‘They have a very strategic and long history, in Turkey and the world, of peddling favour from influential people, including elected officials, journalists and other leaders,’ Hendrick told me.
They had certainly picked the report’s authors well. Two of the four were serving British politicians, Sir Edward Garnier in the House of Commons and Lord Woolf in the House of Lords. Garnier’s Register of Interests entry for the work reveals that the JWF paid him £115,994 for his 100 hours spent on the project. Six months after the report was published, Garnier stood up in the Commons during a debate on the EU–Turkey migrant deal to raise the ‘serial and appalling human rights and rule of law abuses by the Turkish government’.
‘While these abuses continue,’ he said, ‘there should be no question of opening any chapters [on Turkey’s EU membership] at all, even though we need Turkey as a member of NATO and its agreement to help with the migration problem.’
Although he mentioned in his statement to the House that he had worked on the report, he did not reveal who had commissioned it. In his response to me in August 2016, when I reported the story in The Times, Garnier insisted that he and the other authors ‘are not supporters or adherents of [the Gülen movement] but wrote the report as independent English lawyers based on the evidence we had reviewed’.
There is no doubt that he knew who he was working for, though – the original press release sent to me by the Hawthorn PR agency had included a blurb about the Gülen movement at the end: ‘The Gülen movement is a civil society network of individuals and religious, humanitarian, and educational institutions that subscribe to Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s advocacy of interfaith dialogue, community service, and universal education.’
It is easy to see how a British politician might be sucked in. Outside Turkey the Gülenists sell themselves as purveyors of modern, pluralist Islam, a pitch that is directly and deliberately tuned to Western ears. Using that narrative they have built up a large following within the Turkish émigré community and organised endless outreach programmes and round tables in the West. In the UK, where much Gülenist capital has fled since Erdoğan’s crackdown started, they still run a lobby group, The Dialogue Society, which has hosted Cherie Blair and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabati among its guest speakers, as well as an educational trust that offers free weekend tuition to pupils in the state school system. You have to dig fairly deep into their websites before you see that these organisations are linked to the Gülen movement.
Inside Turkey, the Gülenists were best known for running high-achieving private schools for the children of rich families and subsidised university dormitories for those of the poor. ‘Everyone was aware of Gülenists but they were not seen as particularly threatening,’ said one Western diplomat based in Turkey in the early AKP era. ‘They were seen as a kind of irrelevance, a rather eccentric secret society that raised money, did good things and ran schools in Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world. It felt like a normal part of the Turkish society. We did not, as diplomats, focus on things that we probably should have done more. It did have the civic elements, particularly in Anatolia. It felt almost like Germany or old UK, like the Rotary Clubs. It almost fell into that bracket rather than a serious political thing.’
Overseas the Gülenists ran Turkish language and cultural institutes. Their members, having come up through the elite Gülenist schools or been handpicked in the university dorms, were the brightest, the best educated and the most fluent foreign-language speakers – the perfect cultural ambassadors for Turkey abroad. While some members were directed by the higher ranks of the movement to take jobs in the Turkish state and security services (and often handed stolen test papers in advance to ensure they would get the plum positions), others went abroad and opened more schools overseas. Poorer, developing nations – particularly the Muslim parts of Africa, the Balkans and central Asia – were delighted to have such polished and pious people coming to provide education. An opaque group called ‘Citizens Against Special Interest Lobbying in Public Schools’ has released a document online titled ‘Every continent but Antarctica’, listing 101 countries where Gülenist schools were allegedly operating, from Afghanistan to Zambia.
‘I remember that after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, there were hopes from Turkish nationalists and even centre-right parties to bring in their brothers through Central Asia under the Turkish umbrella, sort of a near abroad for Turkey,’ says a US lobbyist who has previously worked for the AKP government. ‘They were going to go as far east as the Chinese border. Those hopes were quickly dashed because seventy years of communism takes its toll – their plans did not work out. But there was still a soft power idea more modestly expressed. The Gülenists were seen as a useful tool. And the Gülenists wanted to do it. It was a win-win situation, and it only became a liability later. It’s funny because for years it was a Turkish foreign policy priority to get these schools up and running. Now the priority is to close them down.’
In those early AKP years Erdoğan was happy to piggyback on the Gülenists’ established networks. His party was electorally strong but institutionally weak, and facing a hostile state and military dominated by the Kemalists. There were few AKP people working within the bureaucracy – this was, after all, the party that had risen from the fringes, and was only now making its way to the centre. The army wanted to bring Erdoğan down. Much of the judiciary wanted to bring him down. The only way he – and his party – could survive was to build alliances.
‘After the AKP came to power in 2002, I, like many others, was hearing informal reporting that the Gülenists were being recruited more and more in some government departments, especially in the police and the judiciary,’ says one former parliamentary deputy. ‘I tried to collect some information on such informal reporting, but I couldn’t get much reliable results. In one case I talked to an ex-Minister of Interior who had recently left that position, asking if it were true that large numbers of Gülenists were being recruited to the police. He said yes, to some extent it was true, but rhetorically asked “what could I do when those people performed much better than others in the entrance tests and examinations?”’
The liberals
Erdoğan’s alliance with the Gülenists was only one among many. The AKP was also reaching out to liberal, anti-army activist groups, and to members of the secular opposition who had grown tired of their stale old parties. Many joined up with the AKP right at the start in 2001. Süleyman Sarıbaş, a lawyer who had been a deputy in Turgut Özal’s Anavatan Party (Motherland Party, or ANAP) since 1983, signed up shortly before the elections of November 2002. Erdoğan personally approached him to join the party. Sarıbaş agreed, despite some misgivings about Erdoğan’s character.
‘I regarded Erdoğan as a civilian, but he never completely retained Western values,’ Sarıbaş says. ‘He was emotional and easily scared. Timid. His lifestyle was something between an urban lifestyle and the provincial rural lifestyle. He was very much in the middle. I will give you one example. He would pull out his Swiss army knife from his pocket and clean his teeth with it. He is a villager in that sense. But he has been raised in Istanbul and he is very urban at the same time. In the period I met him, he was being judged. He had court cases against him. He was afraid about being arrested. After he became the chairperson of the AKP there was a court case against him about his property. He seemed to have too much property and it was not clear how he had managed to own it all. He said that it was the gold belonging to his children that he had exchanged. At about five p.m. we went to see the prosecutor and he wanted to put him under arrest. They were about to close the court. The judge arrived a little bit late on that day. We waited for half an hour for the judge to arrive. Erdoğan was white at the fear of being arrested.’
Sarıbaş joined the AKP because it seemed, in 2002, to offer a reformist agenda. Within three years he had left it again, part of the party’s first mass wave of resignations. He was one of thirteen d
eputies who quit between February and April 2005, throwing the AKP into its first real crisis. Erdoğan was already showing himself to be ‘fretful and ill-tempered’, according to an AFP report on the mass exit of members. On resigning, Sarıbaş said that the party was not truly committed to EU-focused reform, and that its inner workings were corrupt and authoritarian. Musa Kart, a cartoonist at Cumhuriyet, a secularist newspaper, depicted the prime minister as a cat tangled in a ball of yarn as the crisis in his party grew. Erdoğan sued him for $3,500. He also called the defectors ‘the rotten apples in the bag’.
The mass of remaining deputies seemed willing to overlook any growing disquiet about Erdoğan’s character. The AKP survived its 2005 crisis, and two years later scored a huge victory over its old enemy, the army – and over the CHP, the largest opposition bloc in parliament. In May that year, the generals threatened a coup over the nomination of AKP founder Abdullah Gül as president. The constitutional court took up the thread and started a case to close down the AKP. Gül is a moderate Islamist and a pro-European. The army’s problem with having him as president? His wife wears the Islamic headscarf.
Erdoğan called their bluff and called a snap election. The AKP won overwhelmingly, affirming the people’s support for the democratically elected government over the self-appointed secularist saviours. Tens of CHP deputies and hundreds of rank-and-file members left their party and joined the AKP.
‘The AKP between 2002 and 2007 seemed to be following a reformist political line,’ says Haluk Özdalga, a CHP deputy who was among those who crossed the floor. ‘We had extensive consultations with party people, and a majority supported the idea of going over to the AKP. In Ankara, which is my political district, a couple of hundred CHP members followed with us, and they gradually got various elected positions within the AKP organisations. This flow of members from the CHP to the AKP continued until approximately 2011. I consider myself as a social democrat, and at that time the AKP stood ideologically closer to me than the CHP. That may sound a little unusual for those not knowing the CHP and the AKP of that time. Many social democratic politicians in Europe at that time felt the same way. The AKP appeared to be structurally a more democratic party, not dominated by a single person.’
Another of the nine who joined in 2007 was Ertuğrul Günay, a CHP veteran who had left the party in 2004 and was in parliament as an independent. Günay believed he saw in the AKP the promise of a new type of Turkish politics. Erdoğan appointed him minister of culture.
‘It was directly from Erdoğan that I received a proposal to join the AKP,’ Günay says. ‘After a few meetings, and after consulting my friends, I accepted. During its first term in government the party was promising on the issues of democracy, social welfare and pluralism. CHP as the only opposition party in the parliament followed a much more conservative line about the issues of EU and pluralism – I know many “leftists” from the CHP who thought that the EU would divide Turkey. I had hoped that with the AKP, a new social movement in Turkey would form itself, leading to the rise of a progressive politics that would be at peace with the values of the people.’
Erdoğan at that time was a man willing to take criticism, to listen to others, and to learn: ‘well-intentioned and sincere about democracy’, according to Günay. One diplomat said that in his early years as prime minister Erdoğan would arrive at meetings with a stack of notecards on the issues to be discussed. Another said that he was ‘one amongst many important people in the system … more equal than anybody else but there were other players who argued with him, whether Abdullah Gül, Abdüllatif şener [another AKP founder, who left the party in 2007], or Ali Babacan [economy minister]. These other voices were from smart individuals, who had come into government with a lot more experience on a world stage than Erdoğan. He relied on them. He trusted them and respected their advice and judgement.’
In the rest of the world, too, this charismatic rising star of Turkish politics was making a good impression. The AKP won its first elections in November 2002, just as the US and its coalition of the willing were gearing up to declare war on Iraq. They desperately needed allies in the Middle East – and a moderate Islamist, westward-looking Turkey fitted the bill perfectly. Erdoğan visited Washington in December 2002, while he was still legally blocked from serving in parliament, but when it was clear that the law would be changed and he would become prime minister. According to Faruk Loğoğlu, the Turkish ambassador to the US at the time, Erdoğan was ‘given the red-carpet treatment … received by George W. Bush in the White House, not in the Oval Office but in the Atlantic Room. He could not go into the Oval Office because he was not a prime minister but it was important for American interests at the time. It was not a secret that he was going to become a member of parliament. It was not something that the US discovered on its own. It was an open secret.
‘Turkey was the lead for the US in the fight against Islamic radicalism. It was like fighting two birds with one stone: Turkey could fight radical Islam, and be part of the Sunni axis containing Iran.’
Turkey watchers within the US State Department knew that Erdoğan would be unlikely to live up to these high expectations. When he became prime minister on 15 March 2003, parliament having voted to overturn the law that blocked him from office (a move supported by the CHP), he inherited a problem. Two weeks earlier, the Turkish parliament had voted against joining the US-led war on Iraq. It was a surprise to everyone – AKP ministers had appeared open to joining the coalition. But the deputies’ votes reflected the overwhelming opposition to the war among the Turkish population. They had chosen to satisfy their people rather than kowtow to their powerful US ally. Over the coming years, Erdoğan would repeatedly make the same calculation knowing that, without the support of his people, he was nothing. And the US generals would never forget the Turkish betrayal.
‘We oversold this idea of the democratic Muslim thing because it seemed to combine everything, from the Muslim Brotherhood to membership of the EU,’ said one US diplomat. ‘Diplomacy is a competitive business. You are the coach at a beauty contest and you want all the attention. There is first place, a very distant second, then almost an irrelevant third place and then everybody else. Therefore, you try to get presidential visits. The first visit of the Obama administration was to Turkey. In a rational world, Turkey is an easy sell. It is still today. But it brings so much baggage in what it does. And even more baggage in our warped perceptions of what a “loyal” NATO ally should be.’
While Erdoğan built his reputation as a democratiser overseas, back at home the Gülen network was quietly using the leeway afforded it by its alliance with the AKP to stretch out further into the police, judiciary, bureaucracy and army. It was fast turning into an anti-democratic, secretive and powerful force within the Turkish state and society. As journalists, academics and opposition politicians began digging into the murky network and asking questions about what their true intentions were, the Gülenists used their connections and positions to punish and silence them. One foreign journalist based in Turkey in the early AKP era told me how he discovered that his home phone and internet had been tapped by the group when the non-Gülenist police, who by this time were launching investigations into their own colleagues, called him in and presented him with reams of transcripts. Separately, an official from the prime ministry told me a nearly identical story.
Most notoriously, it was Gülenist prosecutors and judges who, with Erdoğan’s blessing, brought a series of court cases that collectively decimated the power of the military. Between 2008 and 2013, hundreds of officers, journalists and politicians were found guilty of coup plotting and handed hefty prison sentences. The trials proved a turning point. On the one hand, the Gülenists had helped Erdoğan neutralise his biggest foes: the army and the Kemalists. On the other, they had shown him how much power they could wield – and so Erdoğan’s fear of the military was gradually replaced with a fear of Fethullah Gülen.
‘Erdoğan felt more liberated because of his increasing n
eutering of other institutions but also more threatened by the Gülenists,’ said a diplomat posted in Turkey as the relationship between the two men began to crumble. ‘As a reaction, there was a series of events from 2009 until the attempted coup in 2016. Erdoğan started striking the opposition, particularly aiming at the Gülenists.’
The scandal
The one-time allies began circling each other in the ring. In 2013 Erdoğan, still the prime minister, announced that he would be running in the coming year’s presidential elections. Meanwhile Gülen was rumoured to be planning his return to Turkey from the US, where he had lived in self-imposed exile since 1999.
Erdoğan had also overseen a détente with the PKK through a peace plan engineered in the mid-2000s, and it riled Gülen. The PKK, with its core ideology of godless leftism, made a natural enemy for the devout Gülenists. In south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, the movement moved onto the PKK’s turf by opening their study centres and schools. As far as Gülen and his people were concerned, it was piety – not political dialogue – that would defeat the PKK. In a piece for the movement’s website, university researcher Adem Palabıyık wrote:
Attendance at Friday prayers, the spread of the headscarf, Quran courses and the emergence of a young generation that is familiar with Islam is the last thing that [the PKK] would like to see because members of such a generation would not go to the mountains; instead, they would attend Friday prayers and they would fast in Ramadan. Moreover, they would not kill others, they would not be hostile to their state and they would have an Islamic code of ethics.
Erdogan Rising Page 10
