TURNING POINT IN TURKEY, By Ameen Izzadeen

A military coup against a civilian government is heard of. But seldom or never do we hear that a civilian government coup against the military. The aim of this column is not to analyse what happened in Sri Lanka after the defeat of the LTTE. Rather, in keeping with the world watch logo, the focus is going to be on Turkey, nearly a century ago a major power.

What is happening in Turkey these days makes many analysts wonder whether the country’s military, which in the past has thrown out four civilian governments at the flimsiest excuse, is losing its grip on power.

The events that are unfolding in Turkey indicate that the one-million strong military’s control over the civilian government is fast disappearing.

In Turkey, civilian governments had been operating within limits defined by the military. They seldom crossed the line the military drew. The government was a trust of the military – not of the people as democracy demands. If the military felt that the civilian government had breached the trust, the generals wasted no time to oust the government. They even hanged Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1961 after the first military coup.

Another example was the overthrow of the Necmettin Erbakan government. Erbakan was the first Islamic prime minister of modern Turkey. The military chief at a national security council meeting in 1997 walked upto the then 71-year-old Erbakan and threw a file containing a charge sheet at his face, saying he was an Islamist and, therefore, not fit to lead the government.

In Turkey, the military is an institution by itself. At NATO meetings, the Turkish military chief would sit by the side of the country’s defence minister, not behind him as military chiefs of other NATO members would do in terms of protocol.

The recruitment to the military is also a rigorous process. If an applicant has a distant family member who has leftist or Islamic political views, it is enough for disqualification. All the recruits have to be committed secularists with deep contempt for political Islam and socialism.

The military has insulated itself from government control or interference. The government only allocates the funds the military wants. Apart from this, the government has little say in the affairs of military.

Until last year, no soldier could be tried in a civilian court for any criminal or civil offence. Neither could police or public prosecutors enter any military-run premise even if they were armed with a court warrant.

The military also closely supervised the appointment of judges to the superior courts. In short, there was a parallel government in Turkey. Critics call it the deep state, which consists of diehard Kemalists or the followers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
But today Turkey’s political landscape is fast changing.

The military stands exposed. Its past misdeeds are coming to the open. It is being accused of extra-judicial killings, plots, undermining the civilian government, whipping up the Kurdish rebellion in the country’s east and even orchestrating terrorist attacks.

A few weeks ago, an alleged plot by the military to assassinate Deputy Prime minister Bulent Arinc, was bared. Police arrested eight soldiers who were part of this plan. They were produced before a court which issued a warrant for the police and the public prosecutor to search a secret room in the military headquarters. Such warrants to search what is regarded as the army’s bedroom were unheard of in the past.

The alleged plot to assassinate the deputy prime minister came amidst a historic trial against several retired generals who were said to be members of a secret group called Ergenekon, which, according to Turkish fairytales, is the birthplace of the Turkish race.

The Ergenekon gang was accused of plotting to overthrow the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an inwardly Islamist but outwardly secularist, and shut down the Fethullah Gullen movement which is largely responsible for the spiritual revivalism in Turkey.

Turkish analysts see the Ergenekon trial and the arrest of the alleged assassins as key events leading to the “moment of truth” that will bring the military under the control of the civilian government.

To its credit, the government has resisted from vulgar jubilations in its victory over the military. On the contrary, it heaps praises on the military, hailing it as the defender of the republic, though the people are fast losing the respect they have for the military.

Whatever the military’s high-handedness, the people respected the military in the past largely because that the history of Turkey was indistinguishable from the history of its military. The country’s very foundation was laid with military victories that go back to the Seljuk period in the 11th century. It was the military that made the Ottoman Empire a world power.
Even after the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the defeat in World War I, it was the military that salvaged what was left of the country’s pride by scoring decisive victories against the British, French, Australian and New Zealand forces in the battle of Gallipoli in 1915 and evicting the allied forces that had invaded Anatolia.

In 1923, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who played a leading role in these victories, became the first president of modern Turkey.

Ataturk, an admirer of the Western liberal values, launched a series of political, economic and cultural reforms with secularism at the root. However, Ataturk was no respecter of democracy. Multi-party democracy came to Turkey during the presidency of General Ismet Inonu in the late 1930s.
These generals-turned presidents viewed political Islam as their main threat. Ataturk and his followers confined Islam to state-run mosques and schools and took series of measures to suppress political Islam at the very first signs of its revivalism. But just as much the military claims that if there is no military, there is no Turkish history, political Islam also can make a similar claim. If no Islam, no Ottoman and no Turkey.

But what the military failed to take into consideration was the people’s power. People are asking whether the military – the main constituent of the deep state together with the elite who control the judiciary and higher education – is acting in the interest of Western powers.

This awareness or suspicion has handed victory to the Islamic-rooted AK Party or the Justice and Development Party in successive elections. The country’s president, Abdullah Gul, was also a member of the AK Party and Islamist.

Though the AK Party publicly declares that is committed to secularism, its shift towards Islam is evident in domestic and foreign policies.

Prime Minister Erdogan, is a hero of sort in the Muslim world, because of his walkout at the Davos Economic Forum last year after a war of words with Israeli President Shimon Peres over the deaths of nearly 2,000 Palestinians during a month-long Israeli attack. Last year, he also cancelled the annual military exercise with Israel.

Erdogan is, however, taking a big risk. He may be winning the cold war with the military and the deep state, but the generals are not going to surrender their unlimited authority and power to political leadership without a fight.

The military is lying low and biding its time for the right opportunity. At the moment, the military fears that any move to launch a coup will lead Turkey to a civil war. It also knows that the United States and the West would not support such a move.

Another factor that is in favour of the government is that one of the conditions that Turkey has to fulfill to join the European Union is to raise the country’s democratic standards. This means bringing the military under civilian control.