Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  The two men were on a panel discussing Middle East peace and Gaza, the strip of Palestinian land where the never-ending conflict with Israel plays out. Peres had just finished talking about his nation’s right to defend itself – the perennial answer to anyone who questions Israel’s policy of punishing all Gaza’s civilians for the actions of its militants – and the moderator was wrapping up when Erdoğan launched into a diatribe:

  ‘When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill. I think that you feel a bit guilty and that’s why you have been so strong in your words. I remember the children who died on beaches. And I remember two former prime ministers of your country who said that they felt happy when they were able to enter Palestine on tanks. The Old Testament’s sixth commandment says “Thou shalt not kill”. There is murder here.’

  Then things got really scrappy. Erdoğan batted away the hand of the moderator who was trying to stop him by nudging him on the shoulder. He continued to speak, shouting over him.

  ‘One minute, one minute,’ the president cried in accented English before switching back to his booming Turkish. ‘Thank you very much – I don’t think I will come back to Davos after this. Because you don’t let me speak! The president [Peres] spoke for twenty-five minutes – I have only spoken for half of that.’

  Erdoğan gathered his papers and stalked off stage, followed by a gaggle of press photographers and stopping only to embrace Amer Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League, on the way out.

  Back home, reactions were mixed. Some columnists and political analysts warned that Erdoğan’s outburst had shunted Turkey out of its influential position as a moderator between Israel and other Muslim states, potentially for good and with dire implications for both Ankara and the region. But for conservative Turks his outburst was another sign that he was one of them, thinking as they thought and refusing to kowtow to the rest of the world. When he landed back in Istanbul that night, thousands of supporters were waiting for him at the airport.

  TURKEY IS PROUD OF YOU! read the placards, while the crowd waved Turkish and Palestinian flags. On the tarmac, Erdoğan deftly turned his performance at Davos into a nationalist triumph, claiming that he had ‘protected the honour of the Turkish nation’ to rapturous cheers. ‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘I come from politics, not from diplomacy. Therefore, I do not speak like a diplomat … I am not just some leader of some group or tribe. I am the prime minister of the Republic of Turkey. This is my character and my identity.’

  In the rest of the Muslim world, support for Erdoğan’s actions at Davos tipped over into full-blown adoration. Hamas, the Palestinian group that rules Gaza and whose armed wing is listed as a terrorist organisation by many Western countries and institutions, praised his ‘courageous stand’. ‘The Palestinian people, the resistance and Hamas salute you, Erdoğan,’ Hamas’s leader Khalil al-Hayya told a rally the same day as the Davos incident. A newspaper in the Gulf ran a front page saying that Erdoğan had exposed the Israeli ‘holocaust’. Iran’s former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani thanked him during Friday prayers.

  Meanwhile Israel flailed to smooth things over, desperate to maintain relations with one of its only Muslim allies in the region. So too did the Turkish army generals, who were unwilling to let a rabble-rousing prime minister wreck the valuable military alliance with Israel they had spent decades nurturing. But things were about to get much worse.

  On 21 May 2010, Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish-flagged ship sailing towards Gaza. The Mavi Marmara was carrying pro-Palestinian activists brought together by Insan Hak ve Hürriyetleri ve Insanı Yardım Vakfı (the People’s Law and Freedom Assistance Association, or IHH), an Istanbul-based Islamist charity with links to the Muslim Brotherhood and given the tacit blessing of Erdoğan. Their aim was to break the Israeli blockade on Gaza by entering its waters. When Israel sent in its crack troops to stop them, pitched battles broke out on the Mavi Marmara’s decks. Nine Turkish citizens were killed, and Ankara severed relations with Israel.

  It took Turkey and Israel six years to recover from the incident; during that time the rusting hulk of the ship remained moored in public view in Istanbul, still hung with its protest banners. When the two countries formally reconciled in June 2016, the survivors paid the price. Turkish prime minister Binali Yıldırım agreed to a deal under which Israel would ‘donate’ $20 million to the relatives of the dead, all of whom were Turkish. But for other survivors who were on the ship, all legal actions against the Israeli state were blocked. Alexandra Lort Phillips was one of thirteen British citizens midway through a case against Israel in the Turkish courts when the decision was made. ‘I understand that they have to do diplomacy, of course political processes carry on, but I don’t feel that the Turkish government has taken other victims into account,’ she told me as she contemplated the sudden end of the years she had spent in the Byzantine Turkish justice system. ‘To dismiss the case at this point just seems wrong.’

  Among Erdoğan’s home fanbase the half-hearted reconciliation has barely been noticed. He is still the unbending champion of Palestine, the man who stood up to Peres – but that comes with consequences for Karen şarhon. ‘All over the world, whenever something negative happens with Israel, the Jewish community is always associated. They think the chief rabbi has power enough to phone the prime minister of Israel and say, “Hey! Come on! What are you doing? Don’t do that any more!”’ she says, good-naturedly rolling her eyes at the idiocy of it all even though she has been putting up with it for decades.

  Karen receives daily death threats from militant pro-Palestinians who believe the Jews of Istanbul are to blame for policies made in Jerusalem. The majority of Turkey’s remaining 15,000 Sephardic Jews live in the city, mostly in upmarket neighbourhoods where they might be mistaken for secular Muslim Turks. They largely keep out of politics, but still politics finds them. And so, to enter the offices of Shalom, on a small side street of swish bars in a neighbourhood packed with boutiques and plastic surgeons’ offices, I also have to go through security. Paranoia? Probably not. In November 2003, fringe Islamist militants drove truck bombs into two of Istanbul’s biggest synagogues, killing twenty-three people. It only takes one of the poison-pen writers to be a committed terrorist.

  ‘They need to realise that we are Turkish – full-fledged Turkish citizens! People don’t realise that we are not Israeli,’ Karen says. ‘It’s not something specific to Turkey, I’m sure it happens in France, too. But obviously because of the affiliation with the Arab countries, they probably say … you know. Plus now, with the radicalism going on …’

  The LGBT community

  Karen will take new citizenship, but she will not leave Turkey – after all, she can trace back her roots here further than most other citizens. ‘No way!’ she affirms, and resettles herself in her chair to prove her point.

  In 2015 Spain and Portugal both began offering citizenships to Sephardic Jews. So many have taken them up that the system has snarled and the waiting list now stretches to several years. But it is a golden opportunity in uncertain times. Karen’s daughters have accepted the offer so that they can study in Europe. She applied so that she might visit them more easily. She has never been tempted to take up her right of Israeli citizenship.

  But people are leaving. The intellectuals. The youth. The comedians and the freaks, and the people who do not fit Turkey’s increasingly conservative mould. Not so long ago Istanbul was a haven for gay and transgender men and women from across the Middle East, who had been forced from their home countries by bigotry and war. In June 2013, during the last spurts of the Gezi protest movement, I joined the Istanbul Pride parade surging from Taksim Square down İstiklal, sweating and dancing under the humid canopy of a fifty-metre rainbow flag. An estimated 100,000 people attended that year, and the police stepped back and let them do their thing. Two years later – after Erdoğan had taken the presidency – the Istanbul governor banned Pride at the last minute, saying it was inappropriate to hold it
during the Islamic holy month of Ramadan. Each year since then, Pride has been banned on various pretexts, and the numbers showing up to have a crack at it anyway have slid. In 2017 it was a huddle of just a few hundred who gathered in the side streets off İstiklal, determined to at least shout a few slogans before the police steamed in with their tear gas and batons.

  When it came to it, no one was willing to stick up for Turkey’s LGBT community – they didn’t fit into anyone’s tribe. When the Kurdish-rooted HDP made equality for all sexualities a part of their manifesto for the June 2015 elections, it was a first for any party in the history of the Turkish republic, but from the trenches it looked like a sop. Ümit Manay, a poet and gay activist in Diyarbakır, told me in early 2016 how he had endlessly requested meetings with the party’s local branch. He wanted to discuss the precarious position of gay and transgender people in what is still a deeply conservative city, and push to get funding for a crisis shelter. They ignored him, preferring to focus instead on issues relating to Kurdish identity. Elsewhere, as Turkey’s rhetoric grows more stridently Islamist, the people who once partied at Pride and in Istanbul’s gay clubs are now hiding themselves away, trying to keep a low profile. In July 2016, as Erdoğan’s Turkey spiralled high on the fervour of having beaten the coup attempt, a gay Syrian man was murdered and beheaded on his way to his job as a hospital cleaner. His flatmates, who are also gay, said they received messages threatening the same fate. A month later a transgender woman was raped, tortured, murdered and then beheaded by a mob in a conservative suburb.

  The bravest men I have met in Turkey are the three gay Syrians who stood in front of the hundreds-strong audience at the Istanbul Film Festival in February 2018, to speak about the documentary that had just been screened. Mr Gay Syria follows them as they prepare to compete in the 2016 Mr Gay World championships in Malta. All had been cast out by their families and abused in the street. Some were married with children in an attempt to cover their sexuality, and coming out meant losing their kids. With the double blow of being refugees and gay, they know they can expect little help from the Turkish government or authorities. ‘I see a lot of sadness in this room,’ one of the main protagonists told a support meeting at the beginning of the film.

  Most LGBT refugees in Turkey have registered with the UN for resettlement, and hundreds have been offered asylum in Europe and Canada. But for those who remain, the future looks bleak. In November 2017 the governor of Ankara banned all screenings, festivals and events organised by LGBT associations. The producers of the Istanbul Film Festival rebranded Mr Gay Syria as Halepli Berber (The Barber of Aleppo) so that it might slip past the government censors.

  Some days it feels like almost everyone I speak to is plotting a way out. There is the highly educated and privileged young media graduate with flawless English who is planning to go to the UK to work in a restaurant kitchen. My friend thinks about rediscovering his Sephardic roots so that he can take Spanish citizenship. When the Turkish government launches an online genealogy service in early 2018 that allows Turks to search for their heritage, it is so popular it repeatedly crashes. Many are checking for pre-Republican roots that might let them claim a second passport. A website portal that lets prospective students search for overseas opportunities reports that its traffic from Turkey tripled in the days following the coup attempt.

  But then I go to the other side of the country – sometimes just a few hundred metres down the road – and people tell me how Turkey is now stronger than it’s ever been. In Çekmeköy and the other gecekondu districts, in the rallies at Yenikapı and in the villages of Rize they say that Erdoğan has broken the country’s old shackles, and nothing will be the same again. It can be disorientating to shift between the two worlds too quickly; like stepping through Turkey’s looking glass. But even as some Turks grasp at chances to leave, desperate to jump before the country they once knew disappears, there are others who are desperate to come and live the New Turkey dream.

  New Turks: the Ahiska

  When I ask Nesibe Aliriza about her plants, her defences drop and she transforms from a shy housewife into a woman with passion in her ice-blue eyes. The blooms are everywhere in her spotless, two-storey house; lined up against the French windows to absorb the winter sunshine, on small side tables dotted around the front room, and tucked into corners that would otherwise look bare and cold. Out in her front garden there are the skeletons of rose bushes that will burst into colourful flower when the spring comes. To the back of the house, a spacious plot has been turned and fertilised ready for planting with tomatoes and squash. ‘These plants are like my children,’ she says, her eyes shining and the gold teeth on her bottom row glinting as she smiles. ‘I love them, I can’t describe it. I’ve kept plants ever since I was a young girl. But I had to give most of them away before I moved to Turkey.’

  All that Nesibe managed to bring from her garden in Ukraine were some tulip and rose bulbs. Now they are nestled in the earth of Turkey – her new home – readying green shoots to burst through the soil.

  Nesibe and her family – her husband, two children and four grandchildren – have always thought of Turkey as the motherland. They are part of the Ahiska Turk minority, who originated in Georgia but endured a seven-decade exile across the former Soviet Union after they were deported east by Stalin in 1944. The Aliriza family were among around ten thousand Ahiska Turks who eventually settled in eastern Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. Life was good there, the family say – until the area was annexed by Russian militias in 2014. A missile fell through the roof of their house in the town of Donetsk and exploded in the kitchen, and they went to stay with relatives nearby. It appeared that they were set to endure another era as refugees on the run. Then, a saviour stepped in.

  ‘In May 2015 we heard that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was going to visit Kiev [the Ukrainian capital]. So we asked for an appointment with him through the Turkish embassy,’ says Nesibe’s husband, Vahid. ‘He agreed, and he promised us he would look out for us and provide homes for us in Turkey. We were thrilled! He had welcomed us and spoken to us as if he was one of us, not a president.’

  Six months passed, and Ukraine’s Ahiska Turks wondered if the promise had been forgotten. But in December 2015 they got a call from the Turkish embassy in Kiev and were told to pack their bags. They were to be resettled in Turkey, and were allowed to bring just thirty kilograms of luggage each. Their flights were booked for Christmas Day of that year.

  ‘We didn’t expect it to happen, we couldn’t believe it,’ says Vahid, his Turkish bearing a hint of a Russian accent and his skin white from a lifetime in colder climes. ‘For the past seventy-three years we have been on the road, no state has ever stood up for us. But with Erdoğan, we are like a child holding the hand of its mother.’

  Most of the Ahiska Turk newcomers have been resettled in Üzümlü, a small village in the mountainous eastern Anatolian province of Erzincan. The area is famous for its waterfalls, ski runs and little else. When I tell my friends in Istanbul that I am going there, they are impressed – it’s a part of the country few Turks have seen. The airline steward who checks me in tells me I am the first Briton he has ever seen flying there.

  It is only 250 miles from Erzincan to the Georgian border, and even less to the place where tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers died in the snow as they fought the Russian army over the winter of 1914. The struggle between the two great powers for this unforgiving patch of the Caucasus was the prelude to the Ahiska Turks’ tragedy; when Turkey’s borders were drawn after Atatürk’s war of independence, their lands fell outside the boundaries. Although they continued to identify as Turks, speak Turkish and practise Islam, the Ahiska Turks now lived in the Soviet Union.

  For two decades they stayed in their homes. But in November 1944 Stalin – by birth a Georgian himself – decided that they were a threat to his empire. The entire Ahiska Turk population – 115,000 people including the elderly, women and children – was rounded up onto cattle
trains and deported to central Asia.

  I sit around a plastic table in the sharp sunshine of a November morning in Üzümlü with Vahid Aliriza and two other Ahiska Turk men. The light sparkles on the snow capping the mountains either side of the village, and when I suck in the air it is cleaner than any I have breathed in Turkey. It is warm enough in the sunshine to sit outside and bright enough to warrant sunglasses, and as we drink round after round of strong tea I get a richly textured personal lesson in the history of the Ahiska Turks. Fifty-two-year-old Vahid and 64-year old Hasan Bahtiyar tell the second-hand stories of what their parents endured on that journey. Ilham Raminov is seventy-seven; the story he tells is his own. He has been happy and vivacious up to this point, but now his blue eyes, with their burst of yellow-green around the pupils, are clouding.

  ‘I was three or four years old when the exile happened, and I was on the train. Since it was a train built for livestock, there were no toilets. We had to make holes in the floor, but still many of the women were too ashamed to go to the toilet in front of everyone else. Some of them died because of that. Every time someone died, the soldiers would throw them off …

  ‘After the exile, my mother lived forty days and then died. My father passed away in Azerbaijan in 1986. He had moved there because he wanted to be as close as possible to his birthplace.’

  Around eighteen thousand people are estimated to have died on the trains, their bodies discarded along the route. At the time no reason was given for this crime against the Ahiska Turks, and the deportations were covered up by the Soviet leadership. The dead were never given proper burials; their families were never allowed to return to find them. But in 1968, fifteen years after Stalin’s death, the Ahiska Turks finally got an official explanation for their suffering. It was revealed that Stalin, drunk on his victories on other Second World War fronts, had planned to declare war on Turkey. The Ahiska Turks were potential enemies within.