‘If we learn anything, we learn it from (the) people who are different from us’
In 2003, Turkish voters elected Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), which moved the country gradually away from a past marked by the rule of secularists. Since the 1920s, they tried to homogenize Turkey’s multicultural society by suppressing religious and cultural expression to erase the influence of the Ottoman legacy.
Over the following decade under the AKP, religious conservatism was stamped on Turkey’s political and social landscape. Minorities, like the Kurds, as well as leftists and those leading a liberal lifestyle, chafed under increasing restrictions on civil freedoms.
By 2013, the restrictions extended to activists, journalists, artists — anyone opposed to the government. The climax came that year, when protests over a government construction project at Istanbul’s Gezi park led to a crackdown in which 11 were killed and 8,000 injured.
Many Turks, including conservatives, were shocked. As a result, Turkish voters punished the AKP in 2015 by denying it a majority in parliament. It was a serious blow to the party. Besides concern over the crackdown and earlier edicts restricting basic freedoms, voters were worried about slowing economic growth and the civil war in neighboring Syria that sent a flood of refugees into Turkey. The final straw was Erdogan’s heavyhanded attempt to make himself president for life by amending the constitution.
Just months after the elections, however, a cease-fire with Kurdish separatists fell apart, reigniting fighting in the decadesold conflict. Also, the Islamic State set off bombs in Ankara, the capital, killing 90 young people during a protest. It was the country’s worst terror attack.
On Nov. 1, voters, concerned about the violence, voted overwhelmingly for Erdogan’s party based on its vow to restore stability. Yet, right after that victory, Erdogan resumed policies that have divided Turks along religious and ethnic lines and pitted urban against rural interests.
Today, the fault lines have only increased after more than a dozen terror attacks and the summer’s attempted coup.
Tens of thousands of civil servants, military personnel and educators have been arrested, and there has been a crackdown on the media. London-based Elif Shafak is one of Turkey’s renowned novelists. An advocate for women’s rights and free speech, she was prosecuted by the government in 2006 for insulting “Turkishness” in one of her novels.
“In a world where there’s so much happening, so fast, where there’s the fear that the next terror attack could happen any time, in a world where you see lots of displacement (of refugees), many people fear that the future is going to be very ambivalent.
“Where they make a mistake is to think that if they close the doors, live in smaller tribal communities, they’ll feel safer.
“That is an illusion. But the fear is real, and we have to understand that.
“We are mostly divided into invisible ghettos, islands of people that do not break bread together. In such an environment, it’s much more difficult to cultivate a culture of coexistence and remind people of our shared values. For me, they have to revolve around democratic values.
“Because the number of people who say ‘maybe democracy is not the only way’ and ‘maybe it’s not suitable for our culture’ is increasing, those alternative models could be authoritarian. So we have to renew people’s faith in democracy. We need to revive a radical humanism that shows what people have in common and not focus only on the differences.
“I’m worried about the rise of populism, the rise of tribalism, the rise of a new politics based on emotions and fear.
“We need to understand what people are afraid of and why they are so anxious about the future. We should never belittle fear or anxiety.
“But also all around the world, we see more and more angry white male politicians speaking very loudly and appealing to the feelings of the masses. This is a very dangerous trend. Because we live in a globalized world, the madness happening in one country has repercussions beyond the borders.
“That’s why we need to promote cosmopolitanism. If we learn anything, we learn it from people who are different from us.
“For extremism to work, (populists) need to dehumanize ‘the other.’ Fiction rehumanizes. Fiction tells us that the person you saw as ‘the other’ has a story. If you know that person’s story, you can connect with that person’s sorrow or hopes.
“In a world of so much conflict, we need the art of story-telling like never before.”