Crisis in Turkey

S P SETH

When Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan went on a foreign trip to visit three North African countries in the midst of serious anti-government protests, it conjured an image of Nero fiddling when Rome was burning. Erdogan, of course, is nowhere like Nero. He prides himself as being a democratically elected leader with strong grassroots support. And until the protests in Istanbul erupted, starting late May, over turning the city’s major public park, Gezi Park, into a replica of Ottoman-era military barracks and a mall, he probably himself was not aware that he was so disliked by many urban residents in Istanbul and many other cities for his authoritarian style. The popular protests in Taksim Park, resonant of Tahrir Square in Cairo, spread to over 60 Turkish cities. In other words, what started as a small protest in Istanbul over a local matter became the trigger for a much large movement with a smorgasbord of grievances against a government that tended to believe that it didn’t need to explain its decisions and actions to the people; with Erdogan behaving like a modern Sultan working to recreate architecturally (and sometimes regionally) the old glory of the Ottoman empire.

And that image seemed reinforced on his return when he rebuked his “children” for their wayward and irresponsible behaviour. Erdogan told them that he had no plan to change his plans for converting the park into a historical-cultural-commercial project. As one protester reportedly said, with tongue-in-cheek, “Papa’s coming home and when he sees what we have been up to he’s going to be really angry.” And that he was, blaming the countrywide protests on terrorists, vandals, looters and foreigners. There have been many arrests; with even high school students detained being naughty spreading malicious rumors on social media sites. There have been some fatalities and many injured from the indiscriminate use of tears gas and water cannons by the police.

Undoubtedly, Turkey has become an economic success story, with Erdogen as the country’s Prime Minister in the last decade. And he has done it by opening up the economy. Ironically, this success story has created a plethora of problems. For instance, the rapid expansion of Turkey’s middle class has created a class of citizens critical of Erdogan’s patriarchical style of doing things. They are educated and they have their opinions and preferences and they want to be consulted and heard. And when Erdogan decided that the Gezi Park will be replaced with a replica of the Ottoman era, it was news to them and an unpleasant one about a landmark of their Istanbul city which, in some ways, was a reference point for many of them growing up and living there. Gezi Park and Taksim Square are part of the city’s personality and hence part of the environment in more than one sense.

From a local issue relating to Istanbul, the protest has gone national and the regime is still refusing to come to terms with the fact that they have a serious problem confronting them. Which, in essence, is that many people are not happy with the way Prime Minister Erdogan and his government are steering the country.  And again and again, on issue after issue, there is a sense that Erdogan is arrogant with a big ego, with almost zero tolerance for opinions at variance with him. Even where he has no expertise, he behaves like he knows best without any reference to the people whose lives will be affected, whether it is the future of the park in Istanbul or even people’s intimate lives. For instance, he has called on Turkish families to have at least three children. His creeping program of Islamization in a society with a strong streak of secularism is not liked by many people. His government is increasingly putting curbs on drinking as it is against Islam. Indeed, there is a concerted effort to reengineer society to conform to Islamic precepts and traditions. Of course, there is nothing wrong with it as long as this is what people want. But Turkey is not a traditional Islamic society. It is culturally pluralistic with a strong secular streak on which modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, sought to model the country after the defeat of the Ottoman empire in WW1.

In the last over ten years, with three election wins behind him, Erdogan and his AKP party fundamentally changed Turkey in some positive ways. Its economic success is one such change.  Another is the civilian control of the Turkish army, with its generals given to staging coups in the past to maintain Ataturk’s secularism. Under the generals, secularism become a rigid belief system of sorts to proscribe any kind of external symbol of Islamic faith, like wearing veil by women. Under Erdogan, Islamic symbols and practices are encouraged and propagated.

But he seems to be making the same mistakes that the country’s generals did, with secularism, by propagating and promoting Islam virtually as state ideology. And many of his opponents of all hues and convictions include a fair proportion of those who do not like the country’s reversion to officially approved Islam. At the same time, his rule has also “nurtured a pious capitalist class” as Tim Arango wrote in the New York Times, reporting from Istanbul, “whose members have moved in large numbers from rural Anatolia to cities like Istanbul, deepening class divisions.” Therefore, the secular/religious divide has been further reinforced with class divisions as well as the widening urban-rural chasm.

There is no sign as yet that the political hold of Prime Minister Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is in danger. And this is for two reasons. First, his rural constituency of conservative and faith-based voters, are still solidly behind him. Second, the country has made impressive economic strides in the last decade under AKP’s rule and many people would be loathe to let that be jeopardized with no real political alternative to Erdogan’s rule. The present movement against the government is a spontaneous protest ignited by a wide variety of grievances with virtually no organized political organization seeking to replace it. Many protesters are angry that the government is seeking to erase the historical memory of the Ataturk’s secular republic by creating Ottoman period replicas, as in Gezi Park, and to create an illusion of continuity between the Ottoman period and the present regime.

And to pursue its conservative agenda, the regime is prepared to crush dissent and throw journalists and other critics of the government into jail. Under the Erdogan regime, Turkey is said to have more journalists in prisons than any other country in the world. It is this intolerance and refusal to listen to people that has spawned the protests against the government. In other words, Prime Minister Erdogan is not ready to be a consensus leader for the whole country.  It is his way or the highway. And therein lies the danger.