SCHISM BETWEEN TURKS MORE THAN SARTORIAL
Chris Kilford, the Canadian defence analyst and former military attaché to Turkey was telling me about what could be understood from a Turk’s moustache.
Turkish military officers rarely grow moustaches, because Islamists from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) do. Or is it that Islamists such as Erdogan grow them because the generals and the admirals don’t?
One of the hottest areas of dispute in Turkey has been about whether female parliamentarians should be allowed to wear pants and head scarves when attending sessions. To the officers, such attire is an affront to the secularist underpinnings of modern Turkey, which was established by the country’s revered first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who initiated economic and cultural reforms that transformed the Ottoman Empire into a secular state.
To understand how petty this dispute can be, after Islamists came to power, the general staff stopped going to government receptions with their wives because the newcomers’ wives wore head scarves.
These are trivial details about the schism between what journalist Ufuk Guldemar dubbed White Turks or secularists of the urban elite, and Black Turks, who are Islamists from the countryside.
The reasons for the bungled coup in Turkey last Friday night were far more complicated than these quick explanations, but in their own way the seemingly obscure battles over dress provide a way to understand why some White Turks from the army and the air force sought to overthrow the legally elected Black Turks and restore what they called democracy.
As after every failed coup, what has quickly followed in Turkey has been a fierce reckoning. Thousands of soldiers have been rounded up, including dozens of generals. They will be tried for treason by courts that are being purged of thousands of judges and prosecutors who might treat the plotters leniently.
The arrests and expulsions will seriously thin the ranks at the senior officers’ clubs in Ankara, where serving and retired generals and admirals enjoy a life of incredible privilege and splendour that is radically different than the lives of most Black Turks.
The struggle to dominate Turkey’s judicial system has been a long one, too. Members of the AKP have not forgotten that the Constitutional Court, which was full of secularists, tried 10 years ago to have Erdogan’s party banned because it was religion-based. That never happened because Erdogan called a snap election and won.
The president’s heavyhanded response to the attempted putsch is understandable given the circumstances, but he walks a high wire. If the crackdown goes too far it could backfire.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has already warned Erdogan that if his government continues down this path, Turkey’s membership in NATO might be in jeopardy. This is probably an empty threat, considering how important Turkey is in trying to solve the hellish matrix of problems created by ISIL on and just beyond its southern border, which in turn has triggered a refugee crisis.
Germany’s Angela Merkel has said that if Erdogan brings back the death penalty, she will veto any talks with Turkey about the long shot of ever joining the European Union.
What these remarks show is that the West’s anxiety level over Turkey’s future is skyhigh. Part of the reason is that ISIL uses Turkey as a bridge to carry out terror attacks in the West. Another aspect is Russia’s ability to cause mischief and worse on NATO’s fragile southern flank.
Erdogan also has to worry about what might happen next time around at the ballot box. Tourism, the country’s most important industry, was already seriously stressed before last weekend’s chaos. It may now collapse, and with it the Turkish lira and the last of the foreign money that has been placed there since Erdogan came to power in 2003.
If Erdogan obsesses too much about the coup, he could also lose his relatively new focus on confronting ISIL, which has been launching terrorist strikes in Turkey with impunity.
Most of all, Erdogan must still keep a close eye on the military. If he continues locking up generals, those that are still free could rise up against him. Given the passion that Erdogan’s supporters displayed in defending their leader during the failed coup, if this were to happen again, civil war would loom as a real possibility.
It will likely take some time to play out, but the struggle between the men with the moustaches and those without is far from over.