The CACI & SRSP Joint Center's Turkey Initiative

Cordially invites you to

"Where is Turkey headed?"

SILK ROAD FORUM
Thursday, March 2, 2009, 13.00-15.00
Klara Konferens, Vattugatan 6, Stockholm

Featuring:

Dr. Binnaz Toprak
Professor, Bahcesehir university, Istanbul, main author of the recent landmark study "Türkiye'de farkli olmak" (To be different in Turkey), focusing on pressures of religious conservatism in Anatolia, published by the Open Society institute in Istanbul

Dr. Haluk Sahin, professor, liberal columnist at Radikal, author of
Liberaller, Islamcilar, Ulusalcilar ve Ötekiler"

Mr. Gareth Jenkins, security expert, Istanbul, author of "Political Islam in Turkey”, (MacMillan, 2008)

Event Summary

Summary

The first speaker of the seminar was Dr. Haluk Sahin, professor of communications at the Istanbul Bilgi University. He is also a journalist and a liberal columnist for Radikal, a leading Turkish daily. His recent book is “Liberaller, Islamcilar, Ulusalcilar ve Ötekiler" which is roughly translated as “The Liberals, the Islamists,  the Nationalist and the Others”.

Dr. Sahin initially gave a brief overview of the local elections that are scheduled for March 29, when some 49 million voters vill elect metropolitan mayors, city mayors and town counselpersons.  Despite the fact that the country is abuzz with local politcal action, the campaign is dominated by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It is obvious that Mr. Erdogan attaches a great deal of significance to this election and he has made strong verbal statements concerning the main opposition parties and certain media. Mr. Erdogan is currently the central figure of turkish politics and very popular with the public, partly because of the recent spat he had with israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

A stark contrast to previous campaigns is the absence of secularism as the central issue in the elections. The parties are not positioning themselves in accordance to this perennial faultline in turkish politics. No accusations of blasphemy has been thrown at the opposing parties or candidates. However, this does not mean that religion is not present. According to Dr. Sahin, this absence can be explained in light of two developments:

Firstly, the ruling AKP party was recently convicted for being a focal point of anti-secular activities by the constitutional court, which limited its room for maneuver in campaigning in this area, making it effectively a dangerous area. Secondly, the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) seems to have arrived at the conclusion that this approach is not a winner and that raising the issue of secularism will deliver the victory to the other side.

Another important feature of the elections is the absence of all parties except two, the AKP and the Kurdish Nationalist Party DTP, in the Southeast, where most of the ethnic Kurdish voters live . The AKP is challenging the DTP in its own backyard, which might have dire consequences for the DTP should it lose.

According to Dr. Sahin, the local elections are important in two regards. First, there are some key cities involved that are important for Mr. Erdogan. Especially Istanbul is valuable to the AKP for both financial and ideological support. The AKP is being challenged in the city by a maverick candidate, the CHP’s Kemal Kilicdaroglu, who has uncovered instances of corruption near Erdogan’s circles, an issue he seems to be quite successful in exploiting in his campaign.

The election will also be evaluated as a referendum of Erdogan’s policies in general, and the crucial question is what will happen if they turn out in favor, in other words if the AKP wins 47% or more of the votes. There are divergent forecasts to what might happen if that is the case. According to an optimistic reading, this would be a sign of popular approval of Mr. Erdogan’s policies so far, as well as an approval of the relentless battle he has been waging against the republic’s old bureaucratic structures. Having gained new confidence, Mr. Erdogan will return to his reformist ways; especially on the EU front, begin to repair the neglected bridges to the west and assume a more conciliatory tone.

According to a pessimistic reading, however, Mr. Erdogan, having gained new strength and power, will continue on the present course with new vigor. He will take additional and forceful steps to consolidate his already very strong position, to muzzle, depress and curtail the opposition, and shape Turkey after his figure. The drift towards the Middle East will continue and Turkey will become a very different place than the one we know right now.
This latter conclusion is supported by the following:
- The emergence of Mr. Erdogan as the strong man of the AKP and the political system as a whole.  He virtually makes all decisions within the party, makes almost all the appointments, and has a very strong say over day-to-day policy.
- The political rhetoric of Mr. Erdogan which echoes of third world populism rather than one that suits a western liberal democratic leader. He targets the media, the bureaucracy and the so called white Turks – a segment of Turkey which has internalized a western style of living.
- The current social-cultural drift towards conservatism and Islamism, especially in the provinces.
- The inefficiency of the political opposition and the lack of a clear political alternative to Mr. Erdogan.
In summary, there is more at stake in the current elections than the actual outcome.
 
Dr. Binnaz Toprak is a professor at the Bahcesehir university in Istanbul and main author of the recent landmark study "Türkiye'de farkli olmak" (“To be different in Turkey”) published by the Open Society Institute in Istanbul. The study focuses on the pressures of religious conservatism in Anatolia.

Dr. Toprak began by addressing the issue of secularism and stated that in many ways, Turkey has come a long way in accommodating the Islamists. A party like the AKP and a man like Mr. Erdogan would have found it impossible to come to power in the Turkey of the 1950s. This shows that the strife and cultural collision between Islamism and secularism has been successfully played out within the democratic system; a development which has made all the difference in not radicalizing Islam. Secularism, however, is contested, and has been contested for a long time.

Democracy, on the other hand, is not, and Turkey has been successful in having regular elections, more or less, since the 1950s. In spite of this, Turkey has a long way to go until it is a consolidated democracy with basic liberal rights. Especially problematic is the fact that there is no alternative to the AKP. This is largely due to the 1980 coup, which altered the legislation and the electoral votes in such a way that the threshold to the parliament now is very high. This has in effect eliminated all parties on the centre-right except the AKP, which isn’t really at the centre at all. Even though the public wants to lower the threshold, no ruling party will do so because it is not in their interest to do so.

The only other alternative is the National Movement Party (MHP) and it is far from subscribing to a liberal democratic society. The MHP is rather a part of the problem with repression than part of the sollution. Dr. Toprak concluded that the problem today is that Turkey is stuck with a one-party government.

The AKP clearly tried to get Turkey into the EU during its first term that began in 2002, but went berserk after the last election, when it got 47% of the popular vote. It now has too much power at its hand which is not a very healthy situation given the kind of division the country is experiencing.
According to Dr. Toprak, there are two sides of Turkey. One third of the population is secular and desires a more democratic and liberal Turkey. The other two thirds wants Turkey to be economically powerful and are in that sense a progressive force as far as the economy is concerned. However, most of them also want Turkey to be more conservative and religious. This division manifests itself in every political issue or debate. Everything is evaluated in the light of secularism and religion. This concerns not only personal identity but also the identity of Turkey itself, its relation to Europe and to the Middle East.

Dr. Toprak continued with an exposition of her recent research about people who aren’t part of the Muslim Sunni block that is currently ruling the country. The results were, in her own words, shocking. The study found that those who did not conform to traditional Muslim customs were harassed and discriminated against. Among the examples were young men that were beaten up because of long hair and earrings and women who were called prostitutes because of their appearance. There were also many instances of government discrimination against people with secular identities who found it impossible to find jobs in cities where the mayor was affiliated with the AKP.

In summary, Turkish society has become more conservative. There is a new atmosphere where people are changing their lifestyle in order to give the impression that they are part of the religious coalition. Contrary to all expectations that economic development will bring forth a more liberal democratic society, this has not happened. Dr. Toprak compared the situation to Saudi Arabia (while making clear there are few parallels between Turkey and Saudi Arabia), which is a very economically advanced but also very conservative, especially towards women.  For Turkey to become a member of the European Union, this trend has to be corrected.

Mr. Gareth Jenkins is a British journalist and analyst who has been based in Turkey since 1989. He is the author of several books, most recently “Political Islam in Turkey: Heading West, Running East”.

Mr. Jenkins began by giving a brief background to the Ergenekon court case which he sees as a very complicated issue with a lot of grey areas. Beginning in 2007, a large number of hard line secularists and nationalists were arrested and accused of belonging to a terrorist organization which the Turkish media has labeled Ergenekon. The pro-government media argues that this organization was created by the military.

Although there is a certain element of truth behind the accusations, Mr. Jenkins tried to show how it is not quite true. According to Mr. Jenkins, the indictment has arisen from a convergence of several factors, the first being the historical background of specially trained military officers in the 1950s.
These officers were trained by NATO in the event of a Soviet invasion of Turkey, as happened in Italy, and were to start up their own resistance organizations. The training involved high levels of secrecy and focused on setting up an organization based on a cell structure to minimize the risk of being compromised. These officers have since then been involved in various operations over the years, with a slight shift of focus from targeting left-wing movements in the 1960s and 1970s to the PKK in the 1980s and 1990s. Mr. Jenkins concluded that this is not one vast organization – whch it could not be given its origins that ensured members did not know one another – but rather a culture of lack of accountability. As long as these officers operated within certain perimeters, they were completely free to act without legal consequences. As Mr. Jenkins noted, the so-called deep state consists of people who were part of the state-organized networks; those who branched off and formed their own autonomous groups; members included in those that in turn went off to found autonomous groups; and people pretending to be part of the military-sponsored networks.

Mr. Jenkins then identified the next factor as the widespread paranoia in Turkey, especially featured within the Islamic media. Any act of violence in the name of Islam is thus blamed on various conspiracy theories. The third factor is the recent politicization of the Turkish police, where a lot of people now sympathize with the Islamic movement. Within the police as well, the paranoia and conspiracy theories thrive – people there often seem to honestly believe in unlikely conspiracies against them.
The indictment is a result of these three factors. When a crate of grenades was found in Istanbul in 2007, the police immediately looked for and found people with ties to the military. They later produced a court case with an extraordinarily detailed plan of the so-called Ergenekon organization. So far 11 raids have been carried through and more than 200 people have been detained, among them former military officers including four-star generals.

The indictment claims that all of these people were involved in a vast organization that goes back to the military, but according to Mr. Jenkins, there are a lot of absurdities in the court case – in one instance, a person arrested as a member of Ergenekon is also on a death list attributed to Ergenekon in the same indictment. You have in the case some genuine evidence of very small plots to destabilize the country, you have a lot of rumors and you have a lot of hearsay. All in all, it feeds into the general paranoia in Turkey and serves the ideological agenda of AKP and its sympathizers very well.

In sum, there are three conclusions to be drawn from the Ergenekon case. A lot of the indictment has been manufactured purely for political purposes and has damaged the public prestige of the military. Although Mr. Jenkins doesn’t believe the order came down from Mr. Erdogan himself, the AKP as a movement has certainly benefited from it and forced its most ferocious enemy  on the defensive.

The Institute for Security and Development Policy is a Stockholm-based independent and non-profit research and policy institute. The Institute is dedicated to expanding understanding of international affairs, particularly the interrelationship between the issue areas of conflict, security and development. The Institute’s primary areas of geographic focus are Asia and Europe’s neighborhood. ISDP’s Silk Road Studies Program constitutes the European leg of a joint Transatlantic Research and Policy Center with the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (www.silkroadstudies.org). It is the first Center of its kind in Europe and North America, and is today firmly established as a leading center for research and policy worldwide, serving a large and diverse community of analysts, scholars, policy-watchers, business leaders and journalists. The Joint Center publishes the CACI Analyst (www.cacianalyst.org), the Turkey Analyst (www.turkeyanalyst.org), the China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly (www.isdp.eu/cefq) and the Silk Road Paper series (http://www.isdp.eu/silkroadpapers).