Turkey now struggles to survive the war between these two Islamist powers. When the forces of Erdoğan and Gülen began to fight each other, the left-wing organizations and the Kurdish opposition were the ones who were targeted. Most of the academics and school teachers who were dismissed and most of the media outlets that have been shut down belong to the progressive movement. Since the “failed coup” of 2016, the country has been in a permanent state of emergency. Parliament has been bypassed. It has become a mere template with no real role in the making of policy. Erdoğan rules from his newly built White Palace. His palace has sealed off the Turkish parliament. What Erdoğan has done was Gülen’s dream. It is now Erdoğan’s reality. It is the kind of dream that has thrown the whole nation into a nightmare.
The last time that we saw the great alliance between Erdoğan and Gülen was during the Gezi Park uprising in May 2013. Millions of people took to the streets for two weeks to resist Erdoğan’s plan to turn the tiny Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul into a shopping mall. The resistance around Gezi amplified the voice of people who had been silenced under the long shadow of religious power. Erdoğan, like all autocratic leaders, used two tools: violence and deceit. He refused the claim that he planned to build a shopping mall in the park at the same time as he sent in the police—manned by Gülen supporters—to break up the protestors. The result was that the authorities arrested five thousand people, wounded four thousand people and killed eight young people. Gezi Park was saved.
When the police were criticized for using excessive force, Erdoğan appeared on the stage and used his usual language of mercilessness. “They ask about who gave the order to the police. Me. I gave the order,” he said. He accused the protestors of hurting the economy. It was their protest, he said, that raised the value of the US dollar from 1.8 to 1.9 Turkish lira. He called the protestors enemies of the state.
Things are worse now. It costs four Turkish lira to buy a dollar. Erdoğan accuses others for this. Nothing is his responsibility.
His policies are innocent. He is innocent.
Normal
Having returned from abroad after some years I went in a smart-phone shop in Turkey as I wanted to buy a charger for my cell phone. The seller offered me an expensive one and said, “This is original.”
“But it is expensive,” I said.
“Then, I have that one, five times cheaper,” he said.
“Okay, if this is original, what is that one?” I asked.
“It is the normal one,” said the shopkeeper.
Such phones would have been called “imitation” or “artificial” phones. But that’s in the past. Now they are “normal.” Our language shows us how much has changed in our politics and in our culture. Since the original and true things are lost, anything fake and artificial can replace it and become “normal.”
In this new century, Erdoğan stands for normality. His reign has already lasted longer than that of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded and ruled the modern Turkish Republic for fifteen years from 1923 to 1938. Erdoğan counts the years when he compares himself with Atatürk. He believes that the destruction of the Ottoman Empire—carried out by Atatürk and his comrades a century ago—was a mistake. Erdoğan has given himself the historic task of reversing Atatürk’s work and reviving the empire. That is what he believes and that is what his followers desire. They see Erdoğan as the chosen one for the nation not only of the Turks, but also for Muslims.
Erdoğan’s prominent supporters define the modern Turkish Republic as a “bracket” between the Ottoman Empire and another kind of empire. This “bracket,” they believe, opens up a mysterious sentence; it is now time to close that sentence. Erdoğan says that to end that period of history, the period between the “brackets,” there is no need to respect the law. “Two drunkards” made that law, he says. It is not difficult to understand what he means by this phrase. The “two drunkards” he refers to are Atatürk and his friend İsmet İnönü, who became president after Atatürk’s death. They are well known for their love of raki, that milky alcohol of the Turkish people.
Drinkers apparently obsess Erdoğan. In 1989, he ran for the mayorship of Beyoğlu District in Istanbul, but lost. He objected to the outcome of the election and took the case to the court. When the judge appeared to go against him, Erdoğan called him a “drunkard.” He was detained for a week and made to pay a fine.
Erdoğan’s conservative political worldview is one thing, but his temper is another. It is not easy to manage. There are rumors that he slapped some cabinet ministers. That he has attacked ordinary citizens is no rumor. In 2014, Turkey experienced a mining disaster when 301 miners died underground. It is said to be the biggest mining accident in the world. The accident came due to poor working conditions. There was no administrative surveillance of conditions in the mine. A few days after the incident, Erdoğan visited the small town where the miners’ families lived. A protest greeted him, with angry slogans filling the air. At one point, Erdoğan had to take refuge in a shop inside the market. There, Erdoğan grabbed a protester and began to hit him, while calling out, “You are the Jew’s semen.” Someone in the shop filmed this attack. It appeared on social media platforms. Before long the film disappeared, like so many other things. It vanished. Erdoğan’s cyber-farm did its work well. The farm’s workers erase and destroy anything on the Internet that is against Erdoğan. Even some of Erdoğan’s speeches are inaccessible. Erdoğan’s conversations with his son about hiding money—and many other recordings—have disappeared. Thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, are forbidden inside Turkey. Twitter and Facebook are shut down whenever the government thinks they are too aggressive against Erdoğan. This is Turkey’s normal.
Erdoğan began his life as a conservative Islamist. Then he changed his status to being a moderate Islamist. Now he is on the march to becoming a new kind of sultan. It has been a long march—taking charge of the traditional authoritarian systems in society and in the state as well as creating new kinds of institutions in both state and society to consolidate his power.
In the 1970s, Erdoğan got involved with the youth division of the Islamist MSP—the National Salvation Party. The military coup of 1980 changed the political field in Turkey. The coup leaders arrested 650,000 people, closed down parliament, shut down trade unions, and shuttered publishing houses. Political parties—including those of the right and of the religious variety—were closed down. The coup was a right-wing coup, but it could not tolerate right-wing parties. It was a total suffocation of Turkish society. This was at the height of the Cold War. In the Middle East and South Asia, the United States was playing with a policy of the Green Belt—the support of Islamist elements, however extreme, to quell communist influence. Erdoğan’s political framework developed in this period. His normal is the normal of an alliance between the imperialist West and the Islamist East.
It was no surprise when Erdoğan, in 2015, chose İsmail Kahraman to be the spokesperson of the Turkish Parliament. Kahraman comes to the AKP from the extreme right. His youth was spent in battle against the anti-imperialist youth who wanted to stop the visit of US warships to Istanbul in the 1960s.