‘They’re
taking everyone’
With
suspicion running amok in Turkey, fear grips the country as Erdoğan
cracks down.
By ZIA WEISE
7/22/16, 6:58 PM CET
ISTANBUL — At the
city’s imposing Palace of Justice, a lawyer greets a clerk pushing
a cartload of papers into the entrance hall. “How’s it going?”
The clerk grimaces. “They’ve taken away my boss,” he says. The
lawyer tut-tuts in response. “They’re taking everyone,” she
sighs. “Anyone could be next.”
In the aftermath of
last Friday’s failed military coup, a growing sense of paranoia has
gripped Turkey, not least among members of the judiciary. Desperate
to consolidate its power, the government has declared a state of
emergency and embarked on a sweeping purge targeting civil servants
believed to support Fethullah Gülen, the reclusive U.S.-based cleric
accused of orchestrating the coup.
And yet even as the
government has blamed Gülen—a former ally of President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan who fell out with him three years ago—it’s unclear
how many people were actually involved. Fear and suspicion rule the
streets.
Some 60,000
employees have been arrested or suspended from their jobs since last
weekend: soldiers, policemen and ministerial staff, but also
teachers, academics, and close to 3,000 judges and prosecutors. A
state of emergency declared on Wednesday night has raised fears of an
even greater crackdown targeting government opponents of all stripes,
whether real or imagined.
For journalists,
Istanbul has become a city of anonymous sources. With the slightest
criticism of the post-coup purge or the increasingly authoritarian
Erdogan often comes the request to withhold names and identifying
details.
In the Palace of
Justice, a young defense lawyer who had been happy to speak about the
cases of soldiers arrested in the coup lowers her voice when asked
about the suspensions in the judiciary. “I was representing a judge
yesterday. A judge in handcuffs,” she whispers, moving me away from
the policemen guarding the corridor. “And everything is secret.
We’re not even allowed to see most of the files.”
This atmosphere of
anxiety stands in stark contrast to the night of the attempted coup,
when citizens of all backgrounds — Turks and Kurds, secularists and
Islamists, liberals and nationalists — marched against the tanks.
The plotters are
believed to have planned a takeover for some time but were rushed
into action when Turkish intelligence agencies caught on to them. In
their haste, they sent young conscripts onto squares and bridges,
botched an attack on Erdogan, and largely ignored the media.
Crucially for the coup’s failure, the public swiftly turned against
them.
As rogue F-16s
dropped bombs on Turkey’s parliament, the government and its three
opposition parties showed unprecedented unity; even the harshest
critics of Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP)
vociferously defended the elected government. Many were hopeful this
would mark a new beginning for a country so riven by internal
divisions.
But when Erdogan
told people to remain in the streets even after the plotters had been
defeated, the liberals and secularists withdrew, leaving the
president’s voter base of religious conservatives to celebrate the
coup’s failure. The ensuing purge convinced government critics that
Erdogan was intent on making the triumph of democracy his own
personal victory to consolidate his hold on power.
Many Turks who do
not vote for Erdogan’s party would support the president’s
campaign to rid Gülen’s furtive movement of its supporters
embedded in state institutions and security forces. But observers
within and outside the country fear the government is going too far
in its crackdown.
Earlier this week,
even before emergency rule was enacted, police raided the printing
house of the outspoken satire magazine LeMan after its latest issue
depicted both soldiers and citizens as the pawns of greater powers.
“You know the
country was just on the edge of civil war last Friday? The worst
civil administration is better than the best military
administration,” Zafer Aknar, the magazine’s managing editor,
tells me over the phone. LeMan has temporarily closed its offices.
“But that doesn’t mean we should bow our heads to civil autocracy
and say thank you.”
Aknar frets that
criticizing the purge may soon become synonymous with supporting the
coup. LeMan cartoonists say targeting their magazine proves that the
government is not simply cracking down on Gülen supporters; after
all, LeMan’s archive is full of unflattering caricatures of the
cleric.
Others point to the
disproportionate crackdown on Turkey’s education sector. More than
15,200 teachers at state schools have been suspended, and 21,000
private teachers lost their licenses. The state-run board for higher
education demanded the resignation of all university deans, who had
no other choice but to do so.
“It’s an
environment where nobody knows what will happen next. Everybody is
suspicious of the other person. Even if you have a personal quarrel
with your neighbor he can call the police and say you’re from
Cemaat,” a university professor tells me, using a common Turkish
term for the Gülen movement.
Hinting that he
sympathizes with Gülen, he says is awaiting suspension or arrest.
Then he adds: “Do not write my name, please. It’s not a time for
criticism. That era has ended.”
It is easy to laugh
this off as baseless paranoia, but stories abound of men calling the
police on their government-criticizing wives, of village headmen
keeping lists of suspicious residents, and neighbors informing on
each other.
In Düzce, a town
halfway between Istanbul and Ankara, a 60-year-old man was arrested
on Thursday after a passer-by noticed him throwing away a box, in
which the police later discovered books written by Fethullah Gülen.
And while most Turks
yawned at Wikileaks’ recent release of 300,000 emails from AKP
servers (many were spam), they contained a number of messages sent to
government officials, naming people that were overheard “insulting”
Erdogan, other ministers, or Islam.
Even among staunch
AKP supporters, suspicion flourishes. In Kasimpasa, a working-class
quarter on Istanbul’s Golden Horn waterway, men and women sitting
in a seaside park clap along as vans playing Erdogan’s campaign
song drive past. Turkey’s president was born in this neighborhood,
selling simit bread rolls and lemonade on its streets.
Three women chatting
in the park giggle when I ask them if they went out to march for
democracy that night. No, they say, they were too scared. “But if
it happens again we will,” says one of them, a youthful grandmother
called Serife. “I’d lay down in front of a tank if my husband let
me!”
She grins and elbows
the oldest of the three, Emine. “This one can make dolma” —
stuffed vine leaves — “for our brave boys. Her dolma are famous.”
Emine doesn’t laugh. She is dressed in black; one of her relatives
was crushed by a tank during the coup attempt.
When the
conversation turns to the state of emergency, Serife chews her lip.
“They say a state of emergency will take Turkey back 50 years. We
don’t want that. It worries me,” she says. The third woman,
Fatma, swiftly admonishes her: “How can you say that? Erdogan says
there’s no need to worry.” Serife nods, then turns to me: “Don’t
write my last name, please. You know the environment here, it’s not
good to say such things.”
At the other end of
the park, a water-seller who introduces himself as Hüseyin tells me
his son spent his compulsory military service at the side of Akin
Öztürk, the former Air Force commander named as the failed coup’s
mastermind. “A few years ago, my son was his cook and taster,” he
says. “He always had to taste his food, the commander was so afraid
of being poisoned.”
When I inquire about
his surname, the water-seller shakes his head: “You will write that
article and someone in the government may find it. I don’t want to
get arrested. You know how it is: these days, Turkey is a country
where lots of little things can get you into trouble.”
Zia Weise is a
freelance journalist based in Istanbul.
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