A year later, the changes to be found in Turkey

Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s vision of the ‘New Turkey’ and the crackdown imposed since the botched military attempt to overthrow his government will change the country’s face for decades. Alex Christie-Miller writes

Older Turks who witnessed the awful scenes that unfolded during the attempted coup in the country last year would have known what to expect had it succeeded: suspension of legal order, a climate of fear, and mass arrests and detentions.

After all, it had happened before, most recently in 1980.

This time around, however, the coup failed but Turkey has ended up with similar problems.

A year on, it remains under a state of emergency as president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has embarked on one of the most far-reaching crackdowns in the country’s modern history.

Just as the 1980 coup brought about profound and lasting changes to Turkish society and politics, so the legacy of the July 15 coup attempt is reshaping the country in ways that are likely to be felt for decades.

Mass arrests

The stream of detentions, police raids and expropriations is dizzying.

In the past two weeks, the heads of several of Turkey’s top human rights organisation were held as they met for a workshop, and arrest orders were issued for 72 academics, including several from Istanbul’s prestigious Bogazici University.

They join tens of thousands of others already behind bars. About 180,000 people have been dismissed from the public sector, with many barred from leaving the country.

The media has been hit, with about 170 websites, newspapers, magazines and news channels shut down.

The clampdown is ostensibly aimed at the network of Fethullah Gulen, the imam exiled in the US who has been blamed for the coup attempt.

But it has gone much further than that, targeting leftists, Kurdish nationalists, and liberals – almost anyone who publicly defies the Erdogan government.

In April, constitutional amendments passed by referendum stripped parliament of many of its powers, putting them into Mr Erdogan’s hands, and granting him effective control over judicial appointments.

‘Walk for Justice’

The extraordinary sense of crisis engendered by the coup attempt has also allowed him to press on with the creation of what he calls the “New Turkey”, in which conservative Islamic values lie at the heart of the nation.

The depth of resistance to all this was evident on Sunday, when the leader of the country’s long-moribund main opposition party staged a rally in Istanbul that attracted hundreds of thousands of people, and came at the end of a 425-kilometre “Walk for Justice”.

“We walked for non-existent justice. We walked for the rights of victims, jailed lawmakers and journalists,” People’s Republican Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu told the crowd, denouncing what he called the “July 20th civil coup” named for the date on which the state of emergency began.

While allowing the march and rally to go ahead, Mr Erdogan alluded to its participants as terrorist sympathisers, telling the CHP it had “gone beyond being a political opposition and taken on a different proportion”.

The accusation is a familiar one in today’s Turkey, where the government justifies its continuing clampdown by appealing to a deep-seated fear in the popular psyche of internal and external enemies plotting to divide, weaken and destroy the nation.

To his large and passionate base of supporters, Mr Erdogan symbolises the nation.

But many of his opponents have tried to keep him and the Islamist movement he represents from power, dating back to 1998 when he was removed as mayor of Istanbul, banned from public office, and imprisoned for four months by the country’s secularist establishment.

There were murmurings of a possible coup almost as soon as the AKP won power in 2002, and the party narrowly avoided closure by the judiciary in 2007.

Gulenists targeted

More recently, it is his erstwhile allies the Gulenists – a shadowy, highly organised religious movement that was infiltrating Turkey’s state offices at the same time Mr Erdogan was building his political career – who have emerged as his primary antagonists.

Both shared the aim of bringing down the Kemalist establishment that saw itself as the defender of the legacy of Turkey’s modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Having achieved this, they turned to fighting over the spoils.

Turkey’s descent into authoritarianism could be seen as essentially reactive: as the perceived threats facing Mr Erdogan have increased, so have the lengths to which he will go to counter them.

Most shocking is the arbitrariness of the current crackdown, with tweets making fun of the government, or possession of an account with a Gulenist-run bank being considered sufficient grounds for arrest.

Suspects have been blacklisted from public employment.

Many have had their assets seized. They and often their family members have been banned from leaving the country. In recent weeks, one woman was detained in hospital with her newborn baby.

Reshaping Turkey

But beyond the measures is a broader plan to reshape Turkey, to which the coup has lent decisive momentum.

The country’s Islamists have long dreamt of reforming the system imposed by Ataturk, which they regarded as a betrayal of the heritage of the defunct Ottoman Empire.

Now, the foiled coup is an anchor for that effort. In speeches and official propaganda, the successful resistance to the coup is being likened to the Turkish victory against the British at Gallipoli in 1915, or its 1919-1922 independence war with Greece as a pivotal moment in the nation’s destiny.

At the start of the most recent school year, children across the country were given classes on the meaning of the coup attempt, casting its defeat as a turning point for Turkey’s democracy and national sovereignty.

But it is a direction that also seeks to emphasise the threats to Turkey, and justify further authoritarian action, with Mr Erdogan claiming that only a strong executive without checks and balances can withstand the country’s enemies.

If his team delivers economic stability, it is hard to see how those against him could derail his vision of New Turkey

US, Europe ties tested

Another legacy of the coup attempt is the fracturing it has caused in Ankara’s alliance with the West.

With Mr Gulen in the US, a deep conviction runs throughout Turkish society that Washington was somehow complicit in the coup attempt, an accusation repeatedly made by senior Turkish officials.

After the election of Donald Trump last year, Mr Erdogan’s government has made efforts to repair its ties with the Americans.

But for the moment they are papering a series of differences on which there is little sign of reconciliation, most notably Washington’s continued military support for Kurdish Syrian rebels linked to terrorist-designated separatists in Turkey.

Meanwhile, a gulf is growing between Ankara and Europe, with which Turkey has a long and mutual history of stirring antagonism to pander to nationalist sentiments at home.

Turkish ministers have been blocked from holding public meetings in several European countries that have large Turkish diasporas.

European leaders claim the officials were inciting hatred.

In response, Mr Erdogan accused the Dutch, Germans and Austrians of “Nazism”.

Last week the European Parliament called for Turkey’s accession talks, opened in 2005 but long stalled, to be suspended if the government fully implemented the constitutional reform package passed in April.

Regional isolation

Other than its staunch ally Qatar, with whom Mr Erdogan has sided in the current Arabian Gulf diplomatic crisis, Turkey appears to be isolated in its region.

It appears to be at odds with the major powers to which it might look to build better ties as an alternative to its western orientation.

It has complicated ties the region, particularly with Egypt over its support of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It stands in opposition to Iran and Russia in Syria. And it is embroiled in a bloody Kurdish insurgency on its own soil and in Syria and Iraq.

This tableau may suggest that Mr Erdogan’s post-coup vision of Turkey is headed for disaster.

And yet he remains one of the most adept and charismatic political leaders in the world today.

Crucially, he is still capable of pragmatism, as he demonstrated in his tolerance of Kilicdaroglu’s Walk for Justice. Perhaps more crucially, with the referendum over the government has shifted its energy towards improving an economy buffeted by crises.

To the relief of the markets, senior government officials have cut their rhetoric against an “interest rate lobby” – a supposed international finance conspiracy that is aimed at weakening Turkey by keeping rates high.

While analysts are increasingly wary of official economic data coming out of Turkey, the lira has stabilised after hitting a record low this year and first quarter economic growth for was at 5 per cent.

If Mr Erdogan’s team can deliver economic stability, then it is hard to see how even the hundreds of thousands who rallied in defiance of him last weekend could derail his vision for Turkey.