Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  There is the clipped moustache that has been there from the start – an essential element of any pious man’s image. Back in the 1990s it was a glossy chestnut brown, set off by his bouffant hair. Over the years, as both have got shorter and greyer on their original wearer, the moustache has spread through Erdoğan’s inner circle like a catwalk trend. As the 2017 referendum approached, a Daily Mail journalist totted up that twenty-seven of the thirty cabinet members were sporting the badem biyik – or ‘almond moustache’. Of the three with no moustache, one was a woman.

  There are the oversized suit jackets, cross-hatched and most often in a dark powder blue. They originally made an appearance around the time of the presidential elections in August 2014 – when Erdoğan first won the post – and have since become so iconic that when a friend decided to dress up as the president for a raucous post-referendum dinner party all he had to do was don one of these suits and grow a week’s worth of moustache. In 2015, as the fashion spread in Erdoğan’s circle, one of Turkey’s leading designers bestowed it with a name: the ‘prestogal’ jacket.

  ‘President Erdoğan is the man who brought the checkered fashion to Turkey. Nobody influences our president; he does not follow the world, but rather he creates his own fashion,’ Levon Kordonciyan, the designer, told the state news agency, Anadolu.

  And then there are those shades, aviator-style with thin gold rims. Erdoğan dons them at rallies and walkabouts, the lenses so dark that his eyes are inscrutable. When he walks en masse with his entourage, all of them dressed in black and wearing shades to match him, you get the sense that the mob boss has arrived. It’s the same with the screaming convoys the high-level politicians move about in – first police on motorcycles, then the swarm of blacked-out cars travelling in packs half a kilometre long down the highways. They have grown more common everywhere since Erdoğan became president – and his own entourage is by far the biggest – but you see them most often in Ankara. Whole intersections must be slickly closed and reopened to allow the government motorcades to pass through, jamming another stick in the spokes of the capital’s dreadful traffic.

  It is impossible to guess to what level such privileges go down. Erdoğan travels like that, for sure, as do the high-ranking members of his cabinet. In August 2016, a month after the coup attempt, prime minister Binali Yıldırım’s press team called me and a couple of dozen other foreign journalists to an Ottoman palace on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus. A jolly Yıldırım ordered us to tuck into the opulent Turkish breakfast, served in the gardens – young cheeses with succulent figs, delicate tea and hot, crunchy pastries – while burly men in black T-shirts, olive-grey combat trousers, shades and earpieces scanned the scene in every direction with assault rifles ready. After a two-hour discussion and a sincere vow from the diminutive, grandfatherly Yıldırım that we should do this more often, we watched as he was whisked away in a helicopter in a flourish of political showmanship.

  Other ministers travel in more low-key style. But in September 2016, down in Diyarbakır, de facto capital of the Kurdish south-east, I happened to be in the city’s premier breakfast spot as the city governor, newly appointed from Ankara, came in. The Hasanpaşa Han is an Ottoman-era caravanserai, a two-level eating and shopping centre around an open central courtyard that was built in the sixteenth century. Back then the traders traversing the Silk Route would spend the night inside its black basalt walls, resting their horses in the straw-strewn central space and dining and sleeping in the warren of surrounding rooms.

  Today, there are stalls at ground level selling trinkets, colourful silk scarves and rugs printed with images of Kurdish heroes. For a time you might have found PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s face among them. Now the rug sellers stick to uncontroversial figures, mostly Kurdish singers and poets; none go so far as to sell any bearing pictures of Erdoğan, as I have seen in other parts of the country. Through tiny arched doorways steep stone steps lead up through the blackness of the han’s thick outer walls like secret warrens in a medieval castle, before they spill out to the mezzanine of the second level. Here, breakfast is served – Diyarbakır style. Endless small plates of cheeses, olive oil, jams, spicy pastes, sliced tomatoes and cucumber, honey, kaymak (a kind of Turkish clotted cream), tahini, fried eggs, spicy sausage sizzling in butter are heaped onto tables along with endless bread and tea, refilled as soon as it is finished.

  I was there with my translator and her friend, who had run a café in the grounds of Surp Giragos, the largest Armenian church in Anatolia, until fighting between local PKK militants and the Turkish security forces enveloped it. He closed up and left his café in December 2015 and had not been back in the ten months since, but a colleague who had been able to get into the curfew zone to check on the church had taken photos for him. It was not so much the loss of his business that made his hand tremble with grief and rage, but what had been done to Surp Giragos. He held up his phone to show me photos of the camp kitchen that the soldiers had set up under the soaring gothic arches of the nave and the Atatürk portrait they pinned up in place of the icons.

  It was at that moment that a gaggle of close protection guards, the same guys in olive and black who had accompanied Yıldırım, filed in and fanned out on both levels of the han. The bubbling conversation hushed as if someone had turned down the dial, then the governor walked in and took his place at a breakfast table. Slowly the chatter returned, but we stopped talking about the church and the war that had ravaged the districts just behind these thick old walls and stuck to banal small talk for the rest of the morning.

  But the portraits in the public corridors of Aksaray, Erdoğan’s thousand-room palace, show the other side of the man at the top of the clique that rules Turkey. He is still in suits and dark glasses but now in the world’s misery spots rather than the halls of power, kissing the hands of old women in headscarves or surrounded by adoring African children.

  The president’s loyal insiders – and often even his opponents – insist that such personal warmth is genuine. One lower-level bureaucrat working in the presidency tells me that in meetings, Erdoğan makes sure everyone has a glass of tea in front of them before he starts. An adviser insists that he berates Turks to have at least three children only because he cares about them as he would his own family. The head of the foreign investment board, who was personally appointed by Erdoğan, says people see the president as their father.

  Turks who have met Erdoğan in person say time and again: he is funny. But his instinct to bring an iron fist down on those who oppose him politically is a bona fide part of his personality, too.

  ‘What I know from his life and his family is that he is not concerned on a macro level,’ a former aide told me. ‘He may cry and help a person but if you tell him that there are thousands of people gathered there, he sends somebody to bust them. A thousand people is something political. The other is something humane.’

  Foreign diplomats paint a similar picture. For sure Erdoğan can be charming, and they agree his personal warmth is real. But they also say he can be obstructive and caustic, especially when he feels he is not getting his way or being treated with respect.

  ‘I don’t find him particularly funny, but he definitely has a presence,’ said one. ‘He was quite warm. He was always patting me on the back. To be this successful you must have something and he absolutely does. He has a very magnetic personality, which does not really come out. He always seems very angry and harsh in his public speaking. But he does not seem like that in private.’

  Another, who had personally felt the force of the president’s fury several times during his posting, said there are two Erdoğans: ‘the diplomatic, polished guy who wants to make friends and is trying to act to his capabilities in order to influence others. This is the nice Erdoğan. Then there is the tough, awful Erdoğan. And you never know which one is going to show up.’

  Outside the country, Erdoğan’s mercurial and often bullish personality wins him more detractors than fans. But inside Turkey – wh
ich is, at its heart, an Eastern country even if it often assumes the veneer of the West – it is seen as his biggest attribute.

  ‘One of his strongest points is that he is genuine in both doing right and wrong,’ a former adviser tells me. ‘He is very transparent, and that’s a good thing in Turkey. He does not conceal anything. He speaks his mind, and this is why he makes so many mistakes. He sometimes says absurd things. But he is not a European politician in that sense. He is more like a guide figure, like a politician of the Ottoman times.’

  The speechwriter

  The photo Hüseyin Besli has chosen for the wall of his Istanbul office is a classic of the genre. Erdoğan is smiling, shaded and waving, dressed in a black greatcoat and surrounded by his entourage. It is the new Tayyip in the new Turkey – a place where he is firmly in charge. But with his Marlboro reds, diamond-patterned sweater and tired and sagging grey face, Besli himself looks like a relic of the old – more like an ageing shopkeeper or a minor bureaucrat than the architect of a revolution. His shoulders hunch forward and his smile is resigned. The way he sucks his cigarettes through his own moustache – a little longer than Erdoğan’s and just as grey – suggests a deep sadness. Maybe he is just lost in his thoughts.

  We meet in his writing room, a neat, wood-panelled attic in an old Balkan-style house, nestled in the heart of a bubbling district in Asian Istanbul. The streets of Çengelköy are narrow and cobbled, lined with family-run grocers. The district sits on the banks of the Bosphorus, at a point where the land juts out to gift it a panoramic view of the first of the three suspension bridges with the outlines of the mosques of Istanbul’s Ottoman centre in the hazy blue background. The din of a Monday evening rush hour leaks in through the huge window by Besli’s desk as I settle into one of his comfy leather chairs. Revving motorcycles and shouting shopkeepers blend with the wail of the sundown call to prayer. His floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed with books on religion and politics. There is a sticker of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rabia hand, a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under, pasted onto the window, and that Erdoğan portrait is the first thing you’re confronted with as you walk in the door.

  Besli chain smokes and occasionally apologises as he breaks off to answer his phone. He says he is sure that I won’t represent his words properly, because the foreign journalists never do.

  ‘Then why did you agree to speak with me?’ I ask.

  ‘Because I am polite,’ he laughs.

  But I suspect he also craves some recognition for the years he spent moulding the image of the most powerful man in Turkey.

  It was in 1974, when Besli was in his mid-twenties, that a tall and striking young man walked into one of his meetings. The National Salvation Party (Milli Selâmet Partisi or MSP) was one of the few overtly Islamist organisations in Turkey at that time, and Besli was head of its youth branch. The country had just undergone its second military coup, and a mushrooming street war between leftist and nationalist youth gangs had sent the murder rate soaring. The rival factions were shooting and stabbing each other to death on the streets and in the university campuses. The MSP stayed outside the violence and the factionalism, meeting to pray, plan and organise. It was a tactic that bore fruit. Throughout the 1970s, the MSP won places in two coalition governments despite never winning more than 12 per cent of the vote, largely thanks to the hopeless fracturing of the non-Islamist parties.

  In 1974 Erdoğan, aged twenty-one, was leader of the MSP’s local branch in Beyoğlu, his home borough in inner Istanbul. Besli, a couple of years older, remembers him as a charismatic guy who could already work a room. ‘I don’t remember where I first heard Erdoğan speak, but I remember that he was great, even back then,’ he says. ‘He could make himself heard. When he spoke, people felt sympathy with him.’

  Within two years, Besli’s term in office had ended and Erdoğan was elected his successor. They were the young bloods in a party led by the middle-aged and nerdish professor Necmettin Erbakan, who was pursuing an agenda beloved of Islamists since the late Ottoman era. Erbakan insisted that Turkey’s ills could be blamed on foreign meddling and Western influence, and that the cure was to turn it back towards Islam and build relations with the Muslim world. The nefarious secular elites who ruled the republic had done her a disservice by taking her into NATO and cosying up to Europe; what was needed was a revival of strong Islamic morals, population growth and rapid industrialisation to bring Turkey’s living standards up to those of the West.

  The establishment was rattled. The army stepped in, launching the third coup of the republic in 1980.

  The MSP, like all the other parties, was shut down by the generals. But young Erdoğan’s rise continued. In 1985 he became Istanbul chair of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP – which replaced the MSP), and then stood unsuccessfully as their candidate for the mayorship of Beyoğlu in 1989. In 1991 he ran for parliament for the first time – and although he won, had to hand his seat to another parliamentary candidate due to the party’s preferential voting system. None of these setbacks discouraged him. That same year Besli began working as Erdoğan’s speechwriter, assembling the strategy that finally propelled him to the Istanbul mayor’s office in 1994. Erdoğan has never conceded victory at the ballot box since.

  ‘Our struggle was not so much about power, it was about a cause,’ Besli says, when I ask him what drove them to continue even when so much was stacked against them. ‘When you have a cause, you don’t give up just because you’re not in power. And when you’re a man of fate, you tell yourself that you have to struggle and the result will not be defined by you. You do what is necessary and leave the rest to Allah.’

  We are twenty minutes into our conversation, yet it is the first time God has been mentioned. I can’t tell whether it is deliberate; however, when I later ask Besli what their biggest hurdle has been, he admits it was the fear and scepticism of Turkey’s secularist voters. He refers to them as the generation raised by the republic, brainwashed into rejecting their faith and their Eastern traditions in favour of a false affinity with the West. But he also says that a key part of his strategy with Erdoğan was to keep religion away from their image, so that they could broaden their appeal beyond the narrow, pious support base the MSP had commanded. When Erdoğan entered the mayor’s office, he signed a paper promising that no one would lose their jobs because of their political affiliations or be forced to adhere to Islamic rules. On the job, he won respect for his party’s technocratic efficiency.

  Erdoğan’s early conciliations in the mayor’s office quickly gave way to a more combative tone. During a rally in the eastern town of Siirt in 1997 he read out a poem that blended nakedly Islamist metaphors with militaristic nationalism: ‘The mosques are our barracks, / The minarets our bayonets, / And the faithful our soldiers.’ The judicial system – dominated by Kemalists – seized the opportunity to take Erdoğan back down to where they believed he belonged. The mayor of Istanbul was sentenced to ten months in prison for inciting religious hatred. And he had already left the Refah Party, which was closed down anyway only eleven months later. But jail time proved the best image boost Erdoğan could have dreamed of.

  Jail time

  In 1999 the future Turkish president joined Johnny Cash and Tupac Shakur, and released an album from prison.

  Bu şarkı burada bitmez (This Song Does Not End Here) – is a 35-minute compilation of Erdoğan reading poetry over a soundtrack of lilting Turkish melodies. Produced by Ulus Music, a label specialising in ‘introducing to the world the richness, colour and variety of Turkish music and same time making sure that the whole world can take advantage of our cultural preciousness’, the album remains widely available on CD and cassette on Turkish second-hand trading websites.

  By the time the glamorous 43-year-old mayor of Istanbul broke with Refah and was sent to jail, he had already started an aggressive spin campaign to reinvent himself as Turkey’s number one Islamist. In the eleven months between his conviction and the start of his jail te
rm, Erdoğan called his first major press conference. As mayor of Istanbul Erdoğan had almost always refused to speak with foreign journalists. Now, he needed the media to reboot his image for the world stage. So he invited a group of correspondents based in the city for a slap-up lunch at an upmarket restaurant serving hearty Ottoman-style food.

  ‘Why are you meeting with us now?’ asked one of the more cynical correspondents.

  Erdoğan turned in surprise to his assistant, a pleasant young man who had always relayed his boss’s rejection of interview requests with an apologetic air. ‘Why didn’t you tell me these journalists have been wanting to meet with me?’ he berated the unfortunate bureaucrat.

  It was, says one of the correspondents who was at the lunch, a transparent attempt to save face. ‘A charm offensive,’ was how another described it.

  As the court case against Erdoğan dragged on, Istanbul city council turned its website into a protest page featuring messages of support and a link to the full text of his defence statement. By the time his appeal failed and he was finally sent to prison in March 1999, he had built a reputation as a free-speech crusader with a legion of loyal personal supporters. Before he was jailed he was allowed to attend Friday prayers at the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul for a final time. Huge crowds came to pray alongside him, and formed a convoy to escort him to Pınarhisar jail, north-west of Istanbul. When he was released in July 1999, having served only 119 days of his ten-month sentence, thousands turned out again to greet him.

  The ad man

  Erdoğan was not the only Islamist mayor to have been imprisoned in Turkey at that time. In 1996 şükrü Karatepe, the mayor of Kayseri in central Anatolia and also from the Refah Party, had told a rally that his ‘heart was bleeding’ because he had been obliged to attend a ceremony honouring Atatürk. Convicted of insulting the eternal leader in April 1998, a week after Erdoğan’s conviction for inciting religious hatred, he had a one-year sentence slapped on him and was sent straight to prison with no time for appeal. But Karatepe did not have a marketing genius behind him – and he was forgotten as soon as his cell door slammed shut.