Erdoğan’s ‘New’ Turkey

Attempted Coup d’état and the Acceleration of Political Crisis

Nikos Christofis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000734225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique du Moyen-Orient

Demonstrating how Turkey's politics have developed, this book focuses on the causes and consequences of the failed coup d'état of 15 July 2016. The momentous event and its aftermath challenges us to ask if the coup was the cause of Turkey's present crisis, or simply an accelerant of trends already in motion, and thus a catalyst for the realization of Erdo?an's latent authoritarian impulses.

Bringing together approaches from politics, sociology, history and anthropology, the chapters shed much-needed light on these crucial questions. They offer scholars and nonspecialists alike a comprehensive overview of the implications of the coup attempt and its aftermath on the issues of religion, democracy, the Kurds, the state, resistance and more besides. Its effects have been felt in almost every aspect of Turkish society from religion to politics, yet it came at a time when Turkey was already experiencing significant social and political turmoil under the increasingly authoritarian leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdo?an.

Readers interested in contemporary politics, Turkish and Middle Eastern studies will find the volume useful, as they ponder other cases in this era of democratic retrenchment and global turmoil.

Part I

Politics, transformation and state (re)formation

1 The brutalisation of Turkey¹

Hamit Bozarslan

Thus, President Erdoğan was successful in his bid and ‘presidentialised’ the Turkish political system following a referendum that took place on 16 April 2017. For sure, his victory was short (51.4 per cent) and most importantly it was stained with massive fraud that the High Council for Elections did not even try to dissimulate. As Erdoğan reminded us, ‘The rider has already taken the horse and crossed the river’.² In reaction to the damning preliminary report prepared by a joint observation mission of the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) which demonstrated that up to 5 per cent of the votes that were accounted for might be fraudulent,³ Erdoğan simply said: ‘They are preparing a report that suits them. … We will not take into consideration any report that you might prepare’ (Semo 2017).

The pariah of the regime in the 1990s, Erdoğan can now officially present himself as the source and extent of all power, be it executive, legislative or judiciary: he will not only run the country, but, as the leader of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), he will nominate the deputies of the majority party; as president of the country, he will nominate most of the magistrates (not only those of the constitutional court) and, as supreme chief he will command the armies. It is difficult to know what impact this will have on the respect of rights, and more specifically on human rights that have been massively violated in form and practice for a long time.

From a strictly formal perspective, the regime first renounced the idea of saving even the appearance of a legal and rational power years ago: while according to the Constitution to which Erdoğan pledged allegiance when he assumed his functions in August 2014, the president of the Republic had essentially symbolic powers, he was the de facto manager of the executive and took major decisions such as halting the peace negotiations with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, PKK) in the summer of 2015. Transgressing his constitutional powers, he refused to recognise the results of the legislative elections of 7 June 2015, he dismissed the prime minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu, whom he had himself designated as his successor, and then dismissed his interior minister, Efkan Ala, in 2016. Finally, he became the one who elaborated and announced the official word, designated who is a ‘friend’ and who is an ‘enemy’, a ‘terrorist’ or ‘traitor’, these labels then often being a prelude to arrests or a condemnation by a judicial system that no longer has any autonomy.

In practice, the decline in the field of rights had reached an alarming level long before the proclamation of the state of emergency on 20 July 2016, only four days following the aborted military coup attempt. The period between the legislative elections of 7 June 2015 where the AKP won 43 per cent of the votes (a result which was not sufficient to capture the absolute majority of seats) and the elections of 1 November 2015 (where his result increased to about 50 per cent of the votes) was marked by plain terror. The confrontation with the PKK resulted in several hundreds of victims, and Erdoğan carried out a general policy of blackmail and chaos. Several Kurdish cities, where more than 75 per cent of the population had voted for the Democratic People’s Party (Halkların Demokratik Partisi, HDP), among which was the historical centre of Diyarbakır, listed as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, were put under siege before and after the ‘renewed elections’ and completely destroyed during operations that lasted for months. In Cizre, where the repression was most brutal, tens of children and youngsters were burned alive in the basements of buildings.⁴ Composed of Islamic militants and extreme right elements, the ‘special forces’ that were deployed in the Kurdish region also left numerous graffiti’s, notably in the bedrooms of girls in houses they destroyed (‘We came to see you girls, but you were not here!’) or on the walls of ruined cities, one could read: ‘We love you, o tall man’ with reference to Erdoğan being a tall man.

The campaign for the referendum and the state of emergency

The campaign for the referendum, which proposed nothing less than the establishment of an autocratic regime, happened under a state of emergency which itself already implied restrictions on public liberties, notably on freedom of expression and assembly. The ban that was imposed on most independent media outlets had already reinforced the control that those in power had on information. During the campaign for the referendum, the ‘no’ camp was accused of treason and of complicity with ‘terrorism’ embodied by the PKK, the Gülen movement (Bozarslan 2016)⁵ and/or the Islamic State, as well as collaboration with external enemies of the state.⁶ On the other hand, the ‘yes’ camp was presented as part of a divine order and a condition to win access to paradise.⁷

The systematic and arbitrary repression of opponents (Uslu 2017; also www.amnesty.org/) has now gained an intensity that is higher than that between the years 2013 and 2015, when it was already quite strong. In a context where the Constitutional Court has declared itself incompetent on issues concerning the measures imposed by decree laws promulgated by the executive and which bypass the legislative, more than a 100,000 public servants have been sacked and seen their names widely circulated in the media, which also made it nearly impossible for them to be hired by the private sector (a very small number were subsequently rehabilitated). Higher education, already in the crosshairs of the political leadership since the publication of the petition of the Academics for Peace in the beginning of 2016,⁸ and the judicial system were particularly touched by these collective sanctions. Also, some 30,000 private contracts were revoked, about 40,000 common law prisoners were liberated in order to create space for the same number of political prisoners, among which are tens of magistrates, 150 journalists, and thousands of Kurdish militants, among them fourteen parliamentarians. The majority of elected Kurdish mayors were dismissed from their functions and were replaced by appointed ‘transitional administrators’ close to the AKP. Thousands of associations and foundations and about 15 universities were dissolved, tens of newspapers, magazines, and radio stations or television channels were banned. The assets of companies accused of being close to Fethullah Gülen (representing 65 billion Turkish Liras or about 15 billion euros) were confiscated and at least 35 people who were arrested or fired then committed suicide! These people and established journalists such as Nazlı Ilıcak, Şahin Alpay, Hilmi Yavuz, all in their seventies, were imprisoned and their retirement benefits were confiscated. These can be considered ‘bare lives’, in the literal sense of the term: they have been stripped of their human rights, enjoy no judicial protection, and no ethical recognition! Finally, it is worth mentioning that Erdoğan, who had already expressed views in favour of the death penalty, which was abolished in Turkey in the early 2000s in the negotiations between Turkey and the EU, is now cheered by crowds who hold up hangman’s nooses.

The syntax of power

The decades of struggles for human rights and more generally for civil rights teach us that the judicial system is not only a simple ‘superstructure’ that obfuscates relations of power and the contradictions at play in a society. Yet, following developments in Turkey, one wonders whether the regression in human rights and the resulting repressive practices (Coşar and Yücesan-Özdemir 2014) could only be the visible aspect of a process that is much more disruptive and which ultimately could lead to the collapse not only of the political system but of society itself. The syntaxes of power by now have been narrowed down to about 15 belligerent words (‘treason’, ‘internal enemies’ which are at the service of ‘external enemies who are jealous of our success and our power’,⁹ ‘crusaders’, ‘lobby’, ‘Zoroastrians’, ‘heretics’, ‘perverts’, ‘conspiracies’, ‘will make you pay the price’, etc). These words saturate the media space via Erdoğan’s ever flowing speeches that are broadcast on nearly all channels simultaneously and clearly show that a dynamics of brutalisation is on-going in the country. Repetitive as can be, this language deliberately aims at dividing society between ‘friends’, meaning Sunni Turks who are faithful to the leadership, and ‘enemies’, meaning the Kurds, the Alevites, the non-Muslim minorities, but also Turkish Sunni dissidents. The ‘loyal ones’ need not only obey, as it is the case in all authoritarian systems that fear the politicisation of their subjects; they need to obey actively by being in a perpetual state of alert and by using, if necessary, their paramilitary potential to defend those instances that require their obedience. One can easily imagine the risks posed by such a demand of allegiance in a country where one inhabitant out of four is armed,¹⁰ and where the authorities express their desire to form self-defence militias.¹¹

Yet more importantly, if today’s enemy is known, only the leader in his sovereign perspicacity has the capacity to designate the enemy of tomorrow against which a new mobilisation will be necessary. Thus, the Kurdish opponents, or the liberal left, who in the past could eventually be seen as allies against the Kemalist establishment, became enemies of the nation overnight. The same goes for those accused of being close to the Imam Fethullah Gülen who not so long ago used to figure among the friends of Erdoğan, and a pillar of the system he established. Numerous signs show that the next wave of repression will target ‘internal traitors’ within the AKP, among whom are certain founding figures such as the former president Abdullah Gül and the former vice prime minister Bülent Arinç who both took refuge in a deafening silence months ago. This state of fear clearly enables the promotion of an ‘elite created by opportunities’, the third generation of AKP members who did not have to assimilate the history of a party that now identifies totally with Erdoğan to the detriment of all other party alliances and which gives itself the mission of radicalising the system by annihilating all mechanisms of check and balance that could restrain it. Rather than an authoritarian regime, a wording that still made sense recently (İnsel 2015 and 2016), the country now looks like a boat adrift.

Destroying the cognitive capabilities of society

All indicators show that the regime has waged a war against the cognitive faculties of society and that it is winning, at the cost of a loss of all rationality, including that necessary for its own stability. A simple look at the chronology of events post-2013 shows that ‘Erdoğanism’ cannot anchor itself in time without provoking cycles of new crises: each campaign against a given ‘enemy’ occupies all the media space during several months, before losing in intensity and leaving the space for a new phase of hypermobilisation. These cycles produce cumulative effects that nourish a vision of a world at war. For Erdoğan, who does not know any foreign language and whose political and historical culture is essentially limited to a few tens of Islamist/nationalist books read at the turn of the 1980s, the Turks constitute both the strong arm and the sacrificial nation of Islam. Proud to have 78 ‘necropolis of Turkish martyrs’ across the world, the president considers that ‘the ground can become homeland and a cloth can become a flag only when blood has been spilt in their defence’.¹²

While enmity appears here as the ‘motor of history’, the name and the nature of the concrete enemy changes. Turkey actually finds itself in the position of ‘Oceania’, the fictive country that George Orwell describes in 1984: in a perpetual state of war without ever knowing whether it is against ‘Estasia’ or ‘Eurasia’. Israel and Russia were definitely the enemies to bring down in the first half of the 2010s, and then became quasi-friends that one would not dare criticise. Then, Iran took their place with emphasis on its Shiite character along with the United States of Obama, before the election of the very Islamophobic and very unpredictable Trump. After the United States came Europe, which qualified as ‘nazi’ for refusing to extradite ‘terrorists’ and not allowing AKP ministers to participate in electoral campaigns: anti-Dutch patriotism notably took hold over the spring of 2017 through the destruction of symbols that referred to this country, tulips and oranges. A few ‘Dutch’ cows also paid with their lives for the ‘hostility’ of the government of their country of origin. The very strong depreciation of the Turkish lira during this period was also attributed to the ‘economical terrorism’¹³ fomented by Europe. After standing against the ‘angry nation’ of the Kemalists (Öktem 2011), the AKP now builds its own without knowing where or how to channel its anger. Hence, just like in the ‘old Turkey’, which Erdoğan denounces with virulence (Bozarslan 2001), the ‘new Turkey’ he is building uses crises as tools for engineering and he is taking risks that the country cannot live up to.

This fact can also be illustrated by the series of foreign policy defeats, which also explains the aggressive approach taken on internal matters. At the turn of 2012, once the choc of Arab revolutionary contestations had faded, Turkey imagined itself as a regional superpower and was under the pretence of an illusory grandeur conveyed by Ahmet Davutoğlu, then minister of Foreign Affairs and theoretician of the very popular Strategic Depth (Stratejik Derinlik) (2001).¹⁴ Despite a violent nostalgia for empire, there was no neo-imperial project as such but rather the hope to figure as the primus inter pares of political parties stemming from Islamism in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, and of course, Syria. The end of this utopia, which wasn’t upheld by any of these conservative movements prior to their violent or pacifist fall, had transformed Syria into the only possible space for the exercise of regional hegemony. However, the al-Assad regime, incapable of controlling the totality of its territory and determined to give pay-back to Ank...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: accelerating political crisis in Erdoğan’s Turkey
• PART I: Politics, transformation and state (re)formation
• PART II: Democracy, solidarity and hegemonic politics
• Index