A Thug’s Life
Turkish leader moves to take total control
THESE days, Turkey’s parliament, the Grand National Assembly, an Italianate palace adorned with a manicured garden, looks more like a building site as workers replace shattered windows, clean debris-filled conference rooms and cover breaches caused in walls by missiles.
“In a few days all that would be a fading memory,” boasts a supervisor. “Everything will be just as before.” Many Turks doubt it. In material terms, the attack on the parliament building by the Turkish Air Force during last month’s abortive coup did little damage. The sloppily planned and clumsily executed scheme fizzled out within 32 hours.
Nonetheless, its ripples could go on for years, if not decades.
In the past week or so, Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done even more damage to his image by lashing out wildly at everyone in his sight. The sad truth, however, is that all those interested in Turkey have no choice but to deal with Erdogan, at least for the time being.
Erdogan is certainly one of the main causes of the current crisis. In fact, in my opinion, the coup was an attempt at pre-empting a real coup that he had planned for Aug. 15 when he was to preside over a special session of the National Security Council to push through a series of power grabs disguised as “reforms.”
To start with, he wanted to end the virtual autonomy the Turkish military has always enjoyed in matters directly affecting it. The Turkish military produces large numbers of colonels who, because the slots for one-star generals is limited, often end up retiring without that first star on their shoulders. The system gives immense power and prestige to the highest echelons of the military that also enjoy the privilege of deciding military pay scales and command assignments.
Erdogan wanted, and still wants (though he may no longer be able to do it), to end all that. He also wants to fast-track his own colo- nels toward the coveted first star.
Anxious to demolish serious challenges to his dream of absolute power, Erdogan has also evoked a “reform” of the voting system by raising the threshold for a party’s entrance into the parliament from 10 percent to 12 or even 15 percent. That would mean the elimination of all parliamentary opposition except for the Republican People’s Party, Turkey’s oldest party. Under the proposed quota, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party could hang on to power indefinitely.
Erdogan also wanted to “punish” the Kurds, an ethnic minority accounting for 15 percent of the population. Initially, he did some good work by removing oppressive measures against the Kurds. Now, however, he’s deeply angry with them, believing they are bent on destroying the Turkish state.
One measure introduced by Erdogan is an attempt at reviving the so-called “millat” system of the Ottomans under which inhabitants of the empire were divided into numerous religious and ethnic communities. One effect would be the dilution of the broader Kurdish identity developed over the decades.
Erdogan’s other idea, to grant citizenship to at least some of the Syrian refugees, almost all Arabs, would be to de-emphasize the Kurdish character of portions of eastern Anatolia, where ethnic Kurds form a majority.
The next adversary Erdogan wished to destroy was the Hizmet (Service) movement led by the theologian Fethullah Gülen, in exile in Pennsylvania. Much has been made in the West about the supposed theologico-ideological rift between the two, who were friends and allies until a few years ago. However, the real fight is over sharing the enlarged Turkish economic cake.
In the first report on the Middle East by the World Bank in 1961, with an annual income per head of $219, Turkey was the richest Muslim nation after Lebanon. Today, with a GDP per head of $21,000, Turkey is the richest Muslim nation outside three small oil emirates of the Persian Gulf.
The problem is that, since 2012 at least, Erdogan has slowly shut out the Hizmet movement, which is based on a vast network of business and media interests, from juicy government contracts, favoring mostly his own cronies.
Gülen’s business network has been excluded from Erdogan’s pharaonic Greater Istanbul project, the largest real-estate venture in the world right now.
In the words of one Gülen supporter: Erdogan claims to be serving the state while he is serving the state on a platter to his business partners.
Erdogan’s friends, however, insist he holds the key to Turkey’s peace and stability. “The president is indispensable,” says Prime Minister Binali Yildirm.
Right now, maybe. But it’s when you think you’re indispensable that you are, in fact, most in danger of being dispensed of.