Turkey’s Liberals Speaking Out as Reform Stalls

ISTANBUL — When Recep Tayyip Erdogan was first elected prime minister of Turkey six years ago, his policy moves were brave and new, and this country’s liberals quickly lent him their support. He started accession talks with the European Union, stopped aggressive rhetoric on age-old disputes like the island of Cyprus, and told Turkey’s oppressed Kurdish minority, in a groundbreaking speech, that it existed.

And while liberals had grown anxious in recent years, waiting for reforms that kept being deferred, in part because Mr. Erdogan’s party was tied up in legal battles for survival, they supported him, hoping he would return to his agenda.

Now, that seems to be changing. Liberal columnists and intellectuals have begun criticizing Mr. Erdogan for what they say is a shift away from his reformist ways toward a more nationalist line, closer to Turkey’s powerful military.

“Erdogan changed the whole discourse,” said Hasan Cemal, a columnist for the daily newspaper Milliyet. “This is the kind of disillusionment we have been having.”

One of the most glaring example of the shift, liberals say, is a speech Mr. Erdogan gave this month in the predominantly Kurdish city of Hakkari in the southeast. His language there, liberals said, resembled the tone of Turkey’s nationalists, hard-line patriots whose message to Kurds, nearly a fifth of Turkey’s population, is accept Turkish identity or get out.

“These were not the words of a reformer,” said Yasemin Congar, deputy editor in chief of Taraf, a liberal newspaper.

Turkey’s dismal relationship with its Kurdish population has been at the heart of politics in this country ever since the state was founded in 1923, and liberals argue that Turkey will be never become a truly free democracy if it is not improved.

An adviser to Mr. Erdogan said that the contents of the speech were not new, and that the liberals’ frustration came more from their high expectations for a solution to the Kurdish problem than from any change in direction by Mr. Erdogan. The problem has existed for decades, he argued, and untangling it will take time.

“They want the government to create a miracle,” said the adviser, who was not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

But liberals use the argument in reverse, saying that the Turkish state has spent years dragging its feet on the issue, which led to a war in the 1980s between a separatist group, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., and the military.

The violence quieted over the years, but Kurds’ basic demands — like recognition as an ethnic group — were never met. Liberals say they threw their support behind Mr. Erdogan because they believed that he would be the one with the courage to change that, but six years into his prime ministership, little has been done.

“People expected him to come up with some major political promises,” said Altan Tan, a Kurdish intellectual from Diyarbakir, the largest city in the Kurdish southeast, “but his strengthened rhetoric was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People are still in shock.”

The speech was particularly painful for liberals because they compared it to one he gave in August 2005, when he acknowledged that Turkey had a “Kurdish problem” and that the state was partly responsible, shattering many taboos.

“This is a different Erdogan from the Erdogan of 2005,” said Yavuz Baydar, a columnist for the daily Today’s Zaman. “This one issues threats. This one does not sound conciliatory.”

But his language needs to be seen in the context of what happened on the day he made it, Mr. Erdogan’s adviser argues. Local elections are scheduled for March, and the P.K.K. is applying pressure.

Mr. Erdogan said in an interview this month that when he reached Hakkari on the day of the speech, “it was absolutely silent,” because P.K.K. supporters warned residents to turn off their car engines. Protesters had broken shop windows and set cars on fire before his arrival to give the appearance of chaos.

“I have no problems with my citizens of Kurdish origin,” Mr. Erdogan said. “The thing to be questioned is violence.”

Mr. Erdogan has promised work and better services in his speeches, Mr. Tan said, but has said nothing about ethnic rights, an approach that has given Kurds the impression that they must give up their cultural demands for economic ones.

Though the majority of Kurds do not want a separate state, jobs alone will not be enough to make a real change, he said.

“Kurds sincerely want to be a part of the country as equal citizens with democratic rights,” he said.

Mr. Erdogan has not had it easy. For almost two years his Islamic-inspired party, Justice and Development, or AKP, has been tossed from one political crisis to another as Turkey’s entrenched secular establishment has fought it over power.

After his party narrowly missed being abolished in the summer, many liberals believe that Mr. Erdogan struck a compromise with the military — a powerful institution that has pressed elected governments from behind the scenes for decades — making the calculation that to stay in power meant dropping reforms.

“He probably thinks, ‘If they catch me again, they will ban me,’ ” Ms. Congar said. “He can’t lead with this fear. He has to be brave with reforms.”

Mehmet Altan, a columnist for the daily Star, was more pessimistic about AKP, saying, “Now Ankara’s status quo has it by the neck, and a change is almost impossible.”

The result, Mr. Baydar argued, is “a new, sort of confused, aimless, AKP.”

Perhaps the bitterest disappointment has been over the accession talks with the European Union, which have drifted. Plans for rewriting the Constitution — a central requirement— were shelved this spring after a court struck down Parliament’s repeal of a headscarf ban in universities. Some liberals described Mr. Erdogan’s push to allow the headscarf as an early break, because it left the impression that he was putting religious freedoms over issues more important to liberals, like freedom of expression.

When asked about plans for the Constitution in an interview in Today’s Zaman, Cemil Cicek, a top AKP official, said, “Desire is one thing and reality is another.”

Mr. Cemal, of Milliyet, said: “The important thing is whether Erdogan is still sincere about Turkey’s membership accession to E.U. I started having doubts about that.”

Mr. Tan said some still believed that the party would get back on the European Union track, “like a final jump from a dying man.”

“He’s banking on the fact that there’s no alternative to him right now,” Ms. Congar said. “If he creates a vacuum, somebody is going to fill it.”