After brutally quelling massive domestic protests against his increasingly despotic rule, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is now facing another serious problem: His unexpected ‘success’ in uniting Arabs and Jews against him!
The Turkish Prime Minister had already antagonized Israel and Syria with his hostile actions and statements. In recent days, he also managed to offend millions of Egyptians by rejecting their new government after Pres. Morsy was deposed by the military. Despite Erdogan’s professed objection to the overthrow of Egypt’s ‘democratically elected President,’ it is evident that he is far more concerned about saving his own neck, fearing a similar takeover by the historically coup-prone Turkish military.
Last week, Aleppo University stripped Erdogan of his honorary doctorate in international relations, awarded to him in 2009, when Syria and Turkey were enjoying a short-lived love fest. Khodr Orfaly, President of the University, accused Erdogan of instigating “plots against the Syrian people” and using “arbitrary” violence against protesters in Turkey.
After losing an Arab award, the Turkish Prime Minister may next be deprived of the “Profiles in Courage” prize given to him by the American Jewish Congress (AJC) in 2004 for “promoting peace between cultures.” In an article published last month in the Jewish “Commentary” magazine, Michael Rubin urged the AJC to revoke its award, describing Erdogan as “Hamas’s leading cheerleader, a promoter of terrorism, and a force for instability in the region. Rubin further asserted that “Erdogan already had a history of embracing rabid anti-Semitism and harboring conspiracy theories during his tenure as Istanbul’s mayor.”
Rubin also criticized Pres. Obama for “toasting Erdogan” and the 135 members of the Congressional Turkey Caucus for running “interference for Turkey’s worst excesses,” including “arbitrary arrests, police violence, launching tear gas into hotels and consulates, attacking the free press, launching anti-Semitic diatribes, and ordering the arrest of medical personnel.” Rubin questioned the motives of these House members and wondered whether they “enjoy the wining and dining Turkish authorities arrange on trips to Istanbul or Ankara as a reward for membership” in the Turkey Caucus. He urged the members of Congress to “suspend if not resign their membership.”
Rubin strongly advised the American Jewish Congress and other Jewish organizations to “base awards on lifetime achievement, not only wishful thinking. The risk of bestowing legitimacy on platforms that run contrary to the AJCongress’ mission is otherwise too great. The AJCongress’ award to Erdogan not only did not stop Erdogan’s anti-Semitism, but rather it for too long provided cover for it. Perhaps the organization can now mitigate the damage it has caused — and also deflate Erdogan’s buffoonery — by publicly revoking its award.”
Regrettably, Rubin is nine years too late in criticizing AJC’s honoring of Erdogan. Back in 2004, within days of the award ceremony, I wrote a column critical of AJC and its President Jack Rosen who had absurdly announced that his organization was honoring Erdogan as leader of “a model Moslem country.”
Now that the whole world has seen Erdogan’s true colors under the façade of leading “a model Moslem country,” many others need to reconsider the awards they had lavishly heaped on this undeserving leader.
For example, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) should revoke its prestigious “Courage to Care Award” presented to Erdogan in 2005. On that ‘happy’ occasion, the Prime Minister pointed out to Abraham Foxman, ADL’s National Director, Turkey’s “close relationship with Israel,” and pledged “zero tolerance” for “anti-Semitic diatribes.”
Here are some other honors given to Erdogan that should be rescinded:
State Medals:
— Russian state medal from Pres. Vladimir Putin (June 1, 2006)
— Crystal Hermes Award from German Chancellor Angela Merkel (April 15, 2007)
— Nishan-e-Pakistan, the highest civilian award of Pakistan (Oct. 26, 2009)
— King Faisal International Prize for “Service to Islam” (Jan. 12, 2010)
— Georgia’s Order of Golden Fleece (May 17, 2010)
— Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi’s International Prize for Human Rights (Nov. 29, 2010)
— Kuwait’s “Outstanding Personality in the Islamic World Award” (Jan. 11, 2011)
Honorary Doctorates:
— St. John’s University, New York (Jan. 26, 2004)
— European University of Madrid (May 18, 2010)
— Moscow State University (March 16, 2011)
— Shanghai International Studies University (Apr. 11, 2012)
— University of Algiers (July 5, 2013)
Honorary Citizenship:
— South Korea (February 2004)
— Iran (February 2009)
— Kosovo (November 2010)
All those who have honored Erdogan have simply dishonored themselves. The sooner they revoke their accolades, the sooner they will redeem themselves from their disgraceful acts.
Ever since independence in 1991, Armenia’s leaders have been reluctant to make any concrete demands from Turkey beyond recognition of the Armenian Genocide.
Only in recent years, Armenian officials have begun to speak about “the elimination of the consequences of the genocide,” without specifying the ‘consequences’ and the means for their ‘elimination.’
Earlier this month, however, a major shift was announced in Armenia’s foreign policy vis-à-vis Turkey, when Aghvan Hovsepyan, the Prosecutor General of Armenia, called for the return of historic Armenian territories at an international conference of Armenian lawyers in Yerevan. This is the first time that a high-ranking Armenian government official has made such a public demand from Turkey.
In a lengthy and comprehensive speech, Hovsepyan stated that the recognition of the Armenian Genocide by various countries is simply a moral and emotional issue. Calling for a switch to “the legal field,” the Prosecutor General indicated that “to eliminate the consequences of the Armenian Genocide” Turkey must “pay compensation to heirs of the Armenian Genocide, return to the Armenian Church the miraculously still standing Armenian churches and properties in Turkey, and give back the ‘lost territories’ to the Republic of Armenia.”
Prosecutor General Hovsepyan insisted that unless Armenians adopt this bold approach, they will not accomplish any concrete results in the next one hundred years, just as they did not in the last one hundred years. He proposed a thorough legal review of all international agreements regulating Armenia-Turkey relations, from the Berlin Treaty of 1878 to the signed but not ratified protocols of 2009. He also declared that the region of Nakhichevan is “an inseparable part of Armenia, albeit occupied by Azerbaijan.” Hovsepyan urged the assembled lawyers from around the world to prepare the legal case for territorial demands from Azerbaijan and Turkey and present it to the Armenian government for eventual submission to the International Court of Justice (World Court).
Statements made by a prosecutor general usually do not carry much weight in international affairs, if it were not for the fact that several other high-ranking officials, including Pres. Serzh Sargsyan, President of the Constitutional Court Gagik Haroutyunyan, Minister of Diaspora Hranush Hakobyan, Armenia’s Minister of Justice Hrair Tovmasyan, and Minister of Justice of Artsakh (Karabagh) Ararat Tanielyan, also made remarks on restitutive justice at the lawyers’ conference. It was clear that the Prosecutor General was the designated spokesman of the Armenian government to articulate its new tougher line toward Turkey in advance of the Genocide Centennial.
Pres. Sargsyan, using more circumspect language than the Prosecutor General, told the lawyers’ conclave: “The international recognition and condemnation of the Armenian Genocide, and elimination of its consequences will always remain a salient issue. As long as the Armenian State is in existence, all efforts to deny and send into oblivion this historical reality will be doomed. This greatest crime against humanity must be recognized and condemned once and for all, and first of all, by Turkey itself.”
In keeping with the government’s new policy orientation, Constitutional Court President Gagik Haroutyunyan announced that a special committee will be formed to prepare the legal documentation necessary for the pursuit of Armenian Genocide claims.
At the conclusion of the conference, the participants issued a joint statement asserting that the priority for Armenian lawyers is not proving the self-evident facts of the Genocide, but preparing a comprehensive legal document “to remedy the consequences of the Armenian Genocide.”
This is a welcome development in terms of arriving at a consensus between the Armenian government and the Diaspora on the objectives to be pursued for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.
However, in order to move beyond mere emotionally inspiring statements, the Armenian leaders must take two immediate steps:
1) Withdraw the Armenian government’s signature from the counter-productive Armenia-Turkey Protocols. On the eve of the Genocide Centennial, it would be inconceivable to move forward with fruitless efforts to improve relations with Turkey, while preparing to file a lawsuit for restitution.
2) Form a team of international law experts to begin structuring the legal case against Turkey in the World Court and/or the European Court of Human Rights.
While skeptics may not take seriously the recent policy pronouncements of the Armenian authorities, the Turkish Foreign Ministry has no such doubts. Last week, Ankara denounced the Armenian territorial demands, announcing angrily that “nobody can dare to claim territory from Turkey!”
They are singing that old sweet song in Turkey again, the big, black lie song. Play it again, Tayyip. Except no one listens to you anymore. You, the nation’s prime prevaricator, cannot fool any of the people any more of the time with your nonsensical flights of fancy. The last one did you in, the vintage Jewish-conspiracy alibi last played by your fellow fascist-moustache up north in Turkish Diaspora-land. You have nothing left. Your thugs have taken over. None of us can escape our past. And you cannot escape your future.
Now your primary objective seems to be maiming, and, if appropriate, killing the nation’s youth. It is no secret. We see the cops whose inhuman behavior seems to be from another planet, perhaps Pennsylvania. We see the street gangs that dress like you. These are your thug-people, presumably doing their bloody work in the name of your bizarre hallucination of what Allah would like. Hitler had his Sturmabteilung, the SA Brownshirts, who also specialized in street violence. And they didn’t like Jews either. You and yours are definitely of their ilk.
You call it self-defense—against terrorists, or against foreign powers, or against alcoholics, or against Europe, or against doctors, or against the European Union, or against the Divan Hotel or against, why not?, the Jewish Diaspora. But your nose is much too long now, growing and getting bloodier by the day. It is all so unsightly. Your idiot puppets like the so-called media, and outright jerks Mutlu, Guler, and Atalay and assorted other boobs you’ve scraped up from obscurity still chirp in your choir. You might be so deluded to call it loyalty. But they are nitwits—you know it, we know it, the world knows it. And that’s what nitwits do, chirp nonsense, your nonsense. This is some poor excuse of a government.
Lies, beatings, gassings, shootings, stabbings, slashings, ooof, it’s disgusting and it’s enough! Isn’t it enough? Yet you and your goons persist. For hoodlums like your thugs, even funeral processions are targets. Surely you are joking about being a prime minister. Crime minister maybe, but leading a nation’s people, never. In the great tradition of tragic figures, you will end alone. And you will become comic. That is inevitable. It’s already happening. America is laughing at you on evening TV. Don’t worry, your reaction is normal. Bullies hate humor. Laughs threaten them. So it’s quite alright that you might feel oddly out of sorts. When someone laughs at a bully, the game is over. Turkey is alone too, at least your Turkey. Thanks to you and yours Turkey is a rogue state. Inhuman, conscienceless police violence. A craven army that allows the government to destroy it every time it beats a kid in the street. Rampaging violence on the order of Pinochet. Mayhem in the streets on a Hitlerian scale. Mass arrests to intimidate. It’s all part of the endgame. The increasing chaos only hastens your end. History says so. Your government is drowning in blood while grasping at straws.
And it’s all coming home to roost on your well-protected roof top. The world has seen the pictures of the machine gunners dressed in black that protect you. You will need ten million more of them. The end is nearing. You will begin to hear helicopters in the night. This is how you will leave. Under cover of darkness. And no one will care. You will vanish like the night.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Cem Ryan
12 July 2013
The Fall of Saigon, 29 April 1975.
Evacuation of CIA station personnel from roof of US embassy.
An International Online Information and Analysis Center , mete62@inbox.ru
(Baku- Tehran-Baku)
The election of Hasan Rowhani as the new president of Iran is part of a much larger process: an effort by the political elite to recapture authority in the population by launching a top-down political transformation lest outside forces provoke one and create a situation which Tehran might find difficult to control.
That transformation, one not often remarked upon by outsiders, reflects the fact that Iranian nationalism is today a more important force than is Islam and the country’s imperial ambitions are more important than Muslim brotherhood, however defined. Those close to the Iranian political elite understand that, and they recognize as well that slogans against Zionism and the United States are no longer enough to satisfy the increasingly poor population of what should be one of the wealthiest countries on earth.
The policies of incumbent Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which have simultaneously led to international sanctions and massive corruption, have left Iranians angry, because they are bearing the burdens of his policies without gaining any of the supposedly positive achievements he liked to point to. Consequently, they voted for Rowhani, but despite what many observers have said, they did so with the full approval of many around the top leaders who recognize that Iran cannot and must not continue as it has.
One area where change is now likely is the relationship between the religious authorities and the state that was set up by Ayatollah Khomeini more than 30 years ago and has remained largely unchanged. Iranians can be dissatisfied with the religious authorities, but all those with whom I have spoken willingly reassert their love for their government. The national policy of the Iranian state thus rests on an imperial ideology as a necessary response to the ethno-psychology of the population. And that state is prepared to make a correction on religion-state relations by taking that factor into account.
Iranians will not support any actions that they believe harm the interests of the state and thus oppose any moves from the outside to oppose it. That is something the West does not understand, but there is something else the West has failed to notice: the authorities in Tehran have developed political strategies to make mid-course corrections and even fundamental reforms. And right now, as the election shows, they are in the middle of something that we are justified in calling a top-down transformation, a change in the key arrangements of the state without violence.
The first step in this direction was paradoxically made by Ahmadinejad who deprived the Muslim leaders of their immunity. The second was the victory of the United Front of Conservatives in the March 2012 elections, which led Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei to reappoint a number of reformers from the administration of former president Ali Rafsanjani. And the third step in this process was the explicit call by Hasan Rowhani for political and economic reform and direct contacts with the United States, two issues that had earlier been taboo.
Rowhani’s election and in the first round at that shows that Iranians are ready for reform, and the support he has received from Ayatollah Khamenei shows that the reformists are winning ever more positions in Tehran and Qum and that the governing structure of Iran that Khomeini put in place after the 1979 revolution is going to change, albeit slowly and carefully lest they trigger instability. As these changes are put in place, the Muslim leadership and the secular politicians will work in parallel, dividing the social-political and economic spheres. Polls of Iranians carried out in Azerbaijan, Turkey and Iran show that a majority of them want to live in a secular society, but not to break altogether with their Muslim roots.
Anyone visiting Tehran can see evidence of that: The majority of women there wear not the chadra, but scarves and long dresses, but not those reaching the ground. In some places, it is even possible to observe women who are not covering their heads, something that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Such examples could be multiplied, and they suggest that Iran, all the rhetoric notwithstanding, is opening up to secular culture and lifestyle.
Over the course of the last 30 years, a new generation of religious scholars in contemporary European dress has appeared in Iran. Its members speak foreign languages, are not trapped by Muslim dogma, are open to Western scholarship, and are quite tolerant. They and the new generation of Iranians, religious and non-religious alike, are going to lead Iran into a new stage of its history. In sum, Iranians are effecting domestic transformation lest someone from the outside attempt to start that process.
Some months ago I wrote a column titled “Obama is Exploiting Turkish Leaders’ Craving for Flattery,” explaining that the U.S. President is able to persuade Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to do his bidding by taking advantage of his weakness for lavish praise!
Those aware of Erdogan’s authoritarian streak — on full display during the recent brutal attacks on protesters in Istanbul and other Turkish cities — have been deeply troubled by U.S. officials’ repeated mischaracterization of the Prime Minister’s dictatorial regime as ‘a role model for the Islamic world.’
The insincerity of such assessments was exposed when WikiLeaks made public thousands of confidential diplomatic cables from the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, indicating that American officials’ real opinion about Erdogan is the exact opposite of what they have been stating in public.
The Embassy dispatches, published by the German magazine Der Spiegel, described the Turkish Prime Minister “as a power-hungry Islamist surrounded by corrupt and incompetent ministers.” In a May 2005 cable, the U.S. Embassy surmised that Erdogan never had a realistic view of the world and believes he was chosen by God to lead Turkey. A knowledgeable source told American officials that “Tayyip believes in God … but does not trust him.”
U.S. diplomats report that the Prime Minister gets almost all his information from Islamist-leaning newspapers, ignoring the input of his own ministers. The Turkish military and intelligence services no longer share with him some of their reports. He trusts no one completely, surrounding himself with “an iron ring of sycophantic (but contemptuous) advisors.” Despite Erdogan’s macho behavior, he is reportedly terrified of losing his grip on power.
Although the Turkish leader declared war on corruption when he first assumed office, informants told U.S. Embassy officials that corruption exists at all levels, even within the Erdogan family. A senior government advisor confidentially told a journalist that the Prime Minister enriched himself from the privatization of a state oil refinery. An Energy Ministry official alleged that Erdogan asked Iranians to sign a gas pipeline deal with a Turkish company owned by an old schoolmate. Furthermore, two American sources claimed that the Prime Minister had eight Swiss bank accounts. Erdogan has denied all such allegations, insisting that his wealth is mostly derived from gifts received at his son’s wedding, and acknowledging that an anonymous Turkish businessman has been paying the expenses of his four children to study in the United States. Such explanations are viewed by the American Embassy as “lame.”
The Embassy’s cables contain many other startling accusations against Erdogan. Informants have told U.S. officials that when his political party’s candidate lost the Trabzon mayoral race, the Prime Minister allegedly funneled millions of dollars from a secret government account to his close friend Faruk Nafiz Ozak whom he had named as head of the local Trabzonspor football club. The money was for hiring top players so that the soccer team’s victories would overshadow the accomplishments of the elected mayor.
According to a cable sent by former U.S. Ambassador Eric Edelman, Erdogan’s appointees lacked “technocratic depth.” While some “appear to be capable of learning on the job, others are incompetent or seem to be pursuing private … interests.” High-ranking Turkish officials have informed the American Embassy in Ankara that they are appalled by the Prime Minister’s staff. Erdogan reportedly appointed as his undersecretary a man exhibiting “incompetence, prejudices and ignorance.” The Women’s Minister Nimet Cubukcu, an advocate of criminalizing adultery, obtained her position because she happened to be a friend of the Prime Minister’s wife. Another minister is accused of “nepotism, links to heroin smuggling, and a predilection for underage girls.”
Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, highly-praised by U.S. officials in public, also comes under private scrutiny and criticism. According to confidential American Embassy cables, Davutoglu “understands little about politics outside of Ankara.” In fact, U.S. diplomats are alarmed “by his imperialistic tone … and his neo-Ottoman vision.” In a January 2010 dispatch, the American Ambassador reported that Turkey has “Rolls Royce ambitions but Rover resources.” Former Defense Minister Mehmet Gonul was also critical of the Foreign Minister, warning American officials about his “Islamist influence on Erdogan,” and calling him “exceptionally dangerous.”
Having spoiled Erdogan through lavish public praise, despite privately acknowledging his character flaws, U.S. officials must now assume full responsibility for the Prime Minister’s reckless behavior at home and abroad!
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
