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The simmering tensions in Turkish
polity
K Gajendra Singh
Tensions building up between Turkey's secular
elite, led by its powerful armed forces, and the ruling
Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has Islamic
roots, ever since the latter's electoral triumph last
November, have up to now remained under check. This was
because of Turkey's preoccupation with more important
matters, such as an admission date into the Europe
Union, a United Nations-led attempt to resolve the
Cyprus problem and the United States efforts to persuade
Turkey to join in the war against Iraq.
With
these issues now either resolved or in limbo, the first
battle lines between the two sides were drawn on April
23 when President Ahmet Sezer, a former head of the
Constitutional Court, and the top military brass led by
General Hilmi Ozkok, refused to attend a reception at
parliament house hosted by its speaker, Bulent Arinc of
the AKP, to mark National Sovereignty and Children's
Day, as hostess Munnever Arinc planned to wear a Muslim
head scarf. The opposition, left of the center People's
Republican Party (RPP), also boycotted the reception. A
last-minute announcement that Mrs Arinc would not attend
the reception came too late.
Since the
establishment of the secular republic in 1923, Ottoman
and Islamic dresses have been forbidden in public
places. Many an Islamist women has lost her job or place
in university, and some women their seats in parliament,
for defying this regulation.
On April 30, a
statement issued after a meeting of Turkey's National
Security Council (NSC), underlined secularism as one of
the basic pillars of the Turkish Republic. Reiterating
that its "vigilant protection cannot be
over-emphasized", it urged the AKP government to protect
the secular state. The NSC is Turkey's highest
policy-making body and is composed of the chief of
general staff (CGS) of the armed forces and top military
commanders, the prime minister and his senior colleagues
and is chaired by the president of the republic. The CGS
is next in protocol after the prime minister and forms
one of the three centers of power, along with the
president.
In 1997, Turkey's first-ever Islamist
prime minister, Najemettin Erbakan, then heading a
coalition government with a secular party, was made to
resign by the armed forces for his failure to curb
growing Islamic fundamentalism. In 1971, the military
members of the NSC had forced premier Suleiman Demirel
to resign for his failure to implement land and other
radical reforms and curb left-right strife. The military
also intervened directly in 1960 and 1980, when
politicians had brought the country to an impasse.
But after cleaning up the mess created by the
politicians and getting a new constitution in place, the
armed forces, self-styled custodians of Kemal Ataturk's
legacy of secularism, as usual, returned to the
barracks. Ataturk had forged the secular republic from
the ashes of the Ottoman empire after its defeat in
World War I.
Arinc, a maverick politician,
blotted his copybook earlier when, in a defiant gesture
soon after the elections, was accompanied by his
scarf-wearing wife to see the Turkish president off on a
diplomatic mission. This was noted with concern by the
Pashas (as the military brass is called in Turkey)as
well as the secular elite. Recently, another minister's
turbaned wife turned out to receive the Iranian vice
president and his delegation. Then the men and the
ladies went to different reception rooms, a practice
frowned on by the Westernized secular elite. Wives of
AKP leaders, like Prime Minister Recep Tayep Erdogan
(even when he was the mayor of Istanbul) , Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul and others avoid attending state
functions.
The leadership believe that women are
"flowers and must find fulfillment at home". Apart from
the clash over the wearing of head scarves and long body
covering dresses, other differences that have cropped up
between the two sides are; the appointment of the AKP's
cadre with Islamic leanings to official positions, a
plan to amend the Higher Education Board law and
proposed radical changes in the constitution, even
making it presidential. Recently, the Foreign Ministry
sent a circular to its embassies abroad to "support the
National View Organizations and the Fethullah Gulen
schools". These have an Islamist agenda. The AKP also
wants to consolidate and expand its vote. Its backers
are upwardly mobile conservative trading and industrial
classes from central Anatolian towns such as Kayseri,
Konya and beyond, who want a share in the economic cake.
This will clash with the interests of the established
supporters of the secular establishment.
Some
AKP leaders have also publicly criticized the armed
forces' annual dismissal of officers with Islamic
proclivities and connections, a practice that has been
in place since the establishment of the republic. The
armed forces have enjoyed autonomy in internal matters
and are very sensitive about it. Many a time Abdullah
Gul, a moderate, has tried to smooth differences, but
the AKP's attempts to strengthen its position in the
establishment, help its supporters and challenge the
established secular norms have been carried on
stealthily.
All these matters were discussed
vigorously at the April 30 NSC meeting, which lasted
seven-and-half hours. Prime Minister Erdogan, who spoke
most of the time on behalf of the civilians and
President Sezer, had frank discussions on the question
of army appointments and other matters.
However,
on one subject both the AKP government and the armed
forces agreed - not allowing the US to use bases for its
troops in southeast Turkey. The motion, which had the
full support of the government, but with 90 percent of
Turks opposed to a war on Muslim Iraq and huge crowds
protesting outside parliament building and elsewhere,
failed to pass muster when nearly 100 AKP deputies voted
with the opposition.
Not sure of being able to
garner enough support for a second vote and even afraid
that the party might split apart, Erdogan did not dare
take up the motion again in parliament, despite
relentless US pressure and an attractive economic
package said to be worth over US$30 billion. Turkey
finally agreed to grant the US the use of its airspace
only, that too with some conditions.
With Iraqi
defenses inexplicably collapsing so easily, many in
Turkey, especially the secular establishment, now rue
the decision not to go along fully with the US. They
would have had around 40,000 troops in north Iraq, with
a say in the future shape of Iraq, notably over possible
Kurdish autonomy. The Turkish armed forces, with half a
century of association with the US defense
establishment, left the decision to the politicians at
the time of the vote, but later publicly extended its
full support to the government motion.
Turkey's
November 3 election results had shocked many in the West
after they delivered a quixotic two-thirds majority (365
out of 550 ) to the AKP, which had received only a third
(34 percent) of the total votes cast. The only other
party to cross the 10 percent threshold and enter
parliament was the left of the center RPP, which won
nearly a third of the seats. Thus other parties remain
unrepresented, but independents, polling only 1 percent
of the votes, won eight parliamentary seats. Although
the AKP was the front runner in pre-election polls, even
its leadership was surprised by the magnitude of the
windfall. A large number of new and inexperienced AKP
deputies have entered parliament, many friends and
officials when Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul.
In
1995, Necmettin Erbakan's Islamic Welfare party won 158
seats even though it only polled 21.3 percent of the
votes. With great difficulty he formed a coalition
government in 1996, which was made to resign the
following year. The veteran Erbakan established the
first "Islamist" party in Turkey in 1969. It was called
the National Order Party, hinting at Islamic order. When
it was closed in 1971 after military intervention, he
named its successor the National Salvation Party ( like
the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria).
When
that was banned, too, along with other parties after the
1980 military takeover, Erbakan named the next party the
Welfare Party (zakat for welfare). After it was
closed by law, Erbakan founded the Virtue Party. When
that was also closed and a ban put on Erbakan himself
from politics in 2001, Erdogan, Gul and other younger
and moderate leaders of the Welfare formed the
conservative AKP. They have repeatedly proclaimed that
it is not a religious party. Erbakan's rightist
followers have formed the Saadet Party led by Recai
Kutan, a proxy for Erbakan (it won 2.5 percent of the
votes in the recent elections ).
The outgoing
ruling coalition parties were decimated, each getting
much less than 10 percent of the votes. They were
entirely responsible for the result with their
mis-governance which saw a record 10 percent fall in
Turkey's GDP in the preceding year, adding millions more
to the ranks of the unemployed. The elections also saw
the exit of the last of the dinosaurs, outgoing prime
minister Bulent Ecevit, who along with Demirel, Erbakan
and Turgut Ozal, all nearly 80 years old, had dominated
Turkish political life over the past 40 years.
The quirky election results are an excellent
demonstration of the maxim that errors tend to add up in
the same direction. Turkey's d'Hont electoral system,
based on the German pattern with a very high threshold,
was selected to provide stability to governments in a
highly fragmented polity. Apart from the fond wish that
each party leader has of seeing others not crossing the
10 percent threshold, there appears a tacit
understanding not to lower it to 5 percent as Kurdish
parties, on the basis of their strength in the
southeast, who consistently manage to cross the 5
percent mark, can be kept out of power. Kurds form over
20 percent of the population, with many supporting left
of center parties.
The Pashas were clearly
unhappy with the election results. After waiting for
some time, they declared, "We will continue to protect
the republic against any threat, particularly the
fundamentalist and separatist [Kurdish] ones." Erdogan
had been banned from contesting the elections because of
a 1999 conviction for reciting a poem at a political
rally which said that "Minarets are our bayonets, domes
are our helmets, mosques are our barracks, believers are
our soldiers." To begin with, both Sezer and the Pashas
expressed opposition to amending the constitution to
enable Erdogan to stand for bye-elections and take over
as prime minister from Abdullah Gul. But later they
relented.
To soothe the anxiety felt in the West
over the AKP's massive victory, Erdogan and other party
leaders went on a charm offensive, reiterating that the
AKP was a conservative and not an Islamic party. Its
leadership had no connection with the banned Islamic
Welfare party of which they were once members. They did
not even meet Erbakan now, they said. No changes were
planned in Turkey's secular dispensation. They redoubled
their efforts to take Turkey into the European Union
(unsuccessfully) and stood by the International Monetary
Fund's program to sort out Turkey's dire economic
problems.
The West and the US were relieved to
see the AKP's English-speaking leadership in Western
suits (having seen the rise of Islamic parties in
Pakistan with its fierce-looking bearded mullahs in last
year's elections while many AKP ministers are highly
educated with backgrounds in economics and management.)
It helped the AKP establish its credentials as a
conservative party with which Europe and the US could do
business. Further legal reforms that have to be carried
out in Turkey to meet EU norms will usher in greater
freedom of expression, specially for the Kurds, and
improve the country's human rights record. The changes
will make it difficult for the secular establishment to
ban the AKP and other parties with Islamic inclinations
or those promoting the Kurdish cause. EU leaders have
openly said that the military's role in Turkish politics
must be reduced to qualify it for membership.
Tussles between the armed forces and religious
political parties are nothing new in the Islamic world.
In 1992, the Islamic Salvation Front in Algeria, on the
verge of electoral victory and bringing in Sharia law
and doing away with elections, was banned, leading to
violence that is still smoldering. There is a constant
battle between Islamist parties and the armed forces in
Indonesia, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Since 1923
Turkey has had a laic (secular) constitution,
which, according to many, is more Jacobin than genuinely
secular. The country is a member of the Council of
Europe, NATO, the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development, and it has a customs agreement with the
European Union. But with its 67 million Muslims, Turkey
is unlikely to be admitted into the EU any time soon,
which is basically a Christian club. At the Copenhagen
EU summit in December last year, France's former
president Valery Giscard d'Estaing said that admitting
Turkey "would be the end of the European Union" because
Turkey has "a different culture, a different approach, a
different way of life - it is not a European country".
Preceded by modernizing and Westernizing reforms
during the last century of the Ottoman rule and nearly
80 years after Ataturk's sweeping reforms, Turkey's
experiment in democracy goes wobbly from time to time.
Ironically, it is invariably put back on the rails by
the armed forces.
A Muslim majority state (99
percent) it is closest to a modern secular democracy in
the Muslim world. Its half a million strong armed forces
is a stabilizing factor in a turbulent region. But
Turkey is now tending to look more to the east after the
runaway success of the AKP. For stronger economic and
political linkages with the east, AKP leaders have
visited Turkic-speaking states in Central Asia, and also
Iran, Syria (in spite of US frowns) and other neighbors
recently.
The US wants other Muslim countries in
the region and elsewhere to become secular democracies,
so it will be keen that Turkey serve as a good, stable
example. From their viewpoint, they certainly don't want
the armed forces to have to intervene once again.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian ambassador
(retired), served as ambassador to Turkey from August
1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served terms as
ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal. He is
currently chairman of the Foundation for Indo-Turkic
Studies.
(©2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd.
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