[A-List] Hegemony and Americanization in Turkey

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2657>
New Left Review 44, March-April 2007

Analysing the current hegemony of Erdoğan's AKP in Turkey, Cihan Tuğal
argues that the party has been the agent of a classic passive
revolution, effectively shoring up the Kemalist state. Paradoxes of
'Americanization with Muslim characteristics', against the backdrop of
Western military intervention in the Middle East.

CIHAN TUĞAL
NATO'S ISLAMISTS
Hegemony and Americanization in Turkey

The tensions currently convulsing the Middle East—Western military
offensive, Islamicized resistance, economic turbulence, demographic
upheaval—have taken a peculiarly Americanized form in Turkey. [1] The
secular Republic of Kemal Atatürk, nato's longstanding bulwark in the
region, is now ruled by men who pray. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice
and Development Party (akp)—the latest incarnation of a once-banned
Islamist movement—has a 60 per cent majority in the Assembly, or
Meclis, forming the first non-coalition government in Ankara for
fifteen years. Prime Minister Erdoğan is himself a possible candidate
for the presidency, a seven-year appointment in the gift of the Meclis
under the Republic's notoriously unrepresentative democracy.
Predictably, perhaps, though elected primarily by the votes of the
poor—above all, the young, informal proletariat now crowding Turkey's
cities—Erdoğan's government is slashing government spending, aiming at
a fiscal surplus of 6 per cent of gdp in the coming year. Though
proclaiming solidarity with the Muslim world, it has dispatched
Turkish troops to join the un occupation force in Southern Lebanon,
and was only restrained from sending them to Iraq by the urgent pleas
of the Iraqi-Kurdish President, Jalal Talabani. Yet the AKP is widely
expected to win the Autumn 2007 elections, and has largely retained
its support among provincial capitalists, the pious small bourgeoisie,
the newly urbanized poor, important fractions of the police and much
of the liberal, left-leaning intelligentsia.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Challenges

Yet for all its successes in retaining the support of the 2002
coalition, the AKP faces a number of difficulties ahead which, if
severe enough, might pose challenges to its hegemony over certain
sectors. Among the most dangerous is the economy. During its first
three years in office the Erdoğan government benefited from the
post-2001 recovery, following the dramatic devaluation of that year.
Growth, built on heavy borrowing, sustained consent for the economic
reforms even among those worst hit by fiscal austerity. But the
Turkish economy is highly exposed. A widening current-account deficit
requires constant capital inflows, and the privatization programme
that the AKP is undertaking to attract these is bedevilled by legal
problems, graft and the run-down state of public utilities and
infrastructure. As Turkey has opened to global markets, the
traditionally strong textile and clothing industries, the basis for
Central Anatolian growth in the 1980s, have lost out to countries with
cheap labour, primarily China. Turkish capital investment is now
mainly directed towards finance, tourism, and construction—all highly
dependent on the vicissitudes of the global economy. A shake-out of
world stock markets would have a very serious effect.

In May–June 2006, Turkey experienced its first serious financial shock
under the AKP. There was a sudden outflow of short-term capital after
the US Federal Reserve raised interest rates. The lira plummeted, and
inflation rose sharply with more expensive imports. Weak sectors of
the economy—textiles, clothing, agriculture—were hard hit, as interest
rates, rents and food prices continued to climb after the financial
crisis subsided, and the lira continued to tremble with every mild
fluctuation on the global scene. In July 2006 the AKP faced the first
mass protest over its economic policies: 80,000 hazelnut producers in
the Black Sea region blocked the Samsun highway to protest the
government cuts in agricultural subsidies that had left the growers'
co-operative unable to purchase their crop. They targeted Erdoğan's
close advisor Cuneyd Zapsu, chairman of the exporters' association
that stands to gain most from low prices. In all probability, these
workers had been AKP voters. In late August, public officials' unions
threatened major strikes to counter falling real wages. With economic
tensions growing, opinion polls suggest that the right-wing
Nationalist Action Party has been regaining ground. In the last year,
nationalist gangs have attempted more than a dozen lynchings of
Kurdish immigrants living in western Turkish cities, and stoned AKP
members after a nationalist rally. One result is that it is becoming
harder to sell Turkey as an 'emerging market' success story to foreign
investors.

A second problem that the AKP confronts is the faltering accession
talks with the EU. The Republic of Cyprus's overwhelming rejection of
the Annan Plan in its April 2004 referendum scotched the West's
'solution' for the island, and confronted Turkey with the necessity of
recognizing the ROC, initially in the form of extending its 1995
Customs Union agreement with the eu to include the latest members,
Cyprus among them. In July 2005 Erdoğan signed the protocols, while
announcing loudly that this did not amount to a recognition of the
Cypriot government. By the EU deadline of December 2006, Turkey had
not opened its ports and harbours to Cyprus. Accession talks were
partially suspended, and Brussels extended its inspections of Turkey's
'progress' over a still longer time-span. It also complained of
Ankara's foot-dragging over the requested amendments to the Turkish
penal code's Article 301, which criminalizes critics of the state. It
is no longer so easy for the AKP to offer accession to the EU as a
highway to a better future.

Opponents

Amid these uncertainties, the AKP still possesses the advantage that
all political alternatives to its rule are totally discredited. Yet it
has opponents, whose hands may be strengthened if the AKP government
loses its lustre in worsening economic times. The most significant of
these include hard-line factions within the state, the growing
nationalist backlash and radical Islamism. Among official circles,
including the nationalist wings of the judiciary and the military,
there are still many who watch the AKP with suspicion and would like
to see it toppled. Deniz Baykal, the leader of the Republican People's
Party and the political representative of these circles, has
frequently implied the need for military and street action against the
AKP. Elements of the deep state have given this more concrete form.

In 2005, several people were killed in a series of bomb blasts in the
Kurdish town of şemdinli in Hakkari, one of the poorest places in
Turkey. Official sources attributed the explosions to the PKK and the
increasing tension in the southeast since the end of the ceasefire in
2004. But in November 2005 one of the bombers was caught red-handed.
Passers-by had seen him leave a case in front of a bookstore. He then
waited around to watch the ensuing explosion, in which a man was
killed. The angry onlookers surrounded the bomber, who panicked and
shouted, 'Stop, I'm a police officer!' He was only saved from lynching
by the security forces. The suspicion that clandestine elements of the
state were behind the other şemdinli bombings—a suspicion voiced even
by the establishment press—was virtually confirmed when the Army's
Second-in-Command, Yaşar Büyükanıt, coolly remarked of the bomber: 'I
know him; he is a good boy.'

In response to this, and in line with Erdoğan's promise that all
responsible parties would be punished, a local public prosecutor in
Van began an investigation which implicated Büyükanıt in organizing
paramilitary activities in the southeast. The prosecutor came under
attack from the establishment media, which claimed—without
evidence—that he had connections with a clandestine religious
community, and that the accusations against Büyükanıt were a part of a
conspiracy to denigrate the military because of its struggle against
'fundamentalism'. The insinuation was that the AKP was behind this
scheme. The prosecutor was disbarred for preparing a 'faulty
indictment', and soon anybody attempting to investigate the şemdinli
affair became suspect. Ultimately, two low-ranking officers were
sentenced, and further legal proceedings were deemed futile. The AKP,
which had initially backed the prosecutor, fell silent—another
disappointment for its liberal supporters. In August 2006, after
months of speculation as to who would be Özkök's successor as Chief of
Staff, the AKP appointed Büyükanıt to the post.

Further evidence emerged of a deep-state campaign against the AKP's
Islamist supporters following the assassination of the head of the
Danıştay, a high administrative court, in May 2006. Some months before
the Danıştay had blocked the promotion of a nursery schoolteacher on
the grounds that, though of course unveiled during working hours, she
covered her head for the journey home. This was seen as an extreme
reactionary measure even by the establishment media, and provoked an
indignant response from the popular Islamist press, with Vakit
publishing photographs of the Danıştay decision-makers on its front
page. The assassination of the Danıştay's top judge, apparently by a
young Islamist lawyer, ignited a storm of secular outrage, and there
were large demonstrations, led by top members of the judiciary,
protesting against the Islamists and the AKP. A few days later,
however, the conservative and pro-AKP daily Zaman revealed connections
between the assassin and a group of retired army officers, who were
members of an emerging network of paramilitary, hard-line nationalist
organizations. These officers also apparently had links with the
state: police had found secret official files in their homes. Their
plan was to discredit and perhaps bring down the akp government.

Initially demoralized, the establishment press soon hit back by
denouncing all this as an Islamist confection: the 'secret files' had
been manufactured by conservative religious elements in the police,
and handed to Zaman. Put together with the attempts by the 'religious'
prosecutor to implicate Büyükanıt in the şemdinli bombings, this new
conspiracy demonstrated rather that the tentacles of Islamism ran deep
into the farthest reaches of the state. Neither the secularists nor
the Islamists could provide conclusive evidence for their claims. But
the drama revealed the depth of the hitherto covert conflict between
the military and the police. The concentration of hard-line secular
nationalists in the Army, and of religious conservatives in the ranks
of the police, threatens low-level conspiratorial wars within the
security forces as well as against the civilian population. Amnesty
International has reported a decrease in state torture under the AKP;
but the şemdinli and Danıştay affairs raise the question of whether
the forces of coercion have not resorted to more intricate methods of
control and intimidation than 'simple' torture and repression.

With the assassination of Hrant Dink these issues were sharply posed
again. The editor of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos,
Dink was a conciliatory figure who emphasized democratization and
Turkish-Armenian dialogue rather than focusing on the genocide debate.
Despite this caution, he was charged several times with 'denigrating
Turkishness'; one of around fifty intellectuals to be indicted under
Article 301 in Erdoğan's Turkey. Unlike most of the others, Dink was
convicted in 2005 and given a suspended sentence. He had also been
frequently threatened by nationalist paramilitary organizations. On 19
January 2007 Dink was shot in the head outside his newspaper office by
an unemployed youth from Trabzon. The killer was arrested, but within
a few days investigators revealed that not only had a police informant
been involved in organizing the crime, but that high-level members of
the police apparatus had known about the planned assassination
beforehand. No sooner were these details disclosed than the
investigation came to an abrupt halt. Emboldened by the popular anger
at Dink's killing—100,000 had marched in his funeral
procession—several civil and political organizations began to campaign
for the forces behind the murder to be fully unmasked. Yet, as of
early March 2007, things remained at a standstill. In the already
strained atmosphere before the April presidential elections, Dink's
assassination has heightened tensions and demonstrated the akp's
powerlessness to act against this continuing campaign of coercion and
terror.

Islamist Quiescence?

A second locus of potential opposition to the Erdoğan government is
radical Islamism—voiced by those left behind by the AKP's
Americanization. Local AKP activists have tried to reassure their more
militant Islamist brethren by circulating 'hidden transcripts' arguing
that they still believe in the same principles, but longer-term
methods are now required. Some AKP leaders—such as Bülent Arınç, who
led the Meclis vote against the Iraq war in March 2003—remain in touch
with the traditional Islamist Felicity Party. Others demonstrate their
commitment by praying in public places. On the whole, as noted above,
radical Islamists have been loath to criticize the government. There
were large-scale protests against the Danish caricatures of the
Prophet—especially in the east and southeast, hinting at a radical
Islamic reorganization in the region—but these were a safely
non-political distraction.

A major test for the Islamists was the dispatch of Turkish troops to
join the un force in Lebanon in October 2006. As with Iraq, a majority
of the population was strongly opposed to the Israeli invasion and the
IDF destruction of south Beirut. The terms of deployment of the UN
force under Resolution 1701—to help disarm the region 'south of the
Litani River'—seemed clearly intended to finish the job of downgrading
Hezbollah that Israel had failed to do. Characteristically, the AKP
attempted both to act with its main military partners, the US and
Israel, and to convince its base that it was on the side of the
'oppressed'. In July 2006, Erdoğan's condemnation of Israeli
'excesses' at the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Kuala
Lumpur was warmly received in the Muslim world, although it differed
little from the G8 Summit's formula of 'disproportionate response'.

Following the passage of Resolution 1701, both Erdoğan and Gül urged
the need for Turkish troops to 'come to the aid' of the suffering
Lebanese people. AKP leaders have invoked the Ottoman Empire
traditions of 'the nation's ancestors': Turkey must not remain aloof
from the problems of its neighbours and ignore the Middle East, as it
had done for the past eighty years. Or, repeated in the language of
Americanization: Turkey had to intervene in the region to become a
global player. There was also a war of disinformation: Islamist media
in favour of sending troops reported that Hezbollah had actually
invited Turkey to Lebanon. This seems highly unlikely, given the
formal military agreement between Israel and Turkey signed by Erbakan
in 1996. Although the scale of this military partnership is secret, it
is known to involve joint training exercises, shared intelligence,
assistance in counter-insurgency operations and modernization of
equipment—that is, Turkish purchases from Israeli arms manufacturers.
The AKP, of course, has taken no steps to annul it.

Yet Islamist protests against the dispatch of Turkish troops to
Lebanon were muted, if somewhat bigger in the east of the country.
Ironically, it was the more concerted opposition to the deployment
from the Republican People's Party and the nationalist right that
helped to rally AKP deputies' support. At the end of August 2006, the
rigidly secularist President Sezer—anathema to the religious
conservatives—declared that, rather than send troops to Lebanon,
Turkey should be dealing with its domestic problems, implying the
resurgent PKK in the southeast. This was sufficient to convince the
AKP parliamentarians that the enemies of 'conservative democracy' were
united in trying to prevent the government from sending troops. The
Cabinet convened immediately after the President's statement and
agreed to the deployment; a decision ratified by 340 to 192 in an
emergency session of the Meclis on September 5th, despite opinion
polls which showed that some 80 per cent of the public was against the
measure. The decision was also welcomed, of course, by the EU, the
Western media and pro-Western liberals in Turkey; some European
commentators even saw it as a good reason to speed up eu accession
talks.

A Hardening Stand

A third potential basis of opposition to the AKP lies in the rising
nationalist sentiment in Turkey, which has been demanding a tougher
position against the Kurdish rebels, more controls on markets and more
cautious relations with the West. Support for the EU has decreased
markedly over the past year. The emergence of a potential Kurdish
statelet in northern Iraq has alarmed Turkish nationalists who think
that this might be a first step towards a greater Kurdistan, which
would inevitably lead to the dismemberment of the country. This has
led to the establishment of several racist and ethnic segregationist
groups in the last years. These groups, some of them armed and led by
retired officers, are becoming popular especially in western regions
with large Kurdish migrant populations. Equally, the potential Kurdish
statelet has emboldened Kurdish nationalists. In 2004 the PKK ended
the ceasefire it had maintained since the arrest of its leader
Abduallah Öcalan in 1999, citing the AKP government's refusal to grant
a total amnesty. But by taking up arms, the guerrilla have inevitably
provoked both a security clampdown and a nationalist backlash. The PKK
declared another cease-fire at the end of September 2006, which again
fell on deaf ears.

Whereas two years ago the Erdoğan government—admittedly, at EU
urging—emphasized the need to acknowledge Kurdish identity, it is now
obsessed with arresting the leaders of the PKK. In terms all too
familiar from the 1990s, it has dismissed a mass demonstration in the
east as 'terrorism', and brushed off criticisms of the security forces
for having killed ten civilians. In June 2006, the AKP introduced
amendments to the anti-terror legislation that seriously curtailed
existing civil rights. Suspects under arrest will no longer have
access to lawyers for the first 24 hours of their detention,
increasing the likelihood of torture. It is now a criminal act to
publish statements by illegal organizations, or even to sympathize
with their views. This could hurt the Islamists and sections of the
left, but will most probably be used against supporters of Kurdish
organizations. The akp seems likely to ride the nationalist tide by
shifting in a more authoritarian direction, especially where the Kurds
are concerned.

At the same time—such are the contradictions of client-state
nationalism—many establishment figures have argued that Turkey has to
make itself ever-more indispensible to the Americans in order to
persuade Washington to set limits on the emergence of any form of
Kurdistan. This was one of the arguments used by secular-nationalist
journalists, policy advisors and intellectuals in favour of joining
the UN occupation force in Lebanon—that this was the only way to get
the US to crack down on the pkk bases in northern Iraq. Given their
current plight in Iraq the Americans are in no position to antagonize
the Kurds, but they have appointed a retired American general as a
facilitator to soothe Turkish fears and negotiate between Ankara and
the Kurds. Ironically, the logic of a growing Turkish nationalism thus
leads to intensifying Americanization, even as it demonstrates the
AKP's incapacity to implement this latest twist on its own. . . .

--
Yoshie


-- 
Yoshie