The Day After Monday (Hold on To Your Hat)
Next Monday is D-Day, when the court meets to decide about closing the AKP. A decision may be announced that day or the next. Hold on to your hat. I’ll be very surprised if they don’t close it down. With the vast Ergenekon conspiracy of coup attempts being unearthed and new arrests every week, as well as the deleterious consequences predicted for Turkey’s economy and EU standing if the court closes the party, maybe they’ll think twice. But I doubt it.
If the court does close the AKP and the functioning government, for all intents and purposes, is brought down in this “judicial coup”, all bets are off.
Some are sanguine about the day after, but Howard Eissenstat isn’t so sure. In his blog post (click here), he points out that the AKP’s support has weakened, so it might not be able to reconstitute itself as easily as many think. He also notes that the military might decide to make a clean sweep of things in order to clear out the AKP (aka “Islamist”) apparatchiks with which the party has stocked state positions, so that the secular Kemalists can regain control of the bureaucracy and public discourse.
I would add the following: Given the level of tension in the country, all it would take to tip it over the edge is for a powerfully symbolic incident to occur, for instance, if someone were to break Ataturk’s picture in protest. Ataturk unfortunately now has become associated with the Ergenekon-like extreme nationalists who have hidden behind organizations like the “Ataturkist Thought Association”, and when arrested, shout things like “I’m being arrested because I love Ataturk”. If footage of someone destroying an Ataturk image — an illegal and almost unthinkable act — were broadcast on television, this would almost certainly result in violence — one ill-defined group against another ill-defined group. (How would one differentiate a male AKP supporter from a nationalist?)
Something like that could be staged to create social chaos, requiring army intervention. This, after all, was the plan revealed during the investigation into Ergenekon, a group of high level military and security officials and others who had allegedly been plotting to create the conditions under which the Turkish population would welcome a coup. Many Ergenekon plotters have been arrested, but the plot could easily continue. No one should be sanguine about next week’s court decision.
Aw calm down. We’ve seen and been through far, far worse. Look around you. Do you see us worried? Does it look like we’re prepering to shoot each other? Here’s a link (see the link in my comment too): http://dithyrambs.net/archives/42
If his name didn’t reveal his roots, I’d be inclined to think that the previous commentator couldn’t be Turkish. No, no one is shooting anyone just now, but if Turks are anything, they are passionate and the underlying issues around the court’s decision have implications for every Turkish citizen. In a country where a Nobel prize winner cannot speak freely without fear for his life, I would not underestimate the very real passions that could come to the boil if the court decides in favor of a judicial coup.
People here may be passionate but it takes a lot for ordinary people all over Turkey to take up arms against each other. This did almost happen once but it took years of build up and groups either trained for it or deliberately pushed to armed militancy by sustained violence inflicted on them.
Suppose you are an avid AKP supporter but without any ties to any organized group. Which ordinary citizen will you go out and attack if the party is closed? People are making it sound like there’s constant tension in the streets between covered and uncovered women or people going to the mosque are bothered by those who don’t (and vice versa).
Now suppose you belong to a ‘cemaat’ (even the largest one) do you think your leaders will sanction/order violence and thereby justify drawing the full wrath of the state apparatus upon the group?
Let me say just say I’d fear more about a sustained series of acts of terror in Turkish cities inflicted by or somehow tied to the PKK and leave it at that. (I’m thinking of the Gungoren bombing, the bombing of an Ankara shopping center last year and such.)
As for the Pamuk issue, unfortunately there’s almost complete consensus here supportive of prosecuting people for words they say or write. This is why TCK 301 could not be rescinded in any meaningful way and the other laws concerning expression remain on the books (add to them the recent internet law[1] that the AKP-led parliament passed w/o opposition). Turkey is not the US, people here neither have nor ask for the equivalent of the principled protections provided by the first amendment (and what it has evolved to become over time). That said, a real or imagined assassination plan for a public figure does not mean that ordinary people were out looking for him, or that they would be out looking for others of ‘his kind’ to shoot.
[1] Internet censorship here is misreported in English to the point of ridiculousness. That’s why — depending on which propagandist they read — people abroad think it is either the Islamists or the Kemalists favoring it (both is the answer!). I’ve given up dispelling such myths, but along with another commenter here (Nihat) we did try once.
The real danger at the present time is that no one knows where “the truth” lies. Without any official conclusions as to who planted the Gungoren bombs, people are assuming it to have been the PKK and are gathering to demonstrate their anger. Could the bombs have been planted by Ergenekon supporters trying to create an atmosphere for a coup? Who knows. Whatever the official conclusions, there will be those who claim lies and deceit. The atmosphere of mistrust is being promoted by those with a vested interest in capitalizing on the current uncertainties.
Although I have not lived in Turkey for many years, I visit often and am in regular touch with family and friends who come from every point along the political/religious spectrum. It is my observation that the majority of Turks are happy to keep TCK 301 as well as any censorship, internet and otherwise, which they see as protecting their heritage. The price for failure to question received wisdom means that “the truth” has no hope of ever seeing the light of day.
GB, you have a point, too, re: Turkish people’s morbid attachment to (and legitimization of) state censorship and power. I sometimes can’t help but think a wide-ranging civil disobedience culture is needed urgently. When, for example, a mayor decides a documentary film screening should be shut down due to perceived insult (hey, everything is an insult in Turkey), the people should be able to shout back “screw you” irrespective of party affiliation.
Nihat - I agree, but there seems to me to be no appetite in the general public for opposition to anything that questions Turkish heritage or culture.
Nihat, might I remind you the scenes from last two May Days? That was for attempted civil disobedience. That kind of stuff won’t fly here. I know that’s not what you had in mind, but I’m just sayin’.
I don’t know if anyone sat down and took a look at how many laws need changing for a decent level of freedom of expression here. LDT may have done a study with EU funding at some point. Civil litigation is also an issue. Remember it was not the government that sued to get Wordpress blocked here.
Principled recognition of freedom of expression is not an easy thing get the electorate behind. Even in the US the present state of affairs is due to the Supreme Court. (You might want to look up NY Times vs. Sullivan for something relevant to our case. W/o something like that you cannot prevent what our present PM and some ministers do to the press here: incessant litigation for defamation/libel (and insults!). This is not an AKP thing, of course.)
We were just BSing about something similar, in Turkish, here. This is about a criminal investigation concerning a book called “Allah’in Kizlari.”
GB — Yeap.
Bulent — your reservations are valid. Thanks for giving the benefit of doubt to what I meant. Briefly, my yearning is for a nation of millions of Can Yucels, who would call things as they see it (if it’s an ass, you’ll call it an ass, you know, not behind or something). Not gonna happen (as it requires clearm simple and straight-forward thinking), but I too am just sayin’.
Btw, so Nuray Mert’s “shameless man” was Cengiz Candar, huh? I was wondering who that was, and guessing it could be Candar.
Yeah, Nihat, I had to google a bit to find out it was Candar. It wasn’t obvious to me at all.
Actually if you are into these things there’s a very interesting and observable process taking place as the various columnists bicker. It turns out many of the folks here who bad-mouthed Bush for saying stuff like “you are either with us or with the terrorists” didn’t mean it at all, or else they didn’t understand why exactly that kind of language might be worthy of contempt. I say this because they are doing it themselves now as they try to pressure others into adopting their positions and language concerning the present goings on. I lack the background to properly name these things, so on a hunch I googled for “oppressive discourse” and it yielded this catalogue. One can go through that and find descriptions matching the methods — probably unwittingly — employed in the present strife among our (press) intellectuals.
Bulent, oppressive discoure is a pretty apt description of the phenomenon imo. No, I am not too much into these things (lacking background, etc.; I am btw a perfect specimen of the ‘12 Eylul generation’ I guess), and the Jazzetta subdiscussion you linked to was pretty hefty for me (the part about versions of leftists). Somehow, that doesn’t make me feel bad. Apart from that, I appreciate your asking for principled liberal positions, and questioning self-interest liberalism (if that’s sufficient terminology). Don’t you have a blog of your own or something?
Nihat, Jazzetta used to be one of a bunch of blogs (Izlenimler was another one) where you could find interesting and talkative people all over the political spectrum and age range. People lost interest this year though and even Jazetta doesn’t draw much of a crowd.
As for the blog, although I’m old enough to remember what happened in the 70’s, I’m a simple-minded computer scientist when it comes to politics. If I weren’t here to take another good look at the country after living abroad for a longish time, I wouldn’t even be reading about these things as much. So no blog for me.