Page 1 of
2 'A bullet at the heart of
democracy' By Dilip Hiro
Recently, Turkey came close to
experiencing a soft military coup. Late last
month, faced with the prospect of the moderate
Islamist Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul becoming
president, the country's top generals threatened
to overthrow the elected government under the
guise of protecting "secularism".
When the
minority secularist parliamentarians boycotted the
poll for president, the Constitutional Court,
powerfully influenced by
the
military's threat, invalidated Parliament's vote
for Gul on the technical grounds that it lacked a
two-thirds quorum - something that had never been
an issue before.
This demonstrated vividly
that secularists are not invariably the good guys
engaged in a struggle with the irredeemably bad
guys from the Islamic camp. Prime Minister Recep
Tayyip Erdogan of the ruling Justice and
Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or
AKP) called the court's verdict "a bullet fired at
the heart of democracy". Other critics pointed out
that earlier presidents had been elected without
the presence of two-thirds of the 550-member
Parliament.
Here was an example of the
complex interplay between secularism and Islam in
a Muslim country. The Turkish secular elite,
fearing a further loss of power, raised the cry of
"Secularism in danger!" and got their way - for
now - even though a recent poll showed that only
22% of Turks agreed with this assessment.
During its nearly five years in office,
the AKP government, led by the charismatic,
incorruptible Erdogan, has kept religion separate
from its politics - the sort of behavior the US
system used to emphasize - while expanding
democratic, human, and minority (that is, Kurdish)
rights through the most thorough overhaul of
Turkish laws in recent memory. The AKP has also
been vigorously pursuing Turkey's full membership
in the European Union.
"The primary reason
behind the intervention of the secular
establishment was not the fear that Turkey would
become Islamic," Suat Kiniklioglu, director of the
German Marshall Fund of the United States' Ankara
Office, noted in an International Herald Tribune
op-ed. "Their fear was that the democratization
drive, led in part by hopes of entering the
European Union, will erode their power."
The present confrontation between the AKP
and the secularist establishment, with the
military at its core (originating with the
founding of the Republic in 1923), is rooted as
much in political power and class differences as
it is in Islam.
On one side is an
affluent, university-educated, Westernized elite,
popularly known as "the White Turks", which
dominates the military, the bureaucracy, the
judiciary and the Education Ministry; on the
other, a coalition of the urban underclass and a
rising group of prospering entrepreneurs from
(Asian) Anatolia, which covers 97% of Turkey. Both
groups are devoutly Muslim and socially
conservative. Both have come to value democratic
rights and governance.
Torn from
landlords, hooked to pious politicians The
urban underprivileged and the energetic
entrepreneurs have, in fact, been the primary
beneficiaries of the Erdogan administration's
adroit management of the economy, which has
expanded by an annual average of 7% for five
years. During that period, per capita income has,
astoundingly, almost doubled, to US$5,500. And
foreign investment since 2003 has soared to an
unprecedented $50 billion.
The alliance of
these classes has occurred against the background
of a multifaceted socio-economic change: the
fast-diminishing size of the Turkish peasantry as
villagers abandon agriculture for better-paying
jobs in urban centers; a staggering rise in the
literacy rate to more than 90%; and the gradual
loss of the traditional working and lower middle
classes.
Ever since the prosperous
mid-1980s, an increasing number of Turks have
benefited from an unprecedented extension of
access to information. They have also gained
personal mobility through car ownership.
Television, telephones and cars have become part
of everyday life for many Turks. Collectively,
they have helped the previously underprivileged to
think for themselves.
This is particularly
true of the rural migrants into cities such as
Istanbul, the capital Ankara, and Konya, which
together account for a quarter of the national
population of 71 million. In an unfamiliar,
impersonal urban environment, they have found
their moral and ethical moorings in Islam. And
they seek solace in the mosque and a caring
political institution such as the Justice and
Development Party and its two antecedents - the
Islamist Welfare and the Virtue parties.
Over time, they have also come to realize
the power of the ballot - how the principle of
one-person one-vote, if applied fully, can help to
right socio-economic wrongs. It was their backing
that initially placed the Welfare Party in the
town halls, inter alia, of Istanbul, Ankara
and Konya, and then transformed it into the
largest single party in Parliament in late 1995
under the leadership of Necmettin Erbakan.
Unlike their counterparts in the secular
camp, Welfare Party leaders, who derived their
moral and ethical values from Islam, were not
corrupt. This mattered a lot to voters, growing
increasingly disenchanted with the corruption and
factiousness of secular politicians
Breaking with past party practices,
Welfare Party leaders set up social networks at
the grassroots. Their regular attendance at local
mosques - popular with traditionally pious rural
migrants as well as local traders and artisans -
helped strengthen the networks. The success of
such a strategy can be judged by the fact that
two-thirds of 2.5 million first-time voters
favored the AKP in the November 2002 general
election, when the year-old party won 363 seats.
By contrast, such secular factions as the
Republican People's Party (RPP) - whose boycott of
the presidential poll in late April made the
Parliament inquorate - are stuck in the old,
elitist mode of politics. "You talk to the AKP
people and they try to persuade you," remarked Ali
Caroglu, a political-science professor in
Istanbul. "But the RPP is very judgmental. They
don't want to talk to the people they don't
approve of."
On being elected mayors in
the early 1990s, Welfare leaders drastically
reduced corruption in town halls and delivered
municipal services efficiently. As Istanbul's
mayor, Erdogan was instrumental in furnishing the
metropolis with a sorely needed subway system and
tramway, as well as providing bread at a
subsidized price to residents.
The
difference wrought by the Islamist parties was
summed up aptly by Omar Karatas, leader of the
AKP's youth section in Istanbul. "Before, the
state was up here and the people down there," he
said. "Now, there's a harmonization between these
two groups."
A tortuous road to
democratic power The road to "harmony"
has, however, been tortuous. The progenitor of the
Islamic factions was the National Salvation Party
(NSP), formed by Necmettin Erbakan in 1972, which
propagated pristine Islamic ideas brazenly. It was
dissolved, along with other political parties,
after a military coup in 1980.
With the
introduction of a new constitution in 1983,
political life slowly revived. The pre-coup NSP
re-emerged as the Welfare Party under Erbakan. In
mid-1996, as leader of the senior partner in a
coalition, he became the prime minister. (His
cabinet included Abdullah Gul, the AKP's
presidential candidate in the recent crisis.)
Within a decade of its founding, the
transformation of the Welfare Party - treated as a
pariah by the White Turks - into the senior
constituent of a governing coalition was a symptom
of democracy striking firm roots in Turkey. It
invalidated the view - held by most Western
commentators - that democracy and political Islam
are
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
