Turkey’s just elected
Abdullah Gül is a conscientious Muslim who says his prayers and observes the
Ramadan fast. His wife appears in public with a silk scarf wound tightly around
her head. Although he was once associated with Islamism of a rather virulent
kind and was a member of the Welfare Party, whose stated goal was to challenge
Turkey's secular traditions, Gül gives the impression of having mellowed. As
foreign minister in the mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan from 2003 until his election to the presidency, Gül directed his
energies mainly at promoting Turkey's claims to EU membership. As president, he
has promised to safeguard Turkey's secular regime.
Gül is not a member
of Turkey's establishment. He is the first Turkish president in decades to have
come from neither the armed forces nor the bureaucracy; his father was a
machine worker in Kayseri, a provincial town in central Turkey that is known
for both its piety and its entrepreneurial spirit. Compared to the outgoing
president, the socially awkward secularist Ahmet Necdet
Sezer, Gül seems worldly and cosmopolitan. He studied in England and, in the
1980s, worked for eight years as an economist for the Islamic Development Bank
in Jeddah. He is an affable man, with a reputation for probity, and he is
popular abroad.
Still, many Turkish
secularists are appalled that Gül now occupies Cankaya, the pink concrete
presidential palace in Ankara. For them, Cankaya is hallowed because of its
association with modern Turkey's founder, Kemal Atatürk. Cankaya, in its
earlier, prettier, stone incarnation, is where Atatürk planned his expulsion of
the Greeks and other Western invaders from Asia Minor following the defeat of
the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. It is where he plotted to
replace the empire with a republic. Most important, Cankaya is where Atatürk
devised his great program of modernization, a "revolution" that
secularized education and the law, emancipated women, and proclaimed the
principles of "knowledge and science" that would henceforth guide
Turkey's development.
Since Atatürk's death
in 1938, the only Cankaya resident to have been perceived as a challenge to
Atatürk's secular legacy, Celal Bayar, was deposed in a coup in 1960, the first
of four interventions by the Turkish military establishment, which sees itself
as protecting the tradition of Atatürk. Subsequent presidents have generally
erred on the side of authoritarianism in their adherence to Kemalism,
the founder's paternalistic political doctrine. In 1997, for instance, the
president at the time, Süleyman Demirel, cooperated when the armed forces
pushed an Islamist government out of power. During his tenure, Demirel's
successor Ahmet Necdet Sezer vetoed the appointment
of hundreds of bureaucrats who were affiliated with Erdogan's Justice and
Development Party (AKP) and pointedly failed to invite Erdogan's wife to
official functions, on the grounds that
the law does not allow women with head scarves into official buildings. But
Sezer has now retired to his lakeside villa near Ankara, and the Islamists, or
the ex-Islamists, as some observers now call them, have conquered Atatürk's castle.
It is worth recalling
how this happened. Although the process of transition was tumultuous to begin
with, it subsequently became calm, leaving grounds for hope that Turkey's
inevitable wider transformation will also be peaceful. Back in April, Erdogan
abandoned his plans to run for president under pressure from the chief of the
armed forces, Yasar Büyükanit, from Sezer himself,
and from the hundreds of thousands of secular-minded citizens who took part in
an anti-government rally in Ankara on April 14. But Gül, the second AKP choice,
proved no more acceptable to the secularists, and a campaign started to prevent
him from becoming president. Roused by anti-Islamist unions and the main
opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), the secularists staged more protests
in big cities.
On April 27, the Web
site of the general staff carried a statement attacking the proponents of
"a reactionary mindset whose sole aim is to erode the fundamentals of our
state," and vowing that the armed forces would, "if necessary,
act...in a clear and unambiguous manner." This was interpreted as a sign
that a coup against Erdogan's government was in the offing. A few days later,
the Constitutional Court ruled that a quorum of 367 deputies had to be present
in parliament for any vote on a new president to proceed. Because the CHP
deputies duly failed to turn up, the number in attendance fell just below the
court's threshold, and Erdogan was forced to withdraw Gül's candidacy.
Erdogan had called
the general staff's statement "a shot fired at democracy," and it was
through the democratic process that he sought redress. Rather than call his own
supporters into the streets, which might have precipitated a coup, he announced
early elections for July 22. As the head of a government whose performance,
especially in managing the economy, had been impressive, Erdogan already stood
a good chance of holding on to his parliamentary majority. The generals'
interference helped him further, allowing the AKP to present itself as having
been wronged, and its supporters insulted, by an unelected military elite.
Erdogan's plan worked and the AKP won a stunning victory at the polls. His
candidacy vindicated by the voters, Gül once again announced that he would
stand for the presidency, and the chief of the armed forces indicated that this
time he would not stand in his way. And as described in our assessment below,
on August 28, Abdullah Gül became Turkey's president.
It is hard to take
seriously the more alarmist statements of Turkey's die-hard secularists. As
Erdogan deliberated on whether or not to run for the presidency, for example,
Sezer claimed that Turkish secularism faced "its gravest threat"
since the Republic's inception, a statement that ignored the Islamist uprising
that convulsed the Kurdish southeast in 1925 and the massacres of Alevis, members of a sect of heterodox Muslims, by Sunni
bigots in the 1970s.
Since it came to
power in 2002, the AKP has passed no overtly Islamist legislation. Erdogan
tried to outlaw adultery, and some AKP mayors of provincial cities briefly set
up alcohol-free zones, but these schemes met with protest and were abandoned.
Erdogan's education minister has been accused of Islamizing textbooks, and of
packing his ministry with former employees of the Religious Affairs
Directorate, but education remains, for the pupils at most state schools, a
resoundingly secular experience. The AKP has not tried to limit or ban usury.
Although it came to power promising satisfaction to those who chafe at the
head-scarf ban, a highly controversial symbol of the secular–Islamist divide,
it did not, in its first term, try to reverse this ban, and the sixty-two women
it put up for election in July were all bare-headed. Moreover, over the past
few years, the government has brought about what a recent report on women's
rights from the European Stability Initiative, a Berlin-based think tank,
called "the most radical changes to the legal status of Turkish women in
80 years."1 Under these reforms, rape in marriage and sexual harassment in
the workplace were made criminal offenses, and sexual crimes in general were
classified as violations of the rights of the individual. They had formerly
been defined as crimes against society, the family, or public morality.
Ever since he became
prime minister, Erdogan, who may have been chastened by the four months he had
recently spent in jail for declaiming some Islamist verses, has been moving his
party toward the center of Turkish politics. During the campaign, the far-right
Nationalist Action Party (MHP) accused him in its election leaflets of
expunging Islamic tenets from school textbooks in order to please the EU, and
of promoting the activities of Christian missionaries. The leaflets contained
photographs of Erdogan wearing a sinister Mason-like gown, apparently worn when
he received an honorary degree from a Western university, and another of him
with the Pope.
The AKP is related,
historically and ideologically, to the Welfare Party, which briefly held power
in the late 1990s in a coalition government that the armed forces toppled for
promoting religious education and trying to turn Turkey away from the West. But
much divides the two parties. It is hard to imagine today's AKP, for instance,
endorsing Welfare's denunciation of the "order of slavery" imposed by
"Zionism and Western imperialism," or its prescription of
"disinfectants" for the "microbes" of the capitalist
banking system. Welfare's parliamentary delegation was full of firebrands,
including one who promised bloodshed on a scale "worse than Algeria"
if the Kemalists pursued their secular aims. Many of these extremists were not
invited to join the AKP when Erdogan set it up in 2001. Most of those who did
join, and entered parliament the following year, were among the 150-odd sitting
AKP deputies whom Erdogan removed from the party list before July's election.
They were replaced by candidates of his own choosing.
Abdullah Gül's home
province of Kayseri, in the middle of Anatolia, over three hundred miles from
Istanbul, has emerged on the winning side in this conflict. During twenty-five
years of demographic and economic development, Kayseri has transformed itself
from a backward region, dependent on the state for agricultural subsidies and
industrial investments, into a place where one can see the private sector at
its most ambitious and imaginative, and home to several of Turkey's most
profitable companies. Back in the 1980s, when Turkey was first exposed to
global competition, Kayseri's entrepreneurs invested in machinery and know-how;
nowadays, the province's industrialists, notably its furniture and textile
manufacturers, are respected internationally. For sugar producers in the
province, the recent phasing out of subsidies has turned out to be a blessing.
Newly privatized, thriving in a competitive environment, Kayseri's big sugar
refinery has doubled its daily processing capacity. It is now Turkey's second-most-profitable
refinery.
Prosperity has
changed the provincial capital, also called Kayseri. Having been, as recently
as the 1960s, a modest little town, it has grown into a modern city with a
population of 600,000 and amenities to match. Literacy rates have risen
sharply, among women as well as men. The city has a well-established
university, which receives private as well as public funding.
Why do many Turkish
secularists feel uneasy as they view the strides taken by Kayseri and several
comparable Anatolian towns? The answer lies in the growth of Islamic cultural
autonomy that the new wealth has generated, and its apparent conflict with the
principles of the secular state. Many of Kayseri's top entrepreneurs are
members of an association of religious-minded businessmen. They go on the
pilgrimage to Mecca and host lavish breakfasts during Ramadan. They contribute
to the building and upkeep of mosques, finance courses on the Koran, and help
poor young people to attend university. The entrepreneurs of Kayseri are rich
enough to buy large houses in Istanbul and villas on the coast, and to send
their daughters to private universities, in this way, they can circumvent the
head-scarf ban. Some are affiliated with Islamic religious brotherhoods,
outlawed by Atatürk, that have been accused of undermining the secular order.
The AKP is their natural political home.
Under Erdogan,
liberalization of the economy has gone faster and deeper. Backed by the
International Monetary Fund, with which it has a standby agreement, the AKP has
shown more fiscal and monetary discipline than any recent government. It has
accelerated privatization and attracted record levels of foreign direct
investment. The government has brought down inflation, which averaged almost 70
percent between 1996 and 2001, to below 10 percent. The economy is growing
strongly.
Not all Turks have
reaped the benefits, and many have felt only the costs. The increases in new
jobs in private factories and the service sector have been offset as
agriculture has shrunk, and thousands of small shops, unable to compete with
new supermarkets and US-style malls, have closed. Despite the boom,
unemployment has hovered around 2.5 million, 10 percent of the workforce, since
2002; and unemployed workers have minimal benefits or none at all. Rural
communities have continued to empty. The province of Cankiri, for instance,
which once survived on agriculture, is now dependent on the remittances of some
700,000 migrants to Ankara and Istanbul.
The AKP is also the
party of these migrants. Confused, alienated, and far from home, they find in
the AKP an outlet for their conservatism and a vehicle for their material
aspirations. In Erdogan, the son of a migrant to Istanbul, they have an example
to admire. Their feelings are not shared by the established urban middle class.
Many educated secularists deplore the newcomers' manners and customs, and they
resent what they perceive as an erosion of civic and urban values. Having to
act as unwilling hosts to wave after wave of Anatolian yokels seems to them
like a cruel ending after the leadership that the Kemalists once benevolently
exercised over the country. These same urban Turks participated in the huge
antigovernment protests of the spring. Combined with the actions and statements
of the armed forces, secular groups, and President Sezer, their openly
expressed concerns about Islamism contributed to the impression that a very
large coalition was forming.
The coalition turned
out to be smaller, and less able to rally other Turks, than the protests
suggested. One reason for this is that for all their rhetorical defense of
"modernity," the Kemalists have a limited program, founded on
paranoia and opposition to change. The leader of the CHP, for instance, the
party that Atatürk founded, has claimed to be the target of a CIA assassination
plot. During the election campaign, the newspaper Cumhuriyet, a bastion of the
Kemalist left, competed with far-right publications in its chauvinistic
denunciation of such institutions as the IMF and the EU.
Yasar Büyükanit, the chief of the armed forces, is deeply
skeptical about the European Union. He has hinted that the EU is trying to
dismember Turkey by supporting Kurdish nationalists and other minorities, and
by demanding a formal recognition by the Turkish government of the 1915
Armenian massacres. In 2005, while Büyükanit was head
of Turkey's land forces, he aroused concern in Europe by praising a military
agent who had been arrested after bombing a bookshop owned by a Kurdish
nationalist. Immediately after Gül's election, he warned that "crafty
plans" were being hatched to "destroy the gains of modernity."
This was interpreted as an allusion to a new constitution, currently being
drafted behind closed doors, which Erdogan has proposed to adopt next year.
This document is expected to subordinate further the armed forces to civilian
authority, and to give the Kurds unprecedented cultural recognition, reforms
that the European Union has long advocated.2
There is a consensus
among many Turks, and among Europeans friendly to Turkey, that the Kemalist
elite must continue to give up power. At the same time, even Turkey's small
number of genuine liberals grudgingly appreciate that were it not for the armed
forces and some judges, the Islamists might not have moderated their message or
their policies to the extent that they have. Had the armed forces not
intervened in 1997, and the courts not banned the Welfare Party and jailed
Erdogan, Turkey's political life would indeed have become more Islamist in
character. While many distrust the Islamists' actions, innocuous as they are,
it is the intentions and sincerity of Erdogan and Gül that are the real source
of anxiety, and which the armed forces use to justify their continuing
involvement in public life.
Many pro-EU Turks
link their country's future development to its joining the European Union.
According to this view, membership would prevent the resurgence of radical
Islamism and force the armed forces to assume the diminished powers,
accountable to elected civilians, that they have in other EU countries. But
entry into the EU, in spite of the AKP's recent pledge to redouble its efforts
to meet the EU's criteria, seems a long way off. Since 2006, negotiations have
been frozen on several of the "chapters" of EU law that countries
must adopt in order to be admitted, and which would require the Turks to make
further improvements in human rights and to promote the cultural rights of
minorities such as the Kurds. In part this freeze is punishment for Turkey's
refusal to open its ports to Greek Cypriot ships unless the EU lifts its
thirty-three-year-old trade embargo on the Turkish-run northern third of the
island, a self-styled republic that the EU does not recognize. It is also a
response to Turkey's shortcomings in other matters, including human rights. The
EU leaders are particularly unhappy about the AKP's failure to scrap a
notorious article of the penal code under which several people, including the
2006 Nobel laureate for literature, Orhan Pamuk, have been charged with
"insulting Turkishness,"3 often because they denounce Turkey's
massacre of Armenians in 1915.
Mutual hostility
between Turks and some countries in the European Union has risen in recent
years. According to a recent poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund of the
United States and the Compagnia di San Paolo, an
Italian foundation, 49 percent of people in France, and 43 percent of people in
Germany, where there is widespread hostility toward the country's large number
of immigrant Turks, regard the prospect of Turkish membership as a "bad thing,"
while a mere 40 percent of Turks support membership in the union, a big drop
from the 73-percent figure for 2004. Turks' enthusiasm for the union seems to
have fallen in proportion to their declining confidence that they will be
admitted. According to the same survey, barely a quarter of Turks expect the union
to let them in. Since coming to power, Nicolas Sarkozy has said that he may not
carry out his campaign pledge to block accession negotiations on further
"chapters," but he continues to favor a "privileged
partnership" for Turkey, not full membership.
The irony is that in
Abdullah Gül Turkey finally has a president who is an avowed Europhile and an
advocate of human rights and other European ideals. It is possible that the
AKP, emboldened by its second mandate, may do what Ali Babacan, the new foreign
minister, recently said it would, which is to accelerate the reform process and
promulgate a new constitution, "to prepare a better...environment for our
own people," so Turkey is "perceived more and more as an asset for
the EU." Equally, it is possible that some members of the government will
revert, at least partially, to their former Islamist selves. On September 19,
for instance, Erdogan announced that he wanted the new constitution to allow
women to wear head scarves in universities. He described the issue as one of
individual liberty.
In his inaugural
address, President Gül defined secularism as "a rule for social peace no
less than it is an empowering model for different ways of life within
democracy." This definition, with its suggestions of political and social
pluralism, was seized on by some secularists in the press as fresh evidence
that the government and the President are intent on dismantling the secular
system in the name of increasing rights and, eventually, undermining democracy
itself. That seems unlikely. Having identified the democratic process as an
ally in their rise to power, many of Turkey's mainstream Islamists have become
convinced of its superiority to other systems of government. These men and
women say they must face the challenge of reconciling Islam with a free
politics. Whether they intended to or not, the Islamists have changed.
The AKP itself
performed remarkably well on July 22. The party won 47 percent of the vote, 12
percent more than in 2002, but the entry into parliament of the far-right MHP,
and some independents, meant that it got slightly fewer seats, 341 of the 550
available.
The election was not
a contest between Islamism and secularism. Although the antigovernment protests
of the spring were impressive, they were held in relatively progressive parts
of western Turkey, underscoring the absence of large numbers of passionate secularists
in central and eastern Anatolia. The largely secular CHP campaigned on issues
such as corruption, the lot of the poor, and the government's handling of the
Kurdish problem. The MHP taunted the government for not hanging Abdullah Öcalan, the incarcerated leader of the Kurdistan Workers
Party (PKK), whose long, ongoing war against the Turkish state has so far cost
around 37,000 lives. The CHP won ninety-nine seats, the MHP seventy-one.
The AKP has become
Turkey's first party in decades to have support from all parts of Turkey. This
was illustrated by its impressive showing in the eastern and southeastern
provinces whose inhabitants are mostly Kurdish, provinces that have given a
great deal, in lives, suffering, and perennial underdevelopment, for Öcalan and his cause.
On election night I
was in the headquarters of the Democratic Society Party, Turkey's latest
Kurdish nationalist party, in Varto, a rural district
in the mainly Kurdish province of Mus. The party had nominated some of its
leading members as independent candidates, hoping to circumvent an electoral
rule preventing small parties from entering parliament, and there was at first
much optimistic talk in the room. But the results were extremely disappointing.
In a district that has provided the PKK with hundreds of recruits, the AKP vote
rose at the expense of the Kurdish nationalists. And the electoral strength of
the AKP generally came as a shock. The party won more than 50 percent of the
vote in several overwhelmingly Kurdish provinces.
The AKP has used its power
cannily in the Kurdish provinces, extending free health care and giving out
schoolbooks as part of a campaign to persuade people in the partly illiterate
region to send their children to school. The AKP's reputation for piety has not
harmed it since many Kurds, despite the PKK's disapproving attitude toward
religion, are pious as well. The Kurds appreciate the government's resistance
to pressure from the armed forces to authorize an attack across the border into
northern Iraq on PKK camps there. But the main explanation for the AKP's
popularity among the Kurds is that Erdogan, unlike his predecessors, recognizes
that the Kurdish problem turns on respect for Kurdish ethnic identity, not
economic and social backwardness. The government has modestly increased the
Kurds' linguistic and cultural autonomy and much reduced torture in police
stations, a major change. The fighting, although it continues, is less intense
than it was.
The new constitution
will allow, so some have said, the teaching of Kurdish as a second language in
Turkish schools. It will also redefine Turkish citizenship without any
reference to ethnicity. Such reforms would be popular among the Kurds, who
resent the current constitution's emphasis on Turkish culture. The PKK, which
has stopped demanding a separate Kurdish state, could hardly complain.
A danger for the
future is that as the PKK watches the AKP gain popularity in the southeast, it
may intensify its attacks on the security forces, hoping that the reaction will
radicalize normal Kurds, who are mostly fed up with war. Another danger is that
the Turkish army could decide to intensify the war against the PKK. That would
strike another blow at Turkey's already frustrated European aspirations.
A third danger is
that Erdogan and his allies will recklessly allow some of their old Islamist
instincts to reassert themselves. There is little doubt that, if Erdogan
insists on reversing the ban on head-scarved women in universities, there will
be another crisis. It would be a mistake for the AKP to assume brazenly that
the age of coups is over. On balance, however, Turkey gives ground for hope. It
is possible that an Islamist movement with a history of intolerance and bigotry
will succeed in transforming Turkish politics along genuinely democratic lines.
This seems to be the task that the AKP has set itself; with what degree of
determination, time will tell. The 2007 general election, as much a triumph for
democracy as it was for the AKP, may one day be seen as a turning point.
1 See the European
Stability Initiative's "Sex and Power in Turkey: Feminism, Islam and the
Maturing of Turkish Democracy" (Berlin and Istanbul: ESI, June 2, 2007),
available at www.esiweb .org.
2 It should not be
assumed that the armed forces are the generally disinterested Europhiles
described in Foreign Affairs last year. The authors are informative on the
AKP's trimming of military powers and privileges, but they are excessively
optimistic when they suggest that the armed forces want Turkey to join the EU
and believe that membership could solve the problems of Kurdish nationalism and
rising Islamism. My impression is that General Büyükan’t
and other senior officers fear that membership will exacerbate these problems
and challenge Turkish sovereignty. Junior officers are, if anything, even
blunter than Büyükan’t in their hostility to the EU.
3 Criticism is not
restricted to Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which has been used to
prosecute Pamuk and other writers: see Amnesty International's recent report on
abuses in the Turkish justice system, "Justice Delayed and Denied: The Persistence
of Protracted and Unfair Trials for Those Charged under Anti-terrorism
Legislation."
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