Comment: Something is rotten in the state of Turkey
A man wears a mask showing the Turkish Prime Minister during a rally in Istanbul on March 23, 2014. (AAP)
Long revered by politicians and diplomats for its democratic encompassing of secularists and sectarians, Turkey now finds itself tainted by corruption and censorship. Where to next for the Muslim-majority country?
By Elle Hardy | 24 MAR 2014
The extent of it, in hindsight, should not have come as much a surprise, for it is only absolute corruption that can come from near-absolute power.
In December last year, snap anti-corruption raids were conducted in Turkey, with arrests of scores of bureaucrats, businessmen, and even sons of government Ministers. Further arrests – said to be of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s sons – were thwarted one week later by police officers refusing to carry out their duties. Unverified recordings of the Prime Minister discussing bribes with his son have subsequently been released.
It’s long been a grimly fun game of mine to ask people: which country is the world’s most prolific jailer of journalists? Those great bastions of repression Iran, China, or Eritrea? Nay, it is Turkey. Sure, there may be a perverse thrill of domination, or the joy of moral paternalism, but censorship is only really necessary when you’re looking to hide the money and concentrate the assets. Often overlooked or understated, censorship is fundamental to achieving the kleptocratic state.
Andrew Finkel, a long-time journalist and author on Turkey, described the public reaction to the corruption scandal: “It was a surprise in the sense no one thought a public prosecutor would have the audacity to move so openly against leading politicians. Certainly people were aware that there was corruption and even more aware of the government's plans to contravene every sound environmental practice known to man to develop the rich hinterland of Istanbul. There was a sense of government unchecked.”
Turkey has long been a country of high income inequality, and it remains the second most unequal country in the OECD. The corruption scandal is centred around the rapid the rapid development of Turkey, and particularly Istanbul, best symbolised by last June’s Taksim Gezi Park protests, where a movement somewhere between Occupy Wall Street and Egypt’s Tahrir Square emerged. Indeed only last week 15 year old Berkin Elvan died after an eight month coma caused by being hit in the head with a tear gas canister while going to buy bread. Astoundingly, Prime Minister Erdogan accused the recently deceased boy of having been “taken up into terror organisations”.
Turkey has long been said to have a ‘deep state’: a clandestine power network which manifested itself last century through Kemalism (the philosophy of modern Turkey’s founder, Kemal Ataturk), with the military, civil forces, and the judiciary frequently displaying a power over the political class through coups and suppression of any threats to the secular order. Elected in 2002, Erdogan’s conservative Islamist A.K. Party has been able to wrest effective ‘deep state’ control away from the Kemalists, and develop a deep state of their own.
The anti-corruption crackdown was not a last throw of the Kemalist deep state, but rather seemingly orchestrated by Hizmet, something of a mass corporation and spiritual movement led by elusive dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen: in essence, a third, competing deep state (although it may be that Hizmet contains the remnants of the largely defeated Kemalist deep state). The anti-corruption arrests were said to have been conducted by forces loyal to Gulen – or as the A.K Party would have it, forces “infiltrated by” Gulenists.
Western writers on Turkey have immemorially fallen into the cliché of calling it “the bridge between East and West”. Now we faced with a new, but more sinister metaphor: Putinism. It’s hard not to see shades of Putin in Erdogan, of Berezovsky in Gulen, and of an increasingly authoritarian Turkey in the mold of its near neighbour.
Indeed it’s arguable whether Turkey has ever been a democracy. “There has always been an authoritarian element in Turkish politics - after all the military were a powerful force until very recently. And there has always been a play between government by the people and government for (but despite) the people in which authority has known best,” says Finkel.
American writer and academic Claire Berlinski recently left Istanbul after ten years. She notes “almost everyone, with some honorable but rare exceptions, is some kind of statist, be it a leftist-statist or a right-wing statist.”
The irony of the contrast with the Arab Spring is stark: as countries such as Egypt overthrew strongmen and ended up with army rule, Turkey’s unelected military upholders of secularism and quasi-democracy have been turfed out by an elected strongman.
Prominent writer Soner Cagaptay is, however, far more optimistic, and believes that since Turkey became a majority middle-class society in 2010, it’s been showing signs of “middle-class demands” in the form of protests for respect for the environment, freedom of assembly, and the media.
Whatever your position, trying to comprehend Turkish deep state politics gives rise to a Socratic agony: the more you know, the less you understand.
Jailing journalists has long been a tool of the Turkish state in its repression of its Kurdish minority, but nothing quite grabs the attention of the foreign press like threats to ban Facebook. One could be forgiven that this month’s (now rescinded) threat to do so by Erdogan was a way of provoking the debate he desires. Anti-Semitic conspiracies are the last refuge of the despot, and the Erdogan government has frequently spoutedvile rhetoric about foreign press ownership and the “international interest rate lobby”.
William Armstrong is a media reporter for Turkey’s English language ‘paper of record’ Hurriyet. He notes it’s close to impossible to find unbiased media (Hurriyet itself has been largely defanged itself over the last few years). “To be genuinely independent you have to be completely free of economic ties to the government, and there are hardly any such titles in Turkey”. Unsurprisingly, it’s precisely these ‘economic ties’ that the media needs to be examining.
English PEN, a free expression advocacy group, delivered a report last week stating 153 journalists were attacked during the Gezi uprising in June 2013; World Affairs Journal reports that since Gezi, 72 journalists have been fired or forced to resign.
Berlinski lists some of the legislation preventing free speech, and frequently used to intimidate and arrest journalists: “Article 301 (It’s a crime to denigrate the ‘Turkish Nation’), Article 318 (It’s a crime to alienating the public from military service), Article 318 (It’s a crime to praise a crime or a criminal), Article 125, which treats defamation as a criminal matter, not a civil one, Article 216, a broad-spectrum hate-crime law that lets you mop up anything left.”
Culturally too, Berlinski laments the attitudes of many ordinary people – who have seen Turkey’s GDP double in the ten years of Erodgan’s reign – to free speech. “I don’t see that there’s any broad, principle-based consensus that speech—all speech—should be free and constitutionally protected, in both letter and life. (As it stands now, it’s constitutionally protected in letter, but you couldn’t even line a birdcage with that)… I really curse the well-meaning busybodies who introduced the idea of “hate speech” to Turkey — it's given the utterly illiberal such liberal-sounding cover for their censorious urges.”
Like fascism’s great excuse that Mussolini made the trains run on time, blogger Alex Christie-Miller recentlywrote about Erdogan’s ongoing popularity being ‘bought’ by Turkey’s development boom: “there is a large portion of the population, however – and in general a poorer segment of the population – to whom these concrete achievements are far more substantial than a series of concepts” [my italics].
Turkey is holding local elections on 30 March, and Presidential elections in August (President Gul is an ally of Prime Minister Erdogan). Journalist Semih Idiz recently warned “the stronger Erdoğan comes out of the elections – due to Islamist and ultraconservative votes - the higher the chances of instability.”
The ongoing deep state clashes are likely to continue the erosion of democratic institutions, making a free and fair election ever less likely.
Andrew Finkel explains that media coverage is already compromised. “The board of the public broadcasting corporation is cabinet appointed, and (according the body which oversees broadcasting in general),in the period between 22 February and 2 March, devoted 13 hours and 32 minutes to the government’s campaign, and a mere 48 minutes to all the opposition parties combined.”
Given Turkey’s chequered history with foreign organisations, particularly the European Union, it will be interesting to watch whether the EU proposes election monitors, and whether Turkey accepts them.
Turkey has long been revered by politicians and diplomats as the ideal model for the modern Muslim-majority state, where secularists and sectarians can compete in the democratic arena. Tainted by such blatant corruption and censorship, and the war between its deep states, Turkey can no longer be held up as the example for the modern Muslim-majority country. Perhaps it should never have been.
