Introduction
The night of the coup, 15â16 July 2016, was a quiet one in Diyarbakir. Many people were glued to the television, following live broadcasting from the western part of the country where the military were apparently attempting a coup. It very soon became clear that the government of the ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) had sufficient support from the army and other security forces. Moreover, it had managed to call its followers onto the street to resist the uprising. After deadly fire-fights were ongoing in Ankara and Istanbul, in Diyarbakir meanwhile, people were queuing in the grocery stores that had haphazardly opened. Fearing a curfew, they were stocking up with provisions.
The days that followed remained quiet in the south-east, while in cities from Trabzon in the northeast to Izmir on the Aegean people responded to AKP calls to assemble on âdemocracy watchâ (demokrasi nöbeti). These âwatchesâ were called to claim the streets, as stated in an AKP text message sent on the night of the coup:
Dear children of the Turkish nation. This action is a coup against the nation, commandeering armored vehicles and weapons in Ankara and Istanbul, behaving as if it were the 1970s. Honorable Turkish nation, claim democracy and peace: I am calling you to the streets against this action of a narrow cadre that has fallen against the Turkish nation. Claim the state, claim the nation.2
Calls for a vigilant resistance against the coup plotters were not only made through the AKP party apparatus, but also through instructions from the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet Ä°Ćleri BaĆkanlıÄı) to its 85,000 mosques through the prayer calls of ezan (the daily call to prayers, normally made at fixed times through the day) and selĂą (normally made to announce that someone from the community has passed away). These prayers were followed by calls to come onto the streets for the sake of God, Mohammed, ErdoÄan, and the state.
The so-called âdemocracy watchesâ in the west of Turkey attracted a range of people who wanted to protest the violence, but a large proportion of those who took to the streets as a vigilance against the putchists in the beginning and later to consolidate and celebrate victory came from a conservative Islamist segment of the population, a population that had been silenced under Kemalist rule and still feared a return to the repressive secular state (Cizre 2016; Esen and GĂŒmĂŒĆĂ§ĂŒ 2016). ErdoÄan demobilized the streets after three weeks, on 10 August, when he ended the watches. Instead, ErdoÄan seemed to put his trust in private security services, which boomed under AKP rule, as an âinstrument of violence under state tutelageâ3 and therefore were regarded as a more reliable instrument of power than âthe streetâ.
In Diyarbakır the aftermath of the coup did not pass by unnoticed. Officers at the military airbase in the city were taken into custody for their alleged involvement in the plot. Various rumors also spread of police being detained over their links to the GĂŒlenist organization held responsible, while others narrated the body language of officers who tried to make themselves invisible before disappearing. Yet this could still be considered a settlement within state institutions. The televised events only started to become a grim reality for the people in the East a week later, when huge state-sponsored posters appeared in the streets in Diyarbakir stating âBiz milletiz, TĂŒrkiyeâye Darbeye Teröre Yedirmeyizâ (We are the nation, we will not swallow a coup or terror). In other cities in the region similar billboards emerged. This came together with raids on âDarbelere Hayır, Demokrasi ve BarÄ±Ć Hemen Ćimdiâ (No to coup, democracy and peace now) watches organized by the Peoplesâ Democratic Party (Halklarin Demokratik Partisi, HDP) and Democratic Regions Party (Demokratik Bölgeler Partisi, DBP). In these watches, resistance against the coup was not articulated with a so-called war on terror, but a resumption of talks with the Kurdistan Workersâ Party (Partiya KarkĂȘren Kurdistan, PKK) for a solution to the Kurdish question.4
In the state discourse, the coup was equated with Fetullah GĂŒlen and his movement, an elastic notion. âTerrorâ was the other elastic notion. It already referred to the illegal PKK and was now further gathering into its net the legal Kurdish-oriented HDP and many professional organizations, NGOs, and individuals active in the struggle for Kurdish citizenship rights and democratization of Turkey. Not only the GĂŒlenists, that is, but also the Kurds were clearly defined as outside âthe peopleâ or the âweâ. They were the traitors, separatists, cancer, and viruses5 that needed to be rounded up in the stateâs response to the coup, a response that thus included massive purges, with detentions and arrests, the closures of schools, universities, media and civil society groups, the confiscation of business and personal property, and the state takeover of local governments in the south-east.
These post-coup measures have been evaluated as both a march towards democracy (İçener 2016) and confirmation of a process of backsliding on civic rights and freedoms (Esen and GĂŒmĂŒĆĂ§ĂŒ 2016; Somer 2016 and 2017). Placing the post-coup measures in the context of a process that started long before, this article will refer to it as an âorganizational coupâ: an extended process of overt and (partly) illegal order-making from within the state apparatus (Zald and Berger 1978), effected not only at the personal level but also at the institutional level, through a concentration of power in the hands of the executive. In addition, it comprises the containment and rollback of the pro-Kurdish citizenship rights movement and the overthrow of their local elected administrations.
Narratives of the coup
The July 2016 coup events took the lives of around 300 people and injured another 1,400 in just a couple of hours. The factions within the Turkish military forces calling themselves the Peace at Home Council (Yurtta Sulh Konseyi) that attempted to unseat the president made use of Kemalist rhetoric, assuming their historical guardianship role. Perceiving themselves as the guardian of the Republic and its Kemalist legacy, factions within the Turkish Armed Forces have staged several coupsâtaking power in 1960, 1971, and 1980, forcing a change of government in 1998âas well as several other attempted coups (Ahmad 1993). In a public declaration, the Peace at Home Council mentioned among its reasons for the coup an erosion of secularism, elimination of democratic rule, disregard of human rights, and a loss of international credibility. Although ErdoÄan and his followers were quick to accuse GĂŒlen of masterminding the coup, the Council pledged loyalty to the founder of Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. The councilâs name was derived from AtatĂŒrkâs 1931 aphorism, âPeace at home, peace in the worldâ (Yurtta sulh, cihanda sulh), which had become the slogan of the Turkish Land Forces. Apparently innocent and universal, it also implies the protection of the nationalist idea of Turkey as a homogeneous national state with a clear Turkish identity (Karaosmanoglu 2000). But the narrative dissolved before it could be articulated.
In the period following the 15 July events, two other narratives emerged. The first one links the coup to the GĂŒlen and his organizationânow engraved in the public imagination as the âFethullah terrorist organizationâ (Fethullah Terör ĂrgĂŒtĂŒ, dubbed FETĂ), previously referred to as the âparallel state structureâ (Paralel Devlet Yapılanması, PDY)âand considers the clampdown and purges a necessary catharsis (GĂŒrcan and Gisclon 2016; İçener 2016). Previously providing the AKP with the educated cadre that wrested control of the institutional organs of governance from the Kemalists, the GĂŒlenists had turned from partners into traitors after 2011, when they tried to sideline ErdoÄan through corruption investigations, ultimately resulting in the arrests of 52 people in the ErdoÄan entourage on 17 December 2013. The conflict between supporters of GĂŒlen and ErdoÄan turned into open war. ErdoÄan dismissed the corruption investigations as a coup attempt and made a counter-move by dismissing GĂŒlenists from the judiciary and police. In this reading, the coup of 15 July 2016 was a last, desperate throw of the dice by the GĂŒlenists throwing caution to the wind to finally capture the state it had worked so long to gain. While the GĂŒlenists are considered the internal threat in the central state apparatus, working top-down, the Kurdish movement is considered the bottom-up threat. Here, the fight against terrorism extends to its supposed Kurdish representatives in legal, Trojan horse organizationsâlike the HDPâwhich seek to divide the ânaturalâ (Islamic, Turkish citizenship) fraternity of Turks and Kurds. In this narrative, the HDP as much as the PKK is considered the separatist âotherâ.
The second narrative sees in the coup response a breakdown of democracy in Turkey and the emergence of a new form of authoritarianism. In this reading, even the veracity of the events on the night in July is questioned, with accusations of a false flag op planned from the very top. Conspiracy theories were already in circulation in the tweetosphere within the first hours of the failed coup attempts. The new order it has ushered inâbe it by design or else just utilization of a heaven-sent opportunity (in the words of President Recep Tayyip ErdoÄan, a âbig gift to us from Godâ [Allahâın bize buyĂŒk bir lĂŒtfu])âis regarded as a demagogic dictatorship.6 It is particularistic, personalized, and mass-based, involving a (further) deep erosion of institutional checks and balances on executive power, weakening of the distinction between state and party, restricting liberty and skewing the electoral playing field (Somer 2017, 2). The coup, it is thus argued, resulted in a counter-coup (Baydar 2016; Gunter 2016). If a coup is the attempt by elites within the state apparatus to unseat the sitting authorities (Powell and Thyne 2011), the post-coup measures could also be characterized as a coup, since they have aimed at the unseating of judiciary and legislative authorities by the executive, executed under the guise of a purge of GĂŒlenists, and moreover, including a sub-coup aimed against the elected Kurdish local authorities in the south-east, under the guise of the fight against terror.
What binds the two narratives of the course of events following the July 2016 coupâas a catharsis necessary to clean the state of those who had undermined the organic relation between âthe peopleâ and its leader, or as a counter-coup (Baydar 2016; Gunter 2016)âis the idea of a clear break between the pre- and post-coup periods. The view expressed here, however, is of a continuum; the post-coup events, it is argued, may rather be considered as a culmination, as the visible expression of an organizational coup, a seizure of state power from within the state by means of infiltration that had started long before July 2016 (Zald and Berger 1978).
Preceding the vote on a presidential system and an empowerment of the executive, parliament approved state of emergency legislation (on 20 July), lasting, as per the constitutional limit, for three months. This state of emergency has since been extended upon the completion of each following time period to create an indefinite, ongoing state of exception.7 Introduction of the state of emergency signaled the anticipated purgeâlists of thousands had clearly already been prepared (Communities 2007; Cizre 2016 and 2017; European Commission 2016; Amnesty International 2016 and 2017; Regnard 2016; Human Rights Watch 2016a, 2016b, 2017a and 2017b; Centre for Policy Research on Turkey 2017). The crackdown has included purges of military, police, judges, prosecutors, and other civil servants, but also of academics, teachers and doctors, universities, dormitories, schools, radios, newspapers, news agencies, TV channels, magazines, publishing houses, food banks, and other civil society organizations, which have been closed, businesses confiscated, and local elected administrations overthrown and replaced by AKP curators.
The extent to which people have been persecuted in Turkey since July 2016 looks unprecedented. In the same way as a significant part of the population in the past did not see the military interventions and interludes (1960â1961, 1970â1973, and 1980â1983) as overly repressive or as failures (Demirel 2005; Ahmad 1993; ZĂŒrcher 2004), today the measures taken can count on approval from a significant proportion of the population in the western part of Turkey. This disregard of democracy in combination with an âappetite for revengeâ (Cizre 2017) explains the support for the far-reaching measures taken and ErdoÄanâs quest for a powerful executive presidential system. In connection to the conviction among a significant part of the population that the costs of abandoning democratic procedures and installing a strong executive power are not all that high, ErdoÄan had himself stated that abandoning democracy is necessary. He raised the specter of th...
