By ADNAN KHAN
ISTANBUL — Special to The Globe and Mail
It’s been a traumatic year in Turkey. Protests have swept through the country, igniting a densely packed tinderbox of discontent that had been accumulating for decades. Turkey’s role in the wars playing out around it, in Syria in particular, have come under increased international scrutiny; corruption scandals have rocked Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and a widening circle of senior members of his Justice and Development Party (AKP); and a recent mining tragedy that killed more than 300 has exposed systemic weaknesses in some its basic economic activities.
This week marks the first anniversary of the Gezi Park protests, which began on June 1, 2013, in Istanbul over the AKP’s plans to build a mosque and museum on the site of one the city’s last remaining green spaces. Since then, the unrest has expanded.
At the heart of it now is Mr. Erdogan himself, viewed as increasingly authoritarian and out of touch with a large segment of the people he is supposed to govern. His actions and statements over the past year have become the source of ridicule, both domestically and internationally. Some of things he’s said have been downright outrageous, others merely myopic. As a whole, however, they shed light on how this increasingly crucial powerbroker thinks, and help to explain why Turkey is where it is today.
Here are six of Mr. Erdogan’s most revealing statements and what they can tell us about Turkey’s troubles:
1. “We will build a mosque in Taksim and we do not need the permission of the CHP [Republican People’s Party, the main opposition] or of a few bums [capulcu] to do it.”
Mr. Erdogan said this in the early days of the protests in June last year. For months, his opponents had been critical of the Turkish leader’s increasingly confrontational stance. The mosque issue itself had become a mission for Mr. Erdogan, something he had dreamed of doing for years. That degree of personal involvement in the minutiae of governance was a hallmark of his leadership style, something even party insiders had noted with concern.
The reference to “a few bums” was the one phrase that caught fire on social media. Critics noted that tens of thousands of protesters taking to the streets in virtually all of Turkey’s major cities could hardly be described as “a few bums.” Protesters concluded Mr. Erdogan’s strategy was to calm his core supporters by assuring them this was only a minor event. To counter that, they took the word capulcu, which can also mean looter, and subverted it. A meme was born: chapulling, a neologism meaning “to fight for one’s rights,” and quickly became one of twitter’s top trending topics. “I am chapulling” became the rallying cry for the protesters.
This sort of subversion has been a trademark of the protest movement ever since. When the mayor of Istanbul pleaded to the mothers of the protesters to take their wayward children home, hundreds of angry moms flooded into Taksim Square, the symbolic heart of the protests, and set up a protective human chain around them. When AKP politicians claimed the heavy handedness of the police was a legitimate response to the violence of protesters, a lone performance artist stood silently for hours on end in the centre of Taksim Square. Hundreds joined him and then thousands across Turkey, sparking the Standing Man movement.
2. “There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.”
Turkish authorities have always been sensitive to freedom of opinion. No-go subjects include insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and the military, long-considered the guardian of Ataturk’s vision. But Mr. Erdogan has taken it to an entirely new level.
Under his guidance, thousands of websites have been blocked in Turkey. Twitter and YouTube were banned in mid-March, after unknown users (believed to be members of the Gulen movement, a secretive organization with deep roots in Turkey’s police and judiciary, headed by Fethullah Gulen, a moderate Islamic cleric based in Pennsylvania) posted recordings of private conversations between Mr. Erdogan, his son and senior members of the AKP allegedly discussing kickbacks and favourtism in business dealings with AKP supporters. In one recording posted to YouTube, senior officials, including Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Hakan Fidan, head of the MIT, Turkey’s spy agency, are caught discussing the possibility of carrying out a false flag operation in which missiles would be fired at Turkey from Syria. Turkey would blame the Syrian regime and invoke article 5 of the Nato agreement, forcing the U.S. to take action.
YouTube remains blocked, though perhaps for not much longer after a May 30 decision by Turkey’s constitutional court calling the ban a violation of individual rights and freedoms. Nonetheless, Erdogan continues to attack the social media. Some observers have noted that the AKP has so thoroughly de-toothed the Turkish mainstream new outlets, through court cases and hefty fines, that the only source for alternative views is the internet. There, social media is a-buzz with anti-Erdogan discussions. Some protesters have set up online television stations to cover events the mainstream news channels refuse to cover. Sadly, the AKP’s core constituency is not internet savvy and remains, in many cases, unaware of what is really going on in their country.
3. “I’m telling my genuine, environmentalist, honest brothers not to sadden us any more; you should withdraw and leave us face-to-face with the extremist terrorist organizations. We will clean Gezi Park.”
Two weeks into the Gezi protests, what Mr. Erdogan had initially called “a few bums” transformed into “extremist terrorists.” This rhetorical shift has numerous precedents in the post-9/11 world but in this specific context, he was not referring to Islamic radicals. Turkey’s experience with religious extremism remains minimal and doesn’t conjure the kinds of bogeymen so often employed in western countries for rhetorical effect.
His terrorists are both radical leftists and ultra-nationalists from the radical right, a potent symbol of fear in Turkey. In the late 1970s, Turkey was beset with street battles between the radical right and left. Thousands lost their lives and Istanbul was turned into something approaching a warzone.
These Cold War-era ideological rifts have often been exploited by Turkey’s leaders, both civilian and military, to advance political agendas. Turkey’s military has facilitated Faustian alliances between nationalists and Islamists to counter the influence of communists. The Ergenekon trials, Turkey’s judicial war against the Deep State, comprising an eclectic mix of military officers, politicians, journalists and mafia dons who are accused of plotting coups and generally causing a nuisance, have captivated Turks for years.
Playing the terrorist card was a revealing move. Mr. Erdogan appeared to be trying out different categories for what had evolved from an environmentalist protest into a broad coalition of ideologies opposed to his rule. “Terrorists” would continue to be his go-to label for many months, until a new menace would emerge.
4. “ The vote you will cast tomorrow will expose this ring of treachery…We will give them an Ottoman slap at the ballot box.”
Here, the vote Mr. Erdogan was referring to was the municipal elections scheduled for March 30, 2014, which the AKP won with 43.31 per cent of the vote. The “ring of treachery” was the Gulen movement, mentioned above.
In the lead up to the vote, observers had characterized the elections as a referendum on Mr. Erdogan’s rule. If the AKP’s results fell below 35 per cent, they argued, Mr. Erdogan would be in trouble. That didn’t happen. The strong showing at the ballot box, despite a few allegations of vote rigging, proved that Mr. Erdogan and the AKP maintain a solid support base throughout Turkey. The Prime Minister has used this to argue that he has a popular mandate and the protest movement is acting undemocratically.
Critics point out that ballot box success is not in itself a measure of democratic success. Mr. Erdogan’s unwillingness to compromise and work with the opposition is a clear sign that he has drifted into authoritarianism, they say. Moreover, the AKP’s popular support remains somewhat under 50 per cent, meaning more than half of the population does not support it, not a number that can simply be ignored.
The Ottoman reference, too, is important: one of the many criticisms of Mr. Erdogan is his seemingly obsessive desire to re-establish the greatness of the Ottoman Empire in Turkey. Too often, say his critics, the Prime Minister succumbs in his public addresses to neo-Ottoman flights of fancy. Most recently, at a May 30 speech in Istanbul commemorating the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, he argued that the word “conquest”, fetih in Turkish, is derived from the Ottoman/Arabic root word meaning “resisting against oppressors.”
Not quite. According to Turkish linguists, the root of fetih is the Arabic construction f-t-h, meaning to open, unlock, reveal, conquer. It thus denotes an initiative on the part of the actor whereas “resist” is passive, a reaction to an outside actor.
This is key in understanding Mr. Erdogan’s aggressive response to the Gezi protests. He believes he is under attack, that his mission to re-establish neo-Ottoman power is threatened by outside actors, guided by nefarious ‘foreign hands’, the Gulenists primarily but also the U.S., Israel, and in one perplexing allegation, a global “interest rate lobby.”
5. “Explosions like this in these mines happen all the time. It’s not like these don’t happen elsewhere in the world. Let me go back to the past in England. In a slide in 1862, 204 people died, in 1866, 361 people died, and in an explosion in England in 1894, 290 died.”
Now things get surreal. This statement was made on May 14, a day after Turkey’s worst-ever mining disaster, while bodies were still being pulled out of the Soma coal mine in the northwest of the country. In the end, 301 miners lost their lives.
It’s a shocking statement any way you look at it but considering the presence of grieving family members of the dead miners, as well as those who were still trapped inside, it borders on the grotesque. Turkey in fact holds the infamous honour of having one of the most dangerous mining sectors in the world, not a hundred years ago, but today. Erdogan’s motivations for what was obviously a scripted (in other words, pre-planned) statement is difficult to gauge. But consider the context.
Hours after the blast, information emerged that two weeks earlier, the AKP had rejected a demand for a parliamentary investigation into the lack of safety at the Soma mine. No reason was given at the time.
The owner of Soma Holding A.S., Ali Gurkan, who took control of the mine when it was privatized in the 1990s, has close ties to the AKP. In the run up to the March 30 municipal elections, SOMA was reported to be handing out free bags of coal to voters, courtesy the AKP.
Additionally, Gurkan has boasted in the past that under his control, the per-tonne price of coal from the Soma mine has dropped from US$140 to US$23.80. This is a startling number considering the mine produces a type of coal called lignite, a low quality version which is susceptible to spontaneous combustion. Its value on the energy market is paltry so making extraction profitable requires lowering operating costs. Critics argue that Soma Holding managed this by ignoring safety standards and using poorly trained staff, in some cases teenage workers as young as 15 years old.
To call this a scandal for Erdogan and the AKP would be an understatement. The purpose of his visit to the mine appears now to be an attempt at damage control and in light of everything that’s come before it – the on-going protests, corruption scandals – a desperate one at that.
Perhaps he’s gone over the edge. Certainly his behaviour at the disaster site belies a man cornered. At one point, after being forced into a supermarket by angry family members of the miners, he is reported to have slapped a protester. Video shows the man taking a feeble swipe to the face from Mr. Erdogan in the midst of a chaotic scene and then the same man being violently attacked by Mr. Erdogan’s guards.
Not very prime ministerial behaviour. And then, in that same scuffle, Mr. Erdogan is reported to have screamed at the man he slapped:
6. “Spawn of Israel!”
There is still some doubt over whether Mr. Erdogan actually said this. AKP officials deny it and audio on the video capture, which was taken on a mobile phone, is somewhat garbled and the scene chaotic. Regardless, that it has become a talking point in Turkey is telling. What’s important here is history: in January, 2003, when Mr. Erdogan was still enjoying the early days of power, he seemed much more accommodating.
“Turkey will not accept any notion that denies Israel’s right to exist,” he told a gathering of students and faculty at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “Everyone should unconditionally accept that Israel is an indispensable element of the Middle Eastern mosaic.”
In the intervening years the Turkish leader’s posturing vis a vis Israel has become more confrontational. Some have argued that this shift is a product of more than a decade in power. It would be difficult indeed for any national leader to remain optimistic and open-minded considering the challenges facing the world in the 21-century, let alone the leader of a country like Turkey, riven by ideological divides and hammered by the realities of geopolitics.
Others, however, take a more conspiratorial view. They point to a conversation Mr. Erdogan once had with King Abdullah of Jordan: “Erdogan once said that democracy, for him, is a bus ride,” Abdullah recalled, “’once I get to my stop, I’m getting off’.”