Turkey’s President has betrayed the hopes and aspirations of liberals in his country. Ironically, he is not too liked by the radicals as well, who view him with suspicion. That leaves him with a Janus-like legacy
On Monday, soon after he shot the Russian Ambassador to Turkey and before he was neutralised by security personnel, the killer shouted in Turkish: “Don’t forget Aleppo; don’t forget Syria.” He also said, “We are the ones who pledged allegiance to Mohammad, to wage jihad… Allahu Akbar.” The Government was quick to point fingers at President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s rivals within and outside the country for the tragedy. Official sources suspect the role of US-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen or the ‘Gulenists’ who are up in arms against President Erdogan. Gulen had also been accused of a recent failed coup attempt against the President.
It’s politically fine for Erdogan’s camp to blame Gulen or the President’s other opponents for all that has gone wrong in Turkey today. These people may or may not be guilty, and it’s important to know for sure. But equally important to understand is President Erdogan’s failure to live up to the promise he showed when he assumed power, first as Prime Minister (early-2003-mid-2014) and President thereafter. He was supposed to take Turkey to the path of a secular nation which the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, had envisaged and worked for. Instead, Erdogan has created a Turkey that is increasingly turning radical. The political and economic liberalisation he had promised has not happened. Nor has his much-touted reconciliation with the restive Kurdish minority, worked.
Why has Erdogan failedIJ The answer is simple: He never wanted to succeed. His attempts at being secular and a reformist were a sham. He began his career in city politics in the late 1980s, famously refusing to shave off his moustache on religious grounds. But when he contested the mayoral elections, he encouraged women to join the Welfare Party, the Islamist group of which he was a member. He did not insist on their wearing headscarves. Those were early indications that Erdogan was to develop an identity crisis.
After he was elected Mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdogan began to toe the conventional Islamist line. He expressed support for Sharia’h, cracked down on the sale of alcohol on civic body-controlled outlets (not on social but religious grounds) and fell in love with a poem that drew an analogy between religion and the military — “mosques are our barracks, domes are our helmets…” The effort landed him in jail for four months on the charge of incitement of religious hatred.
Once released, Erdogan again underwent an image-makeover. He joined hands with a bunch of conservative reformers who favoured greater interaction with the West and tempering down of the Islamist rhetoric. Suddenly he discovered merit in discarding the Sharia’h notion, saying he did not take those people seriously who spoke of a state that must be founded on Islamic law.
By 1999, he had effectively changed colours — though it would not be the last time he would do so — when he announced that Turkey would get nowhere “with radicalism”. Armed with a reformist pledge and the badge of a ‘conservative democrat’, Erdogan, along with a few others, founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and won the national election. By now, the liberals in the country had begun to believe they finally had a leader who would help Turkey be a modern secular nation — a project left unfinished by Ataturk.
The liberals believed that the baggage of history would not trouble Erdogan. They were ready to keep aside the reality that Erdogan, for all his show of reform, had led his party to victory on the strength of support from a deeply conservative and religious middle class which had embraced economic prosperity but kept secular-minded thoughts and projects at an arm’s length. The liberals were mesmerised by Erdogan’s promise of economic reforms that would make Turkey “easier for the world to enter”, of creating conditions for a liberal Press and an independent judiciary; in short, shape his nation into a vibrant democracy.
But it would have been so un-Erdogan like to have kept those assurances. From batting for a free judiciary, Erdogan soon began to complain about its existence. One day he cribbed, “You find yourselves confronted by judges in places where you least expect.” Thereafter, he began to undermine the judiciary’s independence. Over a period of time, he assumed the power to name a majority of the constitutional court judges. Two years ago, he summarily dismissed as many as 3,000 judges. Since the failed coup, he has had more than 2,700 judges removed. last year, a presidential appointee heading the National Intelligence Organisation, was given powers to collect ‘all information, documents or data from any entity in Turkey’ without having to seek any judicial sanction. Needless to add, such an action was kept immune from the purview of judicial test.
The news has been bad on the secular front too. President Erdogan’s Government recently took control of six churches in the war-torn city of Diyarbakir. These include Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches. Although the official reason given is that the move has been taken to facilitate rebuilding and restoring the historical city, nobody is fooled. It was a step to appease the hardline Islamist sections of society, some of which are powerful enough to dictate terms to the regime. These properties now belong to the state, and the fact that this should happen in a country having 98 per cent of Muslim population, is not lost on anyone.
True to his reputation for double-talk, President Erdogan has been spreading the propaganda that all his efforts — controlling the judiciary, cracking down on the media, intimidating and jailing political opponents, micro-managing the freedom of speech of the state’s citizens — are aimed at combating the threat of Islamist terrorism. In a bid to foster this impression, he has been vocal in demanding that the US extradite the Islamic cleric, Gulen. He has also tightened the country’s anti-terrorism laws, which is a cloaked attempt to fix his opponents. The principal and obvious target is the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (with whom he has failed to arrive at a conciliation), though other rivals too could be in trouble because of the new provisions. Ironically, while Erdogan continues to use religion to play both ways, he dubs the European Union (EU) as a “Christian Club”. His rant should be seen in the context of the, until now, failed attempt by his Government to lead Turkey into the EU in the immediate future.
President Erdogan has betrayed the hopes and aspirations of the liberals in Turkey. Ironically, he is not too liked by the radicals as well, who view him with suspicion. That leaves him with a Janus-like legacy.
(The writer is Opinion Editor, The Pioneer)