Military Intervention and a Crisis of Democracy in Turkey

The Menderes Era and its Demise

Mogens Pelt

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781848857780
• eBook ISBN: 9781786724991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Adnan Menderes' election to power in 1950 signalled a new epoch in the history of modern Turkey. For the first time a democratic government ruled the country, taking over Kemal Ataturk's political heirs, the People's Republican Party (CHP), and challenging the Kemalist elite's monopoly on the control of state institutions and society itself. However, this period was short-lived. In 1960, Turkey's army staged a coup d'etat and Menderes was hanged the following year. Here, Mogens Pelt beings by examining the era of the rule of the Democratic Party, and what led to its downfall. Among the chief accusations raised against Menderes by the army was that he had undermined the principles of the founder of modern Turkey, Ataturk, and that he had exploited religion for political purposes. Military Intervention and a Crisis Democracy in Turkey furthermore, and crucially, examines the legacy of the military intervention that brought this era of democratic rule to an end.
Although the armed forces officially returned power to the civilians in 1961, this intervention - indeed, this crisis of democracy - allowed the military to become a major player in Turkey's political process, weakening the role of elected politicians. The officer corps claimed that the army was the legal guardian of Kemalism, and that it had the right and duty to intervene again, if the circumstances proscribed it and when it deemed that the values of Ataturk were threatened. Indeed, these were precisely that ground on which the armed forces justified its coup d'etats of 1971 and 1980. This unique exploration of the Menderes period sheds new light on the shaping of post-war Turkey and will be vital for those researching the Turkish Republic, and the influence of the military in its destiny.

PART I

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY VERSUS THE HEIRS TO THE ONE-PARTY REGIME

CHAPTER 1

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

On 7 June 1945, four members of the ruling CHP party – former Prime Minister Celal Bayar, Adnan Menderes, Fuad Köprülü and Refik Koraltan – submitted a proposal to CHP’s parliamentary group. Known as the ‘Proposal of the Four’, it was a demand for democracy and the introduction of a multiparty system. In their wording, they were careful to not to offend Atatürk or the constitution, putting the blame for the continuation of the restrictions on the constitution on external circumstances, namely the Second World War. They mentioned the democratic nature of the Turkish constitution, Atatürk’s attempts to give a more liberal character to the government and they expressed their understanding that ‘fear of reaction’ had made it necessary to impose restrictions on the constitution.

It is difficult to tell if these observations were really heartfelt. After all, the group was vulnerable and stood unprotected in its opposition to the one-party regime; and what they were demanding would mean no less than a total reversal of the political practices of more than two decades: a restoration of effective powers of control of the government to the Grand National Assembly, the granting of rights and freedom to individuals and the development of political activity based on more than one party.

According to the group, the intellectuals and the peasants were ready for democracy.¹ On 12 June, the parliamentary group of the CHP rejected the proposal.² During the winter of 1945, the four men severed their relations with the CHP and on 7 January 1946 the Democratic Party was formally established under the leadership of Bayar.³ Thus, the party originated from within the National Assembly and was constituted by former members of the CHP. Although the DP had not developed from the people, there were clear signs that public opinion was in sympathy with the efforts to criticize the CHP and a common opposition front was created around the newspapers Vatan and Tan.⁴

Regarding the background and careers of the four, we know, among other things, that Celal Bayar was born in 1883 in a provincial town not far from Bursa. His early career was in banking while he joined the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) before 1908. At the time of the 1909 counter-revolution, he led a unit from Bursa to Istanbul to support the Young Turks. Around 1909, Talat Pasha appointed him secretary in charge of the CUP Izmir branch instead of Rahmi Bey. In the wake of the Greek landing in 1919, Bayar organized resistance in the Aegean under the name of Galip Hoca and was so successful working in the irregular militia that it launched his career as a deputy in the Ottoman parliament. In 1920, he caught the eye of Mustafa Kemal and in 1923, he was elected to the executive board of the People’s Party. He served as government minister in various departments and in 1924, he began his career in the Is-Bank.

He became a rival of Inönü and it was not until after the death of Atatürk that Inönü got the upper hand in this feud: in November 1937, Bayar was appointed prime minister by Atatürk and then in January 1939 Inönü, in his capacity as president, accepted Bayar’s resignation.⁵

Menderes was born in 1899 into a notable family in Aydin. He attended the Ittihad ve Terakki Idadisi School established by CUP and then the American College of Izmir. In 1916, he was drafted into the army and sent to Syria but got sick on the way and was returned. During the Greek occupation of Izmir, he formed a small resistance band near Aydin to fight the invading Greek army. Soon his gang joined a larger guerrilla force and he remained engaged in partisan activities until 1922.

Between 1922 and 1930, he earned his livelihood as the proprietor of the large family farm near Aydin. Marriage connected him to important political personalities including, among others, Tevfik Rüstü Aras, Atatürk’s minister of foreign affairs. In 1930 be became chairman of the newly formed Free Republican Party in Aydin.

According to Bayar, Menderes’ respect for his religion impressed him, and it has been said that Menderes was impressed by the role religion played in the mass support for the Free Republican Party. After the demise of that party, Menderes joined the CHP and, in 1931, he was elected to the National Assembly from Aydin. Menderes would remain a backbencher during the 1930s.⁶ By this juncture, he had met Atatürk.

Refik Koraltan was born in 1889 in the area of Sivas. He entered public service as an assistant prosecutor and became the attorney general of Karaman in 1915. He was appointed police inspector and soon became chief of police of Trabzon, in 1918. While engaged in this duty, he facilitated the establishment of the ‘Society of Defence of the National Rights to Counteract the Pontus Rum Organizations’, which aimed to fight the Greek Orthodox groups in the Black Sea areas that had started to appear after the end of First World War. He was elected as the deputy of Konya and later served briefly as governor of that province.

Thus, all three men had done their bit for the national cause, albeit on a much less spectacular level than a number of prominent CHP personalities who had been leading officers in the War of Independence – some even war heroes. It was only Bayar who had a high profile political career in the one-party era while the DP’s other powerful profile, Menderes, was a homo novus whose political persona was formed during the 1950s.

Fuad Köprülü was born in 1890 in Istanbul and was a renowned historian before he founded the DP.

Elections and supporters

The Democratic Party won all the elections during the 1950s with its share of the votes ranging between a high of 58 per cent in the elections in 1954 to a low of 48 per cent in 1957. In the 1950 elections, its share was 53 per cent. CHP’s total remained more stable, swinging between a low of 35 per cent in 1954 and a high of 41 per cent in 1957, while its share was 36 per cent in elections in 1950 and 37 per cent in the 1961 elections.⁷ Due to the nature of the electoral law, the DP completely dominated the parliament in terms of seats – holding 402 seats against the CHP’s 63 in the period 1950–54; 505 against the CHP’s 31 in the period 1954–57 and 424 against the CHP’s 178 from 1957 until the 27 May coup.⁸

The ‘secret’ of the DP’s success, lay in its attention to the welfare of the peasantry.⁹ During the one-party era, the CHP took over the social and economically dominant role in countryside from the Agas of the pre-republican era. The party had branches in every rural centre of Anatolia and attempted to guide the peasants by means that varied from persuasion to compulsion. While the CHP representatives were agents of the Kemalist revolution, and seen as such, the DP’s nationwide organization in the countryside had no desire to exercise the same kind of surveillance and direction. This and the reduction of the CHP’s network created a vacuum that allowed for a rapid return of the magnates (or Agas), something that only added to rally the peasant behind the Democrats.

The DP was also supported by a new commercial and industrial middle class who objected to the dominant doctrine of étatisme that the one-party regime had practiced in conducting the national economy. Finally, there were the religious leaders, who had ‘never really forgiven’ the CHP for the enforced secularism. These, in turn, commanded a strong support among the peasants, the artisans and small shopkeepers.¹⁰

According to a report from the US Embassy in 1965 on the support of the DP and the Justice Party, the DP’s support was strongest in the populous fertile, agricultural regions of the Aegean and Black Sea as well as the Mediterranean, including the Adana Plain. In these areas, the peasants were doing well economically by Turkish standards. They were no longer ‘supine’ and responsive to the control of the gentry, the Agas, which historically had controlled most of the countryside. In areas where the Agas retained their traditional control over the peasantry, as in the Eastern provinces, this class was still able to produce the vote for the CHP.

The DP’s support was based on the above-mentioned emerging and relatively prosperous peasants and an expanding, but still small, commercial, industrial and newly wealthy farmer class, such as cotton planters for example.

The DP also appealed to the urban lower class that was primarily composed of Anatolian peasants crowed in the gecekondu – the squatter areas around the large cities. Many of these kept ties with their home villages and tended to maintain their former voting pattern. The bulk of this group came from the relatively prosperous areas of Western Turkey and the Black Sea, not having been forced off the land by poverty, but having been drawn by the allure of city life.

For example, when a typical peasant arrived in the gecekondu, he immediately went to a district populated by people from his home village. The local DP man would help him to settle, help with problems vis-à-vis the authorities and function as an employment agency or a marriage bureau. In contrast to CHP men, who typically were outsiders, the local DP representative was always a resident of the district.¹¹

Furthermore, the DP had some people in their ranks who were described as very sophisticated, such as representatives of the Istanbul business community, and a minority of high-level civil servants whose careers were tied to the DP. Finally, there were signs that the DP attempted to ameliorate its image in the eyes of the intellectuals and army officers, feeling the need to cast itself in a more progressive style.¹²

All this leaves us with a picture of the DP’s main constituency that was composed by provincial magnates, the rural majorities of peasants, small business holders and all those who had reason to loath the republican state.

Reaching out to the world of the Turkish peasant

The Democratic Party launched a campaign to improve the conditions in the world of the peasant, seeing Turkey’s total agricultural output rise by 50 per cent between 1950 and 1958.¹³ The new administration built paved roads that linked thousands of villages to the market for the first time in history, and in that way also brought the peasant into the main stream of Turkish life. Based on a shift of economic priorities from those of the one-party era, which had focused on industry and urban development, the new administration placed rural interests and those of the province and private business above urban interests: the government used Marshall Aid monies to buy 40,000 tractors for farmers, at a time when only around 25 per cent of a total of 2.4 million ploughs were made of iron, while a considerable amount of the rest of the US aid went to other capital-intensive farm equipment like mechanical harvesters; dams were constructed, electricity provided to small towns and peasants were granted tax-exemptions. Some see Menderes as the first ruler to give the rural population ‘a rudimentary sense of citizenship’.¹⁴

These policies spurred a commercialization of agriculture that made Turkey the world’s fourth-largest exporter of wheat during the Korean War. In fact, between 1950 and 1955, the expansion of the fortunes of agriculture was so closely tied to the advent of the DP to power that the period has been labelled the ‘Menderes Boom.’ These years of unequalled growth came to an end in 1955 due to bad weather and failed harvests. In order to mend the situation, the government turned to state borrowing and, in 1958, Turkey entered a serious financial crisis including rapidly rising inflation, balance of payment problems and a huge foreign debt, something that, among other things, led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to intervene and attempt to raise new loans.¹⁵

Bayar and Menderes went to small towns and the countryside because they wanted to cultivate a new power-base and decided to espouse a policy of less government control of culture. For the first time in the history of Turkey, a political party made a direct appeal to the world of the mass of the citizens. However, this new policy required what observers have called a sacrifice of some modernizing reforms and that the principle of secularism take a backseat. This development, in turn, caused alarm among the intelligentsia, the bureaucrats and the officer corps.¹⁶

Before we examine the effects of these reactions, we shall attempt come to grips with some of the cultural content of the heterogeneous world of the Turkish citizen. By identifying what was disregarded, repressed, or banished by the one-party regime, we will get a better understanding of the hopes of the voters who carried the DP to its successes and of the power of the resentment directed against the CHP and the one-party era elite.

CHAPTER 2

THE KEMALIST REVOLUTION AND THE OTTOMAN PAST

During the night of 1–2 November 1918, eight top leaders of the CUP regime secretly boarded a German torpedo boat calling at Sebastopol in the German-controlled Ukraine. While Enver Pasha headed for the Caucasus, the rest of the party was taken to Berlin. The CUP leaders were preparing for resistance against an impending occupation, and a ‘second round’ to assert Istanbul’s independence. While Enver invoked his recovery of Edirne during the Balkan Wars as an inspiration for the future, Talat set up a paramilitary underground (Karakol) equipped with arms and funds from the Teshkilat-i mahsusa, the special organization. In Istanbul, the Karakol was funnelling a flow of agents and arms into the interior, where plans had already been laid during the war to move the centre of power.

Eastern Anatolia remained beyond the range of any occupation because the October revolution had removed Russia from the ranks of the Entente powers. Furthermore, while the Ninth Army was left intact under CUP command, local groups sprang up across Anatolia calling themselves ‘Defence of Rights and Rej...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: The Democratic Party Versus the Heirs to the One-Party Regime
• Part II: Menderes’ Foreign Policy
• Part III: The Military Versus The Democratic Party and The Role of CHP
• Part IV: Conclusion and perspectives
• 13. The Menderes era and its demise
• Notes
• Bibliography and sources