Gürbüz [Özaltınlı] has written, with specific reference to Ahmet Altan, that a number of intellectuals have become incapable of generating new ideas, and have therefore had to fall back on spreading malevolence axed on the basic theme of “Dictator Erdoğan.” As for me, I don’t think that this is some sort of guileless malevolence inspired by their hate for Erdoğan. These articles are the work of some very clever authors who are writing to perpetuate their own class in power. This is actually a class struggle and battle; it is a fight waged to be able to proclaim, no matter who happens to be in government, that “we are the true owners of this country, and everything has to be checked through us.” From that perspective, the Gülen Congregation’s 17-25 December 2015 putsch attempt will never be recognized. It can’t be recognized because they themselves also had a place in that coup attempt. (1)
In my previous article I briefly described the current intellectual circumstances in which U.S. analyses of Turkish political developments are undertaken. I noted that the atmosphere has turned so poisonous, and the lack of information so profound, that even nominally progressive figures and publications are turning out commentary on contemporary Turkish politics that is no different than the traditionally most hard-core right-wing ideologues. I then turned to a recent example, the long commentary on the twin 2015 Turkish parliamentary elections recently published by Ümit Cizre in MERIP’s Middle East Report.
An initial observation is that even though both Turkish elections in 2015 were for parliament, Cizre’s 5000-word commentary focuses almost exclusively on Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan. The same themes repeated by the international press ad nauseam over the past six months make their appearance: Erdoğan is “meddling in the day-to-day affairs of government”; Erdoğan is “accountable to no one”; Erdoğan has “apparent disregard for basic values of democracy”; Erdoğan has a “penchant for power”; Erdoğan is “not committed to [democratic] rights and norms”; Erdoğan is [r]unning the country with a small coterie of bureaucrats and advisers, becoming distanced from society, making no time for reading and contemplation, disguising his lack of intellectual curiosity and disconnection from democratic values with pragmatism and arrogance.
It should be clear that repetition is the basic technique used to establish the Erdoğan menace. Meanwhile, however, on all substantive questions the author’s discussion is generally distorted, ahistorical, and rife with errors of fact or interpretation. Nearly every paragraph in Cizre’s article can be criticized on those grounds.
In other words, MERIP has published an article that is little different from the anti-AKP or anti-Erdoğan broadsides voluminously published by MERIP’s own ideological opponents on the right of the U.S. political spectrum. Has no one at MERIP taken the time and trouble to scan what Michael Rubin or Daniel Pipes, or the American Enterprise Institute or the Middle East Forum, have been publishing on Turkish politics for the past decade? If they have, then was there no concern or doubt sparked by the similarity of the themes and arguments in Cizre’s article?
However, instead of going through the entire text to point out every such problem, I want to point to a more fundamental issue that reflects the depth of the contradictions and complications in Cizre’s article. Frankly, this particular aspect goes a long way toward explaining why Cizre is forced to resort to an endless reiteration of inflammatory accusations. For nearly all the phenomena that she refers to, and which seem to have angered her so much, are actually related to the elected government’s ongoing struggle against Fethullah Gülen and his adherents within the Turkish state apparatus, and especially in the judiciary and the security forces.
Indeed, the most eye-catching feature of Cizre’s article is that she manages to write such a lengthy treatise on current Turkish politics without once mentioning Gülen — even though Gülen has been, certainly for the past two and perhaps for four years, at the epicenter of Turkish political disorders.
Simply put, Fethullah Gülen leads a cult. Originally based on religious ideals deriving from Sufi-influenced Islam, somewhere along the way they seem to have opted for not an open, democratic, party-based struggle in pursuit of legitimacy and representation against Turkey’s Kemalist, authoritarian modernist, anti-Islamic establishment, but for trying to conquer the state from the inside behind a façade of educational and other public services. To that end, they have been placing their select, best trained and most talented followers in various Turkish state institutions since the 1980s. In time, these have come to constitute a very close-knit network of special and exclusive loyalties both (horizontally) among themselves and (vertically) to Fethullah Gülen at the top. Over the same decades, the cult’s public front of schools and media outlets has also become rich, powerful, and multi-national. At the same time, it has become and remained emphatically non-transparent. No one outside of Gülen himself (who has been living in exile in the U.S. since the late 1990s, though the U.S. State Department has kept close tabs on his followers’ comings-and-goings), as well as, perhaps, a small group of his closest collaborators really knows the extent of his organization and its resources. It is like an iceberg showing only one-tenth of its mass above the waterline. And below the surface, it resembles a labyrinthine secret society or illegal organization without however any incriminating conspiratorial documents (program or statutes) about seizing political power.
But power is what the Gülen Congregation appears to have been most after. In 2002, when the AKP entered and won its very first election, it had nothing but its popular vote to rely on. It was not familiar with and had no following whatsoever in the army, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the police. Instead, all these “arms” of the state were part and parcel of a hostile Ataturkist establishment. The only exception was Gülen’s organization, which therefore became the AKP’s privileged ally. At this stage the Gülenists helped provide the relatively green and inexperienced AKP with an ideology and a grassroots network while presenting a moderate appearance to foreign observers. Indeed, so close was this working relationship, that for some time it became difficult to separate the two. And ironically, throughout this period Kemalist secularists were more anxious about the Gülenists than the AKP, so that one of their favorite accusations against the AKP was protecting the Gülenists and allowing them to flourish. It was only much later, when the two parted company, the break became public, and the Gülenists became instrumental in a massive attempt to discredit and overthrow the AKP, that the same secularists switched, out of their identification of the AKP as the principal enemy, to an opposite position of now favoring, overlooking, or preferring to neglect and not even to mention the Gülenists.
What is most interesting is the extent to which this description now fits Ümit Cizre. Near the beginning of her essay, she has an excellent opportunity to explain all about the relevance of Gülen to the current political situation in Turkey, but completely passes it over as if there was nothing to add:
These complaints included the concentration of power in the executive; the AKP’s growing antipathy toward oppositional politics and convergence with the nationalist, statist and security-driven priorities of old; purges of perceived opponents in the judiciary and police; the political capture of the National Intelligence Organization; and Erdoğan’s proclivity for meddling in the day-to-day affairs of government even after he became president.
Gently inserted into that long sentence is the phrase that I have put in boldface about “purges of perceived opponents in the judiciary and police.” Any person paying even the slightest attention to the past several years of Turkish politics knows exactly what Cizre is referring to. On 17-25 December 2013, after what have turned out to be several years of ultra-secretive preparations, Gülenists in the police and the judiciary suddenly launched an all-out attack against the AKP government, coming out with files on alleged corruption involving some top AKP politicians and their entourage. Some public prosecutors stood outside courtrooms distributing leaflets to the press; teams of police prepared to raid government offices. As this is not how the law normally proceeds, clearly it had nothing to do with fighting corruption but everything to do with anti-AKP politics. It was an attempt to achieve what the more traditional bulwarks of the Kemalist oligarchy (such as the army) had been unable or unwilling to do over the previous decade or more. It was an autonomous putsch attempt against democracy, in the words used by Tuncer Köseoğlu in my opening quotation, that was stopped only with great difficulty. Following its failure, there did come an administrative purge, though not against “perceived opponents” but officials abusing their powers for conspiratorial activities: Large numbers of Gülenist judicial and security personnel found to have been involved in the abortive coup were (more often) shuffled to distant posts or (less often) fired from their jobs by the AKP government. This is obviously extremely important for any country: How can a supposedly non-political organization such as Gülen’s gain so much influence in multiple state institutions that it feels powerful enough, and legitimate enough, to attempt to take over political control of the state?
Cizre feels no need to explain any of this to the reader. Instead, after that euphemism about the AKP purging its “perceived opponents,” she turns to the politics of the MİT, the Turkish National Intelligence Organization, again without mentioning the Gülenists’ role, though once more they were (are) absolutely central to what happened. In February 2012, some Turkish prosecutors attempted to arrest MİT head Hakan Fidan for engaging in secret negotiations with the PKK in order to initiate a peace process. Their excuse was that it is illegal for the state to enter into talks with any outlawed, terrorist organization. First, if this were the case, no comparable conflicts would be solvable anywhere on earth, since such problems inevitably involve second-track diplomacy and undercover bargaining (witness Ireland, witness South Africa). Second, (as with any other democratic state) the MİT is a key government organization run by an Undersecretary of the Prime Ministry (Fidan’s official title) directly responsible to none other than the PM, and Mr Fidan had actually been personally ordered and authorized by then-PM Erdoğan to enter into the secret Oslo negotiations with the PKK. Hence the action aimed at Fidan was really directed at discrediting and incriminating Erdoğan… for assuming a huge political risk in wanting to bring the Kurdish question to a peaceful solution! And it was apparently initiated by Gülen himself after the AKP first began to remove some of Gülen’s people from key institutional positions.
To repeat, there is nothing, but nothing of all these complicities in Cizre’s account. Neither does she mention the Gülenists’ role in what happened next. Public tensions between the AKP and Gülen began with the Fidan affair, but then came to a boil over the issue of dersanes or extra-school prep courses (the financial base of Gülen’s Turkish operations) before exploding with the December 2013 “corruption” investigations mentioned above. This is the root cause of the subsequent upheavals in Turkish state institutions. Apart from the Kurdish question, this has been the single most dominant issue in Turkish political life for the past four years.
Given these basic facts, Cizre’s silence over Gülen and Gülenists assumes deafening proportions. Obviously, understanding the threat that Gülen has been posing to Turkey’s democracy and stability completely changes the way one reads Cizre’s article. Erdoğan’s and the AKP’s struggle against the Gülenist cult and conspiracy is the fundamental reason behind all the developments that Cizre complains about in her commentary. If an ostensibly non-political actor decides to intervene, through unaccountable and non-democratic channels and methods, in a nation’s politics, should the elected representatives of the people sit idly by and allow that to happen?
The answer to that question will determine whether one takes Cizre’s article seriously.
NOTES
(1) Tuncer Köseoğlu, Memleket (The state of the country), 18th December 2015. The translation is mine. This is the Turkish original:
Gürbüz, Ahmet Altan özelinde bazı aydınların fikir üretemediğini ve ‘Diktatör Erdoğan’ temelli kötücüllük yaydığını yazdı. Ben bunun safiyane bir kötücüllük olduğunu ve Erdoğan’a besledikleri kinin yansıması olduğunu düşünmüyorum. Bu yazılar, son derece akıllı ve kendi sınıflarının her daim iktidarda olması için yazanların yazıları. Bu aslında bir sınıf mücadelesi ve kavgası; siyasi iktidar kim olursa olsun, ‘Memleketin asıl sahibi biziz, bize sorulmadan bir şey olmaz’ kavgası. Bu uğurda Cemaatin yaptığı 17-25 Aralık darbesi asla görülmez. Görülmez çünkü o darbede kendilerine de yer var.