After Banning of Virtue, Nationalism Takes Over Where Islamism Left Off

By Jon Gorvett

Eight years ago this July, in the central Turkish city of Sivas, 33 writers and intellectuals were burned to death in a hotel fire started by a fundamentalist mob.

The “Sivas incident,” as it became known, was one of the worst political massacres in recent Turkish history. Until then, some secular, mainly leftist, public figures had been subject to periodic armed attack from religious extremists, but with Sivas, it seemed that this age-old conflict had erupted into a major new form. The alarm bells started to go off—not just in Ankara, but in the U.S. and Europe, too.

Concurrent with this apparent upsurge in fundamentalist violence, in the early 1980s it seemed political Islam also was becoming unstoppable. In 1984 the pro-Islamist Welfare Party won control of Istanbul in the municipal elections. A year after that, the party swept to national victory, forming a government in coalition with an opportunist center-right party. Necemettin Erbakan, for years the bogey man of Turkey’s staunchly secular military and bureaucratic establishments, became prime minister.

Now, however, a few years down the road, the picture seems a quite different one. In late June, the Constitutional Court banned Welfare’s successor, Virtue, with hardly a ripple appearing on the Turkish political pond. Never mind that Virtue was the country’s largest opposition party, with some 100 deputies in the 550-seat parliament, nor the fact that its mayors run both Istanbul and Ankara city halls.

While the court judges had timed their decision so that it would be announced after the markets had closed on a Friday evening, it seemed they needn’t have bothered, for when the markets reopened Monday morning, they showed every sign of being more buoyant than they had been for weeks.

Meanwhile, on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, not a single protest was held, while the most Virtue leader Recai Kutan could do was say he was “bitterly disappointed” before leading a silent walk-out of Virtue deputies from the assembly.

Virtue was banned on the grounds that it had become the “center for fundamentalist activity.” Five of its deputies were given personal bans as well, disqualifying them from parliament and leaving one—the wine-drinking, non-headscarf-wearing Nazli Ilicak—open to military court action for criticisms of the generals made while under parliamentary immunity. The non-banned Virtue deputies retained their seats but became “independents,” losing all their positions on parliamentary committees. Leadership of the opposition passed to the one party remaining, Tansu Ciller’s True Path—a group which barely managed to get enough votes to ensure any representation at all at the last general election.

It seems Virtue itself was most interested in being banned.

“Deputy chief constitutional judge Hasim Kilic said a day before the verdict that this was a political case,” wrote the respected columnist Cengiz Candar in the daily Yeni Safak. “He then added that they were trying to make this political case fit the legal terms. The fact is that the social reality of the six million Turks who voted for Virtue is now being ruled out.”

Columnists and commentators generally were united in their condemnation of the closure decision. Virtue had gone out of its way to distance itself from any fundamentalist activity, had always played by the quirky rules of Turkish democracy, and had most likely even succeeded in pulling into peaceful political activity social groups which in other circumstances or countries might have turned to more violent extremes. Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said the court ruling had “upset” him deeply, while the other party leaders also expressed their disagreement with the decision.

So who wanted Virtue closed? Mainly, it seems—aside from the more extreme secularists in the military and the bureaucracy—it was Virtue itself that was most interested in being banned.

This rather paradoxical concept stems from the fact that, by the time of the ruling, the party had become deeply split. Divided for some time into “greybeards,” or conservatives, and liberals, both factions seemed to be looking for the court ban to provide an opportunity to go their separate ways.

“The party’s closure will make it possible for both liberals and conservatives to get divorced on legal grounds,” said columnist Turker Alkan of the liberal daily, Radikal.

Fragmentation Not Banned

It now seems that the conservatives will have a new party up and running by the end of July, while the liberals also have announced their intention to form a new center-right grouping. Having been ousted from power, political Islam was unable to prevent itself from being banned, and is now openly fragmenting.

It is possible, however, that the depth of the current economic crisis is partly to blame for the lack of any reaction. Many Turks have far more to worry about as job losses continue to mount, while prices continue to rise. Many of political Islam’s supporters, moreover, are the ones who are suffering from the crash, which began with the double financial crises of November and February. Traditionally, Virtue voters come from among the urban poor—usually first-generation migrants to the cities from the villages—or from more traditional rural communities in the Anatolian heartlands.

These also are the main source of support for Turkey’s far-right National Action Party. As the second largest party in the current three-party coalition government, they probably stand to gain the most from any fragmentation of the religious right. Their leader, Devlet Bahceli, said a few days after Virtue was banned that his party’s doors were “always open.” By early June, there was already a rumor in Ankara that up to 40 deputies might be waiting for a chance to walk through that door, which would give the nationalists the majority in the government and make Bahceli prime minister.

Such a possibility would be deeply worrying to, among others, the IMF. After the February financial crisis, the government signed an agreement with the Fund to undertake a sweeping program of structural reform. This was largely in order to get its hands on the large amounts of IMF cash available to rehydrate its liquidity-crunched economy. The agreement included a program of privatization, one of the main prizes of which was Turk Telekom, the state telecommunications giant. This, however, has aroused the ire of the nationalists—despite Bahceli also having signed the agreement with the Fund—who see it as unwelcome foreign interference. The party seems determined to try and position itself as the defenders of ordinary Turks against international manipulation.

As a result the government is steering very close to the wind, as its leaders try not to be outflanked by nationalist rhetoric. After all, blaming foreign conspiracies is clearly preferable to focusing on the fact that it was this very same government running the country when the crises hit.

Appointed by the cabinet as a kind of economics supremo, ex-World Bank official Kemal Dervis has been attempting to keep the coalition parties sticking to the agreement. He has been having an increasingly difficult time, however, as his erstwhile government allies cast him as “the IMF’s man” or a “representative of the U.S.” After one particular row between Dervis and the nationalists in late June, it was even thought that Dervis might resign—with Bahceli commenting that if Dervis wanted to go, he should.

So the IMF’s structural reforms are meeting some heavy structural resistance, and from what quite possibly soon may be Turkey’s ruling party. It is a cause for considerable concern for those backing economic and political reform. Eight years after Sivas, it may be that it is nationalism, not fundamentalism, that turns out to be Turkey’s biggest question mark.

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