Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Those who remain are working overtime. And a narrative is emerging from the jumble of testimonies given by the accused.

  ‘Four of my clients are military school students,’ Nazlı says. ‘They’re carefully chosen students who passed difficult physical and mental tests for higher level education. On the night of the coup they were in a camp in Yalova, a city close to Istanbul, and were taken to the bridge by their commanders at about eleven p.m.

  ‘The prosecutor asked them: “Didn’t you ask where were you going?” They said that they were told it was a drill, a military exercise. They did not know a thing about the coup. They had no electronic devices so no idea what was happening. They were wearing their full equipment and their guns – but that’s normal on an exercise. They saw the new bridge’ – the third over the Bosphorus, completed but not yet opened on the night of the coup – ‘and they were surprised. Then they saw Ataşehir’ – a high-rise district close to the centre of the Asian side of Istanbul – ‘and one of them asked where they were going. The commander told them to calm down.

  ‘They were taken to the bridge by a bus. Suddenly, at the bridge, the driver was shot and the bus crashed to a stop. After that they found themselves in the middle of the crossfire. One of them died in the bus – he was shot in the eye and died. My client told me: “It’s the first time I saw a dead body. His blood went under my tongue.”

  ‘There were people throwing stones at them and shaking the bus. They realised there was something very wrong. After a little while, the crowd made a human corridor for them to take them to the side of the road. They rushed to emergency lane. They say they weren’t assaulted or beaten, the crowd saved their lives. They were freed after their pleas. But prosecutors objected and now they’re arrested again.

  ‘Their families are having really hard times. Some of them can’t hear anything about their sons for days. There are some families who haven’t heard their voices for a week. Some of them call and ask me: “Could he be dead?”’

  In the chaotic days and weeks immediately after the coup, some of Nazlı’s clients are released, only to be promptly arrested again. Others disappear into the prisons and no one is able to reach them.

  On the outside, the blood lust leaks into the graveyards. The bodies of the 105 putschist soldiers killed during the revolt are to be buried in a ‘traitors’ cemetery’, a patch of ground on the edge of Istanbul that was being reserved for a new stray dog shelter. Major Mehmet Karabekir is the first to be interred. No prayers are said over his body as he is buried, and no headstone sunk into the freshly turned earth.

  ‘The families of the high-level coup plotters are even thinking of changing their names,’ says another lawyer, sitting outside the gates of Silivri. ‘They ask how their relatives are looking – I just lie and say they’re OK. When the government makes the public feel this way, some of them do not even want to collect the bodies of their relatives. People are deleting their WhatsApp conversations, their Facebook posts. It’s fear. It started straight after that sala call to prayer on the coup night– I saw that people’s mentalities are changing.’

  The crackdown

  How do you spot a Gülenist? The government says there are ways. Even if they failed for years to notice them in the top ranks of their military and judiciary, they are sure about how to recognise them now. In the weeks following the coup attempt, conspiracy theories feed into news reports, which are then repeated by the politicians and become facts.

  First, they claim that the imam in Pennsylvania has been issuing dollar bills to his followers, all of them bearing serial numbers that start with the letter F. The evidence? Eight days after the coup, a correspondent for the state mouthpiece Anadolu news agency reports that the police have found such bank notes on many of the Gülenist suspects they have arrested. Then the politicians take up the thread. Bekir Bozdağ, the justice minister, tells A Haber news: ‘There is no doubt that this one-dollar bill has some important function within the Gülenist terror organisation. Prosecutors are asking as they investigate what these are. What does this mean? Why are they being carried? Does it signify a hierarchy to them? Is it some sort of ID that identifies them to one another?’

  Other pro-government newspapers and sources also speculate. Notes with different serial letters have also allegedly been found – so each letter must refer to a rank. Gülen himself blessed the notes before distributing them to his followers, one columnist claims. Quickly, the dollar bill becomes grounds enough on its own for arrest, rather than a bit of coincidental evidence. One of the first to be picked up is NASA scientist Serkan Gölge, who is questioned by police acting on a tip-off a week after the coup attempt. The officers find a single dollar bill in a box in his brother’s bedroom. In February 2018, after nineteen months in prison awaiting trial, he is found guilty on terrorism charges and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.

  But how many people have single dollar bills in their houses? I do – I keep a stack of them for when I’m travelling. It’s small change in the world’s most recognised currency. The bills are lying on top of my writing desk when my landlord comes to pick up my rent money two weeks after the coup. I had always thought of him as one of my allies in Istanbul, a flamboyantly camp guy who greets me with a kiss on each cheek every time we meet. But as he spots the notes he turns round and looks me in the eye.

  ‘Aaaaah, Gülenist!’ he says, and then tempers it with a cheerful chuckle.

  I don’t think he’s serious, but I am spooked. That evening, in the first of many acts that, to an outside observer, might suggest I have lost my mind, I rip the notes into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet.

  Then there are the cheap mass-produced T-shirts from a Turkish chain store with the word HERO printed across the front. One of the coup suspects wears one during his first court hearing and Sabah newspaper decides it is a signal from Gülen: ‘Hero’ standing for Hoca Efendi Razı Olsun (may the teacher – Gülen – bless you). Erdoğan declares that the defendants must all wear brown overalls in the courtroom from now on. Out on the streets, the police start detaining ordinary Turks who are wearing the shirts. Within a few days, more than thirty people have been hauled in.

  But despite such ham-fisted, so-called ‘signals’ the Gülenists are secretive, the government officials tell us. They are clever. They are cunning. They hide themselves, drink alcohol and, if they are women, go uncovered so they can pass as secularists. They have made such good work of concealing their true identities that anyone could belong to the movement.

  Turks’ hatred for the Gülenists is real: the Gülenists tried to take over the country for their own gain, then they turned the state’s weapons against its citizens. They must be exposed and, if they are so adept at hiding themselves, everyone must be a suspect. Friends turn against each other, husbands inform on wives. There are several reports in the newspapers of divorce cases in which Gülenist sympathies are cited. A pregnant woman is attacked in Istanbul by a group who shout that she is wearing revealing clothes, so she must be a Gülenist. ‘They wanted to lynch me,’ she says.

  For those under the state’s microscope, the ones fired from their jobs or left behind when their partner is arrested, the accusations infect like leprosy. In the fashionable districts of Istanbul you might still walk the streets and not realise that a huge purge is leaching the heart out of this country. But I do. Almost every evening and weekend in the year after the coup, once I have filed my stories for the next day’s paper, I travel out on the metrobus lines to the nondescript, unglamorous parts of the city.

  There, I meet the outcasts. I don’t know if they are Gülenists or not, but I do know that they are being judged and punished without trial. Almost every day in that first year of the purge, Turks working in the public sector turn to the country’s legal circular, the Official Gazette, to see if their names have been added to the latest lists of dismissals.

  ‘There were no warnings, no investigations,’ a low-ranking civil servant called Ahmet who
has spent his career working in a provincial city hall tells me. ‘I swear I was the best person working in my office. My manager asked several times to have me back. I found my name in the Official Gazette and I was told to take my personal belongings from the office. No letter, no signature, nothing. They kicked me to the kerb. The reason they said is that I am working with terrorist groups – but they didn’t even say which one, PKK or Gülenists. I had a lot of friends who are opponents of the AKP and I am an opponent too, of course.’

  Ahmet’s family and friends have turned their backs on him – only the ones who have also been purged still pick up the phone. To fill his empty days he runs through the reasons he might have been targeted, again and again and again. It cannot only be his opposition to the government, he is sure. The most likely explanation is that he once had an account with Bank Asya – a now-closed Gülenist business.

  ‘I started a postgraduate degree in January 2014 at a state university, and they wanted me to have a Bank Asya account. I wish I had not started that course. I have lost my job, my passport, my friends, my relatives. I lost my future. I am hopeless. All I want is my passport so I can leave this country.’

  Another public servant, Mehmet, walked into his office two weeks after the coup attempt to find the police waiting for him. His manager handed him an envelope containing a letter with a single sentence: ‘You have been suspended due to the ongoing investigation.’

  ‘I had to sign it, and I thought of not doing it,’ Mehmet says. ‘I had long known that irrational steps were being taken. I thought that this problem could not be solved by these people, so I signed it. Then I found out that there was a detention order in my name. We went down to my office along with the police. They searched the bookcase and the desk, and took the computer to investigate further. After that, we went to my house. They took my communication devices, and I was taken to a sports hall together with almost a hundred people.’

  Twenty-six days later he was taken into the chaotic courthouse. He still had not been told what he was accused of. The prosecutor began reading out some of his social media posts. Still he did not say what the charges were.

  ‘I asked in particular if there had been any official complaints about me, and what I was being accused of. The prosecutor replied briefly: “We’re looking into it.” I couldn’t ask out loud why I had been detained for twenty-five days. I knew the answer: The conditions of the state of emergency, and of course, the court’s workload.’

  Mehmet was released from court, but ordered to sign in at an Istanbul police station twice a week. Days later, a decree published in the Official Gazette declared that he was formally dismissed from his job. Now he has discovered that he is accused of being a member of a terrorist organisation, and awaits trial. With 77,524 people having been formally charged in connection with the coup attempt as of April 2018 and almost twice that number detained, he will likely be waiting for years, if not decades. His appeal to the constitutional court has gone unanswered. The administrative court rejected it because of the state of emergency. Neither has the court of appeals replied. So, like 25,000 others caught up in the purge, he decided to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights, confident that he would at least get justice outside Turkey. The ECHR has said it can only take on cases once they have been exhausted in the domestic courts. And so Mehmet, like all the others, is stuck in a Kafka-esque loop between a justice system in meltdown, a toothless international court, and a president bent on revenge.

  Some of the purged find unexpected ways of coping. Fatma, a woman with flawless English whom I meet with her bouncy ten-year-old daughter, says she started wearing the headscarf only after she and her husband were dismissed. The political connotations were not lost on her.

  ‘Recently I started wearing the hijab – it was a hard decision. After my dismissal I started to study the Qur’an again. I’m from a secular family – it’s very hard to explain this decision. They don’t have religious roots, but they are culturally conservative, from Anatolia. They like Atatürk, my mum is uncovered, but she supports Erdoğan. But we all have prejudices in this country. People are more separatist now. Some support the hijab, others think it is politically abused. When I was first trying it, I tried different styles. I thought I looked too much like an AKP supporter. I wanted to shout that I am not an AKP supporter, I just believe in God. We have an Islamic government, but it is more difficult to practise your beliefs when you don’t belong. My uncles don’t know yet, but I think their reactions will be related to the government: “You became an Erdoğanist.”’

  She found her name on the suspension list at her workplace the Tuesday after the coup attempt – the same day I sat in Yıldız Palace listening to İbrahim Kalın telling us not to question the crackdown. Six weeks later she was fully dismissed.

  ‘When I was dismissed only a few people called me. They were thinking two things: either that I must have some relationship with the Gülenists, or they didn’t care about that but didn’t want to lose their jobs. That doesn’t surprise me, because people are very afraid of something. Former friends don’t call. The people who are still in contact are in the same situation. This is very normal, because people will say, “Look! They have contacts!” They have made us like this. Us versus them – it is something they buy very easily.’

  In early 2017 the European Union prepared an intelligence report about the coup and the subsequent purge. The report states that Gülenists were at the core of the coup attempt, but also that the Turkish government appears to have prepared a list of people it wanted to sack before the coup took place, and which also included civil activists who had been involved with Gezi Park. The events of 15 July have handed Erdoğan the chance to enact it. The report ends:

  AKP will try to derive benefit from the attempted coup and it may even strengthen as a result of that. In domestic politics AKP will settle scores with its one and only real rival and parallel with this in its international ties it tries to demonstrate that it is still strong in order to create a full presidential system.

  Back in Turkey, millions might be thinking the same, but to suggest such a thing would be tantamount to treason. ‘Thousands of people in prison, thousands fired, and thousands are not talking about these things,’ one woman who lost her own job and whose husband had been arrested shortly after the coup tells me in July 2017. ‘I can’t believe my people, my Turkish people actually. I can understand Erdoğan because he is a dictator. But I can’t understand why Turkish people are not talking. I read about the histories of Iran, Iraq, Syria. I never thought that Turkey could one day be like them.’

  10

  ATATÜRK’S CHILDREN

  There are two Mustafa Kemals. One the flesh-and-blood Mustafa Kemal who now stands before you and who will pass away. The other is you, all of you here who will go to the far corners of our land to spread the ideals which must be defended with your lives if necessary.

  Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

  March 2017

  Hatay province

  I had to come today, of all days.

  ‘You don’t have an Atatürk picture?’ I ask Birsen Aldırma, as she piles the lunch table with plates of hummus, meatballs, crudités and yoghurt.

  Her family members, gathered here with us, throw wide-eyed glances at each other and then reply on Birsen’s behalf.

  ‘We have a big one! But it’s being fixed,’ says Feyzullah, the patriarch. ‘Last week there was a storm, and it fell off the wall and smashed. We’ve taken it to the glass shop. It’ll be back tomorrow.’

  But these might be the only people in Turkey who don’t need to see a portrait of Atatürk to feel close to him. Because the Aldırmas and the Kuzulus, three generations of them squashed into Feyzullah’s front room, have Atatürk’s blood running through their veins.

  Seventy-five-year-old Birsen is still bright-eyed and dark-haired. It seems impossible that she’s the mother of 53-year-old Feyzullah, grey and tired, slumped in his armchair in the corner for most of the
morning. He looks too old to be the father of 24-year-old Deniz and nineteen-year-old Derya, with their hennaed hair, trainers and piercings.

  The girls’ four cousins are a little older, respectable-looking family men and women in their early thirties. şarap, Deniz and Derya’s aunt (and Feyzullah’s sister), is a portly but well-kept matron with fashionably cut short hair and a motherly way of squeezing my arm and smiling whenever she speaks to me. All of these nine people are the grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren of Abdurrahman Efendi, Atatürk’s first cousin. They are the last fading flesh-and-blood echoes of a man who, a mere eight decades after his death, has almost become immortalised.

  Only Birsen, who married into the family, can recall Abdurrahman. ‘He was this gorgeous guy – charismatic!’ she says.

  None are old enough to remember Atatürk himself. Their proud bonds to the man they never met are built around a few scattered trinkets and anecdotes.

  ‘When I was in primary school, I was always the one asked to read the poems about Atatürk,’ says şarap, a beaming smile splitting her face. ‘I get very emotional when I think about that even now. The last time I visited his mausoleum, I cried!’

  Feyzullah picks up as şarap grows too emotional and falters. ‘Thinking of Atatürk … it’s like this kind of person comes along once in a hundred years,’ he says. ‘It’s a great success what he achieved. Here we were in the heart of war. The world was boiling. And he saved our country, gave us freedom.’

  They talk on, this warm, modest family. They were not what I expected when I boarded the flight from Istanbul back to Hatay, the southern province skirting the western end of the Syrian border and the region where I had lived for eight months when I first moved to Turkey. Little had I known then that the relatives of the man whose face I was seeing everywhere were so close by. The Aldırmas and the Kuzulus live in İskenderun, a run-down port city facing the island of Cyprus across the water, and in Dörtyol, a town a few miles inland. Their apartments are small, tidy and cheerfully furnished in the typical style of the Turkish lower middle class: lace doilies over small side tables, and delicate, patterned coffee cups brought out only for guests. The walls are hung with framed vistas of Istanbul and Islamic incantations embroidered in Arabic script.