The Atlantic and Its Enemies (71 page)

Enlightenments eat their parents. The medical improvements, considerable in their own way - in Ankara, malaria had been a mass killer until the Republic, with its Çubuk reservoir and its devoted doctors - also resulted in a demographic explosion. This was worst in the partly Kurdish east, where polygamy, starting for a boy in his mid-teens, with a girl even younger who was soon ditched, was standard, though not legal. Then again, as France had discovered post-Napoleon, education creates an unappeasable intelligentsia; a Russian reactionary, Konstantin Leontiev, sagely said that, in Russia, ‘the tavern does less damage than the school’. The best products of the educational system, as with developing countries from the Third Republic or united Italy onwards, went into technical services and were very good indeed, but there were others, hanging discontentedly around the media or the educational institutions, and thinking that they knew it all. This was to be an enormous problem in the Turkish seventies, more or less as happened in Chile; and such men and women tended to look on the peasantry, trooping into the towns, as isomorphic magnitudes like a sack of potatoes. Migrant peasants occupied huge areas on the outskirts of the main cities, especially Istanbul. By law, they could not be evicted if they managed to put up a house during one night’s work. These ‘night constructions’ (
gecekondu
) formed rings round historic Istanbul and Ankara, a terrible affront to modernizing Turkey. Ankara had been planned by central European architects and their Turkish associates in the 1930s, and they had aimed higher than this.

Migrant rurals even besieged the old part of Ankara, where Atatürk had established the modernizing State. You could leave the official entertainment palace of the foreign ministry, where, once, Atatürk had danced the waltz with Western ambassadresses, and perhaps discussed the principles of Bauhaus architecture with Bruno Taut, luminary of Weimar, Moscow and Tokyo. (Taut, out of gratitude, said that he would design Atatürk’s catafalque gratis. He then designed something resembling a huge gilded eggbox. The Turks did not know how to respond. Taut let them off the hook by himself dying, and being buried in it, at Edirne.) Then you would smell kebabs, and have to avoid large, religious-clad women driving their brood along the pavement towards a multifarious bazaar. Istanbul’s population grew from 2 million to 10 million (and by some accounts, even 15 million). There had been 12 million Turks in 1922. By 1950 there were 20 million, by 1975 35 million and by 1980 45 million. The infrastructure could hardly respond to this. Schools were too few, the electricity network was overburdened, and even the sewage system suffered. It was a variant of what western Europe had undergone in the later nineteenth century, but on a much greater scale, and in a much shorter time. In the 1970s order was breaking down.

All enlightened, reforming states encountered a political problem: how far could liberty be sacrificed for the sake of progress? This problem was well-known in Russia or Spain, two countries with which Turkey had a great deal in common. Pushkin had said that ‘the State is the only European in Russia’, and in such countries the army had a role in public affairs that it did not have in more advanced places. It took in ambitious boys from the provinces, sometimes even the peasantry, gave them discipline and education, and so caused them to rise in society (e.g. the chief of staff in 1960 came from a tobacco-farming family, and a later military saviour, Kenan Evren, was the son of a bank clerk in the Balkans). Military schools taught medicine and engineering, and the Turkish officer corps had had a role in the modernization of the country ever since the early nineteenth century. Under Atatürk - himself, in Salonica, a one-time cadet, refugee from a religious school - this went on: the army was at the centre of the State. On the other hand, there was much pressure for political change, in the direction of greater freedom. In the later 1940s there was a split in the ruling single party, the Republicans, partly because of foreign pressure, and partly because the two wings grew further apart. The Republicans, under İsmet Inönü, represented bullying Westernizing virtue, and Inönü had a statue of himself, bigger than the National Monument itself, designed for Taksim Square, where once had been an Ottoman barracks. But there were rivals, interested in prising open the State and, in some grubby cases, using primitive nationalism to expropriate the property of the minorities, especially the quarter-million Greeks in Istanbul. They were also prepared to open up to the peasantry, especially as regards the legalization of religious practices that the Republicans had regarded as ridiculous. The Republicans were by this stage unpopular, as they were associated with a police state.

In 1950, under American pressure, Inönü allowed free elections, and the free-market, liberalizing element, established as the Democratic Party, won an enormous victory. The old Republicans survived in any number only because local prefects had done deals with Kurdish chieftains in the east, whose tribes voted
en bloc
as instructed. The Democrats were in power for ten years, and started well: American aid flowed in, some of the state restrictions were lifted, a large concrete mosque was put up in the middle of Ankara (with a supermarket underneath) and the Democrats’ leader, Adnan Menderes, won respect abroad because of his NATO connections (he said, ‘Whatever America does is right by us’). Then came the worst mistake of modern Turkish history. The Greeks of Istanbul occupied much of the best real estate and ran the best shops; they were half of the stock exchange. Some were even deputies of the Democratic Party. On 5-6 September 1955 there was a riot in the European part of Istanbul, and the great avenue running through it, once called Grand’ rue de Péra, was filled with broken glass and goods flung out of shop windows, while the police stood by. This was ostensibly done because the Greeks on Cyprus were behaving intolerably against the Turkish minority, but the main factor was simply greed, and stupid greed at that, on the part of Democrat associates. The Greeks (and many Armenians) left Istanbul, except for a tiny remnant, even then - in the Fener district - overshadowed by true-believing Moslems at their truest-believing noisiest, and having to be protected by the army and the police. The Greek district was then taken over by rural migrants, and took two generations to recover. So did the country. Menderes was later executed because of this, though, oddly enough, the Greek Patriarch appeared as a witness on his behalf. The Democrats made whoopee with the budget, lost control of finance, split, had to attempt a fiddling of elections, then tried to govern in authoritarian style. They encouraged religion, whereas Atatürk had determinedly kept it out of public life. Secular Turkey hated all of this, and there was a military coup, on 27 May 1960. A general, Cemal Gürsel, now became head of state, and tried, in close co-operation with Inönü, to produce an updated version of Atatürkism. Professors of law produced a revised constitution, in the extraordinary belief that the decreeing of things on paper would mean their realization in practice. The Americans offered almost immediate recognition and $400m credit; more professors - Dutch - arrived with a Plan.

But the outcome was Menderes’s revenge. In the first place, the demographic boom went ahead - by 1980 two thirds of the urban population was under thirty-five, and the villages moved to the towns (and also moved to German towns, in hundreds of thousands). The Democratic Party had been banned, but it carried on in another form, as the Justice Party (Turkish parties sometimes have names with an almost untranslatable religious reference, to the seven deadly virtues - chastity, sobriety, thrift, etc.). The Americans had a soft spot for it, and its leader, the wily Süleyman Demirel, had worked with them, in a company that built the Bosphorus Bridge and the Middle Eastern Technical University. The Republicans, by contrast, were turning increasingly towards the Left, and old Inönü was eventually forced out by a man who had the makings of a Turkish Allende, Bülent Ecevit: very cultivated, a Sanskrit scholar, a considerable poet and quite hopeless in politics. He had to deal with a very divided party. Part of it was rigidly secularist, regarding Islam as a disease. Another part came from a very heretical element of Islam, the Alevis, who treated women as equals, drank wine in the Christian manner, and regarded the holy month of Ramazan, when nothing was supposed to pass the mouth during daylight hours, as ridiculous. Then there were Kurds, also a rough fifth of the population, whose chiefs tended towards deadly rivalry, and were generally willing to change party allegiance according to favours. Already in the early 1960s an uncomfortable pattern was setting in. Roughly 40 per cent of the vote would go to parties with some form of religious programme; another 40 per cent would go to their opposites, some of them veering towards the Left. Then there would be small parties, set up to champion a leader’s ambition. But the large parties themselves only held together if there was a leader with all of the strings in his hands, prepared to behave dictatorially and even corruptly. Coalitions succeeded each other, and the army waited in the wings. A counterpoint of bullying and irresponsibility then went ahead. The trick in politics was to establish personal influence, whether to do favours for your electors at home or for your friends in the capital. There was an element among the educated youth that wandered off into terrorism - much as had happened with ‘Land and Liberty’ in Tsarist Russia, where students had imagined that the masses could only become seriously revolutionary if the police made their lives hellish, by mistake. They provoked trouble, and brought another military coup in 1971, a pointless one. As happened in Chile, the Turkish Left had a great deal more responsibility for its fate than it ever, generally speaking, admitted to.

In the seventies, Ecevit with his rough 40 per cent matched Demirel, with his rough 40. In the hothouse atmosphere of the other 20 per cent, there were strange growths. Certain parts of Turkey had a strongly Islamic tradition, especially Konya, south-east of Ankara, and the Erzurum region, far to the east. Here, in secular eyes, were brainwashed peasants with a vengeance, but the real point was hatred of the corruption that came from Istanbul and Ankara. The leader was a professor of water engineering, Necmettin Erbakan, who had taught in Germany and had been a colleague of Demirel’s; if he got anywhere, it was because his hands were clean. Ecevit took up an alliance with him, both sides anxious to repel the military, in 1973. Demirel could to some extent rely on another small party, the Nationalists, whose real power came partly from inflation. In an inflationary period, small suppliers, not paid on time by large receivers, suffered. A visit from Nationalist bully-boys would cause debts to be repaid faster than if the business had gone through the courts, and in populous, unsavoury areas the Nationalists did tolerably well. The Nationalists also tended to do well in districts close to areas of Kurdish or Alevi migration, such as Gaziosmanpaşa or Sütlüce in Istanbul. It was a dismal period, each party throwing money at voters (Ecevit even paid twelve of Demirel’s men cash, to desert their party and join his, as ministers for this or that: one suggestion was ‘weather-reporting’), and inflation got under way. The oil shock meant that the economy, almost entirely dependent upon imported energy, ran down; it survived only by contracting debts, which went up from $2bn in 1970 to $20bn in 1980. Between 1975 and 1980 there was also an eightfold rise in prices, as the government’s deficits became uncontrollable, covered only by paper.

Matters were made worse because relations with the United States turned sour. This had to do with Greece and Cyprus. That island had become independent in 1960, and the position of the Turkish minority - one fifth of the population - was supposedly guaranteed under the constitution, which reserved certain rights. Great Britain, Turkey and Greece were supposed to guarantee the constitution, with a right to military intervention where required. Quite soon after independence, Greek Cypriot nationalists started to persecute the Turks. This was not wise. Left alone, a third of them would have become Greeks, a third would have emigrated, and a third would have remained as picturesque folklore, cooking kebabs and dancing in a masculine line as evidence of the great tolerance towards minorities displayed by Greek civilization. Instead, there was stupid and nasty persecution, beginning at Christmas 1963 with the killing of a wedding party. A United Nations force arrived to hold a ‘Green Line’ supposedly separating the two sides. This meant, as such ‘peacekeeping’ ventures generally did, that excuses were found for the stronger side, which then pushed the Turks into small enclaves, mostly dependent for survival on foreign charity, itself sometimes diverted by Greek Cypriot officials. Potatoes rolled around the floor of the customs shed at Famagusta, because the sacks were slit open. Matters then became pointlessly complicated, in the manner of the Levant. There was a military coup in Greece in 1967, and in 1974 there was a coup within the coup, which led to crypto-Fascists taking power. They tried to overthrow the government of Greek Cyprus, assuming that its leader, Archbishop Makarios, was playing up to the Soviet Union, given that Cyprus stood on the edge of a Middle East which was, just then, boiling. A civil war on Cyprus resulted, a number of Greeks disappearing. The local Turks, held together by a remarkable figure, Rauf Denktaş, could justly fear a return of persecution, expulsion, but Ecevit and Erbakan, with their unlikely coalition, were presented with an opportunity. The Turkish army went in, and, given the paralysis of America, through Watergate, and England, through money, was not resisted. In the outcome, the Turks occupied nearly one third of the island, and resisted international condemnation. The Turks of Cyprus remained poor and isolated, but they survived. Denktaş said, quite rightly, that they had avoided the fate of the Gaza Strip Palestinians. Nevertheless, the simple solution - recognition of Turkish Cyprus’s independence - evaded international bureaucrats, and a good part of the Turkish Cypriot population simply ended up in London.

In Turkey, Ecevit became hugely popular. He decided to exploit this, with an immediate election, which would let him dispense with his odd-bedfellow Islamic ally. But parliament would not allow early elections, and fell into paralysis; when they were held, six months later, Ecevit narrowly lost. Demirel and the smaller parties put forward a ‘National Front’ government, with a majority of four seats, early in 1975. In the provinces, and some of the ministries, the smaller parties, Nationalists and Islamists, used their power disproportionately for changes of personnel; and besides, their strength was such that an institution designed to train clergymen (
Imam-hatıp
) was opened for ordinary schoolchildren, segregated between boys and girls, and subjected to solid religious education, including koranic Arabic, which Turks simply repeated syllabically, without understanding; prizes went to the
hafiz
, who knew the lot off by heart. They had been started (in effect) in 1951, and grew from seven to over one hundred in 1975, and 383 by 1988; in 1971 they were functioning at middle-school level as well, and were teaching 300,000 pupils. Half of the curriculum was religious, and the secularists grumbled. Under Demirel’s National Front governments (1975-7 and after the June election, 1977-8) the desecularization of modern Turkey, in a sense, got under way. In some universities, during Ramazan, the canteens closed; there was tension between observers and non-observers since the observers got up early to have something to eat before sun-up, and woke up the non-observers by their talk about football and so forth, while non-observers’ smoking after lunch similarly irritated observers; there were fights and, on occasion, ambulances. The call to prayer was now heard, loudly amplified, in the very centre of great cities, and in Ankara there was a big row when the mayor put up a statue of one of the secularists’ symbols, the stag of the Hittites (Indo-Europeans, not Arabs), and the religious-minded interior minister stopped construction again and again until the courts ruled otherwise. On one level, no doubt desperately childish, but on another deeply serious, and to do with the nature of the country and the upbringing of children, especially daughters. At any rate it divided the country very deeply. Perhaps Demirel and Ecevit themselves would have preferred to co-operate, as the great industrialists (Vehbi Koç and Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı) wanted them to do. But each was prisoner of his supporters, in no mood to compromise. When Ecevit visited an Alevi centre in Cappadocia (Hacı Bektaş) his cortège was fired on by the orthodox Sunni in Nevşehir; in the mixed town of Maraş a regular battle developed between Alevis and Sunnis, and a hundred people were killed. The police lacked training and equipment, as only seventeen of sixty-seven provincial sections even had a camera; and the prisons were in chaos, some of them unable to pay their telephone bills because prisoners abused their rights to long-distance telephone calls (in a country where in any event talking on the telephone is a national curse). In 1979 a Fascist murderer, Mehmet Alı Ağca, was able to slip out from Ankara prison, where he had been tried for the murder of a famous newspaper editor, Abdı İpekçi (from an old
dönme
family, a stout secularist, and descendant of Jews who had converted). Ecevit sought a way through the mess with a combination of nationalism and restated left-wing orthodoxies. He approached the Soviet Union (in vain) for oil; he toured Yugoslavia and irritated the army chiefs by praising its supposedly non-professional and voluntary territorial defence system. In 1978 he made a considerable blunder, of refusing to apply for membership of the European Economic Community at precisely the same moment as Greece did apply. His government fell apart, and Demirel returned, with a minority government.