For Turkey It’s Deja Vu All Over Again
March 12, 2014 § 4 Comments
Yogi Berra’s famous dictum was the first thing that came to mind yesterday as I watched yet another round of peaceful protests overtake Turkish cities and be met with the predictable barrage of TOMA water cannons, tear gas, and massive police force. This round of protests is in many ways an extension of the Gezi protests last summer, as they were ignited by the death of Berkin Elvan, a fifteen year old boy who had been in a coma since being hit in the head with a teargas canister in June. Just as the government’s overreaction in June directly led to yesterday’s events, no doubt the effects of the police response yesterday and the continuing teargassing of mourners during today’s funeral will reverberate down the road, as more civilians were injured yesterday, including people struck with teargas canisters. So yet again Turkey’s cities are filled with protestors angry at the government, and the official government response is to cause chaos and destruction in urban centers and send the message that protest and dissent will not be tolerated in any form. This is becoming habitual rather unique, which does not augur well for the future.
The most remarkable part of all this is that the government has demonstrated that it has learned absolutely nothing from its experiences of the past year. Not only was yesterday’s response inappropriate, it was also ineffective and counterproductive. For some reason, Prime Minister Erdoğan – who, by the way, given his propensity to micromanage everything from local construction projects to whom television stations interview is no doubt directing the police response – believes that violence will succeed in getting everyone off the streets and creating compliantly meek citizens. Rather than indicating that he has heard Turks’ legitimate complaints and grievances and is working to address them, he deems it better to act as imperious as always. An apology from Erdoğan for Elvan’s death does not seem to be forthcoming, and there has not even been a simple statement of regret. Contrast this to Erdoğan’s public tears and repeated decrying of the Egyptian government for the deaths of Egyptian protestors, and you can understand why many Turks are fed up. Given that Elvan was killed after leaving his family’s home to buy bread and that Turks have been hanging bread outside their doors as a symbol of protest and mourning at his death, Claire Sadar’s bitingly sarcastic prediction that we are perhaps about to see the emergence of the bread lobby as Erdoğan’s newest bogeyman captures well how tone deaf Erdoğan’s past rhetorical broadsides have been. Successful leaders learn from their mistakes and move on, but there is no evidence that Erdoğan has even a sliver of this trait.
Turkey’s claims of enhanced democracy under the AKP are crumbling in other ways as well. The protests are overshadowing the news that former army chief of staff General Ilker Başbuğ and other military officers ensnared in the Ergenekon trials were released from prison over the past week, exploding forever the idea that the AKP’s greatest achievement has been subordinating the military to civilian control by punishing officers for numerous coup plots. Whether the military will be willing to align with Erdoğan in his fight with the Gülen movement after everything it has been through is an open question and my hunch is that the answer is no, but it’s clear that the prime minister is eager and open to partner with anyone in his latest battle. The Ergenekon prosecutions were largely shams, so releasing officers who were convicted under false pretenses is a good thing, but do not think for a second that this is being done in the service of democracy. Rather, it is being done to curry favor with one undemocratic actor in order to create a stronger coalition against another undemocratic actor. In the process, the AKP’s claim to have installed a consolidated democracy by defanging the military has gone up in smoke, as the government itself has now conceded that the trials themselves were marked by all manner of irregularities and is working to reverse the verdicts. In the process, Turkey’s justice system is turning more and more into one big kangaroo court.
The variable injecting massive uncertainty into everything this time around is the municipal elections scheduled for March 30. When the Gezi protests were violently suppressed, elections were still some ways off and there was room for the government to recover. Now, however, elections take place in less than three weeks, and will come on the heels of more injured protestors, more inflammatory government statements, the graft and corruption scandal, and they have also taken on an outsized importance in Erdoğan’s mind itself. If the AKP does not do as well as they have become accustomed to, or loses Ankara or Istanbul, it will severely damage what has been up until now an aura of invincibility surrounding Erdoğan and the AKP. Erdoğan himself has been saying for months that the municipal elections should be viewed as a proxy for the party’s national power, and given the allegations swirling around him and his family, the results matter more to him than perhaps even to the mayoralty candidates. With the stakes involved and more information coming out every day about the government’s illicit behavior and attempts to influence all sorts of decisions, I have grave doubts about whether these elections are going to be free and fair, and whether the AKP’s efforts to put its thumb on the scale are going to cross over into more egregious election violations.
Yet, there are some small rays of hope. President Abdullah Gül went farther this week in denouncing Erdoğan’s threats to ban Facebook and Youtube than he has in the face of similar comments in the past. Gül, Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek, and EU Affairs Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu all expressed condolences to the Elvan family yesterday, which is farther than any government official went during Gezi. So even if Erdoğan is too stubborn to ever change his ways, perhaps others in the AKP have learned something about how to interact with the people who have put them in office, even if it is nothing more than a small gesture such as offering sympathies to the family of a boy killed by the government for no reason while buying groceries. Let’s hope that Berkin Elvan eventually becomes an exception rather than a rule.
A Turkish Course Correction
January 28, 2013 § Leave a comment
There were a couple of extremely consequential stories out of Turkey toward the end of last week that I didn’t get a chance to write about with the Israeli elections going on, but I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity now to highlight them and comment. First was the Turkish cabinet shuffle, with the big move being the replacement of Interior Minister Idris Şahin with Muammer Güler. Şahin is about as hardline on the Kurdish issue as any Turkish government official – he referred in May to the civilians killed in December 2011’s Uludere air strike as “PKK extras” – and his sacking is important for two reasons. First, it signals that the Ocalan talks and Imralı process might actually be a real reorientation of the government’s policy and not just a ploy at running out of the clock or buying more time. Getting rid of the minister overseeing the terrorism fight who was absolutely despised by Kurdish politicians and ordinary Turkish Kurds and replacing him with someone who is likely to be a little more open to Kurdish sensitivities is an important step, and while there are concerns about Güler given his actions while governor of Istanbul, literally anyone will be an improvement over Şahin.
Furthermore, replacing Şahin with a new face in the Interior Ministry is important inasmuch as it signals a tacit admission on the government’s part that its strategy of pounding the PKK without making a real effort on the political front has been a mistake. The Imralı process also fits into this idea as well, and a new interior minister communicates a fresh start and that the old approach was not working. Prime Minister Erdoğan rarely if ever publicly admits that he was wrong, but this is as close to a public admission as you’ll see. The optics of this are important by themselves divorced from what ever actual policy emerges. By the same token, putting Ömer Çelik in the cabinet as Culture and Tourism Minister is important too as he is one of Erdoğan’s two or three closest advisers and has advocated a much more conciliatory approach than the government has adopted in the past. I expect him to be influential in the new Kurdish policy as well despite his portfolio, and his elevation to a cabinet position now is also a signal that the government has erred and that it needs to find a different formula if it wants to be successful.
The other noteworthy development last week was Erdoğan’s full about-face on the government’s assault on the military as embodied by the Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) prosecutions and widespread imprisonment of officers. After crowing for years about the defanging of the armed forces and how Turkey is now coup-proof, Erdoğan acknowledged over the weekend that things have gotten out of hand and said that the detention of generals is negatively impacting the fight against terrorism. As an example of just how dire the situation is, the Turkish navy now has no full admirals left after the resignation of Admiral Nusret Güner in protest over the fact that the officers under his command have mostly been arrested. There is literally nobody to fill the positions of Navy chief and fleet commander, since all that remain are vice-admirals, and there is never any way of knowing when those officers will be arrested either. While the situation is the worst in the navy, the other services are not in great shape either and have been decimated by arrests. Erdoğan now seems to realize just how out of control things have gotten, but the damage has already been done and there is no quick fix for the low army morale or the military’s readiness level. Like with the Kurdish issue, however, this is a very public admission that policy needs to change, and like the moves on the Kurdish front, this should be applauded.
While both of these developments were undoubtedly positive ones, there is some political maneuvering involved as well. As I wrote last week, the backtrack on the Kurdish policy has to be seen in context of Erdoğan’s desire to get his new constitution through the Grand National Assembly, and it seems even more clear now that he is going to turn to the BDP for support. The cabinet shuffle is all part of this longer view, and so the nakedly political angle to all of this should not be ignored. On the military issue, it’s difficult for me not to view it partially as a broadside against the Gülenists, who have lately turned on Erdoğan and the AKP. The military prosecutions have been driven by Gülenist prosecutors and judges, and when Erdoğan calls on the courts to either hand down verdicts or release the imprisoned officers, and even casts doubts on whether the accused were ever part of a conspiracy at all, you have to consider why he has suddenly decided that the Ergenekon and Balyoz investigations are a net negative rather than a net positive. There is little doubt in my mind that Erdoğan’s new position is the correct one as a matter of policy, since the government cannot be in the business of holding people on trumped up charges indefinitely – not to mention the side effect of making it far more difficult for the Turkish military to operate – but there is also an element of score settling here, with Erdoğan laying the groundwork for a possible public push against the Gülenists and the cemaat down the road. Whatever the case, it looks like from a policy perspective, 2013 is going to look a lot different than 2012 did in Turkey.
The Turkish Paradox
June 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
Anyone who follows Turkey knows that there has been a perpetual debate during the past few years over whether Turkey is becoming more democratic or less democratic. The answer you get depends on whom you ask, and Turkey experts point to different factors to bolster their respective cases. To my thinking though there is no absolutely right or absolutely wrong answer to the question, because the truth is that Turkey is becoming both simultaneously; it just depends on where you look. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Steven Cook and I tried to capture this dynamic and explain the proper way of viewing what is going on in Turkey by harkening back to Robert Dahl’s definition of democracy that divides it into two elements, participation and contestation. Our article can be found here, and I have excerpted part of it below. I look forward to people’s feedback and comments.
The Turkish Paradox
How the AKP Simultaneously Embraces and Abuses Democracy
Michael J. Koplow and Steven A. Cook
MICHAEL KOPLOW is a Ph.D. candidate in Government at Georgetown University and has a blog called Ottomans and Zionists. STEVEN A. COOK is Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Prime Minister Erdogan sitting in a fighter jet on June 27, 2012. (Umit Bektas / Courtesy Reuters)
The Halki seminary, founded in 1844 as a center of learning for the Orthodox Eastern Church, was for decades a symbol of religious toleration and minority rights in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. But in 1971, Ankara closed the seminary when the constitutional court, dominated by adherents of Kemalism, the secular ideology of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, ruled that only the army was allowed to run nonstate-supervised private colleges. So in March, when Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that the Halki seminary would be restored and reopened, it seemed that the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the country’s ruling faction since 2002, was furthering its reformist agenda of making Turkey a more open society by expanding personal, religious, and economic freedoms.
But while Ankara encourages openness with one hand, it clamps down on it with the other. In May, Erdogan announced that the government would end state subsidies for the arts, closing the spigot on $63 million in annual funding and, in effect, endangering the country’s more than 50 state theaters and artistic venues across the country. The AKP claimed that it did so in the name of private enterprise and was instituting a modern approach to government patronage of the arts; opponents argued that it was a deliberate attempt to silence artists, some of whom had become highly critical of AKP rule. Since the AKP era began, the world has watched closely to see if Turkey would embrace, or abuse, democracy. What is becoming clear is that Erdogan’s strategy is to do both, simultaneously.
The key to understanding democracy under the AKP lies with the meaning of democracy itself. The Yale political scientist Robert Dahl wrote that democracy is defined by the extent to which citizens can participate in civic life and whether they can contest the government’s power. Looking at each factor separately illustrates why Turkey is such a paradox.
To continue reading, please click over to the article at foreignaffairs.com
The Pros and Cons of the 1980 Coup Trial
April 5, 2012 § 2 Comments
In what is an amazing scene, General Kenan Evren, the instigator of the 1980 military coup and a former president of Turkey, is being prosecuted in a civilian criminal court for the atrocities and human rights violations that were carried out during the period of military rule. The entire Turkish political establishment is lining up against Evren, with over 500 co-plaintiffs including the CHP, MHP, and BDP, and the prosecution of Evren was paved by a referendum in 2010 that proposed to nullify the constitutional provisions granting Evren immunity for life.
Dealing with the perpetrators of the coup and the subsequent dark era in Turkish history is an important move for Turkey, as only by airing this type of dirty laundry out in the open can Turkey once and for all move past the era of military interventions in politics. The trial is one step on this path, and the scrapping of the 1982 constitution in favor of a new one will finally establish civilian control over the military as complete. That nearly every important Turkish politician, institution, and public figure is of one mind over the Evren trial, and that the military has so far remained quiet, is a great sign of how much Turkish democracy has matured. Prosecuting Evren does not read as a quest for vengeance so much as a desire to grapple with and face an unpleasant reminder of Turkey’s more authoritarian past, and it will make a future authoritarian takeover that much harder to accomplish, whether it emanates from the military or from Turkey’s civilian rulers.
Putting Evren on trial does not, however, come without consequences. I will leave the analysis of what nullifying these types of pacts does to the mindset of the SCAF in Egypt to those who are expert in both Egypt and Middle Eastern militaries and have written on the subject of pacts before (paging Steven Cook on all counts), but it will also affect internal politics in Turkey. Whatever one thinks of Evren and the validity of the 1982 constitution, the fact is that he only consented to returning power to civilians because of the immunity safeguard, and the uncomfortable truth is that the 1982 constitution is still the operative governing document of Turkey until it is replaced. Evren deserves to answer for his crimes, but this smells of mob justice rather than proper procedure. Furthermore, if Evren can be hauled in front of a court to answer for his crimes three decades later and despite his age (94) and bad health, it makes it that much more unlikely that should Turkey suffer an authoritarian relapse, the offenders will agree to leave absent some serious fighting and bloodshed. As unsavory as the golden parachute may be, it serves a distinct purpose, which is to pave the way for smooth transitions to democracy. Finally, while the ultimate objective here may be deterring the military from ever overthrowing the government again, it might have the opposite effect on the mindset of the officer corps. Erdoğan and the AKP have shown no hesitation at going after more contemporary military targets, such as Ilker Başbuğ, and this might be the straw that breaks the camel’s back so that the next time a military coup plot is uncovered, unlike Ergenekon and Sledgehammer it will be based on reality more than fiction.
The Başbuğ Trial and Government Overreach
March 29, 2012 § Leave a comment
Former Turkish Chief of Staff Ilker Başbuğ’s trial is underway, and he made headlines on Tuesday by walking out of the courtroom after denouncing the entire proceedings as a sham and as a black stain on Turkey’s reputation. It probably did not help matters that the court is actively trying to appeal to the darker side of public sentiment by asking its very first question about a picture of Başbuğ in Israel at the Western Wall, as if this is somehow ipso facto proof of his guilt. Başbuğ is determined not to go down quietly, and his lack of reticence may highlight the fact that the government went too far in charging him and mark the beginning of a shift in the power imbalance that has developed between the civilian government and the army. This piece in Hurriyet is a good rundown of the various absurdities contained in the Başbuğ indictment, from conflicting claims as to the general’s place within Ergenekon to lack of evidence to support the charge of violence to whether the allegations even support the ultimate indictment.
Up until this point, however, such inconveniences have not prevented Turkey’s generals from being convicted and imprisoned. Aside from Başbuğ, prosecutors yesterday asked from 15-20 years for 365 officers who are Sledgehammer suspects, and half of all of Turkey’s admirals and 10% of its active duty generals are already in prison on charges of conspiring to overthrow the AKP government. The government has eviscerated the power and authority of the military and jailed generals almost at will, and there is no question that Erdoğan and other top officials clearly have the upper hand over the military. This is not generally a bad thing, as complete vertical accountability – in which there is no unelected official or group at the top that has the final say in state affairs – is a requirement of true democracy, but the pendulum has shifted so far in the government’s direction that few take the slew of allegations against members from every branch of the Turkish armed forces as legitimate. Indeed, it is almost certain that the Sledgehammer documents were forged but up until this point the government has not faced any real consequences or pubic outcry for its actions against military officers that are clearly trumped up.
With Başbuğ, however, the government went after its biggest target to date and it may have committed a bad misstep. If Başbuğ continues to push back hard against the legitimacy of the charges against him and even the authority of the special court set up to try him (rather than the Supreme State Council), it might be a turning point in the government’s efforts to root out military plots, imagined or otherwise.
