Divided 'Islamist' republic: A rebellion for Turkey’s soul. HT:
RussiaToday.
Cycles of renewed demonstrations and spirited duels involving angry youth and
tense police forces continue to keep the country’s major cities on the boil, and
to sow doubts about the future direction of what was once hailed as a “global
swing state” that would have a decisive impact on Middle Eastern and world
politics.
A heavily polarized domestic political scene does not augur well for Turkey
to formulate consensus on key policy questions.
Compounding the troubles is a plunge in the Turkish lira, mounting current
account deficits and foreign debt, and a flight of capital. The much-touted
Turkish “economic miracle” is under a cloud, threatening to deepen the
social fissures which are already wide open.
What do the protesters want? I spoke to dozens of college students who are
the kernel of the uprising against what they denounce as the
“dictatorship” of the popularly-elected Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan.
I sensed that their demands hark back to the dual identity of Turkey as
both a European and an Islamic nation.
Some of them listed grievances such as
restrictions on personal freedoms; the non-availability of alcohol after 10 pm;
the ban on public displays of affection; the lifting of the constitutional ban
on the hijab (the traditional Islamic headscarf for women); and the
“advice” from Erdogan for Turkish women to have “at least three
children.” My enraged interlocutors, who fall mostly in the late teens and
early twenties demographic, insist that they have “no freedom in this country.”
A common refrain in the sloganeering that lights up the nights with political
sparks and an air of confrontation between the youth and police in all Turkish
cities is: “We are the soldiers of Mustafa.” Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the
founding father of the modern Turkish Republic, was a staunch secularist imbued
in Western values who instituted the constitutional principle of secularism, and
prevented the Turkish state from adopting Islam as the state religion.
Most of
the angst of the urbanites taking up cudgels against the current Islamist
Turkish government stems from fears of Erdogan’s creeping “hidden agenda” to
push the country towards a state-approved religious fundamentalist order.
But Erdogan’s supporters have a different take on the culture war. Their
first counterpoint is that Turkey has an overwhelmingly Muslim population, which
has been subject to deracination by Kemalist civilians and military rulers for
decades. For those who decry Erdogan’s permission to overturn the longstanding
ban on displaying the hijab in universities and government offices, the
traditionalists retort that over 60 percent of Turkish women anyway adorn
headscarves and they should be
“free” to do so in campuses and public
sector locations. Arguably, Turkey is relatively the freest Muslim majority
country in the world in terms of personal liberties, and the defenders of
Erdogan and his Islamist AKP party contend that the secularists are setting up a
straw man by alleging that these historically inherited freedoms are in danger.
Many Turks I have interacted with on the streets detest the ongoing cycle of
mass protests by their fellow citizens, and some accuse the protesters of
carrying the banner of homosexuality. Prime Minister Erdogan has labeled gay
people as “contrary to Islam” and some of his aides have labeled them as
carriers of a “biological disorder and disease.”
The conjunction between
the environmental cause of preserving Gezi Park and the gay rights movement in
recent months has drawn ridicule from traditionalist Turks that the park is a
“haven for gay couples to consort” and that
“immoral acts” should not be
tolerated.
The back-and-forth between the secularists and the Islamists has a
no-quarter-given quality to it, with little possibility of any midway
compromise.
This goes to the root of the problem besieging Turkey, which has
long nursed ambitions of joining the European Union but is also experiencing a
revival of Islamic sentiments based on socially conservative ideals.
With elections scheduled in 2014, Prime Minister Erdogan is unable to relax
his foot on the Islamism accelerator owing to fear of losing his traditional
base within the AKP party, and that half of the electorate which is pious and
expects him to uphold the conservative banner. The great success story of Turkey
as a resolver of the dilemma between Islam and Western-style liberal democracy
is thus being torn apart as the crisis unfolds.
I asked organizers of the protests in Istanbul how they could claim to be
fighting for democracy when Erdogan’s AKP party had won convincing majorities in
three successive elections since 2002.
The protest brigade responds with
theories that cast doubts on the fairness of the election results as well as the
political maturity of voters in rural Turkey, which is the traditionalist
stronghold of Erdogan.
With undisguised contempt, many protest leaders say that vote-buying through
AKP inducements is rampant in the politically sleepier Anatolian periphery, and
that the patronage networks of AKP politicians ensures thumping majorities in
elections by capitalizing on the
“ignorance” of the masses.
One Kurdish
youth, who is active in mobilizing demonstrations in the Beyoglu district of
Istanbul, even came up with an estimate of “a maximum of 35 percent of Turks
who genuinely believe in the Islamist ideology out of conviction.” The rest
of the AKP’s support base, he claimed, were gullible peasants who can be
wheedled into voting for it through petty sops.
If sections of the protest movement sound Bohemian and elitist, there is also
a leftwing strand among the opposition parties which leads loud group chanting
in public squares for Erdogan’s resignation.
The social-democratic Republican
Peoples Party (CHP), which won 26 percent of the votes in the last election, and
the smaller Communist Party of Turkey (TKP), are often vocal in the street
tussles with the police, while their banners are prominent there, too. The
occasional Che Guevara red flags are in plain sight.
These progressives articulate more of an economic critique of the Turkish
government’s path rather than its assault on personal freedoms. The high level
of inflation, the awarding of lucrative construction contracts to government
crony capitalists, and nearly double-digit unemployment are issues that are
intermeshed with the disenchantment that started over Gezi Park but has
metastasized into something wider.
Here, Turkey is no different from other
emerging market economies (EMEs), which underwent breakneck economic growth
until recently, but incurred costs like rising inequalities and failing social
safety nets.
The
“democracy with Turkish characteristics” that Erdogan has shepherded
created the openings for a fearless generation of youth who want more civil
liberties. Here, the perception that the prime minister is a
“victim of his
own success” rings true.
Some interpret this as meaning that Erdogan lost
his sense of limits on authority and allowed electoral success to get to his
head. Either way, there are no sparks of revolt without the prior underlying
structural transformation – for which all credit goes to Erdogan.
Imbalanced ‘middle power’
Contradictions abound in Turkish foreign policy. While Ankara may be on the
same side as the West on Syria, there is also the
“neo-Ottoman”
inclination to carve out a distinct Turkish sphere in the former Arab colonies
of the Middle East.
Ankara is the main staging ground for the Western agenda of
toppling Assad, but the AKP has also taken a regional lead in opposing Israel’s
blockade of Gaza.
The question may have to be rephrased, from “On whose
behalf is Turkey acting in world affairs?” to “What is Turkey’s role in
the international system?”
I posed the second question to Mitat Celikpala, a professor of international
relations at Istanbul’s leading Kadir Has University.
He responded that Turkey
was “a middle power that has lost its balance.” As a medium-sized world
power, Turkey cannot singlehandedly change either the regional or the global
order. But it enjoyed a special attraction and soft power in the Middle East by
virtue of its “European self” that set it apart from its Arab neighbors.
Erdogan, says Celikpala, has diminished Turkey’s unique pulling power in the
region through his Islamist governance, which negates his country’s status as a
free space for Arabs experiencing violence and extremism in their home nations.
The era when the Arab world could look up to Turkey with admiration is thus
gone. Turkey’s geographical location and direct intervention in the Syrian war
will keep its reputation as a “haven” for refugees, but the sectarian
“Sunni mindset” which permeates Erdogan’s vision of the Middle East has
damaged Turkey’s quest to assert an economic and cultural variant of
neo-Ottomanism.
The resilience of the rebellion is etched in the narrow alleyways of urban
Turkey, where one finds ubiquitous spray-painted slogans like
“Police killed
Ahmet” (a reference to Ahmet Atakan, a 22-year-old protester who was
recently found dead in the city of Antakya, bordering Syria). The state’s harsh
response to the agitation has in itself become a rallying cry triggering fresh
protests, producing cyclical disturbances that could become the new normal.
Turks who have decided that they will keep protesting until Erdogan goes are
becoming inured to the choking tear gas and water cannons aimed at them to
sanitize tourist areas. Every demonstrator I met, while huddling for safety
behind shop shutters or concrete pillars as the police tried to retake the
streets, said she or he was not afraid.
Mass mobilization and self-belief could dwindle as the euphoria of the Taksim
Square agitation fades with time, but Turkish politics is at a historic
inflection point.
The misguided “children” and “terrorists” whom
Erdogan has chastized are hunkering down for a long, nonviolent struggle to
reshape the destiny of what used to be a role model in the Middle East. The
consensus between Occident and Orient, which underlies Turkey’s legend as a
crossroad of civilizations, is on the line.
Turks who have decided that they will keep protesting until Erdogan’s
downfall are getting inured to the choking tear gas and water cannons aimed at
them to sanitize touristic places. Every demonstrator I met while huddling for
safety behind shop shutters or concrete pillars as the police tried to retake
the streets said she or he was not afraid.
Mass mobilization and self-belief could dwindle as the euphoria of the Taksim
Square agitation fades with time, but Turkish politics is at a historic
inflection point.
The misguided “children” and “terrorists” whom
Erdogan has chastised are hunkering down for a long nonviolent struggle to
reshape the destiny of what used to be a role model in the Middle East. The
consensus between Occident and Orient, which underlies Turkey’s legend as a
crossroads of civilisations, is on the line. Read the full story
here.
