The Former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey, W. Robert Pearson, spoke to our National Security Forum last year. He posted this analysis of the Turkish coup attempt and asked us to distribute it to our NSF participants. It is a extraordinarily insightful article and deserves close attention.
What Caused the Turkish Coup Attempt?
President Erdogan’s uncompromising approach to rule was bound
to produce a violent backlash—but this wasn’t the way to go.
By Amb. W. Robert Pearson
Politico.com, July 16, 2016
A military coup succeeds or fails quickly. The July 15 attempt in Turkey now is over with thousands arrested, hundreds killed and Turkey in traumatic shock. The reasons behind a coup attempt, however, do not rise or disappear as quickly.
In a country that treats conspiracy theories like snack food, there will be few limits to public speculation in Turkey. For its part, the government has moved quickly to blame President Erdogan’s previous chief ally, Fetullah Gulen. The government quickly rounded up nearly 3,000 people suspected of involvement, and Erdogan has promised further retaliation. “They will pay a heavy price for this,” he said.
U.S.-Turkey relations might pay a price as well. Gulen has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and the Turkish government is now accusing Washington of sheltering him—which provides the government with an opportunity to deflect attention away from its own actions. Turkey filed a lawsuit in 2014 to compel the U.S. to extradite Gulen to Turkey, but on June 29 the federal court in Pennsylvania dismissed the suit as not within its jurisdiction. Lawyers for Turkey say they will continue to press the U.S. executive branch to extradite Gulen. “Turkey will not be run from a house in Pennsylvania,” Erdogan said Saturday, according to TRT World.
It’s not that simple, unfortunately. There is an existential battle going on for Turkey’s heart and for Turkish democracy. The struggle began years ago, has powerful forces on each side, and neither side intends to leave the field until the matter is settled. Years of turmoil may lie ahead for this important ally of the United States. The coup attempt—wrong, undemocratic and unacceptable in any modern society—did not arise from nothing, and we need to examine the possible causes.
The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is devoted to a view that emphasizes the right of majority rule over concepts of shared control by institutions within a constitutional system. His views are similar but not identical with the Muslim Brotherhood theory of government which does not recognize freedom of press, individual rights against the state, the separation of powers or a clear division between state and religion.
His view contrasts sharply with the original vision of Kemal Ataturk and his contemporary disciples to maintain a secular democratic state with checks and balances, rule of law, and protected rights for individuals against the State. The two views admit little space for compromise thus far.
By their own rhetoric, the coup leaders pointed to corruption and the threat to Turkey’s secularism as reasons for their actions. These are concerns widely shared among elements of the Turkish public, and these sentiments will persist even as the coup itself is rightly condemned as an attack on the principles of democracy.
In recent times, riding a series of election wins that gave his party strong support, Erdogan has moved aggressively to neutralize any serious political or popular opposition to his vision:
—In 2012, with the strong support of Fetullah Gulen, his then-chief ally, he purged the armed forces in a series of show trials that raised fundamental questions about respect for the rule of law;
—The government accelerated moves in recent years to take over newspapers, TV stations and media outlets, resulting in almost total control of the media by the government;
—In the summer of 2013, the government forcibly repressed peaceful demonstrations nationwide against perceived government authoritarianism;
—In 2014, the government threw out widely believed corruption charges against families of government ministers, including against Mr. Erdogan’s son;
—Also in 2014, the government charged Fetullah Gulen with organizing a “parallel state structure” and began removing his supporters from government bodies;
—In 2015, the government accused university professors of treason for urging a restart to the peace process with the Kurds, leading to threats to remove them from faculties, and new legislation in July 2016 gave the government greatly increased powers over appointment of judges at all levels of the Turkish judiciary;
—Changes in Turkey’s educational system have introduced compulsory religious instruction and altered the governance of schools and universities in ways that weaken the secular nature of education.
The charge that, in response to the moves against Gulen and his supporters starting in 2014, die-hard Gulenists in the military launched the coup attempt may be true. Given the use of public broadsides by the government against all forms of opposition in order to maintain popular support, however, we may never know the actual facts. There is something peculiar about the charge. Gulen himself was the motive force behind the government’s purge of the military in sham trials in 2012. It sounds convenient for the government to charge Fetullah Gulen with an armed coup attempt when there are so many other reasons why unrest might have erupted within a military charged by Ataturk with preserving democracy and the secular nature of the Republic.
Whatever the truth of these charges by the government, what brought Turkey to this particular moment will roil the fabric of Turkish society well into the future. It is a story of old glory and new revolution, of liberal ideas and conservative control, of what defines democracy and what model Turkish will present to the Muslim world. It is the story of one man determined to surmount every obstacle in his path and a society that time and again seemed to have crushed his ambitions. It also goes back to conflicts that date from the very beginnings of the republic.
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When Kemal Ataturk succeeded in 1923 in founding the Republic of Turkey, he threw over centuries of Ottoman imperial dead weight and refashioned the entire political, economic and cultural configuration of Turkey. He gave women the vote, converted to the Roman alphabet, put in place European legal systems, and a Western style constitution with division of powers giving the parliament predominant control. A new class of Turks emerged, and Ataturk steered his country through the 30’s without succumbing to fascism or communism. Turkey joined the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1952, cementing its place in the democratic pantheon. Kemalism seemed triumphant.
The rigid secularism of this new revolution, however, denied a public role to the Islamic faith which permeated nearly every strand of Turkish cultural, social and religious life. While an elite trained in modern and western life flourished, people in the villages and towns of traditional Turkey sank further into poverty under crushing inflation. Political parties began to find ways to demonstrate sympathy for the role of faith in Turkey. The army, in the 1971 coup, even encouraged religious instruction as a counter to feared communism. Clearly, religion was making a slow comeback in Turkish life, albeit outside the established institutions.
In 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a young politician with religious convictions and regarded as a successful mayor of Istanbul, one of the world’s largest cities, went to jail. He had publicly proclaimed an inflammatory reference to a Turkish poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…” After release from jail, he altered course and with others founded the current ruling party in 2001, espousing a more liberal and tolerant political theology.
His shift was propitious. The old political order was crumbling under the weight of successive failures by traditional parties to improve the economy. In 2001, the Turkish economy imploded with the Turkish currency losing half its value within a few months. Thus, after a decade of bumbling misrule by secular parties, in 2002 the Turkish people, in essence realizing there was no other option, put Erdogan’s party in power with a powerful win.
Hopes ran high for a new Turkey reconciling religious faith, liberal politics and constitutional government that would bring the prosperity that had eluded the masses for decades. The new government took on corrupt financial syndicates in Turkey, rigorously implemented economic reforms that slashed rampant inflation and launched new efforts to join the EU. It did what no previous government had been able to do for decades. Turkey’s GNP tripled within a few years.
The worm in the apple, however, was the remaining weakness of Turkey’s political structure, which was chronically anemic because of successful military coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. The military, judicial, and educational institutions of Turkey were solidly Kemalist and resisted the government efforts. Thereupon followed a series of domestic crises as the new Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempted to solidify its popular support in actual governance of the country.
The turning point came in 2007 when another military attempt failed to prevent the election of Abdullal Gul, an AK Party founding member from being elected president. Seeing popular support as the enduring strength of the AKP, Erdogan began to dismantle institutional opposition across the entire spectrum of Turkey’s constitutional system. In the years that followed, he gained control over the educational, judicial, police and military structures in Turkey.
Erdogan rejected all attempts to reconcile with his political enemies. Using the same model his tormentors had used against him, he struck back with force. In succeeding years, he converted the educational system into a religious friendly institution, altered the court system to his advantage, purged the police and judiciary, and with widespread show trials decapitated the Kemalist structure in the army. Extending that momentum, his party moved to dominate the press in Turkey.
The year 2013 saw a powerful blowback to his ambitions. Peaceful demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park in May over environmental issues ballooned into nationwide protests. In December there were surprise arrests of family members of AKP ministers, revealing widespread corruption within the party. A resulting open split with his former chief ally, Gulen, added to the rising tensions in Turkey which had resulted from the previous purges and neutering of institutions.
More recently, a series of events has stoked the flames. After a setback in elections in June 2015, Erdogan’s government reinitiated an intense war with the PKK Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey in a move widely viewed as also an attempt to destroy a key opposition Kurdish coalition party (HDP) in the parliament. Five to seven attacks by ISIS (all unacknowledged) and more by the PKK in Turkey this past year have highlighted the government’s security failures.
If the charge against Gulen is true, then so be it. If it is not true, then the charge itself may reveal a weakness on the part of the government. Either it knows the charge is false and is using it to sway public opinion or it believes it true and may be unwilling to look at the tsunami of discontent that might have influenced the attempt.
Coups are undemocratic and have no place in modern societies. The attempt of July 15 was a terrible blow to Turkey and a mistake of historic proportions. No Turk went to sleep the night of July15-16. The memory of that night will now stay in the consciousness of an entire generation of Turks. But it would behoove the government to try to understand more clearly what actually might have set the stage for such sentiments and to reach out. For the first time in this long period of AKP rule, armed violence has entered the picture. If the government reaction leads to further repression of rights and freedoms, and the existing tensions remain unaddressed, then the door to more violence widens. That’s not what Turkey needs.
Robert Pearson served as U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2000 to 2003 and is currently a scholar at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C.