TURKS CAUGHT IN MIDDLE AS IDEOLOGIES COLLIDE

After failed coup, Marianne Taylor tells of her holiday encounter with journalists who lived in fear

LIKE most people who watched in horror on Friday night as Turkey’s attempted coup unfolded live on my Twitter feed, the only real experience I have of this beautiful and complex land is as a holidaymaker. I can’t speak the language, and have only scant knowledge of the remarkable culture, history and politics. But when news of the coup broke, my thoughts immediately turned to its people, and specifically a pair of young Turks I had dinner with around three years ago in Dalyan, a lovely wee resort in the south west of the country. They were from Istanbul, well-dressed, well-educated, secular and modern, here, like me, for a few days’ respite from city life. My friend and I had inadvertently followed every step of their food trail, and soon we were all nodding to each other. On the last night of our holiday, they invited us to join them at a restaurant they knew which served the best food in town. They were right: it was exquisite.

But it was the conversation – conducted in impressively fluent English – that really stuck with me. It turned out they were also journalists and before long we got talking about our shared profession. I remember feeling a bit cynical at the time about the changing media landscape in the UK, and talking of how it was getting tougher for journalists to produce quality work. My Turkish peers listened intently and politely. Then they talked with brutal honesty – rather quietly, so as not to attract too much attention – about the reality of their working lives; the censorship that is the industry standard, the sackings when a reporter or commentator says something, anything, the Turkish regime does not like. And, of course, the arrests which have seen hundreds of journalists jailed simply for doing their job. The latest global press freedoms index puts Turkey at number 151 – between Tajikistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is certainly nothing to brag about.

Listening to my fellow journalists recount their frustrations was both humbling and deeply troubling. At the same time, the everyday life they described, with its modern economic realities and frustrations, its search for meaning in the digital world, was startlingly familiar to urban western Europeans like us. And therein, I suppose, lies the fundamental tension at the heart of this vast Muslim country of 75 million souls:

‘‘ The fundamental tension at the heart of this vast Muslim country ... can a modern sovereign state really be both democratic and religious?

can a modern sovereign state really be both democratic and religious?

Obviously, the events of the weekend would suggest the answer is no, especially when they have a leader in Recep Tayyip Erdogan who seems intent on mirroring the strongman tactics of Vladimir Putin.

Coups, by their very nature tend to be violent, which is ironic when you consider that those behind Friday’s failed action appear to have been trying to ensure that Turkey would remain a secular democracy that looked towards Europe rather than the Middle East; Mr Erdogan has for some time been trying to increase Islamic influence on the state.

There are many other factors to Turkey’s internal turmoil, of course, including a brutal fight with the Kurdish PKK resulting in many lost and ruined lives, as well as a deep and dangerous involvement in the war in Syria.

But those behind the coup have done their cause a great disservice; at least 265 dead and many hundreds injured is a hideous toll indeed. It seems most Turks agree – they showed their support for democracy by failing to go along with the coup, even though many do not like the increasingly totalitarian actions of their president.

But anyone hoping that the action may have elicited the healing of divisions is likely to be disappointed if President Erdogan’s immediate reaction is anything to go by: 6,000 arrests – including 2,700 judges and many high-ranking soldiers – is only the beginning. A complete purge of his critics looks depressingly likely. There is even talk of legislation to introduce the death penalty. Those of us who hoped Turkey would one day make the sort of societal progress and economic growth that would ease it towards EU membership are also about to be gravely disappointed. The wider political and economic consequences are like to be severe, too: the already collapsing tourist industry looks set to fall even further, while the EU deal to let Turkey all but manage its refugee problem will surely require a rethink.

My mind keeps returning to the two Turkish journalists I met in Dalyan and their friends, families and colleagues. Were they caught up in the violence? Were they able to freely report what is going on in their troubled country? Where do they see Turkey’s future?

Sadly, I’m unlikely to find out – I probably won’t be visiting their beautiful, brutal homeland any time soon.