Secularist, Islamist Labels Misleading in Turkey’s Latest Political Crisis

By Jon Gorvett


	An elderly Turkish man shouts anti-government slogans as he holds a flag with a picture of Ataturk during an April 29 rally in Istanbul (AFP Photo/Sezayi Erken).

THESE ARE extraordinary times in Turkey. Triggered by April’s presidential crisis, the military’s “e-coup”—the April 27 posting on a military Web site of a message threatening to short-circuit the country’s electoral process—has been followed by a protracted game of chicken on the Iraqi border, the consequences of which lie in unknown and dangerous territory.

Yet despite much recent media focus on a potential invasion of northern Iraq by the Turkish army to crush Kurdish rebels based there, there is another conflict going on much closer to home—in the hearts and minds of Turks, from Istanbul to Erzerum.

This conflict is commonly presented as one between two distinct and mutually irreconcilable sides.

“Today on one side we have a great mass of the people,” wrote Ahmet Altan recently in Hurriyet, Turkey’s most popular daily. These people “take off their shoes before going into a house, their women cover their heads…their men have never read a book or danced or gone to a restaurant with their wife, have never been to the theater, have little education and profess strong religious sentiments.”

These, it is generally supposed, are the masses who underpin the current government of Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan, whose Justice and Development Party (AKP) enjoys a large majority in parliament. The AKP’s roots go back to a variety of pro-Islamist parties, one of which, the Welfare Party, gained office at the end of 1995, only to be ejected by the last military intervention, the “soft coup” of 1997.

“On the other side,” continued Altan, “are those who dance at weddings and at soirees, who go to the cinema, who sometimes read books, have a fairly good level of education…whose women never cover their heads…and who live more or less according to the norms of the West.”

According to common wisdom, these people are the secularists, those who are afraid of too much Islam in Turkey’s public life and who took to the streets en masse during April and May to protest against the perceived threat of an Islamic takeover.

For anyone who has ever visited Turkey, however, this division should come as little surprise. In fact, it has been the staple of a cottage industry of photographers specializing in juxtaposed covered and uncovered women and of writers talking of a country caught between East and West.

Yet, as Altan also pointed out, like all clichés this image masks at least as much as it claims to reveal. For a start, while support for an Islamic state remains highly marginal, with opinion polls giving the AKP 35 to 40 percent of the vote, the party clearly represents a much broader constituency than is often painted. Indeed, in most major cities there also were demonstrations in support of the government—all ignored by the international media. Meanwhile, the AKP also has done more than any secular government in recent times to steer Turkey toward membership in the European Union, with its batteries of secular regulations.

At the same time, the secular camp is far broader than it first appears. The giant demonstrations of April and May were characterized by the fact that while all participants could agree that they were against Shariah law—a condition no one was seriously offering them—the politicians and political parties they were being offered received little except boos from one section of the crowd or other when their leaders took to the platform. Finally, the demonstrations began to be hijacked by the far right, with the May gathering in Izmir seeing speeches against the EU, IMF, U.S., the West and foreigners in general. Many of the dancing and headscarf-free people described as the “other Turkey” by Altan likely would have been revolted by such a spectacle of chauvinism.

Similarly, many have been left cold by the recent saber rattling over northern Iraq. This, too, is no new phenomenon. Turkey has been threatening to invade Iraq for some time, as this magazine has reported. The rhetoric has ratcheted up in 2007, with a closed-session parliamentary debate on the subject back in January. Also, since the end of the winter the Turkish army has been building up forces in the largely ethnic Kurdish southeast in expectation of spring and summer offensives. The Kurdish separatist guerrillas it is fighting, the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), had been observing a cease-fire since last October, but abandoned this recently as Turkish military pressure began to mount.

But while the secular/Islamist and Army/PKK divisions are nothing new, the context for all these long-standing stresses and strains is changing. In April, the AKP came close to taking the country’s presidency, a position elected by parliament. The president does not have much in the way of executive power—he or she can veto legislation but not initiate it—but does appoint judges to the Constitutional Court. This court, and the judicial system in general, long has been a bastion of a ruling elite in Turkey that is sometimes described as the secular or the Kemalist establishment, after the founder of the republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

The presidential election appears to have been a major alarm call for this elite, which traditionally takes its lead from the powerful military, whose General Staff has long practiced initiating domestic regime change. At the same time, the AKP’s largely loyal adherence to IMF and EU prescriptions for the economy—which was largely bailed out by these two institutions following the financial crash of 2001—has been to the detriment of many state employees in particular. The traditional neo-liberal formula of privatization and encouraging foreign investment and competition have left a whole class of people who work or worked for the state with declining purchasing power and eroding social status. These people most likely made up much of the crowd at the anti-Islamic law demonstrations.

The EU, too, has been declining in popularity recently, with requirements for Turkey to normalize its relations with Cyprus and Armenia highly unpopular in a country where fervent nationalism has a cross-party status. Thus the ease with which the far right could tip the demonstrations over into national chauvinism.

Many also now see the PKK war—long the preserve of the military—as being used as a further source of discontent for this coalition of groups weakened or threatened by the AKP and by Turkey’s economic development. Unlike previous staff reports of military campaigns against the PKK, the more recent ones have stressed only the military’s casualties, rather than the PKK’s. The chief of the General Staff, Gen. Yasar Buyukannit, has called on people to demonstrate against the PKK in the same numbers as demonstrated against Islamic rule. At the same time, the military declares that it is ready to go into Iraq and destroy PKK bases there at any minute—as soon as the AKP-dominated parliament gives it its orders.

The linchpin of all this is, of course, the July 22 general election. The implied slur in the military’s statement that its tanks are ready to roll and that the AKP is “soft on terror” exposes some complex twists. It is unlikely that the military wants to actually invade Iraq with anything other than a very limited operation and with U.S. and Iraqi Kurdish support—neither of which is forthcoming. Yet the likely success of a more limited operation would hand a victory to the AKP just in the run up to voting. Meanwhile, Erdogan is well aware that any such attack would be a huge gamble, risking Turkey’s—and the AKP’s—whole strategy for gaining EU membership. It also would risk blowback into Turkey itself. Indeed, the fact that most of the PKK’s support comes from within Turkey has also been successfully hidden by this fixation with Iraq.

Meanwhile, another big problem for Turkey’s secular establishment is that there are few credible political groups other than the AKP to run the country. If the presidential election goes to a popular vote, as has been suggested, it is also difficult to think of any secular politician with sufficient national standing to run seriously against an AKP candidate such as Abdullah Gul, the current foreign minister. This, the generals historically have sighed, has always been the problem—it’s not that they like intervening, but just that the political class is so hopeless. That the military men might still see things that way is a cause for alarm for many Turks, who remember only too well the coups of the past. Turkey’s extraordinary times look set to continue for some months to come.

Jon Gorvett is a free-lance journalist based in Istanbul.