In a blog he has started since leaving the Bosphorus Centre, Fırat Erez has publicly described the Pelikan Dosyası and the expulsion of Davutoğlu as a ‘right-wing coup’: the moment when ultra-loyalist forces in Erdoğan’s court – the clique gathered around son-in-law Albayrak – took over the party, the government and ultimately the country. The trigger for Davutoğlu’s banishment, Erez says, was the arrest of Reza Zarrab, the kingpin of the alleged Iranian sanctions-busting plot, in the US in March 2016. According to Erez, that was when the organisation shifted its attention away from semi-genuine fact-checking and a bit of light spin to ‘building a wall against the West’ – stoking Turkish public scorn towards the US and Europe, so that any allegations against Erdoğan emerging from Zarrab’s trial in the near future could be dismissed as part of a plot against Turkey.
‘The liquidation of Davutoğlu was very important because it was him who got the promises from the West on the refugee deal,’ Erez said. ‘He had pulled the date for visa-free travel in the Schengen zone earlier. Even the Turkish opposition accepted Davutoğlu’s successes and prestige in the West.’
On 6 May 2016, five days after the Pelikan Dosyası was published and a day after Davutoğlu stepped down, Erdoğan made the first of many speeches that would turn Turkey’s relations with the EU toxic, blowing up all the bridges that his banished prime minister had built. ‘We’ll go our way, you go yours,’ the president told EU leaders. He delivered the message not in the cordial and closed-doors meetings that Davutoğlu had held with European heads of state, but in his preferred arena – in front of the television cameras and baying throngs of his fanatics in Istanbul.
June 2016
Britain’s referendum and Boris Johnson’s Turkophobia
At the other end of Europe, another difficult partner was also entering torrid waters with the bloc. Britain had always been one of Turkey’s best allies in the European Union, consistently supporting its ambitions to join. Yet, when it came to the referendum on leaving the EU, Britain’s Eurosceptics latched on to the possibility of Turkish membership as one reason why the UK should leave the bloc as soon as possible. Then they took that unlikely prospect and twisted it into imminent danger.
12 MILLION TURKS SAY THEY’LL COME TO THE UK! screeched one front-page headline in the Sunday Express in May 2016. Its evidence, revealed in paragraph two, was predictably thin. Sixteen per cent of 2,500 Turks questioned said they would consider relocating should their country join the bloc – a fast-fading possibility now that Davutoğlu had been booted and Erdoğan’s hate-bombing campaign on Brussels had begun. Two months earlier UKIP had released a party political broadcast based entirely on scaremongering about what might happen should Turkey join the EU in 2020, bringing its huge and growing Muslim population with it (the blonde and furrow-browed presenter was superimposed over background footage of Istanbul, and explained that the growing crackdown on the press in Turkey meant she was far more comfortable recording her assertions about the country without actually visiting it).
Such hyperbole and misrepresentation might be expected of the Sunday Express, a newspaper chiefly concerned with jingoism and Princess Diana, and of UKIP, a party founded on a single nativist objective. But what about Boris Johnson, who in June 2016 co-wrote with his fellow Leave campaigner Michael Gove a letter to then prime minister David Cameron, demanding assurances that the UK would use its veto powers in the EU to halt Turkey’s accession talks and block the visa-free travel arrangement – everything that had been hard-won by Davutoğlu only three months earlier? ‘If the Government cannot give this guarantee, the public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave and take back control on 23 June,’ the letter concluded.
Vote Leave, the lobbying group fronted by Gove and Johnson, also produced a billboard poster claiming that a vote to stay in the EU was akin to opening the door to 76 million Turks. It was Vote Leave who commissioned the survey that led to the dodgy headline in the Sunday Express. And evidence submitted by Facebook to the House of Commons committee on culture, media and sport’s inquiry into fake news in July 2018 showed that Vote Leave had hired data company Aggregate IQ (a Canadian firm linked to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy famed for mining voters’ data during the 2016 US presidential elections) to place targeted ads on the pages of British voters with the strapline ALBANIA, MACEDONIA, MONTENEGRO, SERBIA AND TURKEY ARE JOINING THE EU. SERIOUSLY. Another claimed that ‘Turkey’s 76 million people are joining the EU’, next to a graph showing the average wages of Britons (£25,692) and Turks (£7,368). Viewers were invited to vote yes or no on whether this was ‘good news’. Other ads claimed that ‘Turkey’s 76 million people are being granted visa-free travel by the EU’, that Turkey was joining the EU, meaning that ‘Britain’s new border is with Syria and Iraq’, and that furthermore ‘We’re paying Turkey £1 billion to join the EU’. A graphic showed the money flowing east from Britain to Turkey. Under repeated questioning from the committee, Rebecca Stimson, Facebook’s UK head of public policy, eventually revealed that the adverts generated by Aggregate IQ were likely to have reached ‘most’ of the site’s UK users.
Such Turk-hate proved good – perhaps winning – campaign fodder in referendum-era Britain. James Kerr-Lindsay, an academic at the London School of Economics, concluded his study of the campaign saying ‘there is a good case to be made that the unfounded claims made by the Leave campaign about Turkish membership of the EU have ultimately cost Britain its own membership of the Union’.
Boris Johnson got stuck into his new role as Brexit campaigner-in-chief in February 2016, when he officially threw his considerable weight behind the Leave campaign. At first he spoke cautiously on Turkey. ‘I am certainly very dubious … about having a huge free travel zone,’ he said in March 2016 when asked about the visa-free promise that Davutoğlu had just clinched under the migrant deal.
Boris turned combative as soon as he stepped down as mayor of London on 8 May 2016 and launched his rebrand as a Leave campaigner. Ten days later, he won a contest set by the Spectator to write a rude poem about Erdoğan. Johnson’s limerick, published in the magazine and widely circulated, refered to the Turkish president as ‘the wankerer from Ankara’ and suggested he had intimate relations with goats. But inside Berat’s Box and the forgotten news cuttings of a time-not-so-long-ago, there is proof that Johnson is no Turkophobe.
Boris had been making a good impression on Turkey, and vice versa, since he first campaigned to become mayor of London. In 2007, on the BBC’s pop-genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?, he revealed that his great-grandfather had been an Ottoman diplomat kidnapped and hanged by Atatürk’s agents in 1922 for his continuing support for the Sultan. This disclosure propelled Johnson to the top of a small but prestigious group of Britons with Turkish origins (others include artist Tracey Emin and Lords member Baroness Hussein-Ece). Johnson was appointed (and remains) the president of the Anglo-Turkish Society. Almost as soon as he was voted into the mayor’s office in May 2008, he took his family on a sailing holiday to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, where the local newspapers reported that he was pondering buying a villa, and he was gifted a rug, table cloth, coffee pot and cups and saucers by the mayor of the resort town of Göcek. The mayor of Istanbul, AKP man Kadir Topbaş, visited London two months later, when according to records from City Hall he presented Johnson with a ‘paperweight and plate’.
Over his eight years as mayor, Turkey lobbied Johnson harder than any other country bar Qatar, sending AKP deputies, ambassadors and PR firms to his office. Meanwhile, a network of London-based Gülenists with high-level connections back in Ankara went out of their way to schmooze and flatter him. In September 2009, the Business Network, an organisation run by Gülenists to serve their supporters setting up businesses in the UK, put Johnson on the front cover of the inaugural issue of its glossy magazine with the splash THE TURKISH MAYOR OF LONDON. Interviewed inside, Boris said he believed
that Turkey’s entry to the EU would ‘contribute enormously to a better Europe; indeed it will help recognise the considerable contribution they currently make’.
A year later, the Business Network awarded him the ‘Most Supportive British’ prize at its annual Most Successful Turk Awards, held in the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The glittering ceremony was attended by Ünal Çeviköz, Turkey’s ambassador to the UK, and Aliye Kavaf, the Turkish families minister and previously the long-term president of the AKP’s women’s branch. Although Johnson didn’t attend that year, he was the keynote speaker at the 2011 awards, which Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Ali Babacan, and Ahmet Davutoğlu, then foreign minister, both attended.
In February 2013 Egemen Bağış – a close ally of Erdoğan, and at that time Turkey’s Europe minister and chief negotiator with the bloc – travelled to London for a meeting with Johnson, who was fresh from the success of the London 2012 Olympics. The two discussed Erdoğan’s own mayorship of Istanbul in the 1990s, the huge development projects planned for the Turkish city, and its bid to host the 2020 Olympics. They also talked about Johnson’s Ottoman heritage, and his call for the people of London to fast for a day to get a better understanding of their Muslim neighbours’ endeavours during the holy month of Ramadan. Bağış’s emailed account of the meeting to Berat Albayrak is full of praise verging on eulogy for the mayor of London:
[Johnson] wholeheartedly supports Turkey’s membership of the European Union, even against those who try to block it. He does not hide his admiration for Istanbul … He said he was following the growth of Istanbul closely. I asked him for his support on Istanbul’s Olympic bid, and he gave his support without hesitation.
Details of the conversation were immediately leaked to London’s tiny but vibrant Turkish-language press, which, just a day after the meeting, reported that Boris backed Istanbul 2020. Bağış was forced to resign seven months later, in December 2013 – he was one of the ministers implicated in the Iranian gold-dealing scandal. But although he was no longer in the cabinet, he retained his seat in parliament until June 2015 and even after that has continued to serve as one of Erdoğan’s most loyal enforcers within the AKP. According to Fırat Erez, Bağış was a regular visitor to the Bosphorus Centre in the months after it was founded.
In February 2015, as he entered the final year of his second term in the London mayor’s office, Johnson was still full of praise for Turkey, saying that he hoped to visit the country again before he stepped down. Then, a year on, he announced he was backing the Leave campaign – and everything changed.
Although Prime Minister David Cameron repeatedly tried to assure the public that there was no imminent prospect of Turkey joining the EU, Johnson and the other Leave campaigners pumped up the threat of mass Turkish immigration in their campaign rhetoric, their claims growing more absurd and divorced from the facts as the Brexit battle reached its bloody crescendo. Theresa Villiers, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, claimed that six hundred Isis fighters who had left Syria for Turkey would soon enjoy visa-free travel in the EU. Penny Mordaunt, later to become Britain’s first female defence secretary but then a backbencher, said that levels of criminality in Turkey were far higher than in Britain (leaving it to be implied that Turkish criminality would inevitably wash over into the UK if Britain failed to exit the EU). Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, claimed that Ankara had been promised accelerated membership.
As the Brexit campaigning progressed, back in Turkey the knives were gathering behind Davutoğlu and his refugee deal was being dismantled. The numbers of migrants landing on the Greek islands started to creep up again, and Erdoğan openly threatened to open his borders unless Brussels handed Turkey more money. It all fed into the Brexit camp’s rhetoric about the dangers of imminent Turkish membership of the EU, even though events in Ankara and Erdoğan’s increasing Europhobia made it less likely, not more, that Turkey would join the bloc at any foreseeable point. On the same day as Johnson’s poem was published in the Spectator, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu insisted that Turkey would not amend its anti-terror laws to satisfy the EU’s human rights rules, effectively quashing the promised visa-free travel arrangement that Davutoğlu had won.
After the Leave campaign won and David Cameron resigned, the new UK prime minister Theresa May appointed Boris Johnson foreign secretary. His first visit was to Turkey, where he was tasked with nurturing new trade ties of the kind that would be key to Britain’s economic success post-EU. In front of the press pack in Ankara, Johnson praised his Turkish-made washing machine, dismissed his Spectator poem of five months ago as ‘trivia’, and restated the UK’s support for Turkey in the wake of the coup attempt, which had unfolded just three weeks after the Brexit vote.
‘The United Kingdom is totally behind the Turkish people and the Turkish government in resisting the forces that tried to overwhelm your democracy,’ Johnson said. ‘It was great to see the way that the Turkish people responded to that challenge and of course we discussed the importance of a measured and proportionate response now to what has taken place, and I believe it’s overwhelmingly important that we support Turkish democracy.’
A year later, in August 2017, Johnson was back on another sailing holiday in Turkey, his anguish at the thought of hordes of Anatolian peasants flocking to Britain apparently overridden by the lure of the turquoise coast. Meanwhile the Business Network, which had once hosted him as guest of honour at their sumptuous and influential awards ceremonies, has been driven underground in London and is now helping some of the Gülenist businessmen who have fled Erdoğan’s crackdown into exile in the UK. In early 2016, it was through an intermediary on a Business Network email address that I conducted my convoluted interview with Akın İpek, one-time owner of the halal Angels Resort and the Bugün newspaper, after his businesses had been seized and his brother arrested. İpek remains in London, despite attempts by Turkey to have him extradited to face charges at home.
In January 2019 Johnson delivered yet another volte-face on Turkey, claiming in a public speech that he had never raised the issue of the country’s membership bid during his Brexit campaigning. By now, he had quit the Foreign Office and set his sights once more on the Tory leadership and Number 10 – and so he attempted to drop his very recent xenophobia into the memory hole. Too bad for Boris that the British press and public have memories that can reach back two years; he was immediately called out and ridiculed. But maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised at Boris’s frequent changes of heart on Turkey, his fickle relationship with the Turkish community in London – or at Erdoğan’s unprecedentedly laid-back response to his poem. Because Johnson and Erdoğan have more in common than divides them – they are playing from the same rulebook. For populists like them, winning is the only part of democracy that matters. It doesn’t matter how many lies you tell, how often you change your ideological course, so long as in the end you take your place on the winner’s podium.
Britain and Turkey: the bottom line
To fully understand Britain’s relationship with Erdoğan’s Turkey, you need to look beyond Boris Johnson to the bottom line. In its post-Brexit era, as the UK gropes for new trade relationships to keep its economy afloat, Turkey is turning into an increasingly important ally. Bilateral trade between the two countries is worth $20 billion annually in 2019, more than double what it was a decade ago. Theresa May’s second visit on becoming prime minister was to Ankara in January 2017 – she flew straight to her meeting with Erdoğan from Washington, her first overseas destination. In Turkey, she signed off on arms deals worth £100 million and said almost nothing about Erdoğan’s escalating post-coup purge or war against the PKK, to the horror of human rights campaigners. Diplomats insist that May aired her concerns behind closed doors.
Four months later, in May 2017, British defence companies and trade bureaucrats flocked to the cavernous halls of the World Trade Centre close to Atatürk airport for Istanbul’s biannual arms fair. Here, more deals were s
truck between Rolls-Royce and Kale, a Turkish defence company, for a project to help Turkey produce its first indigenous jet engine. Come summer, when the British embassy in Ankara hosted its annual garden party to mark Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, the manicured lawns and gilded rooms of the grand main building were scattered with adverts for iconic British brands, from JCB to Aston Martin (several Turkish cabinet members and scores of Erdoğan’s advisers attended). In May 2018, even as Erdoğan spat venom against other European countries and leaders, he was welcomed in London for a two-day visit that stopped just short of full state honours. After speaking with investors and attending a string of lunches and dinners thrown in his honour by the London branches of the AKP’s various lobbying groups, he went to Buckingham Palace for afternoon tea with the Queen.
The roots of the special business relationship between Britain and Turkey go back to July 2010, when David Cameron, elected prime minister two months earlier, visited Ankara. Following his meeting with Erdoğan, he gave a speech setting out the future shape of relations: ‘I have come to Ankara to establish a new partnership between Britain and Turkey. I think this is a vital strategic relationship for our country. Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy … Today the value of our trade is over $9 billion a year. I want us to double this over the next five years.’
That speech kick-started a flurry of economic diplomacy, with much of the legwork on the British side being carried out by the City of London Corporation, the opaque administration that governs the heart of the UK’s financial sector in the ancient warren of the Square Mile. It is the only part of the country over which Parliament has no jurisdiction: a unique cross between local municipality, business interests lobby and charitable organisation that has existed for more than a millennium. Although separate from UK government, the work of the City often overlaps with that of Whitehall, most frequently when it is used as a soft power arm by the Treasury and Foreign Office as they nurture relations overseas. Other financial centres, from Wall Street to Tokyo, may command more capital than the City of London, but none can compete with its gothic dining halls, medieval guilds and sumptuous costumes. It is the Lord Mayor of London (not to be confused with the Mayor of London), successor of Dick Whittington and wearer of fur-trimmed capes and gold chains, whom Britain sends on trade missions to the countries it wants to impress.
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