ISTANBUL - Turgut Ozal, former prime minister and the eighth president of Turkey, is buried on a hillside at the edge of Topkapi Cemetery in Istanbul. His mausoleum is a metal dome supported by metal struts that converge overhead into a 20-meter spire. Outside, the howl of traffic is heard from a highway below that slices up through the evergreen trees. Late last year, beneath this structure, where polished granite and white stones border a patch of fresh grass, Ozal's remains were reinterred.
Ozal died on April 17, 1993, officially of a heart attack. But there have been rumors ever since. Forensic scientists finally exhumed
his body last year to look for signs the Turkish president had been murdered. Last week, on April 16, a day before the statute of limitations would have taken effect, an Ankara court charged a military officer - already in custody as a defendant in the so-called Ergenekon trial - with the death of Turgut Ozal.
Time will tell if this is a filing of convenience meant to keep alive the possibility of prosecution, or another instance of the country's judicial dysfunction, or a substantive charge. But the allegations, Ozal's legacy, and the 20th anniversary of his death still have much to say about today's Turkey, where each day truth is lent to the phrase found in George Orwell's 1984, "Who controls the present controls the past. Who controls the past controls the future."
Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) became the government in 2002, political power has shifted from a secular, army-revering, statist class to a more pious Muslim and socially conservative segment of society, one that sees itself as long-oppressed.
This power shift has brought with it a massive reckoning with the past. Most high-profile investigations and prosecutions happening today have focused on episodes the new power class consider representative of their past oppression: the 1980 coup d'etat, the army intervention in 1997, alleged coup plots of the early 2000s, and alleged crimes of the so-called "deep state" - the extra-legal gangs accused of murdering and manipulating on behalf of the state.
The allegation that Ozal was assassinated is part of this picture.
Supporters remember him as leader of a great Turkish leap forward - a bold and decisive man, who had a mandate for reform.
"He dedicated his whole life to pushing Turkey just the slightest bit ahead, so that Turkey could be integrated with the world. He opened a road for young people. He increased freedoms in civil society," said Bayram Haciosmanoglu, a visitor, with his wife and children, to Ozal's mausoleum.
Ozal's death in 1993 is often considered an interruption of sorts - a 15-year postponement of what those in power today would consider "progress". He liberalized the economy. He was talking about finding a solution to the country's "Kurdish question" when he died. He is often remembered as a politician who was proud to be Muslim and who stood apart from the army. Many religious conservatives, among others, revere him for this; the Turkish army is, after all, the institution that has most suppressed the power of Islam in the country.
"He cracked the shell of the country. He was also not afraid of the army. He was the first [politician] who was able to say that he would relieve army officers of their duty," said Fikri Donmez, another visitor to the grave.
With Ozal dead, one argument goes, a faction of the state elite was able to retrench and claw-back power lost to Ozal's policies; Ozal's work to end the Kurdish conflict and to increase official tolerance for Islam were replaced by an intensified war with the Kurdish national movement and a campaign against political Islam - a reaction that culminated in, and was consolidated by, the 1997 "post-modern" coup d'etat, when the army forced the resignation of an Islamist government.
That each of these issues - the transformation of Turkey's economy, the Kurdish question, the place of Islam in society, the role of the army in politics - remain the core of the country's domestic agenda gives some support to the argument that Turkey could have been further along its current path had Ozal lived longer.
Turgut Ozal was born in 1927 in Malatya in eastern Turkey. By the 1970s he was a powerful bureaucrat, World Bank consultant, and businessman. Following the 1980 coup d'etat the junta had him run Turkey's economy. He quit in 1982 and founded the Motherland Party, or ANAP. Elections in 1983 brought Ozal's ANAP to power and an end to army rule; his was the only party not endorsed by the military. As prime minister, Ozal won a second term in 1987, survived an assassination attempt in 1988, and became president of Turkey in 1989.
Ozal had many critics. In general, one might say he was too common for snobs, too Muslim for secularists, too Western for Islamists, and too capitalist for socialists; more practical criticisms concern the pervasive corruption, cronyism, and the fall in real wages during his time in power.
A major complicating factor of Ozal's legacy is that his liberalization of the Turkish economy depended on one of the army's most brutal interventions - the coup d'etat of September 1980.
Until the army takeover, Turkey's economy was protectionist, inward, and populist - sometimes describes as "Peronist", after Juan Peron, Argentina's post-World War II president. To transform Turkey's economy into the free-market darling of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher it became under Ozal required no less a force than military rule, Professor Erinc Yeldan, Dean of the Economics Department at Yasar University in Izmir, said in a phone interview.
"This was a huge structural shift," Yeldan said. "It would have been impossible without the military [coup]." The junta abolished political parties, banned politicians, arrested trade union members, and jailed and suppressed the organized left and the nationalist right; academics, journalists, and lawyers were persecuted, fired, or otherwise left their jobs. The natural opposition to liberal globalization-friendly economic policies was neutralized. Also, the transformation would have been unaffordable but for loans eagerly extended by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, Yeldan said.
In other words, the transformation of the Turkish economy in the 1980s was backed by an absolute military regime, bankrolled by the richest international financial institutions, and cheered on by Reagan and Thatcher. With such power, critics say, anyone could have done what Ozal did.
If it turns out Ozal was assassinated, people may be shocked but few will be surprised. Unsolved political murders in Turkey are not rare. Last weekend, a crowd gathered in central Istanbul for the 420th demonstration of the "Saturday Mothers" - a group led by mothers of (mostly) Kurds who "disappeared" or died while in police custody during the 1990s; hundreds of such cases remain unsolved. Many other Turkish intellectuals, students, journalists, politicians, and soldiers were murdered in the 1990s; their families still do not know who killed their loved ones.
Just a few meters down the road from Ozal's mausoleum is the mausoleum of Adnan Menderes, the first elected prime minister of Turkey, who led the government from 1950-1960. After the 1960 coup d'etat that toppled his government, Menderes was tried and executed. It is no coincidence the two men are buried close to each other. Turgut Ozal spearheaded the official rehabilitation of Menderes from executed convict to symbol of interrupted democracy.
But it is hard to believe an authoritative pronouncement will be made whether Ozal is himself another symbol of interrupted democracy.
Last year, following Ozal's exhumation, Zaman, one of Turkey's highest-circulation newspapers, run by people close to Fetullah Gulen, leader of a large and well-connected Muslim congregation that strongly opposes the army's interventions into politics, published a story in which anonymous sources at Turkey's Institute of Forensic Medicine described evidence that Ozal had indeed been deliberately poisoned; specifically, that Ozal was first surreptitiously weakened over the course of several weeks with various toxic chemicals and then finished off with insecticide.
But the official forensic medicine report, once published, did not point directly to assassination, but instead, was rather inconclusive.
As Turkey reckons with its history, unofficial convictions too often pre-empt the credible presentation of facts.
Caleb Lauer is a Canadian freelance journalist living in Istanbul and covering Turkey since 2006.
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