Turkey’s descent into Islamism

Viewpoint
Peter Wertheim

What began late on July 15 as a coup by sections of Turkey’s military forces against the civilian government has very quickly been turned into a coup by the Erdogan regime against the military and judiciary – and other institutions that stand in the way of the regime’s goal of Islamising the country.

To understand what has been happening, a knowledge of Turkey’s recent history is essential.

The modern Republic of Turkey was proclaimed in 1923 on the rubble of the old Ottoman Empire, which was dismantled after being comprehensively defeated by the military forces of Britain and its Dominions, including Australia, during World War I.

The new Republican government was headed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (“father of the Turks”), a former military commander who had been instrumental in his country’s successful defence of the Dardanelles in 1915.

Atatürk was determined to drag his country into modernity. His government systematically dismantled the old discredited Ottoman institutions.

The Islamic caliphate, the theocracy under which the Ottomans ruled most of the Middle East, was abolished. Secular, democratic government and the rule of law were enshrined in Turkey’s new constitution. Far-reaching modernist reforms were introduced into the education system, the economy and culture. Women were given equal civil and political rights.

The paradox of modern Turkey is that Atatürk and his legacy continue to be widely revered, yet most Turks remain deeply religious and conservative in their political and social views.

Turkey’s military has always seen itself as the guardian of Atatürk’s secular legacy. It has successfully intervened five times – in 1960, 1971 and 1980, 1993 and 1997 – to scotch any threats it sees to that legacy.  Other elements of Turkey’s elite, most notably the judiciary and an independent media, have provided the additional bulwarks of secularism.

This also ensured that Turkey’s foreign policy was pro-western and friendly to Israel. As a member of NATO, Turkey played a key role in the containment of Soviet communism during the Cold War.

However, since the 1990s the Turkish Republic’s secular, modernist character has clashed headlong with the global Islamic revival.

After the 1997 coup, Turkey’s Islamists were crushed and their Welfare Party was dissolved.   One of their leaders, the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was imprisoned for four months. At this time Erdoğan and his followers supposedly re-invented themselves. They formed a new Justice and Development Party (AKP), appearing to abandon Islamist policies and to embrace a conservative, non-religious program.

The apparent remake of Erdoğan was never sincere. It was a ruse to enable Erdoğan and the “reformed” Islamists of the AKP to make another bid for power without the military intervening.

The subterfuge worked. The AKP won the 2002 general election in a landslide. Erdoğan, who had previously been banned from holding political office, became Prime Minister the following year, was re-elected at subsequent general elections and became President in 2014.

The electoral success of Erdoğan and the AKP was legitimately earned with mostly sound economic management. Between 2002 and 2012 Turkey experienced a growth of 64% in real GDP and a 43% increase in GDP per capita.

Unlike the short-lived, openly Islamist government of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, Erdoğan and the AKP provided competent government and avoided, at least initially, crude repression.

Economic success ensured that Erdoğan and the AKP continued to enjoy popularity, but Erdoğan, slowly but surely, used that popularity to introduce measures which enabled the government to infiltrate and dominate all rival centres of power, principally the military, the judiciary and the media, and to move Turkey towards Islamisation and a restoration of its Ottoman-era regional hegemony.

The defeat of the attempted coup last week and the public humiliation of the Turkish military was a watershed, but not the kind of watershed it appeared to be. It did not mark the end of the Turkish military’s long-standing role as the guardian of Turkey’s democratic, secular polity, because that role was effectively terminated by Erdoğan and the AKP some years ago.

Turkey’s military was purged of its senior pro-secularist officers in a series of show trials between 2007 and 2012, during which the officers were accused of plotting against the government.

With the military neutralised, Erdoğan then moved on the judiciary. Even though Turkey’s 1982 Constitution provides that “Turkey is a democratic, secular and social state governed by the rule of law…loyal to the nationalism of Atatürk”, and demands that the judiciary remain strictly independent of the legislative and executive arms of government, Erdoğan removed unfriendly judges and replaced them with compliant ones.

At the same time, Erdoğan moved to close down or squeeze out sections of the private media which were critical of the government.

Erdoğan’s ally in this process was the Islamic theologian and preacher Fethullah Gülen. Gülen’s Cemaat movement managed to infiltrate and take over many, large commercial enterprises and civil society organisations, changing them from secular to supposedly moderate Islamic entities.

As Erdogan successfully moved towards achieving a monopoly of power, he no longer needed Gülen, and they had a spectacular falling out in 2013. Gülen fled to the US.

It was at this point that Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism and concentration of power in his own hands provoked the first serious popular opposition in the form of a series of mass protests against Erdogan in Istanbul.

The real significance of the failed coup last week was that one Islamist movement, led by Erdoğan, has now finally prevailed against a rival Islamist movement, led by Gülen, and against any residual secularists still remaining in positions of power. It was not about democracy at all.

The 6,000 people who have now been arrested in Turkey are mainly Gülenists and secularists in the Turkish military and judiciary. According to Johannes Hahn, the European Union’s Commissioner overseeing Turkey’s membership bid, Erdoğan already had a prepared list of targets for arrest before the coup was launched.

Erdoğan has since announced that Turkey will consider reinstating the death penalty. Nobody has been executed in Turkey since 1984. Capital punishment was abolished in 2004.

Although Israel’s Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu is probably correct in saying that recent events will not interrupt the ongoing rapprochement between Israel and Turkey, in the long-term the prospect of an authoritarian, Erdoğan-led Islamist Turkey with neo-Ottoman pretensions cannot be good for Israel, Europe or the US.

Peter Wertheim is the executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry.

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