The New Old World (77 page)

At the time, the Grey Wolves looked the more formidable of the newcomers to the system, rapidly capturing key positions of the police and intelligence apparatuses of the state, from which terror could be orchestrated with paramilitary gangs outside it. Few terms have been as much abused as ‘fascism', but there is little question that the MHP of these years met the bill. Therein, however, lay its limitation. Classically, fascism—in Germany as in Italy or Spain—was a response to the threat of a mass revolutionary movement that the possessing classes feared they
could not contain within the established constitutional order. Where such a movement was missing, though clubs and squads might be useful for local intimidation, the risks of entrusting supreme power to any extra-legal dynamism of the right, welling up from below, were generally too high for traditional rulers. In Turkey a protean revolutionary force had emerged, attracting not just firebrands in the universities, but recruits from the religious and ethnic minorities, local support from groups of workers, even sympathizers in the educated middle class. But though it was capable of ascendancy in particular neighbourhoods or municipalities, it was never a mass phenomenon. A student-based movement, however dedicated its militants, was no match for a heavily armed state, let alone a conservative electoral majority.

Much of the traditional fabric of Turkish society was meanwhile coming apart, as migration from the countryside threw up squatter settlements in the towns, still not far removed in ways of life and outlook from the villages left behind—ruralization of the cities outrunning urbanization of the newcomers, in the famous formula of
Ş
erif Mardin, dean of Turkish sociologists
⁵³
—but without the same communal bonds. Though from the turn of the seventies the post-war boom was over, industrialization by import substitution was artificially prolonged by remittances from Turkish workers abroad and a ballooning foreign debt. By the end of the decade this model was exhausted: Demirel's brand of populism ended in larger deficits, higher inflation, wider black markets and lower growth than Menderes's had done. Deteriorating economic conditions were compounded by increasing civil violence, as the far Right stepped up its campaign against the Left, and a medley of revolutionary groups hit back. Worst affected were Alevis—communities suspect of a heterodoxy worse than Shiism—who became victims of the latest pogrom against a minority, the Grey Wolves acting as the Special Organization of the day.

The tipping point, however, came from another direction. In September 1980, an Islamist rally in Konya, resounding to calls for restoration of the sharia, refused to sing the national anthem, in open defiance of Kemalist prescriptions. Within a week, the army struck, closing the country's borders and seizing power in the small hours. Under a National Security Council headed by the chief of staff, Parliament was dissolved and every major
politician put behind bars. Parties were shut down; deputies, mayors and local councils dismissed. A year later, martial law would be declared in Poland, to a universal outcry in the West—a torrent of denunciations in editorials, articles, books, meetings, demonstrations. The military take-over in Turkey met with scarcely a murmur. Yet the rule of Jaruzelski was mild compared with that of Kenan Evren, commander of the Turkish Gladio. No less than 178,000 were arrested, 64,000 were jailed, 30,000 stripped of their citizenship, 450 died under torture, 50 were executed, others disappeared.
⁵⁴
Europe's good conscience took it in its stride.

Mass repression was not the gateway to a dictatorship in Turkey, but to a democratic catharsis of the kind that would become familiar in Latin America. Evren and his colleagues had no compunction about the wholesale use of torture, but equally they understood the importance of constitutions. A new charter was written, concentrating power in the executive, introducing a 10 per cent threshold for representation in the legislature, and eliminating excessive civil liberties, especially those which had permitted irresponsible strikes or calumnies in the press. A referendum in which any discussion of the document was forbidden duly ratified it, installing Evren as president. In 1983 elections were held under the improved rules, and parliamentary government returned. The way was now paved for a third cycle of Centre-Right politics.

The new premier was Turgut Özal, like Demirel—to whom he owed his rise—a provincial engineer with a background in the US, whose initial move from bureaucratic and managerial positions into a political career had been made via the National Salvation Party, of which his brother was a leading light. A year before the coup, Demirel had put him in charge of the stabilization plan on which the IMF insisted as a condition of bailing Turkey out of its financial crisis—a standard deflationary package that had run into stiff trade-union opposition. When the military seized power, they retained his services, and once popular resistance was crushed, Özal's hands were no longer tied. He could now implement the
reductions in public spending, hikes in interest rates, scrapping of price controls and cuts in real wages that international confidence required. A financial scandal in his team, forcing him to resign in 1982, saved him from continuing association with the junta when elections were held the following year. Creating his own Motherland Party, with the tacit backing of all three of the now banned formations of the previous Right—populist, fascist and islamist—he carried off an easy victory with 45 per cent of the vote, giving him an absolute majority in Parliament.

Squat and unprepossessing in appearance, crude in manner, Özal always had a touch of a Turkish Mr Toad about him. But he was a more considerable figure than Demirel or Menderes, with a quick, sharp mind and a coherent vision of the country's future. Coming to power at the turn of the eighties, the hour of Thatcher and Reagan, he was a local equivalent in neo-liberal resolve. The import substitution model, with its web of administered prices, over-valued exchange rates, bureaucratic licenses and subsidized public sector—all that Kemalist statism had thought to develop over the years—started to be dismantled, to give free rein to market forces. There were limits: privatization of state enterprises was more talked about than done. But overall, economic liberalization was pushed through, with highly satisfactory results for Turkish capital. Exports trebled in value. New enterprises sprang up, profits rose, and wages declined. Amid accelerating growth, and a general climate of
enrichissez-vous
, a contemporary consumerism arrived for the middle class.
⁵⁵

Simultaneously, Özal exploited religion to consolidate his position more openly than any of his predecessors. He could do this because the junta had itself abandoned military traditions of secularism, in the interests of combating subversion. ‘Laicism does not mean atheism', Evren told the nation.
⁵⁶
In 1982 confessional instruction was made obligatory in state schools, and from then on what had always been tacit in official ideology, the identification of nation with religion, became explicit with the diffusion of ‘the Turkish-Islamic synthesis' as textbook doctrine. Özal, though an arch-pragmatist, was himself a member of
the mystical Naqshbandi order—he liked to compare them to the Mormons, as examples of the affinity between piety and money—and used state control of religion to promote it as never before. Under him, the budget of the Directorate of Religious Affairs increased sixteen-fold: five million copies of the Koran were printed at public expense, half a million pilgrims ushered to Mecca, seventy thousand mosques kept up for the faithful.
⁵⁷
The devout, the dynamic and the epicurean all had reason to be grateful to him.

In the spring of 1987, Özal capped his project to modernize the country by applying for Turkish entry into the European Community, the candidature that is still pending twenty years later. In the autumn he was re-elected premier, and in 1989 took over the presidency when Evren retired. From this peak, it was downhill. Economically, a trade deficit and overvalued currency combined with electorally driven public spending to send inflation back to pre-coup levels, triggering a wave of strikes and choppy business conditions. Corruption, rife during the boom, now lapped the presidential family itself. Politically, having gambled that he could keep the old guard of politicians out of play with a referendum banning their re-entry into the arena, which he then lost, Özal was faced with the rancour of a reanimated Demirel. Increasingly abrupt and autocratic in style, he made Turkey into a launching-pad for American strikes against Iraq in the Gulf War, in defiance of public opinion and against the advice of the general staff, and got no economic or strategic reward for doing so. Instead, Turkey was now confronted with an autonomous Kurdish zone on its south-eastern borders, under American protection.

Each cycle of the three cycles of Centre-Right rule had seen a steady weakening of one of the pillars of Kemalism as a historical structure—its compression of religion to a default identity, restricting its expressions to the private sphere. Now it was not just secularism, as officially defined, but also statism, as an economic outlook, that was eroded. Özal had gone furthest in both directions, confessional and liberal. But the deeper foundations
of the Kemalist order lay untouched. Integral nationalism has remained
de rigueur
for every government since 1945, with its invariable toll of victims. After the Greeks in the fifties and the Alevis in the seventies, now it was the turn, once again, of the Kurds. The radicalization of the late sixties had not left them unaffected, but so long as there was a legal Workers' Party, or a lively set of illegal movements in the universities, Kurdish aspirations flowed into a more general stream of activism. Once the coup of 1980 had decapitated this Left, however, the political reawakening of a new generation of Kurds had to find its own ways to emancipation.

On seizing power, Evren's junta had declared martial law in the south-east, and rapidly made any use of the Kurdish language—even in private—a criminal offence. Absolute denial of any cultural or political expressions of a collective Kurdish identity covered the whole of Turkey. But in the south-east, social and economic relations were also explosive: the proportion of landless peasants was high,
⁵⁸
and the power of large landowners, long complicit with the state, was great. In this setting, one of the Kurdish groups formed in Ankara just before the coup found the natural conditions for a guerrilla war. The PKK, initially sporting Marxist–Leninist colours, but in actuality—as time would show—thoroughly pragmatic, launched its first operations across the Syrian and Iraqi borders in the spring of 1984.

This time the Turkish state, facing a much more disciplined and modern enemy, with external bases, could not crush the movement in a few months, as it had done the risings of 1925 and 1937. A prolonged war ensued, in which the PKK responded to military terror with pitiless ferocities of its own. It was fifteen years before the army and air force finally brought the Kurdish insurgency to an end, in 1999. By then, Ankara had mobilized more than a quarter of a million troops and police—twice the size of the American army of occupation in Iraq—at an annual cost of $6 billion. According to official figures, at least 30,000 died, and 380,000 were expelled from their homes. Actual victims were more numerous. In the words of a leading authority, ‘unofficial estimates put the number of internal refugees at three million'.
⁵⁹
The method of deportations was old, the destination new, as
the army burnt and razed villages to concentrate the population under its control, in a Turkish version of the strategic hamlets in Vietnam—invigilated slums in the regional cities.

This was the other face of Özal's rule. In his last years, he started to speak of his own half-Kurdish origins—he came from Malatya in the east—and to loosen the most draconian laws against the use of Kurdish as a language. But on his sudden death in 1993, Demirel grabbed the presidency, and torture and repression intensified. The rest of the nineties saw a succession of weak, corrupt coalitions, that reproduced the trajectory of the seventies, presiding over a disintegration of the political system and economic model of the preceding decade, as if the hegemony of the Centre-Right was fated to repeat the same parabola every generation. Once more public debt soared, inflation took off, interest rates rocketed. This time deep recession and high unemployment completed the debacle.

In the last year of the century a moribund Ecevit returned to office, boasting of his capture of the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan—a figure out of Dostoevsky, abducted by Mossad and the CIA in Africa and delivered in a truss to Ankara, where he was soon profusely expressing his love for Turkey. By now public finances were in ruins, the price of necessities out of control. The final economic crisis was triggered by an undignified dispute between the president, now a former judge, and the premier, livid to be taxed with the corruption of his ministers. Dudgeon at the helm of the state led to panic on the stock market, and collapse of the currency.
⁶⁰
Meltdown was avoided only by an emergency IMF loan, extended for the same reason as to Yeltsin's Russia—the country was too important an American interest to risk a domestic upheaval, should it founder. The fall of the government a few months later brought the aftermath of the Özal years to a close.

Elections in the autumn of 2002 saw a complete transformation of the political scene. A party that had not even existed eighteen months before swept the board. The AKP—Justice and Development Party—running on a moderate Muslim platform,
won two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly, forming a government with the largest majority since the time of Menderes. Its victory was widely hailed, at home and abroad, as the dawn of a new era for Turkey. Not only would the country now be assured stable government, after years of squabbling coalition cabinets, but—still more vital—there was the prospect of a long overdue reconciliation of religion and democracy in Turkey. For the central plank of the AKP's electoral campaign was a pledge to bring Turkey into the European Union, as a country made capable of meeting the EU's long-standing criteria for membership, above all the political
sine qua non
of the rule of law and respect for human rights. Within a month of their victory, AKP leaders had secured a diplomatic triumph at the Copenhagen summit of the EU, which gave Turkey a firm date, only two years away, for starting negotiations for its accession to the Union, provided that it had enacted sufficient political reforms in the interim. At home the general change of mood, from despair to euphoria, was dramatic. Not since 1950 had such a fresh start, inspiring so much hope, been witnessed.