Claire Berlinski writes about international news and trends, liberal democracy and its discontents, and living in interesting times. Her readers and writers join her in what has become Substack’s premier salon for the discussion of global affairs.
If you’re looking at the New York Times today, you’ll see only that Erdoğan failed to win a majority. Because neither Erdoğan nor Kılıçdaroğlu reached the 50 percent threshold and won outright, there will be a runoff election in two weeks.
Erdoğan performed badly—so badly that at first, it was possible to think Kılıçdaroğlu was winning; no one had ever seen such low early numbers for Erdoğan before. He lost Istanbul. He lost Ankara. He lost the first round—for the first time in his career.
That there will be a runoff might sound encouraging. But it isn’t. Erdoğan’s alliance has a majority in the parliament, and barring divine intervention, Erdoğan will take the presidency in the next round, probably in a landslide.
The polls were wrong—all of them. Kılıçdaroğlu significantly underperformed expectation. The opposition strategy—about which so many (including me, stupidly) were so hopeful—just didn’t work.
So Erdoğan will be president again. He will probably be president for life
To understand why, you need to be familiar with two parties, the MHP and the HDP, and their relationship to each other.
The MHP is typically described as “nationalist” or “radical right,” but “xenophobic, fanatically nationalist neo-fascists” is closer. The contemporary MHP also has respectable politicians, if you think politicians who could reasonably be described as Turkish analogues of Marine Le Pen or Georgia Meloni are respectable. I’ve spoken to some in their ranks who are thoughtful and well-spoken, even if I disagree with them. I had a lunch once with an MHP parliamentarian who was a fan of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and imagined himself a politician in their mould. We liked each other. So they’re not all fascists.
You need to subscribe to The Cosmopolitan Globalist in order to read the full article. Claire Berlinski is a guest writer at Turkish Forum and editor in chief of The Cosmopolitan Globalist. (https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/notes-on-another-turkish-election)
Around the world, liberal democracy is in retreat. The West is divided, and Caesarism is flourishing. Why?
Turkish News Summary and news blackout
Claire Berlinski
I’m safely back from Mauritania, where I had no access to the news at all. It was just me, my family, and five Moors. My life was like this:
I was so much happier that way.
Next week I’ll tell you all about it, but for now, I want to reprint a letter I received from a correspondent who wishes to remain anonymous. The news from Idlib and Turkey, which is cataclysmic, is scarcely being covered in the US amid the Coronavirus panic and the American election. It should be, and since my correspondent does such a good job of it, I thought I’d pass it on.
He writes:
1. Both Turkey’s and Russia’s security councils have met. The Turkish security council did not issue a statement, though spokesmen have continued to refer to an attack on Turkish troops by Syrian rather forces rather than by anyone else and President Erdoğan has uttered the traditional revenge formula, “Their blood will not stay on the ground.” But there have been no clear details about what happened, where, or when.
2. The Russian Security Council met later and did issue a statement, in which it essentially blamed the Turks for the deaths that had taken place, saying that no Turkish soldiers had been killed in the agreed observation posts in Idlib. Those who had died did so because they were involved in or close to terrorist attacks on Syrian forces
3. 33 deaths of Turkish soldiers in Idlib have been officially acknowledged. Soldiers sending home messages have, from the moment the news broke, been claiming much higher figures, originally 86 (the figure circulating inside the Turkish civil service) and 150 (from soldiers on the front.)
There is no way of telling whether or not these figures are correct. Families have also revealed that they were getting farewell calls from their sons serving at the front over the last few days saying that they were being bombarded and would soon die.
4. Turkey has not blamed the Russians or declared hostilities against them. Its accusations are confined to the Syrian forces, against whom it says it is retaliating. Instead the AKP proposes to hold a secret session of the Grand National Assembly. This is traditionally done to protect information of impending military or security initiatives, but in this case the motive appears to be to conceal the facts of this catastrophe from Turkish public opinion. (Two years ago when two Turkish soldiers were burnt alive by ISIS, the government similarly successfully concealed news of the event by threatening in public to send anyone mentioning it to prison, even though a video of the murders was available on the Internet.) Metin Gurcan, the strategic studies commentator, has boldly issued a personal condemnation of the secret session. Elsewhere, the government has warned that messages on the social media are being followed and may lead to prosecution. (A specialist department of the police was recently created to do this.)
5. Yesterday evening around midnight its time, Turkey opened its borders to Syrian refugees(those already in the country and not those still in Idlib) and provided free transport by local municipalities for them to cross into the EU via Greece. Response from the EU to this seems so far to have been muted. There is absolutely no rational or moral explanation for a policy move of this kind. Greece is inevitably repelling the would-be immigrants with tear gas. Despite it, a number of Western commentators have called for international support for Turkey and its president against Syria and Russia.
6. Turkey has appealed to both the EU and NATO for assistance and has had expressions of sympathy. It is hard to see how NATO could possibly go to the assistance of an invading country who troops are involved in a conflict with the legitimate government of that country—though of course other NATO members have also long broken international law by stationing their troops there and assisting in attempts to partition it, opening the way for a steady succession of international problems, including of course the displacement of millions of people. Turkey’s motive for appealing to NATO may be largely cosmetic—to give it the opportunity to proclaim to its population that the EU and NATO are its opponents.
7. Turkey seems to be planning to resolve the issue with a summit meeting between Presidents Putin and Erdoğan. President Putin will presumably only agree to this when he is sure that there will be a full Turkish climbdown. Those looking for a historical parallel might recall the Battle of Sadowa/Königratz in 1866 when Bismarck fought and cowed Austria-Hungary into permanent acceptance of Prussian, later German, dominance.
8. The Turkish public is mostly well aware that a catastrophe has happened and that this is the result of policies by one or more specific individuals. This is not good news. It implies that as life returns to normal there will have to be another emergency crackdown on opposition activists and media—those that remain, and it will probably be harsher than that which followed the Gülen-led attempted coup of July 2015.
9. British and American news coverage will continue to focus on transgender rights, Harvey Weinstein, and Prince Andrew and other overwhelmingly important issues. Governments will continue to try and placate Ankara while keeping a safe distance.
More from me soon as I ease back into Western life. Mauritania was extraordinary, and I have a lot to say about it. But unfortunately, I came back to a gravely ill cat—the Smudge has suffered a massive stroke. In the coming days I’ll be nursing her, either back to health, which growingly seems unlikely, or toward the most peaceful end I can give her.
As anyone who has loved an animal knows, it is unspeakably sad. We must endure our going hence, even as our coming hither: Ripeness is all.
If a reader wishes to contribute to the veterinary bills, or other bills, I’d be very grateful. I hadn’t budgeted for them. This is the link, and thank you.
I will have fascinating tales from Mauritania to tell you soon.
Controversial Muslim preacher, feared Turkish intriguer—and “inspirer” of the largest charter school network in America
RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX
Gülen in his Pennsylvania compound
With the American economy in shambles, Europe imploding, and the Middle East in chaos, convincing Americans that they should pay attention to a Turkish preacher named Fethullah Gülen is an exceedingly hard sell. Many Americans have never heard of him, and if they have, he sounds like the least of their worries. According to his website, he is an “authoritative mainstream Turkish Muslim scholar, thinker, author, poet, opinion leader and educational activist who supports interfaith and intercultural dialogue, science, democracy and spirituality and opposes violence and turning religion into a political ideology.” The website adds that “by some estimates, several hundred educational organizations such as K–12 schools, universities, and language schools have been established around the world inspired by Fethullah Gülen.” The site notes, too, that Gülen was “the first Muslim scholar to publicly condemn the attacks of 9/11.” It also celebrates his modesty.
Yet there is a bit more to the story. Gülen is a powerful business figure in Turkey and—to put it mildly—a controversial one. He is also an increasingly influential businessman globally. There are somewhere between 3 million and 6 million Gülen followers—or, to use the term they prefer, people who are “inspired” by him. Sources vary widely in their estimates of the worth of the institutions “inspired” by Gülen, which exist in every populated continent, but those based on American court records have ranged from $20 billion to $50 billion. Most interesting, from the American point of view, is that Gülen lives in Pennsylvania, in the Poconos. He is, among other things, a major player in the world of American charter schools—though he claims to have no power over them; they’re just greatly inspired, he says.
Even if it were only for these reasons, you might want to know more about Gülen, especially because the few commentators who do write about him generally mischaracterize him, whether they call him a “radical Islamist” or a “liberal Muslim.” The truth is much more complicated—to the extent that anyone understands it.
To begin to understand Gülen, you must start with the history of the Nurcu movement. Said Nursî (1878–1960), a Sunni Muslim in the Sufi tradition, was one of the great charismatic religious personalities of the late Ottoman Caliphate and early Turkish Republic. His Risale-i Nur, disdained and sometimes banned by the Republic, nevertheless became the basis for the formation of “reading circles”—geographically dispersed communities the size of small towns that gathered to read, discuss, and internalize the text and to duplicate it when it was banned. Nurcus tend to say, roughly, that the Risale-i Nur is distilled from the Koran; non-Nurcus often find the claim inappropriate or arrogant.
These reading circles gradually spread through Anatolia. Hakan Yavuz, a Turkish political scientist at the University of Utah, calls the Nurcu movement “a resistance movement to the ongoing Kemalist modernization process.” But it is also “forward-looking,” Yavuz says, a “conceptual framework for a people undergoing the transformation from a confessional community (Gemeinschaft) to a secular national society (Gesellschaft). . . . Folk Islamic concepts and practices are redefined and revived to establish new solidarity networks and everyday-life strategies for coping with new conditions.” To call this movement “fundamentalist” or “radical” is to empty both terms of meaning. It is equally silly to dismiss it as theologically primitive. I confess that I have not read all 6,000 pages of theRisale-i Nur, but I have read enough to be convinced that Nursî is a fairly sophisticated thinker.
Gülen’s movement, or cemaat, arose from roughly a dozen neo-Nur reading circles. Gülen was born in 1941 in a village near Erzurum, the eastern frontier of what is now the Turkish Republic. This territory was bitterly contested by the Russian, Persian, and Ottoman empires and gave rise to interpretations of Islam strongly infused with Turkish nationalism: when nothing but the Turkish state stands between you and the Russians, you become a Turkish nationalist, fast. Likewise, contrary to a common misconception among Americans who view the Islamic world as monolithic, Gülenists do not consider Persians their friends.
Two notable points about Gülen’s philosophy. First, he strongly dissuades his followers from tebliğ, or open proselytism. He urges them instead to practice temsil—living an Islamic way of life at all times, setting a good example, and embodying their ideals in their way of life. From what I have seen in Turkey, the embodiment of these ideals involves good manners, hard work, and the funding of many charities. It also involves a highly segregated role for women. I would not want to live in the segregated world that they find acceptable here; neither, I suspect, would the Western sociologists who have enthusiastically described the Gülen movement as analogous, say, to contemporary Southern Baptists or German Calvinists.
Second, Gülen holds (publicly, at any rate) that Muslims and non-Muslims once lived in peace because the Ottoman Turks established an environment of tolerance. To restore this peaceful coexistence worldwide, he says, Turks should become world leaders in promoting tolerance among religions—and Turks following his teachings should become world leaders.
Gülen’s detractors, however, inevitably point to a speech of his that surfaced in a video in 1999:
You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centers. . . . Until the conditions are ripe, they [the followers] must continue like this. If they do something prematurely, the world will crush our heads, and Muslims will suffer everywhere, like in the tragedies in Algeria, like in 1982 [in] Syria, . . . like in the yearly disasters and tragedies in Egypt. . . . The time is not yet right. You must wait for the time when you are complete and conditions are ripe, until we can shoulder the entire world and carry it. . . . You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey . . . . Now, I have expressed my feelings and thoughts to you all—in confidence . . . trusting your loyalty and secrecy. I know that when you leave here, [just] as you discard your empty juice boxes, you must discard the thoughts and the feelings that I expressed here.
By this point, Gülen had decamped from Turkey to the United States for medical treatment. Nonetheless, in 2000, he was tried in absentia by a state security court for endeavoring to replace Turkey’s secular government with an Islamic one; the indictment alleged that his movement had attempted to infiltrate Turkey’s military schools. His followers say that the video was altered to incriminate him, but they have never produced the putatively innocuous original videotape. After years of legal wrangling, Gülen was acquitted in 2008.
Gülen’s cemaat is by far the strongest Nurcu group in Turkey, described by many as Turkey’s third power, alongside Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP, its initials in Turkish) and the military. The structure and organization of the cemaat are a subject of controversy. Members tend to be evasive not only about their relationship to Gülen but about the very existence of the cemaat; of late, some have urged Turks to use the wordcamia in its place. What’s the difference? Not much. Camia conveys looser ties; cemaat can mean “congregation,” whereas a camia is more like a circle. But the word cemaat has become so fraught with sinister overtones that rebranding was in order. Gülen himself calls his movement Hizmet, or service.
The movement’s supporters say that its structure is informal—that being “inspired” by Gülen is akin to being “inspired” by Mother Teresa. Critics, including many people who have left the movement, observe that its organizational structure is strict, hierarchical, and undemocratic. Gülen (known to his followers as Hocaefendi, or “master teacher”) is the sole leader, they say, and each community is led by abis, or elder brothers, who are privy to only a limited amount of information. Sociologist Berna Turam has argued that the abis make strong suggestions about, and perhaps dictate, whom members should marry. Even if prospective spouses are not within the cemaat, the cemaat should benefit from them; a spouse from a rich or powerful family would be an asset, for example. This sounds plausible: we often see this approach to marriage in societies with weak institutions and low social trust, and Turkey is certainly such a society.
The movement, according to researchers such as Yavuz, has three coordinated tiers: businessmen, journalists, and teachers. The first tier, the so-called Anatolian bourgeoisie, provides financial support: it funds private high schools, universities, colleges, dormitories, summer camps, and foundations around the world. The journalists of the second tier own one of the leading Turkish dailies, Zaman; its English-language counterpart,Today’s Zaman (which is often not a faithful translation); the Turkish television station STV; the Cihan news service; many magazines and academic journals; several lesser dailies and TV channels; and many Internet-only news outlets. Finally, teachers operate the schools.
An e-mail message released by WikiLeaks and written by Reva Bahalla, an employee of the private intelligence company Stratfor, details the first two tiers. The e-mail describes “hanging out with hardcore Gülenists” in Istanbul. It begins with a visit to the headquarters of Zaman:
The way they represent their agenda is that this is about democratization in Turkey, human rights, world peace, etc. The guy was actually quoting Western liberal philosophers trying to show how much in common they have with them in respect for these democratic values, and this is what’s essential for Turkey’s candidacy in the EU. The irony, they claim, is that people think because they’re Islamist, they’re fundamentalist and not modern, whereas the authoritarians (in their view) i.e. the military, are the ones who are seen in the West as modern. . . . (my note—what Emre and I noticed is that in all our meetings with Gülenists, they recited almost the same lines verbatim. . . .)
The next day, Emre and I visited a major Gülenist organization that puts together these massive conferences all over the world to promote their agenda, raise funds, recruits, etc. Their office is in a very expensive part of Istanbul. They’ve got the best facilities, this beautiful theater system. In short, they’ve got money. Now you have to ask yourself, where is the money coming from? . . . Their funding comes mainly from co-opting the Anatolian business class. . . .
After getting a very long tour of the entire building, top to bottom, they sat us down for a Gülen propaganda film in their theater. . . . The Gülen guy is so overcome by the speech shown in the video by Fethullah Gülen, that he starts crying. Meanwhile I’m trying really hard not to laugh.
Well, it’s funny unless you have to live here.
Wherever the movement establishes itself, it seems to follow a particular pattern. Sociologist Jonathan Lacey has studied its activities in Ireland, where the Gülen-inspired Turkish-Irish Educational and Cultural Society (TIECS) organizes one-week trips to Turkey for non-Turkish people:
I established that these trips are subsidized by businessmen, who are members of the Gülen Community. Members of TIECS claim that these trips are subsidized in order to promote intercultural dialogue. However, given the fact that the Gülen Community is actively engaged in trade as well as education in Central Asia, I proposed that these businessmen subsidize these trips, at least partly, to increase trade between Ireland and Turkey. Another possibility for these subsidies may lie in the hope of promoting a positive impression of Turkey in Europe and thereby securing entry into the European Union.
French researcher Bayram Balcı, who is of Turkish origin, describes something similar in the movement’s activities in Central Asia:
Businessmen from a particular city in Turkey, for example Bursa, will decide to concentrate their efforts on a particular Central Asian city, for example Tashkent. Nurcu investment will then become important in Tashkent, and a kind of twinning . . . between the two cities results. Nurcu group members—whom we can consider as missionaries—are sent by the movement with the aim of making contact with important companies, bureaucrats and personalities in order to appraise local needs. They then invite some of these important personalities to Turkey. . . . Nurcu organizations receive them and show them the private schools and foundations of thecemaat, without ever mentioning this word.
Whether one should admire the cemaat or be disturbed by it depends on the answer to this question: What is it after? And to arrive at that answer, we should explore two things about it that are known to be troubling. First, there is evidence that the cemaat is internally authoritarian, even cultlike. Ilhan Tanır, a Turkish journalist who was in the cemaat but who left it, has expressed particular concern about the blind obedience demanded of its members:
Confusing the real world with the cosmic one, the movement sees itself many times as self-righteous and blessed in every occasion, and surrounded with miracles. Consequently, when hearing any criticism against its wishes and work, it equates suspicious inquirers either with iniquity or having ulterior motives. “Itaat,” or obedience, therefore becomes the first and the most important characteristic of a “good” and “trusted” member. . . . Living in such an environment for so long, many of these people simply become afraid to face the outside or are too weak to live in a real world.
Moreover, Tanır holds, the cemaat believes that its cosmic mission “justifies any conduct to achieve its ends at any cost.”
In 2008, the Dutch government investigated the movement’s activities in the Netherlands. Ella Vogelaar, the country’s minister for housing, communities, and integration, warned that “in general terms, when an organization calls for turning away from society, this is at odds with the objectives of integration.” It was, she noted, incumbent upon the government to “keep sharp watch over people and organizations that systematically incite anti-integrative behavior, for this can also be a breeding ground for radicalization.” Testifying about one of the schools in the investigation, a former member of the movement called it a “sect with a groupthink outside of which these students cannot [reason]”:
After years living in the boarding school it is psychologically impossible to pull yourself away; you get guilt feelings. Furthermore, it forces the students to live, think and do as the Big Brothers [the abis] instruct them to. Furthermore, through psychological pressure, these students are told which choice of career is the best they can make for the sake of high ideals. . . . Another very bad aspect is that students no longer respect their parents and they do not listen if the parents do not live by the standards imposed by the group; they are psychologically distanced from their parents; here you have your little soldiers that march only to the orders of their abis. The abis are obliged to obey the provincial leaders, who in turn must obey the national leaders, who in turn obey Fethullah Gülen.
Following the investigation, the Dutch government, presumably concluding that the Gülen schools did indeed promote “anti-integrative behavior,” reduced their public funding.
The belief that the movement commands or inspires blind obedience is not confined to those who have left it—its spokesmen are proud of it. In 2010, American journalist Suzy Hansen, writing for The New Republic, visited the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, where Gülen lives. The president of the facility, Bekir Aksoy, explained to her that “our people do not complain. . . . They obey commands completely. . . . Let me put it this way. If a man with a Ph.D. and a career came to see Hocaefendi, and Hocaefendi told him it might be a good idea to build a village on the North Pole, that man with a Ph.D. would be back the next morning with a suitcase.”
The second troubling fact about the cemaat’s activities is that the Turkish media organizations associated with it are clearly pursuing an agenda at odds with the movement’s publicly stated ideals. The English version ofZaman is often significantly different from the Turkish one. Remarks about enemies of Islam, perfidious Armenians, and Mossad plots are edited out of the English version, as are other comments that sound incompatible with the message of intercultural tolerance. For example, Today’s Zamanlast year published Gülen’s criticism of the government for failing to solve long-standing issues over the rights of Kurds, but omitted his ambiguous prayer: “Knock their homes upside down, destroy their unity, reduce their homes to ashes, may their homes be filled with weeping and supplications, burn and cut off their roots, and bring their affairs to an end.” Gülen’s supporters will insist that he was referring only to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, which the United States quite properly considers a terrorist group. But many ethnically Kurdish citizens of Turkey heard this as a call for genocide and were terrified by it.
Or consider Gülen’s reasonable rebuttal, printed in Today’s Zaman, to the common charge that his followers have infiltrated the organs of the state: “To urge fellow citizens to seek employment at state institutions is not called infiltration. Both the people urged and these institutions belong to the same country. . . . It is a right for them to be employed in state posts.” Those ellipses indicate something from the Turkish-language Zaman that has been omitted from the translation. What has been omitted is “Kastedilen manadaki sızmayı belli bir dönemde bu milletten olmayanlar yaptılar,” meaning roughly that in the past, the state was infiltrated—by those who “weren’t part of this nation.” Those who know Turkey will immediately recognize the statement as part of a common understanding of history in which infiltration explains the state’s actions as far back as the nineteenth century. The clear intimation is that the state was once infiltrated by non-Muslims or people only pretending to be Muslim—among them Atatürk, of course. (Though expatriates in Turkey readToday’s Zaman for roughly the reasons that Kremlinologists once readPravda, I should note that it seems to be influential among foreign observers and is apparently beloved of Anne-Marie Slaughter, recently the State Department’s director of policy planning.)
But to understand the strongest case against the Gülen media empire, we must explore some recent Turkish history. In June 2007, police discovered a crate of grenades in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed that they belonged to a shadowy clique of conspirators called Ergenekon. The organization was supposedly an outgrowth of the so-called Deep State—a secret coalition of high-level figures in the military, the intelligence services, the judiciary, and organized crime, which surely existed at one point and doubtless still does. Ergenekon allegedly planned to stage a series of terrorist attacks throughout Turkey and use the ensuing chaos as the pretext for a military coup.
Since the day this news broke, thousands of Turks have been arrested by the AKP-led government, including military officers, academics, theologians, and journalists. In 2009, a new round of mass arrests began, targeting Kurds and leftists, as well as their attorneys. Journalists who witness these trials come away shocked, unable to believe the absurdity of the spectacle. I’ve watched a presiding judge, for example, ask a defendant why—if the evidence against him had been forged, as the defendant claimed—he had not caught the forger. Beyond the irrelevance of the question (that isn’t the job of the accused), there was the obvious fact that the defendant had been in a prison cell since his arrest and thus hardly in a position to do freelance police work.
It’s impossible not to conclude that something is rotten in the way the judicial process works in these cases, which until recently were under the control of the so-called Special Authority Courts. These were sold to the public as an advance upon Turkey’s loathed military courts, but as far as I can tell, they have represented no great improvement in the justice system. You don’t have to be a forensic specialist to see this; you only have to spend 15 minutes looking at the quality of the evidence upon which they rely. The most famous example involves the admission as evidence of coup plans that refer to entities that did not yet exist in the year that they were allegedly drafted; but anyone who wants other examples is spoiled for choice.
Yet the Gülenist media have cheered on these arrests and mass trials—representing them as the cleansing of the Deep State; describing them as a move against “terrorist networks”; calling those who question the cases’ legal standards darbeci, or coup-mongers; and failing to retract or correct misleading claims in their reporting. In other respects, by the way, journalists employed by the Gülen-“inspired” media are often better reporters than those employed by Turkey’s older media, so it’s not convincing to suggest that they’re just dumb and sloppy. They are careful and professional when they want to be. For these trials, they apparently don’t want to be.
Now to America. Gülen lives in the United States, and he has received praise and support from high-level figures in the American government. Bill Clinton and James Baker have delivered encomiums to his contributions to world peace, for instance, and President Obama has made an admiring visit to the Gülen-inspired Pinnacle School in Washington, D.C. Former CIA officer Graham Fuller—also former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council and the author of The Future of Political Islam—vouched for Gülen personally in his green-card application process, as did former CIA officer George Fidas and former ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz.
All this support fuels conspiracy theories in Turkey and feeds deep anti-American sentiment among those who fear Gülen. They don’t understand why these former spooks and diplomats have been helping him. Frankly, neither do I. Nor can I dismiss their fears as absurd Oriental delusions; on the face of it, it might make sense for the United States to back Gülen. He is pragmatically pro-American; he has been quoted as saying that he would do nothing to undermine America’s interests in the region. He is suspicious of Russians and Iranians, as are we. He is influential enough in Turkey that it’s at least plausible to imagine that America wants to placate him or use him. I understand why many Turks believe that Gülen is reposing himself in the Poconos because, for some inscrutable imperial purpose, we’re protecting him.
Unfortunately, I know enough about American foreign policy to be confident that we’re not that smart. Our government is often astonishingly incompetent, with branches habitually failing to communicate important information with one another and even senior officials uninterested in following the details of complex events in Turkey. I also know that Americans are on the whole very kind and decent and want very much to be friends with Muslims who say that they denounce terrorism. But they don’t understand that by befriending Gülen, they infuriate Muslims in Turkey who likewise denounce terrorism but who also loathe Gülen as a power-hungry opportunist.
Gülen has used his time in America to become the largest operator—or perhaps merely inspirer—of charter schools in the United States. Sharon Higgins, who founded the organization Parents Across America, believes that there are now 135 Gülen-inspired charter schools in the country, enrolling some 45,000 students. That would make the Gülen network larger than KIPP—the runner-up, with 109 schools. The schools, in 25 states, have anodyne names: Horizon Science Academy, Pioneer Charter School of Science, Beehive Science and Technology Academy. Thousands of Turkish nationals, almost all of them male, have come to America on H-1B visas specifically to teach in them. The schools focus on math and science, and their students often do well enough on standardized tests. The administrators say that they have no official ties to Gülen, and Gülen denies any connection to the schools. But federal forms required of nonprofits show that virtually all the schools have opened or operate with the aid of Gülen-inspired groups—local nonprofits that promote Turkish culture. The Ohio-based Horizon Science Academy of Springfield, for example, cosigned a five-year building lease with Chicago’s Niagara Foundation, which explicitly promotes Gülen’s philosophy of “tolerance, dialogue and peace.”
The FBI and the Departments of Labor and Education have been investigating the hiring practices of some of these schools, as the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer have reported—particularly the replacement of certified American teachers with uncertified Turkish ones who get higher salaries than the Americans did, using visas that are supposed to be reserved for highly skilled workers who fill needs unmet by the American workforce. The schools claim, according to an article written by Higgins in the Washington Post, that they are unable to find qualified teachers in America—which seems implausible, given that we’re in the depths of the worst economic downturn in postwar memory, and given that some of these new arrivals have come to teach English, which often they speak poorly, or English as a second language, which often they need themselves. They have also been hired as gym teachers, accountants, janitors, caterers, painters, construction workers, human-resources managers, public-relations specialists, and—of all things—lawyers.
Two of the schools, located in Texas, have been accused of sending school funds—which are supplied by the government, of course, since these are charter schools—to other Gülen-inspired organizations. Last year, the New York Times reported that the charters were funneling some $50 million in public funds to a network of Turkish construction companies, among them the Gülen-related Atlas Texas Construction and Trading. The schools had hired Atlas to do construction, the paper said, though other bidders claimed in lawsuits that they had submitted more economical bids. Meanwhile, Atlas may have played a part in protecting Gülen charter schools; Folwell Dunbar, an official at the Louisiana Department of Education, has accused Atlas’s vice president, Inci Akpinar, of offering him a $25,000 bribe to keep mum about troubling conditions at the Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans. Dunbar sent a memo to department colleagues, the Times-Picayune reported, noting that “Akpinar flattered him with ‘a number of compliments’ before getting to the point: ‘I have twenty-five thousand dollars to fix this problem: twenty thousand for you and five for me.’ ” Abramson is operated by the Pelican Foundation, which is linked to the Gülen-inspired Cosmos Foundation in Texas—which runs the two Texas schools.
Utah’s Beehive Science and Technology Academy, another Gülen-inspired charter, was $337,000 in debt, according to a financial probe by the Utah Schools Charter Board. The Deseret News tried to figure out where all this taxpayer money had gone. “In a time of teacher layoffs, Beehive has recruited a high percentage of teachers from overseas, mainly Turkey,” the newspaper reported. “Many of these teachers had little or no teaching experience before they came to the United States. Some of them are still not certified to teach in Utah. The school spent more than $53,000 on immigration fees for foreigners in five years. During the same time, administrators spent less than $100,000 on textbooks, according to state records.” Reports have also claimed that the school board was almost entirely Turkish.
A reporter for the leftist magazine In These Times noted in 2010 that the Chicago Math and Science Academy obscured its relationship to Gülen. And the school board was strikingly similar to Beehive’s: “When I went to the school’s board meeting on July 8, I was taken aback to see a board of directors comprised entirely of men. They all appeared of Turkish, Bosnian or Croatian descent. Although I have nothing against Turkish, Bosnian or Croatian men, it does seem that a school board serving students who are 58 percent Hispanic/Latino, 25 percent African American, 12 percent Asian and 5 percent white might be well served by some women board members and board members from ethnic backgrounds the school predominantly serves.”
Federal authorities are also investigating several of the movement’s schools for forcing employees to send part of their paychecks to Turkey, theInquirer reports. Also worrying is that some of these schools, after being granted the right to issue large, tax-free public bonds, are now defaulting on them. The New York Times recently reported that Gülen-inspired schools in Georgia had defaulted on $19 million in public bonds, having granted hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts to businesses associated with Gülen followers.
There is no evidence that Islamic proselytizing takes place at the American Gülen schools and much evidence that students and parents like them. Most seem to be decent educational establishments, by American standards; graduates perform reasonably well, and some perform outstandingly.
So what are the schools for? Among other things, they seem to be moneymakers for the cemaat. They’re loaded with private, state, and federal funding, and they have proved amazingly effective at soliciting private donations. The schools are also H-1B visa factories and perhaps the main avenue for building the Gülen community in the United States. In 2011, 292 of the 1,500 employees at the Gülen-inspired Harmony School of Innovation, a Texas charter school, were on H-1B visas, the school’s superintendent told the New York Times. The feds have investigated Concept Schools, which operate 16 Horizon Science Academies across Ohio, on the suspicion that they illegally used taxpayer money to pay immigration and legal fees for people they never even employed, an Ohio ABC affiliate discovered. The feds’ suspicion was confirmed by state auditors. Concept Schools repaid the fees for their Cleveland and Toledo schools shortly before the ABC story broke, but it’s unclear whether they have repaid—or can repay—the fees for their other schools.
Perhaps to deflect scrutiny from the schools, people “inspired” by Gülen are constantly inviting high-ranking leaders to dinners to speak and lavishing them with awards. And remember those trips to Turkey that the Turkish-Irish Educational and Cultural Society organizes? The same thing happens in the United States. Dozens of Texans, ranging from state lawmakers to congressional staff members to university professors, have taken trips to Turkey financed by Gülen’s foundations. The Raindrop Foundation, for instance, paid for State Senator Leticia Van de Putte’s travel to Istanbul, according to a recent campaign report. Last January, she cosponsored a state senate resolution commending Gülen for “his ongoing and inspirational contributions to promoting global peace and understanding.”
Steve Terrell, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, did a bit of digging and found that a remarkable number of local lawmakers had recently taken trips to Turkey courtesy of a private group, the Turquoise Council of Americans and Eurasians, that is tied to Gülen. In Idaho last year, a full tenth of state legislators went on the Turkey-trot tour, thanks to the Pacifica Institute, also inspired by Gülen. The Hawaii State Ethics Commission sent a memo to lawmakers reminding them to check with the commission before accepting the all-expenses-paid trip to Turkey to which they’d been invited by Pacifica. “The State Ethics Commission,” said the memo, “does not have sufficient understanding of Pacifica Institute, the purpose of the trip, or the state ‘benefit’ associated with the trip.”
It is no very cynical asperity to wonder if all these trips are connected to the staggering amount of public money going to Gülen-inspired charter schools. Indeed, America is the only country in the world where the Gülen movement has been able to establish schools funded to a great extent by the host country’s taxpayers.
But does the cemaat want something more than money? Its supporters call it a “faith-based civil-society movement.” Mehmet Kalyoncu, an advisor to the ambassador of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation to the United Nations, has observed correctly that the cemaat’s Turkish enemies call it a creature of the CIA or the Mossad, a secret servant of the pope, or a Trojan horse trying to Christianize Muslims or weaken them. To some Western critics, such as Michael Rubin, the cemaat is “a shadowy Islamist cult,” anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and trying to Islamize Americans. Gülen is a second Khomeini, Rubin has warned, who is trying to establish a new caliphate.
But none of that is quite right. According to researcher Aydin Ozipek, who attended a Gülen school, “the primary objective of the Gülen Movement is to increase its share of power.” That, it seems to me, is the most accurate description of all. The cemaat poses problems not because its members are pious Muslims (that’s probably the most admirable thing about them) but because it’s a power-hungry business that often behaves repulsively—like a mafia, in other words. Gülen does not run “madrassas” in America, as some have suggested; he runs charter schools. He does not “practicetaqiya”; he just dissimulates, like any ordinary politician.
I doubt that Gülen is a significant threat to American interests in the Middle East. For pragmatic reasons, the movement is friendly to any country where it can establish a business presence; if we stay friendly to business, it will stay friendly to us, however we define our interests. Thecemaat need not be a problem within America, either, so long as we deal with it with our eyes open and make sure that its members are obeying the law. But eyes open is the key. Here’s another excerpt from that infamous sermon that surfaced in 1999: “The philosophy of our service is that we open a house somewhere and, with the patience of a spider, we lay our web to wait for people to get caught in the web; and we teach those who do. We don’t lay the web to eat or consume them but to show them the way to their resurrection, to blow life into their dead bodies and souls, to give them a life.” Those are words that suggest that Gülen’s activities in the United States deserve careful scrutiny—scrutiny because his business is organized and he thinks ahead.
Overall, America’s assimilative power has a track record far more impressive than Gülen’s. Our posture toward the Gülen movement in America has been, if inadvertently and late in coming, the right one: indict those who need indicting for specific, established crimes—visa fraud and, I suspect, racketeering—and wait for the next generation to become Americans. Treat people inspired by Gülen to the rule of law—to the same laws that everyone else in America follows. If they don’t already see it, they will recognize in time that those laws are excellent and connected to the economic opportunities that they enjoy. In fact, they may even do America some good, insofar as they’re locked into battle with the teachers’ unions: if Gülen’s followers can break them, more power to them. Maybe one day, we’ll even get a great American cemaat novel out of their experience.
Our posture toward the movement as a foreign policy actor, however, to the extent that I can understand it, has been foolish. It is wrong to imagine that Gülen can be some kind of asset to us internationally or to accept or promote him as one. He has not been elected in Turkey—our NATO ally—or anywhere else. We have an interest in seeing Turkey become a full-fledged liberal democracy. That means supporting Gülen’s stated ideals—not him.
Claire Berlinski, a City Journal contributing editor, is an American journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
A power struggle is brewing in Turkey. It is a contest not among the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the country’s secularists, but between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the populist religious movement of expatriate cleric Fethullah Gulen. It is not about elections or democracy. Rather, it is a struggle for control of the Turkish state itself.
From his self-imposed exile in the Poconos, where he has lived since 1999, Gulen has explicitly declared that he wishes his followers to control the state to encourage a kind of a cargo-cult Westernization, one that may be described as bringing to Turkey what he views as the good part of the West – technology and global commerce – without the bad: liberal democracy’s inherent resistance to Islamic conservatism. Superficially, there is no huge difference between Gulen’s and Erdogan’s worldviews. Gulen presents himself – nowadays – as more liberal, reasonable and friendlier to the United States. But he has not always done so, and unlike Erdogan he enjoys the luxury of being unaccountable to the electorate.
The Gulen movement has spent the past three decades aggressively expanding its presence in the education sector, both in Turkey and abroad. It is one of the largest players, for example, in the American charter school market. The movement seeks to create a well-educated “Golden generation,” friendly to the movement and possessed of the technical skills to assume high positions in strategic sectors of the economy, government and armed forces.
The contemporary Gulen presents himself as an elderly, humble champion of interfaith dialogue, and perhaps this is now true. Age, after all, mellows many a man. But Gulen has never unequivocally reversed his early teachings, on which his senior cadres have been raised, including his early sermons, which are replete with bracing exhortations to Muslims to “become bombs and explode,” and “tear to pieces the heads of the infidels.”
Initially, the AKP and the Gulen movement formed an alliance of convenience aimed at dislodging the old, “Kemalist” establishment in Turkey. But like any alliance of convenience, it reached a natural conclusion. Today, the old guard is safely in prison or silenced for fear of arrest. As a result, what we are witnessing now is a fight among the new, ostensibly pious ruling elites about how to divide the spoils of power.
Erdogan’s wing of the AKP is mainly in charge of the military, and the Gulenists in control of the police and judiciary. But the state isn’t big enough for them to share. The split had been papered over for years, but broke into the open when Gulenist prosecutors attempted to arrest Hakan Fidan, Erdogan’s intelligence chief. It exploded during the Gezi protests this past summer, when the movement issued an 11-article communiqué to dispute “accusations and charges” that it claimed came from AKP quarters.
The most recent flashpoint was Erdogan’s decision to abolish the dershanes – something like private university crammer schools, and a major source for Gulen’s recruits. The movement correctly perceived this as an attempt altogether to eradicate their influence. While they’re fighting, of course, the actual business of governing has been crowded out.
Erdogan is unlikely to encounter serious obstacles in the three approaching elections: municipal in March 2014, presidential in August 2014, and general in 2015. His support in the polls remains high, and he has no serious challengers. Unable to throw his weight behind a serious political alternative, all Gulen can do is grumble and sabotage. This may make some difference at the margins, but will not result in Erdogan’s removal via democratic means. The crucial question is who will take over the ruling party after Erdogan – and whether the Gulen movement will remain influential.
For those still friendly to the idea of Western-style democracy in Turkey, there are two ways to look at this. In the optimistic view, any counterweight to the growing authoritarianism of Erdogan’s government is a positive development. If the Gulen movement is the last meaningful barrier to one-man rule, at least it’s a barrier. In the alternative view, a balance of power only serves a nation well if it is a legitimate one. No one has elected Gulen, he and his movement did not come to power transparently and there is no mechanism by which they may be peacefully and transparently removed.
The optimist and Turkophile in me focuses on the former. The pessimist and Turkophile in me sees the latter and despairs.
Claire Berlinski is senior fellow for Turkey at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington, D.C.
via Turkey’s Political Civil War – World Report (usnews.com).
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized?
Claire Berlinski
Istanbul-based writer, author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books, 2008).
~ Also by Claire Berlinski ~
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized? by Claire Berlinski
Some see it as a modern democracy with an Islamic tint, an improving, reforming country. But if you were in Istanbul during the last month and a half, you’d have seen something completely different: a violent, authoritarian, increasingly suppressive and brutal regime. Tales from the Dark Side, Turkish style.
I’ve always been a critic of armchair reporting. But when your armchair is four blocks away from Taksim Square, it has one of the best views of the uproar in Istanbul any diligent reporter could ask for. I’m now able to calculate with great precision the time between the beginning of the screaming, the sound of the shot, and the entry of the gas through my window. It’s two and twelve seconds respectively.
In the past month, Americans have seen violent images from Turkey on their television screens: massive clouds of tear gas, the sound of screams and sirens, lots of Turks looking mad as hell.
What’s it about? Another outburst of Muslim rage? Something about kids camping in a park? Isn’t Turkey supposed to be the model moderate Muslim miracle?
But understanding the explosion of violence pitting demonstrators against Turkey’s authoritarian and increasingly heavy-handed state—and why it surprised so many who should have known better—requires some work. Start by forgetting most of what you’ve been hearing for the past ten years about Turkey. Don’t try to compare it to any other country: not America, not Afghanistan, not Egypt, not Syria, not Iran, not Russia, and certainly not France in 1968—not that the latter would occur to you, but the French press seems crazy for the idea.
Here’s what you need to know, bare-bones: The supposedly secular Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk almost a century ago was an authoritarian state, although not a totalitarian one. And yes, Jeanne Kirkpatrick was right, there is a difference. I went behind the Iron Curtain when the Wall was still standing. The USSR was indeed—immediately, visibly, on first sight—an evil empire. The Turkish Republic wasn’t remotely like that; there has never been all-encompassing government enslavement of the citizenry here, nor is there now, and I pray there never will be. But since its emergence after World War I, Turkey has always had weak institutions—and a state that’s strong as an ox.
Over the decades, the authoritarianism has come in different flavors. Once they served it state-worship style, and from time-to-time military style; now they serve it piety style. But it’s still the same thing. They just changed the wrapping paper.
Photo: Burak Su / Flickr
Piety-style Turkey is better off economically, though not as much as you’ve been told. Still, even considering the past few weeks’ horrific events, even considering the preposterous show trials, the increasing displacement of state-worshipping authoritarians by piety-style authoritarians in Turkey’s institutions, the jailing of journalists, the censorship of the Internet, the almost unfathomable dishonesty of its government and its intellectuals, the cronyism, the corruption, the foreign policy misadventures as its government shows support for Hamas and flouts the Europeans and declares Zionism to be a form of fascism—despite all of that, it’s probably a better place to live, for most of its citizens, than it has been at many points in its recent so-called secular past.
And Turkey was never truly “secular,” at least not in the way Americans understand the term. True, after the founding of the Republic, Islamic courts were abolished and replaced with a secular legal apparatus, often modeled word-for-word on the Swiss, German, and Italian civil and penal codes. But a state-funded and state-controlled institution, the Diyanet, was one of the first organizations established by the Turkish Parliament after the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. It was founded “to execute works concerning the beliefs, worship, and ethics of Islam, enlighten the public about their religion, and administer the sacred worshipping places.” Those would be the ethics of the Hanafi Sunni school of Islam, not the Eleusinian Mystery cults—or any of the religions of the 20 percent of the Turkish population who aren’t Sunni Muslims. The point is that religion in Turkey has always been subservient to, and a tool for, the state. When the state decides it’s important, the Diyanet can tell the Imams—all the imams, if they want to stay out of jail—what to put in their sermons. None too secular, that. Neither is the increasingly visible Islamic discourse of today’s ruling elites, nor that of the civil servants who work for them.
Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East. It’s a democracy with free elections. It has a secular constitution. It’s a member of NATO. And every so often, it goes nuts and kills its own citizens.
So Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East: It’s a democracy, if only in the sense that it does hold regular, free elections, and it has a secular constitution. It’s in NATO, and it furnishes NATO’s second-largest army—and its leading army, if you use the criteria of “percentage of admirals and generals in jail.” It provides a crucial energy corridor to Europe. The Incirlik air base has a vital staging point for the US military, for the most part. It has made a reasonable contribution to the coalition forces in Afghanistan, and agreed to host a radar system designed by the United States as part of its NATO shield against a missile attack aimed at Europe.
And every so often, as sort of a national tradition, Turkey goes nuts and kills a few—or more than a few—of its own citizens. The Dersim rebellion in 1937 and 1938 was suppressed with such vigor that historians suspect tens of thousands of souls perished. The civil war with the terrorist PKK is said to have claimed 40,000 lives. At the height of the conflict, in the 1990s, thousands of civilians were systematically rounded up and—with no trial—jailed and tortured and disappeared.
And shall we mention not only the military coups, but the events that led up to them, such as the clashes in the 1970s between far-left and far-right paramilitaries, which created such chaos and anarchy—killing, on average, ten people a day and toward the end, 20 a day—that the public was relieved, yes relieved, when the military finally stepped in? They whitewash that effusion of relief right out of history here these days, but ask anyone old enough to remember it, just remember to ask them in private. They wanted that junta, and badly, until the junta began doing what juntas tend to do, with one very important exception: After finishing up the torturing and the hanging, they returned the government to the civilians.
So we should not for a moment imagine that the events of the past weeks have been some hideous aberration from the otherwise irenic and secular history of the Turkish Republic.
Yet, in the past decade, since the rise of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP party, the world has decided that Turkey is finally democratizing—and this precisely as the screws have in fact tightened around crucial pieces of what you would call an ordinary democratic civil discourse and judicial norms. Indeed, Erdoğan has so thoroughly undermined free civic expression and the rule of law that a great many Turks feel that their country has been ripped from their hands.
Military leaders are in jail. Journalists are in jail. Professors are in jail. Elected parliamentarians are in jail. This has been going on for years now, though rather ignored by many in the West. And when the government this spring decided to go medieval on a few tent-dwelling, yoga-practicing, tree-decorating youths trying to save an Istanbul park, many of us felt a kind of stomach-churning inevitability, accompanying the breaking of bones and the unbreathable air.
April 2: A rumor starts going around that people are trying to organize a protest to save Gezi Park. People here protest a lot, so I don’t pay much attention. On weekends you can often see five or six protests a day in Taksim Square. Usually no one notices them. The police watch them benignly, and the protests make no difference at all, especially since they’re always uniquely boring. The slogans are ritualized, it’s always “shoulder-to-shoulder against something” (be it fascists or whale-killers), and everyone goes home at the scheduled time and nothing ever changes.
But this rumor is a little different, because the organizers claim that 50,000 people have already signed up for it. That’s a lot of protesters. I mention this to a friend, en passant. He’s pretty shrewd about Turkey, being Turkish. He says, “If 50,000 people actually signed something and a sizable fraction shows up, I don’t see the AKP tolerating this. Even the anti-censorship march drew inane bile from the heavyweights of the AKP newspapers.”
“Or they’ll be ignored,” I say. “But I wish them well.”
“There’s a fairly good chance they’ll get hit and gassed,” he replies. I should note that “hit and gassed” happens so often here lately that we barely notice it anymore. We just check the #dailygasreport on Twitter to see what streets to avoid. It’s like traffic: one of the hassles of Istanbul you learn to deal with.
“Maybe,” I say, and then make one of my less prescient predictions. “Of one thing I’m sure—unless, say, 50 Buddhist nuns set themselves on fire, or an American tourist is bludgeoned by a glue-sniffer, no one outside of Turkey will be interested.”
It takes a few weeks for me to be proven quite wrong.
May 31: The police burst into Gezi Park at dawn with tear gas and water cannons. More than a hundred protesters are injured, including three journalists. By eight that evening, some 100,000 more return to the area to try to defend it. The police block the roads leading to Taksim Square with barriers and try to disperse the crowds. Within hours, the protests spread throughout Istanbul, and then to other cities.
So-called “terrorists” do yoga at Taksim. Photo: Mr Ush / Flickr
At three in the morning, a massive crowd begins marching across the Bosphorus Bridge from Asia to the European side. People join the protests from their houses, shouting and clapping, and banging pots and pans—a tradition inherited from the Ottoman era, when Janissaries warned of their imminent mutiny by banging on cauldrons—
And as all of this is happening—and broadcast around the world by foreign news services—Turkish television is showing anything but these scenes. CNN Türk aired a documentary about penguins.
June 1: Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators in more than 40 Turkish cities keep protesting. The protesters move to the office of Prime Minister Erdoğan in Beşiktaş, providing the police with an excuse for even harsher retaliation. Every living being in the district gets showered with tear gas—including, I’m told, the officials in the office, which at least was satisfying to imagine, if it’s true. Ankara and Izmir rise up in force.
Snippets of conversation:
“They’ve got to be running low on tear gas.”
“They saturation bombed this part of the city with gas, how much can they possibly have?”
“Be careful. My brother got gassed today, too.”
“This is just ridiculous. What the f*** are they thinking?”
“I hate this f***ing gas. Was a bit late to shut the windows and now I can’t breathe.”
“Ok, no way to get anywhere near Taksim from here. They’ve blocked Vali Konaği Avenue with a bus. I haven’t seen any gassing, but judging how hard it was for me to breathe and the way kids were taunting the cops to take off their masks and helmets, I imagine they’re gassing them regularly.”
“People were walking back teary-eyed and coughing on Cumhuriyet Avenue. Halaskargazi was crowded with people in surgical masks. Folks were mumbling obscenities, but I saw no tendency towards violence or anything like that. Oh, and they blocked the rear entrance of the governor’s residence with fire trucks.”
“Why the f*** are they provoking this, I wonder? Completely lost it?
“I get gassed at home and walk by the semi-dispersed crowds and breathe the gas. I can tell you, though, the people I saw were ordinary people. Just frustrated.”
June 3: A Tweet from journalist Orkun Ün: “I have just spoken with a police chief, these are his exact words: ‘The country is finished, may God help us all. We got direct orders from the prime minister to break up the protests.’”
Violence in Istanbul. Photo: Bulent Kilic / AFP / Flickr
June 4:Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç announces that 244 police and 60 protesters have been injured in clashes. The Turkish Doctor’s Union, on the other hand, puts the number of injured protesters at 4,177, including two deaths and multiple blindings. NGOs such as Human Rights Watch suggest the number of deaths and injuries may be much higher. Journalists debate among themselves how to report the number of casualties. We’ve seen what’s going on. We know whom to trust. We settle on “more than 4,000.”
Later that night, heavy protests break out in the eastern province of Tunceli. The police are forced to call for help from the military in Antakya, on the Syrian border, although they end up staying on the sidelines. In İzmir, police begin detaining people for suspicion of Tweeting “provocations” and “misinformation.” “Provocations,” apparently, include such Tweets as “Please don’t act in unrestrained ways and don’t assault the police.” The state says they picked them up for taking pictures of buildings they set on fire and gloating about having done it on Twitter. Probably both are true.
We’re all getting paranoid. We start writing emails to each other like this: “Let me just say, once again, how much I love our police and how much I appreciate their intelligence capabilities and diligence. And their unique manliness, their rugged good looks, and their unparalleled loyalty to God and country. Fine men, one and all, and I am honored to share my correspondence with them. I only hope my small contribution might contribute to the glory and power of Turkey, I mean Türkiye.” (Once, they decided to rebrand. They’d had it with the Thanksgiving jokes.)
June 5: I receive an unbearable letter from a local human rights group:
Last night (June 3, 2013) around 9 p.m. I was detained in Beşiktaş, at traffic lights on Barbaros Avenue. I was not involved in any action like swearing or throwing stones. They took me in bending my arm the moment they saw me. Some friends of mine saw on TV how I was taken into custody. Then hell began.
After crossing the lights in the direction of the seaside, while I was at the edge of the platform where the IETT bus stops are at the seaside, any policeman who was there and any riot police squad member (çevik kuvvet) who saw me started kicking and punching me. For about 100-150 meters, in other words, all the way to the Kadıköy ferry station, whoever was present there was kicking and punching. Insults and curses such as “Are you the ones to save this country, motherf***rs, sons of bitches,” never ended. I could not count how many people hit me before I reached the detention bus. Just as I was taken near the buses, a few policemen called from behind a bus, “Bring him here.” They took me behind the bus and started kicking and punching me there. I learned later that because of the cameras they took me behind the bus to beat me.
When I was inside the detention bus (İETT) the lights were out, and I heard a girl’s voice begging inside the bus: “I did not do anything, sir.” I could not even see who was hitting me as I was taken inside the bus and after I was in the bus. The only thing I was able to do in the dark was to cover my head. Curses and insults continued. I sat. Everyone who was passing near me was hitting me. I got up and went to a corner. They wanted me to take a seat again. I told them everyone who passed by was hitting me when I was seated. They again swore, slapped and punched me and made me sit. They were hitting the girl and throttling her. A civilian policeman whose name is Suleyman told the girl, “I will bend you over and f***, right now.” Response of the girl was heartbreaking. She could only say “Yes, sir,” with a low voice.
And next, we, the three people present at the bus, were forced to shout: “I love the Turkish police. I love my country.” They made us yell this again and again ordered us to make it “louder, louder.” The insults and beating did not come to an end.
The atmosphere seemed a bit calmer, as they brought another young person. The guy’s nose was broken. When I asked him why he didn’t protect his face, he told me, “Two people held me by force and a third person punched my nose three times.” From time to time there were others brought in….
Once we were at the police station, an army of lawyers was waiting for us. And the policemen now were talking to us on polite terms.
I want to thank all the lawyers, all our friends who called the lawyers and everybody who was worried about us. There is not a bit of an exaggeration in this piece. Everything that has been experienced is true and my only aim is for everybody to hear it firsthand.
Oh, by the way, they detained the lawyers too. A few days ago, I think. I ask a friend whether the account above could possibly be true. He laughs at my naiveté. Laughs hard.
“This is not our country,” wrote Turkish novelist Tezer Özlü, “this is the country of those who want to kill us.” Indeed, the past few weeks have been Tezer Özlü weeks. The police killed five of their fellow citizens—and probably more—and blinded nearly a dozen of them in an explosion of violence so convulsive it shocked the country. It should also be noted that a policeman died, too, chasing his fellow citizens. But these words don’t begin to encompass the cruelty meted out by government agents acting against its citizens.
Protests in Istanbul, June 1, 2013. Photo: Alan Hilditch / Flickr
I live by Taksim Square. It is not clear what set it ablaze one Tuesday evening, but certainly something did; police stormed a crowd of some 30,000 with massive clouds of tear gas and sound bombs, setting off a stampede. Extremists in the crowd began fighting back—throwing stones, setting off fireworks, starting fires to mitigate the effects of the gas, transforming what had just the day before been an irenic, quirky festival of a protest into a nightmare of nihilism and violence, the sound of the ezan in the background adding surrealism to the sacrilege and vice-versa. The police behaved like animals. I saw it. They terrorized and maimed and wounded and traumatized a bunch of goofy kids whose only crime was camping out in a park, as well as everyone in a mile-wide range of them. God only knows what they did in the parts of the city and country where the media wasn’t looking. I’m not even sure I want to know.
But keep this in mind: They did not shoot them with live bullets. This wasn’t a Syrian-style wholesale slaughter, and as I said, brutality and human rights abuses in Turkey were hardly unknown before the rise of the AKP.
What is an aberration, and utterly inexplicable to me, is this: Since the AKP came to power in 2002, the world somehow ceased to care, or to ask any deep questions, about whether Turkey’s “democratic deficit,” as it’s euphemistically known, has really healed, or is apt ever to heal given the AKP’s style of governance.
Turkish brutality is not new. What’s new is that since the AKP came to power in 2002, the world somehow has ceased to care about whether Turkey’s “democratic deficit” will every get any better.
What is that style of governance? To amass power—of every kind—and distribute the spoils to its supporters. The media? An impediment. Lock it up, buy it up, or terrify it into silence, with a special emphasis on imprisoning lots and lots of journalists. Critics? No use for them: Sue them, slander them in the media, imprison them, or chase them out of the country to evade prosecution (for crimes that in all likelihood have been committed in one form or another by nine-tenths of the Turkish elite).
The Paleolithic, but at least independent, judiciary? Its independence is now gone, and I cannot believe that the West was so stupid as to celebrate the vehicle of its execution as a democratic advance, rather than see it clear-eyed for what it was—and scream bloody murder.
In a move underscoring Erdoğan’s skill at amassing power, the independence of the judiciary disappeared in a 2010 constitutional referendum, one with 26 items bundled into a single package. Voters couldn’t select the items they wanted: It was thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Of the items, 24 were innocuous or salutary, one was dubious, and one was the poison pill. It restructured the size and membership of the Constitutional Court, raising its membership from 11 to 17, and took the power of the Supreme Court of Appeals and the Council of State to elect and appoint its members and assigned it to parliament and the president. This was in addition to Erdoğan’s pre-existing power to hand pick all of the MPs in his party (the legislative branch) and all of the ministers in his cabinet (the executive branch). So the majority of the judiciary, including the members of the Constitutional Court, are now elected by a parliament dominated by MPs entirely under Erdoğan’s control. There goes the independent judiciary.
What’s more, a 2007 constitutional referendum resulted in the direct election of the president, the president, a role that is often considered ceremonial but actually has the power to veto legislation and is therefore really quite crucial to the fate of the country, by the public. Before this, the president was elected by parliament, and viewed as an oppositional figure whose role was to limit the power of the prime minister through the veto. Now, however, his election is plugged into the same personality cult machine that runs everything else. To put it succinctly, in two referenda—which the world applauded like maniac penguins as great advances for Turkish democracy—the prime minister directly or indirectly took control of all three branches of the government. This is unprecedented in the history of Turkey’s post-World War I state apparatus.
The last leg of the balance-of-power stool was the military. So off to the clink went the top brass, who rotted behind bars for years before being convicted; they will wait years more for the European Court of Human Rights to review their appeal. Some have already died in jail, and more will surely die before the case makes it to the top of the ECHR’s overcrowded docket.
The Wish Tree, created by artists and protesters, was burned by government forces on June 15. Photo: resim77 / Flickr
And the Kurds? Well, the word a few weeks ago was peace, but the word last year was war, with the highest casualties—some 700 dead—in 15 years—and it seems, though it’s hard to say, that the word may be war again quite soon.
Now tell me: Islamist or not, can’t you see what the problem is here? A country already cursed by its authoritarian traditions managed to hand all of the power to one single man. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and this man now has absolute power.
To make matters worse, Erdoğan has been feted around the world, including by people who should surely know better, as the greatest democratic reformer since Benjamin Franklin, which did little to enhance his grasp on the Reality Principle.
So nobody should be surprised when we hear the sound of screams and sirens in Taksim Square, Turks looking mad as hell, and massive clouds of tear gas over Istanbul—not to mention Ankara, Izmir, Antakya, Adana, Eskişehir, Muğla, Mersin, Bursa, Balikesir, Kocaeli, Antalya, Rize, and God only knows where else, because the international media is focused on Istanbul chiefly and Ankara as a footnote, and the domestic media is muzzled. Really, the only surprise is that it took this long.
June 6: Delivering a speech from Tunisia, the prime minister defiantly vows to demolish the park and promptly crashes the stock market.
Here, people are going insane. There are rumors—sparked by an idiot comment posted on the CNN iReport webpage—that the cops are using Agent Orange. No one here has a clue that CNN iReport is not “official, trustworthy Western journalism,” or even what Agent Orange is. They just know it’s something really, really bad. The irony of this—that Agent Orange is a defoliant and that the very point of this protest (ostensibly, at least) is to manifest discontent with Istanbul’s near-absence of trees—is not lost on the few of us who speak English and have some familiarity with the Vietnam War.
We try to explain on Twitter that the gas is probably colored with something orange because the cops want to identify and arrest the people they can’t manage to catch right away. In retrospect, I suspect, this only somewhat reassured them.
June 7: Calm and peaceful, save for incidents in Cizre, near the Syrian border (tear gas, sound bombs, rubber bullets, stones, Molotov cocktails), and the Istanbul neighborhood of Gazi (unrelated to Gezi). A protester there was hit in the head by a gas canister the previous night and is still in critical condition. Clashes there continue throughout the night (barricades, tear gas, water cannon, slingshots).
Compared to days prior, though, my own neighborhood is quiet. The police have pulled out of Taksim. I go for a walk through Taksim and Gezi Park and can’t believe what I’m seeing: It looks like freedom. For the first time ever, maybe. I walk through Taksim all the time. I live right by it, and it’s always full of cops. Don’t get me wrong: They are there for a very good reason. The PKK and its affiliates have attacked Taksim four times since 1995—I was nearly one of their victims the last time they did it. Istanbul is a city of at least 12 million people, not all of them pleasant (though most of them are), and Turkey lives in the world’s roughest neighborhood. Obviously, yes, you do want a heavy police presence in the city’s most heavily trafficked square and its most obvious terrorist target.
But Taksim is a lot more fun without the cops, especially when lately they’ve been more of a threat than the PKK. The place has become a giant carnival almost overnight: Singing, dancing, improbable comity among groups that under normal circumstances would prefer to be killing each other—nationalists and communists, Turks and Kurds, Alevis and Sufis, all thrilled to be there, thrilled not to be choking on tear gas.
An overturned police van (the only sign that they were ever there) has been turned into a makeshift memorial to the wounded and killed, with handwritten messages promising them that they won’t be forgotten and it won’t be in vain. I hadn’t really cared about Gezi Park before, to be honest, but if it had stayed the way it was that night, I’d care.
Photo: Burak Su / Flickr
Again I’m baffled, just baffled, by the prime minister’s determination to destroy this place. What a tourist attraction this could be! “Joyful, harmless festival” versus “multiple subdural hematomas and packed casualty wards”—you’d think that would be a no brainer, right? It’s all so innocent that even the streetwalkers and the drunks I usually see on the streets around Taksim have, for some reason, decamped for seedier pastures. I keep thinking that if only Erdoğan would visit the place, he’d see there was nothing to fear.
But apparently that wasn’t his plan. Later that night, he returns from Tunisia. While publicly AKP officials announce that there will be no fanfare at the airport for fear of further aggravating the tension, half of Istanbul receives text messages from their local AKP branch instructing them to show up at the airport to show their support. Buses will be provided. Public transportation will be open late. Crowds of thousands greet him, chanting his name ecstatically. “I salute my brothers who are here in Istanbul,” he says, indefatigable even after all that traveling. And he continues: “In Istanbul’s brother cities, Sarajevo, Baku, Beirut, Skopje, Damascus, Gaza, Mecca, Medina. I salute Istanbul again and again with all my heart, every Istanbul neighborhood, every street, every district.”
The crowd, perhaps, didn’t catch that last part. “Ya Allah, Bismillah, Allahu Akbar,” they roar. “Let us go, we’ll crush Taksim.”
Wait, he tells them, you’ll have your chance at the ballot box.
June 13:The prime minister says, “This will all be over in 24 hours.” People old enough to remember the ’70s are getting worried. Yes, plastic bullets are bad. Real bullets are worse.
June 15: The police burst into Gezi Park. Hours before, parents were there with their kids, planting gardens. They clear out the media first, then go in with water cannons and flash-bangs and start tearing up the tents. They attack the medical tent, too. It’s rumored that one of the medics has a nervous breakdown because the wounded are being attacked. Panicked crowds run to the nearby Divan hotel. Tear gas and stun grenades are shot down neighboring roads. Police gas women with children in their arms.
At the Divan Hotel, the lobby is full of vomit—everyone is vomiting because the police are shooting gas directly into an enclosed space. Many are wounded. The police warn that they’ll arrest anyone who comes out. No one, but no one, has any clue why they’re doing this.
Thousands try to march to Taksim Square in solidarity. The police gas them all. They kick and assault a cameraman trying to film the Divan Hotel. Sound bombs and tear gas no longer seem to frighten the crowd as much as they did. I worry this will prompt the cops to move up to something that will. The police burn the “wishing tree” in Gezi Park where protesters had hung messages with their dreams, and cart everything else off in dump trucks.
Finally, the police allow ambulances into the Divan to take out the injured. But they keep gassing for miles in every direction. The US embassy is completely silent—not even a pro-forma call for “restraint on both sides.” The British consulate is not quite so silent. They Tweet, “@LeighTurnerFCO #istanbul 0045-tear-gas becoming eye-watering at #British Consulate-General c 1 km from Taksim Sq.”
Chief Negotiator and Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bağış announces that anyone in Taksim Square will be “treated as a terrorist.” In Turkey, this usually means “jailed for life or shot on sight.” His years of patient negotiations with the EU are undermined when police burst into and gas the Hilton Hotel, dousing Germany’s Green Party co-chair, Claudia Roth, with astringent chemicals that leave her skin so red it’s practically fluorescent. I saw the photos. Not even fury can account for a human face turning that color.
So-called “terrorists” camping in Gezi park. Photo: Ian Usher / Flickr
They fire tear gas into the hospital near my apartment. I had pneumonia once; they treated me there. I think about the effect this must be having on the lung patients who are there now. If this were a war, attacking a hospital would be a flagrant violation of Article 56 of the Geneva Conventions. Indeed, if this were a war, the record of the day would include notable violations of Islamic law, too. The first Caliph, Abu Bakr, was exceptionally clear on this point: “Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful.” And that’s only the most obvious law that comes to mind. They’ve also violated the Turkish constitution in ways too countless to mention, but that’s been going on for so many years that pointing it out seems as obvious as noting that objects unsupported fall toward the earth. The major networks in Turkey have returned to their regularly scheduled programming. On SkyTurk 360: a fascinating history of traditional tea and coffee cups.
A Tweet that sums up how many are feeling: “Let me take this opportunity to thank Erdoğan’s international cheerleaders for the monster they’ve co-created. Oh, & f*** you @FareedZakaria.”
June 16:Yeni Şafak, said to be the prime minister’s favorite newspaper, devotes its front page to the revelation of a Jewish, Armenian, and CNN sex-scandal plot against Turkey. In Ankara, police are preventing demonstrators from approaching Kizilay square, where slain protestor Ethem Sarısülük’s funeral is to be held. It’s Father’s Day, and people in neighborhoods miles from mine are doing their Sunday shopping in gas masks. The police won’t reveal where they’re detaining the people they arrested the night before.
The Prime Minister is furious at the media. “If there are those who really want to know about Turkey,” he declares, “they should come and try to understand the AKP. It’s the truth.” In other words: The nation is the party, the party is the nation.
Meanwhile, the Istanbul governor says that while he respects medical science, he urges medics not to treat protesters. (Hey, docs, too bad about that Hippocratic Oath.) U.S. Embassy silent as an Antarctic graveyard. The Turkish journalist Ilhan Tanır, who is in Washington, tells me that he spoke to a White House official late the night before. They have no updated comment on the situation.
In the afternoon, the prime minister holds a massive “Respect for the National Will” rally in Istanbul. The state media news agency covers it with extra-special Baghdad-Bob-Pravda-c.1956 sauce: “LIVE: Erdoğan says international media is alone with their lies.” They report, too, that an AKP official says the Taksim protests were planned by the “American Entrepreneur Institute.”
The AKP rally ground is packed so tightly that, according to a Bloomberg reporter on the scene, five women have been carted off for treatment after fainting. Erdoğan scolds the European Parliament: “How dare you adopt a decision about Turkey. Know your place.” He’s furious at the media: “If there are those who really want to know about Turkey, they should come and try to understand the AKP. It’s the truth.” I’m about to faint myself just watching this on television: Turkey is the Party and the Party is Turkey. They have merged. He claims that before he came to power, there was police abuse, but he stopped it. I wonder if I’ve misunderstood that, but my native-speaker friends confirm that I heard it just right. He promises to identify social media provocateurs “one by one.” He says that only three people have been hospitalized, one of whom was a police officer shot by the protesters. He says this while I have the medical reports from my local hospitals on my desk; all filled with accounts of blindings, brain damage, thoracic damage, testicular trauma, comas, and patients in intensive care.
Erdoğan is becoming more and more aggressive. The speech is going on forever. Police helicopters are hovering above me, everyone outside my apartment is screaming and whistling, and my neighborhood is yet again filling up with tear gas. Elif Batuman also lives in this neighborhood. She writes on Twitter that she sees billows of smoke rolling out of Siraselviler Avenue, “like Lord of the Rings.”
Taksim protest, June 2013. Photo: Burak Su / Flickr
There’s tear gas in the Dutch Consulate, now. A fairly trustworthy news source reports that shootings have been heard by the Istanbul Police Headquarters. The headquarters of the main opposition CHP party are apparently under attack, but no one injured.
The historian Jim Meyer, who specializes in the Turkic world, is in Istanbul this week. He writes:
These are not “clashes.” The police are attacking protesters. The protesters are building barricades, making noise, and occupying territory, then scattering in the face of water cannons and gas bombs. From everything I’ve seen, these are police riots.
A few loud sound bombs go off about a street away from me. At least I hope they’re just sound bombs, but by this point I’m so tired that for all I really care they could be H-bombs. All I want to do is sleep. A Christian cemetery in Şişli has somehow been damaged in all of this, details unclear.
Someone warns me to be careful because they’re targeting Jews and journalists, running through Asmalımescit with clubs in their hands and shouting “God is Greatest,” so I shouldn’t go out. I figure since they’re targeting half the country anyway, there’s no reason for me to feel especially threatened.
I don’t know what happened next. I fell asleep in my chair. I don’t know what’s happening now, because I haven’t checked the news. It’s quiet outside, from what I can see. But by the time you read this, more will be dead and more will be blind, I suspect.
According to legend, when the great historian Robert Conquest was asked if he wanted to rename the updated edition of The Great Terror, his history of the Stalinist purges, he replied, “How about, I Told You So, You F***ing Fools.”
And that’s what I’m saying now to every single lazy journalist and policy wonk, professional sycophant, diplomat and idiot pundit who’s never so much as visited this place, the duly-funded social scientists and craven Western politicians and everyone else who for years swallowed Erdoğan’s nonsense and helped to manufacture the fantasy that Turkey was getting more and more democratic by the day.
Taksim protest, June 1, 2013. Photo: Araz Zeynisoy / Flickr
Only months ago, not an hour went by without some dimwit churning out an article about the economic and the reformist wonders of the AKP and its newly-emerged Anatolian middle class, the magnificent result of the AKP’s mix of moderately-Islamist daddy-state, fiscal discipline and free-market economic policies. One of the best performers of its kind in the world, a model for every Arab who felt like springing, the blossoming of Turkey’s open society, proof that Islam and democracy can mix just fine. Now, I have no idea if Islam and democracy can mix just fine. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. But I can tell you one thing for sure: authoritarianism and democracy can’t mix just fine. And this was just obvious, blindingly obvious, years ago.
I have no idea what will come next, now that things that have been overwhelmingly apparent for the past decade are finally getting attention and coverage in English. But this I do know: There are real people here. They are not pawns to be moved about on a geopolitical chess board. They are not subjects for fashionable tales told by people climbing up the greasy pole of their careers in the West. They could use some honesty from the rest of the world, because they’re sure not going to get it from their government or their media and they know it. So if you had any part in creating this situation, whether by cheering the rise of this authoritarian government or promoting the fantasy of Turkey’s advanced democracy and this nonsense about it being a model Muslim nation, go look at those photos of the kids with no eyes. Then get down on your knees and ask God to forgive you—because those kids, they’re not going to.
Banner Photo: resim77 / Flickr
The Gezi Diaries: Can We Still Call Turkey Civilized? / Claire Berlinski
Special to The Globe and Mail Published Saturday, Jun. 29 2013, 6:00 AM EDT
Claire Berlinski
I live blocks from Taksim Square and Gezi Park in Istanbul. I never imagined that Gezi Park would bring what academics call Turkey’s “democratic deficits” to worldwide attention. But I never doubted that something would.
My proximity to Taksim ensures that even when I’d rather ignore my journalistic instincts and get an early night’s sleep, I have no choice but to follow the story wherever it leads – because it leads to my apartment. When police attack, the crowds run up my street trailed by cops and tear gas. Like everyone in my neighbourhood, I’m now able to tell exactly what lachrymatory agent they’re using.
The tear gas, however, is the symptom. The “democratic deficits” are the disease. The conventional wisdom is that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan does not understand the full meaning of “democracy,” believing that having won several elections, he is now a monarch. Partly correct. But the problems are deeper still, and even Mr. Erdogan’s megalomania is just a symptom of this disease.
Consider this: In what kind of democracy does the prime minister decide where to build a shopping mall, particularly when the courts have already halted the project? To grasp the explosion over Gezi Park, you need to understand the details of Turkey’s “democratic deficits.” The most economical way to explain them is how Cem Toker, the secretary of Turkey’s very-minority Liberal Democratic Party, put it to me: “Democracy doesn’t exist in any shape or form here, so there are no problems with democracy in Turkey – kinda like no car, no engine problems.” He is exaggerating only slightly. Yes, Turkey holds regular elections. But the rest of the institutions we associate with “democracy” are so weak that everyone living here knew this car was going to crash.
Aengus Collins, a thoughtful observer of Turkey, suggests a deeper way to consider this. He uses Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino’s markers of “high quality” democracy: rule of law, participation, competition, vertical accountability, horizontal accountability, freedom, equality and responsiveness. These phrases may sound academic, but to people who daily experience their absence, the path from these terms to tear gas is a straight line.
Behind these protests are bitter grievances. Among the most bitter is the dysfunctional Turkish legal system – in particular, the government’s use of it against opponents. Mr. Erdogan has introduced constitutional referendums enabling him to pack the courts with his supporters, and used the courts to shut down hostile media on technical grounds or through punitive taxation. The courts have imprisoned dissenters. Potentially dangerous challengers have fled the country to evade arrest.
As for “participation,” this too has been gravely undermined, particularly for the generation that grew up in the wake of the 1980 coup. In Turkey’s very recent past, forms of organization, assembly and protest that healthy participatory democracies require have not only been discouraged, but met with consequences so terrible that parents teach their children that they cannot win, so don’t even try. Anyone who thinks this has changed since Mr. Erdogan came to power is gravely mistaken: Consider the case (one among thousands) of students Ferhat Tüzer and Berna Yılmaz, arrested for holding up a banner that read, “We want free education and we will get it.” They were sentenced to 81/2 years.
“Competition” may be the most challenging problem of all. Turkey’s 10-per-cent election threshold ensures that a party with 9.9 per cent of the popular vote receives no representation in the National Assembly. The d’Hondt method, which favours large parties, is used to distribute the seats among the remainder. Finally, Turkey uses a closed-list system: Voters choose a party rather than an individual candidate. This keeps power in the hands of party elites; individual voters can’t choose – or hold to account – the person who represents them.
As for freedom, the imprisonment and harassment of journalists is so ubiquitous that they scarcely need the state to censor them any more; they do it themselves. When these protests began, Turkish stations broadcast anything but news about them: They showed documentaries about penguins.
“Vertical accountability” describes the way elected leaders are held accountable for decisions by voters; “horizontal accountability” describes the way they are held accountable by legal and constitutional authorities. Again, don’t look for either here. Without press freedom, voters have scant information by which to judge their elected officials. This has led to such deep distrust of journalists that as a friend put to me, “We don’t mind when they put them in jail. We’d mind if they locked up the streetwalkers, though. At least they perform a useful service.”
The penultimate refuge of horizontal accountability, flawed though it was, disappeared in a 2010 referendum that changed the composition of the nation’s highest courts, giving Mr. Erdogan the power to handpick loyal jurists. The very last limit on his power was the military. Its senior figures are now in prison, convicted on the basis of evidence that would have been thrown out of anything but a handpicked court. While no proper democracy is mediated by military coup, the electorate had become conditioned to the idea that in extremis, the military would protect them from their mistakes. This promoted the growth of an immature electorate unaccustomed to thinking rigorously about voting and its consequences.
It should now be clear why there’s no way to bring Turkey’s corruption under control. Politicians have no motivation to do so. On paper, Turkey’s Law on Political Parties requires political parties to maintain records of all income and expenditure, but it doesn’t require them to publish records. So no one has any idea where the money is coming from or going – although everyone knows it is coming from places it shouldn’t and going to people it oughtn’t.
Turkey was no democratic paradise before the rise of the Justice and Development Party (known as the AKP). But the AKP has cynically reduced the idea of democracy to the proposition that democracy is elections and nothing more. Unsurprisingly, many are unsatisfied, particularly because rising incomes have permitted them, for the first time, to consider problems less urgent than merely putting food on the table.
Unfortunately, it’s too late. So thoroughly has Mr. Erdogan consolidated his power that the most likely outcome of these protests will be yet another unwanted construction project – the building of new prisons. Waves of arrests are taking place now, even as the world assures itself that the protests are “dying down.” Yes, they are dying down, but in a more literal way than you might realize.
Claire Berlinski is a freelance writer who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters.
Doug Saunders A new Middle East can be seen through the teargas of Istanbul
JEFFREY SIMPSON Jeffrey Simpson: Relative prosperity, then revolution
PATRICK MARTIN Why Turkey’s protesters are angry: “No way to run a democracy”
