Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  But Istanbul was on the brink of change. Already as Hotham penned his flowery piece, migrants were pouring into the city from Anatolian villages. The ancient, narrow roads were choking up with motor cars. New luxury hotels of glass and steel were rising in the wealthy centre, yet at the same time squalid ghettos were spreading rapidly from the outskirts. Between 1950 and 2012, Istanbul’s population grew more than ten-fold, and its area more than twenty-fold. The huge bulk of the new city was made up of unplanned, sprawling settlements built by newcomers who, culturally and aesthetically, picked up their villages and tacked them on to the edge of the freewheeling metropolis: ‘Turkish governments seem to regard any form of social housing as the thin end of the wedge of communism, so, in the true tradition of private enterprise, the poor build their houses for themselves.’ wrote Hotham of the city’s new appendages.

  Çekmeköy began as one of the neighbourhoods known as gecekondu. Illegal constructions were hastily thrown up and left deliberately unfinished in anticipation of the growing family to be housed in future extensions. Photos from as recently as the 1990s show Çekmeköy as a place of jaunty self-built housing against a backdrop of green hills. The roads were dirt tracks. Sheep and cows wandered between the houses, constructed of unrendered brick and concrete. Without mains water, Çekmeköy’s residents had to wait for a tanker to drive round each week to fill their plastic cisterns.

  Now, only two decades on, almost nothing is recognisable. Even residents who have lived here throughout its remarkable transformation find it incredible to look back on photos from the recent past. ‘When I came in eighty-seven all the roads were mud and there were no cars!’ says Recep Kılıç, a fifty-year-old with a bristling moustache and hairdo like a 1980s football commentator.

  We meet on a Saturday afternoon on a pedestrianised street outside a gleaming white mosque, where he has gathered with his uncle and cousins for an hours-long tea-drinking session. Today, Çekmeköy looks like any other neighbourhood in Istanbul’s suburbia, with its repeating roll call of patisseries, cheap shoe shops and kebab houses. The shoppers bustling down the pavement are as Turkish a mix as you will find: women in black shawls with only their eyes and noses peeping out rush past harried-looking young mothers with bare heads and fashionable, cheaply made clothes. Engine revving and horn tooting blends into a constant background hum.

  Çekmeköy has come a long way since the Kılıç family packed onto a rickety bus in the remote eastern province of Erzurum to begin the 800-mile journey westwards to their new life in the metropolis. By the late 1980s, the PKK had locked the Turkish security forces into a full-blown war in eastern Turkey. Erzurum lies north of the main Kurdish region, but the conflict played around its fringes. The Kılıç elders, themselves of Kurdish descent, saw their village’s young men lured by the romanticism of the insurgency. And so, to remove their own children from the temptations of the militants, as well as to escape the region’s dour poverty, they sent them to Istanbul.

  ‘Eighteen siblings and cousins came with their families,’ says Recep. ‘We chose here for the cheap land. It was almost free! And we were so pleased with what we found. In Erzurum it is winter for eight months of the year. We had to dig tunnels through the snow to get from one house to another. Here, we found the forest!’

  Çekmeköy at that time was a huddle of villages amid a sweep of pine forest heading north towards the Black Sea coast. In Ottoman times it had been prized hunting territory. Later, during the birth of the Turkish republic and the huge population swaps between Anatolia and Europe, Turks expelled from the Balkans settled here and began hacking down the trees to fuel the new factories that were springing up around Istanbul. The Kılıçs bought seventy houses and land from the Yugoslavs, as the Balkan Turks were then known, and opened some of the area’s first businesses. Their photography studio is still trading opposite the mosque where we are sitting, catering mainly to the lower-middle-class wedding market. Pictures of soft-focus young brides in huge meringue dresses and thick make-up fill its windows.

  Two things happened in 1994. First, Çekmeköy was recognised as part of Istanbul. Its population had erupted from just three hundred people in 1970 to around twenty thousand by the mid-1990s, and the villages had fused together. It was still not connected to the city’s water system and the locals had to walk three kilometres home from the last bus stop, which served the nearby military base, each time they travelled to the nearest big district to go shopping. But as an official part of Istanbul it became amalgamated into the nearby municipality of Ümraniye, meaning that its residents could have a voice in the central Istanbul council. The village kiosk set up when the migrants started arriving in the 1980s became the Çekmeköy council house.

  Second, an energetic young man with a growing reputation became mayor of Istanbul. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan won the city on a ticket that included a promise to build a mosque in Taksim Square. Across the country, his was one of twenty-two local victories for the Refah Party. After the 1980 coup the ruling junta of General Kenan Evren had permitted Islamist parties like Refah to combat the power of the leftists – as long as they stayed within strict parameters. An Islamist party would open, only to be shut down by the courts when it strayed too far from Turkey’s secular path. Within months, another new party would spring up, usually populated by the same figures as the one that had been closed; different only in name. Now, though, the Islamist shapeshifter had moved into the halls of power. Erdoğan, Refah’s candidate in Istanbul, won just 26 per cent of the vote in the 1994 municipal elections, but with the opposition parties riven by internal squabbles and corruption scandals, it was enough to hand him the mayor’s office. His supporters touted it as historic.

  ‘Kemalism is at an end,’ Fehmi Koru, a columnist for Turkish Islamist newspaper Zaman told the New York Times. ‘Before, people were afraid to say they were against Kemalism. Now the fear has gone.’

  But in districts like Çekmeköy, the reasons why people voted for Refah were more basic. ‘There were huge rubbish and water problems here,’ says Recep Kılıç. ‘They wouldn’t have been sorted if it wasn’t for Refah. When the party started winning local councils, Erbakan would call his mayors every week and ask them: “What have you been doing?”’

  A thousand Anatolian migrants poured into Istanbul each day after Erdoğan became mayor – and as their conditions improved, so their loyalty to Refah deepened. The first pavement in Çekmeköy was laid in 1997, next to a park named after an army major killed by Kurdish militants. Two years later the district was connected to the city’s water supplies and bus services; the streets were paved, the houses properly built. If residents had grievances, they could take them straight to the top – Erdoğan held open surgeries every Friday.

  Recep Kılıç’s cousin, 43-year-old Erdem Kılıç, emigrated to the United States in 1990. By the time he returned seven years later, his Midwestern drawl peppered with sharp Turkish consonants, his former village was unrecognisable.

  ‘I couldn’t find my house. I was shocked!’ he says, the only member of the family left behind while the others park their teas to attend prayers at the mosque. His years overseas have, he says, changed his outlook on both Turkey and God. ‘I stood on the road – it was just a mud track when I left – and I tried to see where I lived. I couldn’t! Everything had changed.’

  Then something else happened, which would turn Çekmeköy from a suburb into a bona fide city district. On 17 August 1999, a huge earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale hit İzmit, a city sixty miles south-east of Istanbul. The metropolis itself was rocked, with hundreds of buildings collapsing. Istanbul’s solidly built ancient mosques and palaces survived; it was the newly built apartment blocks on the fringes of the city, most of them thrown up without quake safeguards, that were the worst affected. But although the earth shook in Çekmeköy, the buildings remained standing. The ground here was discovered to be solid rock – a sound foundation. The developers and new residents rushed in at an even greater speed and by 20
09, with the population now above 150,000, it was granted full status as a city district in its own right.

  Today Çekmeköy’s population stands at 240,000 – a city the size of Derby – from almost nothing in less than fifty years. It has its exclusive neighbourhoods, where designer-clad young couples live in gated developments with swimming pools and only see the rest of the area through the smoked windows of their 4x4s. Most of the district, though, is somewhere in the middle: not rich, not poor, just riding the economic boom that Erdoğan brought to the whole of Turkey when he traded up from mayor of Istanbul to become prime minister of the country in 2003. His tenure at the top has brought a wave of both construction and credit – the main recipients being people like those who live in Çekmeköy. Rather than living with relatives until they have scraped together the money to buy a house outright, they can take out mortgages (the lowering of interest rates in 2001, followed by reform of the housing laws in 2006, opened up mortgages to the masses). Thirty years ago they came to the city with nothing; now they have cars, household appliances, and ambitions.

  ‘One of my grandchildren is an engineer, another a teacher, another an economist!’ says Sadrettin Kılıç, Recep’s 73-year-old uncle. It would all have been unthinkable back in Erzurum.

  Recep Kılıç and his cousins don’t credit Erdoğan for all that has happened here. Erbakan was the brains, they say, and the 1999 earthquake the real trigger for Çekmeköy’s dizzying rise. But somewhere along the way, it is Erdoğan who became the figurehead for this generation. His government is still ploughing money into huge development projects – the country’s first driverless train line is currently being built and its terminal will be in Çekmeköy. But their love for the man who is now president is based on something more ethereal than sewage systems and train tracks.

  ‘Now, if you go into any girls’ class in an İmam Hatip school, you won’t find a single male teacher,’ Recep beams. In his eyes, that is progress.

  Erdoğan’s elites

  Back in a swerving minibus, it’s only a ten-minute drive to the other side of Erdoğan’s Istanbul. The sun has come out in Kısıklı, a hilltop neighbourhood of wooden villas clustered around a picturesque stone mosque. It’s a quaint area despite being in the middle of a city district. The roads are narrow and winding and there are boutiques and luxury coffee shops. Erdoğan has a villa here, his private residence when he is in Istanbul. It’s a very different neighbourhood to Kasımpaşa, and a world away from Çekmeköy. His daughter, Sümeyye, runs a women’s organisation headquartered out of another of the area’s mansions.

  Kısıklı embodies the quieter side of the Erdoğan revolution. You would be unlikely to find this neighbourhood’s genteel residents out on the streets in Erdoğan T-shirts, or shouting and waving their fists at his rallies. Yet the support of this moneyed, pious elite is every bit as crucial to his success as that of the disenfranchised masses. Under Erdoğan’s rule, a whole new class of rich, conservative Turks has assumed the trappings of wealth the secularists once guarded so jealously: the cars, the designer fashion, the glittering weddings and the luxury homes. But they do all of it with a religious twist that makes the old elites gasp. Women buy silk headscarves from designer labels and families go on holidays in exclusive halal resorts, where not a drop of alcohol can be found on site and the women’s bathing areas are completely off-limits to men. At Islamic society events, jewel-encrusted crowds make their toasts with fruit juice and then pray.

  I peer into an estate agent’s window on Kısıklı’s high street, trying to gauge the prices of villas like Erdoğan’s. They don’t come cheap – a wooden mansion down the road is on sale for three million lira.

  ‘This area has changed a lot, but construction here is limited because it’s classed as a green region by the municipality,’ says the estate agent, Necat Karakaş, when I go in to gently dig about the local market and what Erdoğan might have paid for his place. ‘Fifty years ago people wouldn’t go to the water for their entertainment, they would come here to picnic. There are few areas left like this in Istanbul. This is one of the most exclusive neighbourhoods.’

  Karakaş is seventy-eight and has spent forty-one of those years running this estate agency. Stepping into it is like entering a time machine. He is settled back into a green leather chair, and the walls around him are panelled in dark wood. There is a Turkish flag on the wall, and a calendar issued by the Diyanet, the state agency in charge of religion. Through his gleaming plate-glass frontage he has a perfect view of the mosque, where Erdoğan often goes to perform Friday prayers.

  ‘They buy,’ Karakaş continues. ‘There is no economic problem here in Turkey. Our economy is great. The restaurants are full, even doormen have cars, even cleaning ladies have cars!’

  Maybe Karakaş avoids news from anywhere outside of Kısıklı, this old-world, salubrious bubble. On the government-controlled news channels, and in growth figures alone, the Turkish economy appears to be booming. Construction is everywhere, especially in Istanbul. A road tunnel under the Bosphorus and a third bridge over it have been opened in the past year. Metro extensions are snaking out of the old centre and spreading out into districts that didn’t exist twenty years ago. But look close, and you see that everything, from huge state-funded development projects to starter-home apartment blocks for the ascendant lower middle class, is built and bought on borrowed cash. The economy is faltering by the spring of 2017, as investors start to realise that Turkey’s construction-credit economy is a hollow bauble. The lira is falling in value and unemployment is rising, especially among the youth. The educated are trying to leave the country, and those without an education are left with few well-paid options outside the police force and army, which are the only employers recruiting in large numbers. Everything is getting more expensive in the shops, and the tourism industry has been decimated by terror attacks and the political unrest since the coup attempt nine months ago. The lady who comes to clean my flat once a fortnight travels for an hour in a public minibus.

  The people down the road in Çekmeköy may be delighted with the improvements they have seen in their fortunes over the past thirty years, but neighbourhoods like Kısıklı have shot further out of their reach in the same time period as the gap between rich and poor has widened. Meanwhile, the mega-projects keep coming. The huge new airport to the north of Istanbul has enraged the city’s few beleaguered environmentalists, who are aghast at how much of the apparently protected forest around the metropolis is being hacked down for these schemes. Most controversial of all is the one Erdoğan calls his ‘crazy project’ – a man-made canal linking the Sea of Marmara to the Black Sea that will run parallel to the Bosphorus and turn the European side of Istanbul into an island. Experts are warning that it will cause an ecological catastrophe, both on land and at sea.

  Three weeks from referendum day, these are all big issues. I’m trying to inch Karakaş from the housing market to the economy and then towards politics. He begins talking down interesting lines, about how he has known Erdoğan since the 1970s. He is obviously both an admirer and a pious man. He credits his youthful looks – which are remarkable – on the fact that he has never drunk alcohol nor smoked, and is blessed by Allah for it. And then, suddenly, he clams up. He doesn’t want to talk about politics any more, and he doesn’t want me to take notes. Just in time for him, the mosque sounds the call to prayer.

  ‘And now,’ he says, ‘I must go.’

  My friend and I are confused by Karakaş’s sudden change of mood. He had been hospitable, if not exactly friendly, and none of the Erdoğan supporters I have spoken to during the referendum campaign has been backwards about saying so – it’s the people who oppose him who have reason to be wary about speaking to journalists. We try to work it out over coffee in the tea shop next door as the worshippers file into the mosque. Maybe Karakaş is full of the same mistrust of Western reporters that so many of Erdoğan’s fan club harbour – only better at hiding it beneath his urbane finish. Or maybe he sudden
ly realised that he was about to give away too much. Whatever, we decide, on to the next. We head to Kısıklı’s florist.

  But our day is about to take a different turn. We are just ten seconds out of the coffee shop when six plain-clothes police officers come up to us from behind. One flashes his identity card, and we stop. I reach for my papers – passport, press card and Turkish residency – thinking this can all be sorted in minutes. But the officer doing the talking, a small guy with sharp eyes and a scar running down the length of his nose, has different ideas. He herds us towards a tea shop, sits me down at one table with an officer watching me, and my friend at another metres away. Then comes the moment when everything changes. My friend, who is six foot six tall and is asked every day whether he plays basketball, stands up to get his cigarettes out of his pocket, towering over the diminutive cop.

  ‘Otur!’ – Sit! – the policeman shouts suddenly. I realise immediately that he feels his masculinity has been threatened, at some kind of Darwinistic level, and that we are now here for the long haul.

  An hour into our questioning, a couple of policemen lead my friend away to a nearby car. They have already called my papers in and I am sure that by now they know I am an accredited journalist. They have done a preliminary search of both of us, and asked some questions about what we are doing. I tell them everything we have done this morning. Çekmeköy and Perişah’s cosy café feels like a long time ago.

  ‘And what have people been telling you?’ asks a policeman with his arm in plaster and a lazy eye.