‘Turkey is in a dark tunnel, we have no light’
Ruthless purge by Erdogan after last year’s failed coup has left thousands jobless and stuck in judicial limbo
ISTAR GOZAYDIN was in her bathrobe when the police came to her Istanbul apartment at 6.30am one day last December. They gave the professor time to change before they took her to prison to join tens of thousands of others jailed amid Turkey’s crackdown following last summer’s failed coup.
Mrs Gozaydin had already lost her job as a law and politics professor after the putsch attempt when the government shut down universities it claimed were linked to Fethullah Gülen, an exiled cleric and once an ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkey’s president.
Officials accuse Mr Gülen and his supporters of masterminding the coup attempt, a charge the cleric denies.
Mrs Gozaydin says she does not belong to any ideology and used to support Mr Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party. None of that mattered during the three and a half months she was in jail over allegations of being part of a terrorist organisation.
Mrs Gozaydin was eventually released, but she cannot find a job because institutions cannot hire someone from one of the closed universities.
This is the post-putsch fate of many one year on – unemployed and stuck in judicial limbo in Turkey, with no way out since authorities have confiscated passports, including Mrs Gozaydin’s. The purge has resulted in 50,000 people being jailed pending trial and 150,000 dismissed or suspended from their jobs. The crackdown has worsened relations with the EU.
Last week, the European Parliament said Turkey’s EU accession talks should be suspended if it goes through with plans to strengthen Mr Erdoğan’s powers following an April referendum.
Mr Erdoğan says the curbs are necessary to fight threats to Turkey, including attacks by Kurdish militants and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).
“Anything might happen to anybody at any time,” Mrs Gozaydin said. “Rule of law is for everybody … everybody needs it one way or the other. If [it] is violated for somebody today, it may easily be violated for the others”.
Ali Ergin Demirhanin is the editorin-chief of a socialist news site that, he said, had been shut down 49 times. But it was the questioning of the legitimacy of the results of an April referendum that led to his detention.
Mr Erdoğan narrowly won with 51.4 per cent voting in favour of constitutional changes, but questions were raised over the election board allowing unstamped ballot papers to be counted.
On April 20, police came to Demirhanin’s office. He was sentenced to 15 months in jail but was told it would be postponed. If he does not get in trouble again, he will not serve the time.
“It’s something to make journalists afraid … they have to kill the truth,” Mr Demirhanin said.
Last week, hundreds of thousands of people attended the largest protest since the coup attempt. It was the culmination of a march started in June by the Republican People’s Party (CHP), the main opposition party, after Enis Berberoğlu, one of its MPS, was jailed for 25 years, allegedly for spying.
The pro-kurdish HDP has 11 MPS in jail and joined the march while some conservatives voiced their support. It may be a sign that divisions within the opposition are narrowing, posing a greater threat to Mr Erdoğan’s power.
Baris Yarkadas, his CHP colleague, is not scared. “If the government wishes they can [arrest me] within five minutes,” he said. “If you are afraid, you cannot do politics. Therefore, I am not afraid. This is the killing of democracy … they put Turkey in a dark tunnel, they want to stop us from seeing the light from that tunnel.”
Anyone who insists that Britain has had a catastrophic year should look to Turkey for perspective. Today is the first anniversary of the attempted military coup against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s authoritarian but democratically elected president. The military failed; some dared hope that the country would respond with greater unity and commitment to democratic norms. Sadly, the opposite was true. Turkey, the ancient bridge between Europe and Asia, arches towards dictatorship.
Since the coup attempt, some 50,000 people have been arrested, including judges, journalists and human rights activists. Tens of thousands of public employees have lost their jobs. In April, Mr Erdogan, who has revived Ottoman grandiloquence, held a referendum to establish a powerful executive presidency. He won, albeit narrowly and with questions over the fairness of the contest. The result may well reflect the will of Turks living outside prosperous Istanbul; the countryside is poorer than the cities, and feels culturally alienated from the secularist elite.
Europe’s attempts to bribe Turkey to liberalise with the prospect of EU membership have proved spectacularly naive. And yet stability in the Middle East and management of the Syrian refugee crisis remain impossible without Turkish engagement, which is why Mr Trump met Mr Erdogan, even as the US began arming Kurdish forces in Syria. Turkey is too important to punish with isolation, but increasingly too dictatorial to trust entirely. Nevertheless, the West must press Ankara to respect the rights of its people, if Turkey wishes to be regarded as a key player in the alliance of free nations – not an autocratic embarrassment.