Photo: Burak Su / Flickr Piety-style Turkey is better off economically, though not as much as you’ve been told. Still, even considering the past few weeks’ horrific events, even considering the preposterous show trials, the increasing displacement of state-worshipping authoritarians by piety-style authoritarians in Turkey’s institutions, the jailing of journalists, the censorship of the Internet, the almost unfathomable dishonesty of its government and its intellectuals, the cronyism, the corruption, the foreign policy misadventures as its government shows support for Hamas and flouts the Europeans and declares Zionism to be a form of fascism—despite all of that, it’s probably a better place to live, for most of its citizens, than it has been at many points in its recent so-called secular past. And Turkey was never truly “secular,” at least not in the way Americans understand the term. True, after the founding of the Republic, Islamic courts were abolished and replaced with a secular legal apparatus, often modeled word-for-word on the Swiss, German, and Italian civil and penal codes. But a state-funded and state-controlled institution, the Diyanet, was one of the first organizations established by the Turkish Parliament after the abolition of the Caliphate in 1924. It was founded “to execute works concerning the beliefs, worship, and ethics of Islam, enlighten the public about their religion, and administer the sacred worshipping places.” Those would be the ethics of the Hanafi Sunni school of Islam, not the Eleusinian Mystery cults—or any of the religions of the 20 percent of the Turkish population who aren’t Sunni Muslims. The point is that religion in Turkey has always been subservient to, and a tool for, the state. When the state decides it’s important, the Diyanet can tell the Imams—all the imams, if they want to stay out of jail—what to put in their sermons. None too secular, that. Neither is the increasingly visible Islamic discourse of today’s ruling elites, nor that of the civil servants who work for them. Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East. It’s a democracy with free elections. It has a secular constitution. It’s a member of NATO. And every so often, it goes nuts and kills its own citizens. So Turkey is a rarity in the Middle East: It’s a democracy, if only in the sense that it does hold regular, free elections, and it has a secular constitution. It’s in NATO, and it furnishes NATO’s second-largest army—and its leading army, if you use the criteria of “percentage of admirals and generals in jail.” It provides a crucial energy corridor to Europe. The Incirlik air base has a vital staging point for the US military, for the most part. It has made a reasonable contribution to the coalition forces in Afghanistan, and agreed to host a radar system designed by the United States as part of its NATO shield against a missile attack aimed at Europe. And every so often, as sort of a national tradition, Turkey goes nuts and kills a few—or more than a few—of its own citizens. The Dersim rebellion in 1937 and 1938 was suppressed with such vigor that historians suspect tens of thousands of souls perished. The civil war with the terrorist PKK is said to have claimed 40,000 lives. At the height of the conflict, in the 1990s, thousands of civilians were systematically rounded up and—with no trial—jailed and tortured and disappeared. And shall we mention not only the military coups, but the events that led up to them, such as the clashes in the 1970s between far-left and far-right paramilitaries, which created such chaos and anarchy—killing, on average, ten people a day and toward the end, 20 a day—that the public was relieved, yes relieved, when the military finally stepped in? They whitewash that effusion of relief right out of history here these days, but ask anyone old enough to remember it, just remember to ask them in private. They wanted that junta, and badly, until the junta began doing what juntas tend to do, with one very important exception: After finishing up the torturing and the hanging, they returned the government to the civilians. So we should not for a moment imagine that the events of the past weeks have been some hideous aberration from the otherwise irenic and secular history of the Turkish Republic. Yet, in the past decade, since the rise of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his AKP party, the world has decided that Turkey is finally democratizing—and this precisely as the screws have in fact tightened around crucial pieces of what you would call an ordinary democratic civil discourse and judicial norms. Indeed, Erdoğan has so thoroughly undermined free civic expression and the rule of law that a great many Turks feel that their country has been ripped from their hands. Military leaders are in jail. Journalists are in jail. Professors are in jail. Elected parliamentarians are in jail. This has been going on for years now, though rather ignored by many in the West. And when the government this spring decided to go medieval on a few tent-dwelling, yoga-practicing, tree-decorating youths trying to save an Istanbul park, many of us felt a kind of stomach-churning inevitability, accompanying the breaking of bones and the unbreathable air. April 2: A rumor starts going around that people are trying to organize a protest to save Gezi Park. People here protest a lot, so I don’t pay much attention. On weekends you can often see five or six protests a day in Taksim Square. Usually no one notices them. The police watch them benignly, and the protests make no difference at all, especially since they’re always uniquely boring. The slogans are ritualized, it’s always “shoulder-to-shoulder against something” (be it fascists or whale-killers), and everyone goes home at the scheduled time and nothing ever changes. But this rumor is a little different, because the organizers claim that 50,000 people have already signed up for it. That’s a lot of protesters. I mention this to a friend, en passant. He’s pretty shrewd about Turkey, being Turkish. He says, “If 50,000 people actually signed something and a sizable fraction shows up, I don’t see the AKP tolerating this. Even the anti-censorship march drew inane bile from the heavyweights of the AKP newspapers.” “Or they’ll be ignored,” I say. “But I wish them well.” “There’s a fairly good chance they’ll get hit and gassed,” he replies. I should note that “hit and gassed” happens so often here lately that we barely notice it anymore. We just check the #dailygasreport on Twitter to see what streets to avoid. It’s like traffic: one of the hassles of Istanbul you learn to deal with. “Maybe,” I say, and then make one of my less prescient predictions. “Of one thing I’m sure—unless, say, 50 Buddhist nuns set themselves on fire, or an American tourist is bludgeoned by a glue-sniffer, no one outside of Turkey will be interested.” It takes a few weeks for me to be proven quite wrong. May 31: The police burst into Gezi Park at dawn with tear gas and water cannons. More than a hundred protesters are injured, including three journalists. By eight that evening, some 100,000 more return to the area to try to defend it. The police block the roads leading to Taksim Square with barriers and try to disperse the crowds. Within hours, the protests spread throughout Istanbul, and then to other cities.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Jul 2013 08:50:37 +0000
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