloodless revolution – a measured reform of its repressive state bureaucracies, a democratic resolution of the Kurdish problem, and an end to what polite political scientists call tutelary democracy.
In the Turkish context, they mean a democracy in which the army has the last word, involving itself in the day-to-day running of government and stepping in to shut it down whenever it deems it to have strayed from the righteous path.
Many of those who would like to see Turkey become a real democracy are veterans of its political prisons. Some did time after the 1971 coup, others were imprisoned after the much more brutal coup in 1980. A significant number did two stints in prison and/or were forced to spend time in exile. Quite a few bear the marks of torture. By and large, they are secularist in background, education and temperament, but in the past decade they have worked in parallel with Islamist groups that support democratic pluralism and oppose militarist secularism. Whatever their views on religion, a large number of Turkey’s democrats supported the AKP in the last two elections. They did so because they saw it as the party most likely to challenge the status quo.
And so it has. Not since the founding of the republic has any government challenged the military with such daring. But its defence of free expression and the rights of others has been patchy. In 2005 and 2006 it largely condoned the prosecution of more than a hundred of Turkey’s most prominent writers, publishers and scholars.
It did not speak against relentless media hate campaigns that have resulted in most of the Turkish public seeing the 301 defendants as public enemies. It did not offer any protection to the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink. After Dink’s assassination, it did assign round-the-clock protection to the most prominent 301 defendants. But do not assume that they are safe. They put their lives at risk every time they speak, wherever they speak. A casual aside in Kansas City one day will appear under bold and distorting headlines in the Turkish press the next, alongside pleas for civil society to ‘silence them for good’.
Does democracy have a future in Turkey? A lot depends on the Ergenekon indictment; a lot more depends on the outcome of the case against the AKP. But for me the litmus test is whether or not Turkey’s democrats can press for change without facing prosecution, persecution and (all too often) death.
· Maureen Freely is a novelist and writer. She translated ‘Snow’ by Orhan Pamuk