LETTER FROM ISTANBUL
Erdoğan’s
Pyrrhic victory
Turkish
leader’s instincts saved him from a coup, but larger challenges lay
ahead.
By
Hugh Pope and Nigar
Göksel
7/17/16, 6:32 AM CET
ISTANBUL —
Paradoxes have always abounded in the relationship between the
Turkish military and the country’s politicians. Turkey’s armed
forces — or factions within them — have justified their repeated
interventions in politics with claims that they are saving the state
from corrupt, populist politicians. The political class, for its
part, frustrated as its leaders turn rotten, blames its degradation
on over-dominant army interventions that keep wrecking the country’s
democratic progress.
The recent attempted
coup in Turkey was no exception. On Friday night, an email from a
Turkish Armed Forces address said, in effect, that the military was
breaking the law in order to restore the rule of law. In response,
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called on the Turkish people to take
to the street in defense of the democracy he has done so much to
undermine with attacks on the media and assaults on constitutional
checks and balances.
And indeed, the
people rushed to secure key points for the government. While some
social media postings showed anti-government passers-by cheering on
the tanks, a broad social and political alignment emerged against the
attempted coup, including rare unison among all the country’s main
political parties and media voices. More than 160 people were killed
and 1,440 injured in clashes between soldiers sent out to seize power
and the pro-government police force and loyalist army factions.
Nobody in Turkey
has won in the long-term.
In the end, Erdoğan
and his supporters won the day, quickly reconsolidating control. And
perhaps this is unsurprising. Election after election —
scrupulously democratic in form, but dominated by authoritarian
political party leaders in practice — have shown that about half
the electorate still supports the president’s Justice and
Development Party (AKP).
But nobody in Turkey
has won in the long-term. The damage to the army — more important
than ever, given the turmoil in Turkey’s neighborhood — will be
severe. Internationally, Turkey’s already battered reputation has
slipped down several more notches.
There are no
specific links between the attempted coup and Turkey’s deepening
secularist-Islamist divide. The government alleges that it is the
work of a rival Islamist group loyal to Pennsylvania-based Fethullah
Gülen.
But stark divisions
remain nonetheless. The half of the country that does not support
Erdoğan remains deeply unsettled by his party’s increasingly overt
Islamism and his creeping takeover of all arms of the state and
economy. The country’s unsolved Kurdish problem is feeding a harsh
insurgency, and regional problems abound.
***
What happens next is
anybody’s guess. Some commentators were remarkably prescient,
drawing attention to unrest in the army well before this weekend’s
events. The Turkish armed forces, after all, have been the backbone
of the modern Turkish Republic since 1923, as well as the many Turkic
states that preceded it during the past millennium. They have
famously intervened in politics with full-blooded coups in 1960, 1971
and 1980-83; a bloodless post-modern show of force that ousted a
government in 1997; and an abortive attempt by press release to block
the election of Erdoğan’s predecessor Abdullah Gül in 2007.
It would be
wonderful if the failure to seize power breaks Turkey’s cycle of
lurching from coup to autocrat and back to coup again.
Other commentators,
who had previously dismissed chances of a coup, pointed to Erdoğan’s
popular base, arguing that no conscript-based army could afford to
try to move against it. For now, they seem to have been proved right
by scenes of soldiers stripping off their uniforms or surrendering
their tanks without a fight. One tank operator told a Turkish
television station that he and his fellow soldiers had no prior
notice of their mission.
It would be
wonderful if the failure to seize power breaks Turkey’s cycle of
lurching from coup to autocrat and back to coup again, with bouts of
chaotic coalition governments in-between. Liberals and urban youth
long for the day when overweening politicians and generals give way
to a Turkey that gives primacy to rule of law, respect for legal
contract and individual human rights.
The current Turkish
context, unfortunately, is not propitious — perhaps one reason that
the faction that launched the coup thought it had a chance of
success. The gravity of the situation is even recognized by Erdoğan,
who has an acute sense for political survival. In recent weeks, he
made several changes to begin reversing Turkey’s catastrophic
foreign policy mistakes of the past five years. Since 2011, all four
pillars of the country’s national security — relations with the
Middle East, Russia, the U.S. and the EU — have suffered grave
damage.
Erdoğan opened
Turkey’s doors to the Middle East, betting big on his Muslim
neighbors. Instead, Turkey suffered severe blowback as 2.7 million
Syrian refugees arrived and the rest of the region started exporting
its conflicts to its territory, including six big attacks apparently
by the Islamic State over the past year.
Arguments over Syria
have crippled relations with Russia, Turkey’s biggest natural gas
supplier and a major trading partner. This is only beginning to
change after Turkey’s expression of contrition for shooting down a
Russian warplane on its Syrian border in November, and Russia’s
recent decision to lift its trade and tourism bans.
His legitimacy
as ruler of all of Turkey is diminished with each drop in Turkey’s
cruising altitude.
Turkey’s key
relationship with its NATO ally, the U.S., has been similarly damaged
by arguments over Syria. The U.S. backs a Syrian Kurdish faction that
Turkey, with some justification, considers as part of the Kurdistan
Workers’ Party (PKK). “Some parts of the Pentagon think they’re
actually at war with Turkey,” one U.S. official said privately.
Finally, the recent
deal with the EU over refugees, still in progress, has not really
reversed Turkey’s loss of momentum since the early 2000s on
progressing towards EU norms and solving the problem of divided
Cyprus. Though, certainly, hostility from populist EU leaders and the
Greek Cypriot rejection of a Cyprus deal played a role in this
slowdown.
In one of the
country’s gravest challenges, however, there is no sign of change:
the mismanagement of the conflict with the PKK after the peace
process collapsed nearly a year ago. According to International
Crisis Group research, at least 1,700 people have been killed since
then, mostly in the Kurdish-populated southeast, one of the bloodiest
periods in a 32-year insurgency. After a decade in which a prosperous
new era seemed possible, 350,000 Kurds have been displaced and huge
swathes of Kurdish towns laid waste.
***
The paradoxes never
end in Turkey: it was actually the Turkish armed forces that in the
late 1990s did much behind the scenes to steer Turkey towards the EU
candidacy in 1999 and made it easy for Erdoğan’s AKP to make so
much progress after its election victory in 2002. And it was that
same armed forces’ leadership that found itself in jail for years
shortly afterwards, facing treason charges — with Erdoğan
brandishing this flagrant injustice as a righting of the
military-civilian balance in line with EU norms.
As this weekend’s
events play out, the president may once again prove that he is an
extraordinary political operator. But even if he uses the attempted
coup to continue pushing a change to an executive presidential
system, his rule will become even more brittle.
His legitimacy as
ruler of all of Turkey is diminished with each drop in Turkey’s
cruising altitude. The support he has from the pro-Islamic street is
in, large part, because the constituency it represents believes that
there is nobody that can take his place or protect their new-won
status and interests.
Any visitor to the
1,150-room palace Erdoğan’s built for his ascension to the
presidency in 2014 will be still struck by the fact that many of its
large rooms and long gilded corridors are empty. For the first time
in years, parliamentary parties united on Saturday to condemn the
coup attempt — including Kurdish nationalists. As Erdoğan seeks to
uncover those behind the attempted coup, he would be wise to build on
this outstretched hand, and abide by the rule of law. The lonelier he
gets, the harder it will be for him to keep winning.
Hugh Pope, whose
books include “Turkey Unveiled” (Overlook, 2011) and “Sons of
the Conquerors: The rise of the Turkic world” (Overlook, 2006), is
the ICG’s director of communications & outreach. Nigar Göksel
is the Turkey senior analyst for the International Crisis Group, an
independent conflict prevention organization.
Authors:
Hugh Pope and
Nigar Göksel
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário