Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Hür has made her name by questioning all of Turkey’s dodgy historical narratives, from the Kemalists’ pseudo-scientific explanations of who the Turks are, to the details of what really happened during the ethnic massacres of 1915. She calls it the history of the underdog – and back when Erdoğan was the underdog, he was a fan. These days, when she has turned her attention to unpicking his own fabrications, he is less enamoured. In a witty internet post from April 2016 titled ‘Erdoğan’s ignorance in history and numbers’, Hür forensically examines occasions when the president has played with the facts. In 2003, he claimed that during the Battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt) in 1071 – the Ottomans’ first victory in Anatolia – the invading Sultan Alparslan had cried out ‘Allah, Allah!’ and ‘Vatan!’ (Motherland). Hür pointed out that the word ‘Vatan’ did not exist in the Turkish language until the eighteenth century, and even after that there are no recorded instances of it having been cried out during battle.

  Then, in 2011, Erdoğan claimed that his great-grandfather was one of the seventy thousand Turkish soldiers who had frozen to death while battling Russian forces in Sarıkamış in the winter of 1915–16. ‘My great-grandfather, Rize Güneysulu Kemal Mutlu, was martyred here in Sarıkamış and embraced with the mercy of Allah. My elders told me, saying: They wrapped around their guns, we saw they had been martyred by freezing, and their tears were like dripping drops of ice,’ he said at a speech to commemorate the tragedy.

  Armed with the name, Hür went to the defence ministry archives and scoured the five volumes of records about the Sarıkamış martyrs. The name of every soldier who had died there is listed. Erdoğan’s great-grandfather was not among them.

  The questions that really haunt Erdoğan, following him around like a mosquito he can’t swat away, are the ones about his university degree. He claims to have graduated from the business school at Istanbul’s Marmara University in 1981. In 2014, as he prepared to run for the presidency, members of the opposition started to investigate. The president must, by law, have a university degree. The university’s rector produced a degree certificate. But Marmara was only incorporated as a university in 1983, and the questions linger on. Ayşe Hür is one of the people looking into it.

  ‘I asked Marmara University [to look at their records] but there is an internal law and they cannot give information. I applied to the university asking if there was ever a student by that name there. The answer was that it was about somebody’s private life and that they could not answer,’ she says. ‘Then I asked a teacher’s assistant at the university to check. He researched and it was not there. Erdoğan does not exist in any documents. When I started to research a guy who claims to have taught Erdoğan there was no information and when asked more was told that it was private information. That guy is now living in Israel. I contacted him and asked how Erdoğan was as a student. It turned out it was also bullshit. There are no school friends, no photos. The research assistant found a yearbook from 1983. There is a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but with no photo. On another yearbook he is not mentioned.’

  Those awkward old military service photos also throw doubt on Erdoğan’s claims about his degree. In them he is wearing the uniform of a private – entry level for non-graduate enlistees. If he had indeed graduated, he would likely have been an officer.

  The furore died down as Erdoğan’s grip tightened, and these days the degree question is just one on a list of many others that no one talks about. There are the tapes of Erdoğan and his son discussing how to hide money that emerged during the December 2013 Iranian gold-dealing scandal. Or Erdoğan’s second son – not Bilal, the model child who organises traditional Turkic sporting events in the mass rally ground at Yenikapı, but Ahmet, who killed classical musician Sevim Tanürek in a hit-and-run car crash in 1998. Ahmet Erdoğan did not have a driver’s licence and was found guilty on three of eight counts in his first trial. At appeal he was cleared and flew to America. No one talks about him now. Younger Turks might never have heard of him.

  It’s little surprise, then, that Erdoğan is also trying to rewrite the history of coup night and its aftermath. The people injured on the night, and on his side, are given the honorific title of ‘Gazi’ (meaning veteran – and also bestowed on Atatürk), and cards that allow them free public transport and other benefits. Now, he is trying to recast his own military history, claiming status as a war hero – not as the timid, cowardly man remembered by those who knew him in the early days.

  ‘He is trying to identify himself with Atatürk and make them the same,’ says Hür. ‘People do not get it. In Çanakkale the Allies were attacking us. He is saying the same about Afrin even though we are the attackers there. There is false information. Nobody knows about the true genuine facts.’

  In a small glass case in the museum at Anıtkabir you can find the first known portrait of Atatürk.

  It is an expressionist oil painting depicting him from mid-chest upwards, face turned slightly to the right, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. It was crafted in October 1915 by Austrian artist Wilhelm V. Krausz, famous for his depictions of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rulers. At the time Mustafa Kemal was an Ottoman officer fighting in the First World War; six months earlier he had won the glorious victory over the British and Australian troops at Gallipoli, establishing himself as a hero among his men and the Turkish press, who dubbed him ‘the saviour of the Dardanelles and the capital’. But back in Istanbul, Atatürk did not receive the praise he believed he deserved. His relationship with Enver Paşa, the general who led the Young Turks, was fraught. Mustafa Kemal considered Enver incompetent, and Enver viewed Mustafa Kemal as an upstart to be watched. He dispatched him to the Caucasus front, out in the eastern wilds, 400 miles from Istanbul.

  I’m fascinated by this depiction of a future icon. The canvas is less than fifty centimetres high, and none of the facial features that would later stand out so strikingly seem remarkable. A messy moustache cancels out the sharp cheekbones; the blue eyes seem watery rather than sharp. His rank is not visible, and there is no indication of his achievements.

  It is difficult to imagine this soldier’s portrait being replicated millions of times on posters, tea sets and lighters, as Atatürk’s more famous later images subsequently were. By the end of the twentieth century it had occurred to the Kemalists that the old forms of Atatürk-worship – mass rallies in sports stadiums; dour official portraits looming over public squares; above all, harsh punishments for anyone who did not comply – were no longer working. The rising Islamists – men like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – were forging genuine bonds with the people through their common touch. Thus, the Kemalists decided to bring Atatürk into the private realm. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the republic in 1998, new official exhibitions displayed Atatürk’s evening wear for the first time, and historians went to the archives and started pulling out new photos of him – drinking, laughing and swimming.

  Esra Özyürek, a Turkish anthropologist who had lived in the States for many years, noticed a profound change in her people’s relationship with Atatürk on her return to Turkey to study the celebrations in 1998. She writes in her 2006 book, Nostalgia for the Modern:

  Although I grew up under the perpetual gaze of the founding father, I was astonished by the omnipresence of Atatürk images on my return to the country after several years’ absence. What startled me most was not the multiplication of his image, but his appearance in strange, new places and in novel poses – the very commodification of the leader. Kemalist entrepreneurs and consumers had creatively adopted the founding father into their personal lives and ventures … Most surprisingly in the newly popular images, Atatürk appeared smiling, much in contrast to his fierce looks in pictures that decorate state offices.

  Back in those days, when Erdoğan was still the rebel upstart, Ayşe Hür spent most of her time battling against the Kemalists’ myths. Over strong coffees she destroys one after another little parts of the Atatürk story that I have taken to heart over the past si
x years: ‘He has fake photographs, like the one where he is sleeping on the snow,’ she says, referring to a famous grainy black-and-white picture of Atatürk on the battlefield. ‘It is staged … There is a story about Atatürk getting hit by a bullet and it bouncing off his watch. This is probably also fabricated. Most of my career has been about deconstructing the Kemalist reading of the era. Over the last ten years, people started to get pissed off because now everyone expects me to give only a critical review of the AKP period. Sometimes I tweet something about Kemalism and people ask what I am doing. They say that this is not the time to be criticising Kemalism!’

  We have been speaking for three hours over the din of the coffee shop, our conversation curving through Atatürk and Erdoğan, then back to Atatürk again. Both men are more fictions than fact, we conclude – but Atatürk has one claim over Erdoğan: ‘Atatürk joined the war,’ Hür says. ‘Erdoğan would never do that!’

  She gathers her things to dash to her next meeting through the rush-hour crowds on a warm April evening in Taksim. On one side of the square the brutalist Atatürk Cultural Centre – a symbol of the modern republic – is being pulled down by digger trucks to make way for a new opera house. Turkey’s secularists are horrified, seeing it as a metaphor for Erdoğan’s drive to pull apart the nation that Atatürk created, and to refashion Taksim just as he is trying to remould the minds of the people. They will not be soothed by what is happening on the other side of the square, exactly facing the demolition site. Here, the skeleton of a new mosque is rising in exact sync with the razing of the Cultural Centre. It is the project that Erdoğan has been promising for a generation, since he first became mayor of Istanbul.

  Just after Ayşe and I say our goodbyes, news comes in. Snap elections have been called, even earlier than everyone was expecting. In two months, on 24 June 2018, Turks will go to the polls seventeen months early to pick both their president and parliament. Either way, the decision they make will reroute the country’s future. Once the winner is called, Erdoğan’s new constitution will come into force, sweeping away Atatürk’s legacy of parliamentary democracy and handing whoever takes the presidency almost unbridled power to shape the country as he, or she, sees fit. The opposition must now scramble to find their candidates. Erdoğan doesn’t have to announce he is standing: it’s a given.

  15

  ERDOĞAN’S ENDGAME

  24 June 2018

  Election night

  Defeat and the death of democracy wears an ashen, sickened face. On the top floor of a draughty old Istanbul building, men cluster around a small television set as a map of Turkey turns Erdoğan-yellow.

  All of them smoke and few of them talk. Those that do murmur vague protest.

  ‘The count isn’t finished yet!’

  ‘Their numbers don’t match with ours!’

  ‘There’s still time!’ This last in a small, desperate whisper.

  Hope’s dregs gurgle away as the count nears its finish. Erdoğan wins it outright, calling victory at 9.30 p.m., only four and a half hours after polling booths have closed. And that is the end of parliamentary democracy in Turkey.

  As soon as it was settled it all seemed so obvious: of course Erdoğan would never lose. Every weapon in this battle had been his for the choosing: the media coverage, the resources, the power to lock up his opponents – everything he had gathered over the past fifteen years. But the outcome is no longer the real point of an election in Turkey – it is all about the journey, the show. The June 2018 elections had turned into the greatest test of his flock’s loyalty since the coup attempt: a challenger rose, Erdoğan faltered, and for the six weeks of campaigning his opponents started believing that things could change. And so, his devotees came out stronger, fought tougher, and played dirtier. And when he defied all the doubters and won it again, they lauded him more fiercely than ever. Jeopardy was not the process here but the goal – and payoff came with proof that, once again, the most skilled and practised populist in the world could rally his army and march on.

  The campaign

  The June 2018 election campaign was a masterpiece of black comedy, timing and suspense: the opposition’s last chance to stop Erdoğan, the endgame. He knew he couldn’t wait much longer to set the last pieces of his plan in motion: the economy was stuttering, the currency weakening. Everything he had built his support on was going into reverse. Ever the gambler, Erdoğan was gambling on an opposition in shambles, and a country flying high on the jingoism of Afrin.

  ‘Who’s getting ready? Making preparations? Working ten hours a day? Touring the provinces? Making alliances? Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Who else is doing that? No one,’ a former member of his circle told me a month before the elections were called. ‘It is his big asset – he knows what the mood is. Aged thirteen he started giving speeches. Since then he has been dealing in politics. It is the first time that we have a natural-born politician. Atatürk didn’t have to win popular support, it was narrower elite politics when he ruled, he was managing groups. But Erdoğan grew up being a populist. He is a deal-maker, a deal-breaker. He keeps his constituency under strong control. His family lives politics twenty-four-seven, even on holiday. It is defensive politics at home. Do they go on holiday? Never. Never happened in that family. In the past, ministers would dream of retirement. His only relaxation is maybe playing with his grandchildren. Maybe Islamist politicians are like that because they are defensive. It is their style of engaging with life – politics is everywhere. It is twenty-four-seven, without an exit strategy. They believe there is an afterlife, maybe that is their holiday.’

  Turkey had no shortage of issues in the spring of 2018. Soldiers were dying in Syria and the educated youth was deserting the country. Construction projects were stopping midway, cranes frozen, as companies’ credit lines dried up. Their huge skeletons loomed over the cities’ highways like the concrete ghosts of Christmas yet to come, a warning of what the future surely holds as the backlash of the AKP’s obsession with borrowing and building begins. But all else was pushed aside in the spring of 2018, because there was only one issue in this election – a Turkey with Erdoğan, or without?

  All the main opposition candidates pledged to scrap the results of his referendum should they win and rewrite the constitution – again. The nationalist Iyi (Good) Party had Meral Akşener, a glamorous grandmother with hennaed hair and a problematic past; she was interior minister in the 1990s, at the very time that the Turkish state was committing its worst atrocities in the Kurdish south-east. She reinvented herself by replacing the wolf’s-head hand gesture of the ultra-nationalists with pearl earrings and a hennaed star and crescent on her palm to match her hair, but the Kurds would never forget.

  Saadet, the rump Islamist party left behind when Tayyip and the other young guns broke away to form the AKP, had the aged Temel Karamollaoğlu, a grandfatherly, grey-bearded figure. The party’s campaign video featured a cartoon Karamollaoğlu depicted as Superman, swooping down to stop a car steered by Erdoğan from driving off a cliff.

  ‘The first ever Islamist with a sense of humour!’ one friend remarked.

  Selahattin Demirtaş, the first major politician to oppose Erdoğan’s presidential system, stood for the HDP. He had been in prison for seventeen months but was still by far the most popular Kurdish politician. If convicted before election day on any of the seventeen terrorism charges he faced his bid would be finished. He was not able to hold rallies or speak to his followers apart from through statements handed to his lawyers. Then, seven days before the election, state television decided to grant him a ten-minute slot. The pro-Erdoğan press heralded it ‘a first for democracy!’

  The outsider was Doğu Perinçek, leader of Vatan – a neo-Maoist, ultranationalist party so marginal it never gleans more than 1 per cent of the vote. And the CHP had Muharrem İnce, a 54-year-old former physics teacher who had challenged Kılıçdaroğlu for the leadership of the party a year earlier.

  İnce was a witty orator, well used to controlling a classro
om full of bored and gobby teenagers. The Turkish paparazzi snapped him enjoying a beer and performing the Zeybek, a traditional Aegean dance. Such leisure pursuits marked him down as a full-blooded Turkish secularist – though his mother and sister wore the headscarf. As he announced his candidacy İnce took off his CHP lapel badge, his tribal marker, and promised to be a president for the whole of Turkey.

  The AKP media sneered. ‘He couldn’t even win the CHP leadership elections,’ scoffed one commentator. ‘How does he think he can win the presidency?’

  None of the challengers looked promising. İnce’s face adorned bus shelters around my neighbourhood, and on one I saw that a woman wearing bright red lipstick had kissed the glass over his forehead. Doğu Perinçek’s people pasted some scrappy posters on construction hoardings, showing the brush-moustached leader glaring beneath thick eyebrows. I caught a glimpse of Meral Akşener, regal and smiling, on posters pinned to the central reservation on the road out of Istanbul to Silivri prison, where I went in late April to watch a hearing of one of the terror cases against Selahattin Demirtaş. It would have been his first public appearance since he formally announced he was running for the presidency. Journalists, international observers and Kurdish activists jammed the building, hammering on the door of the prison’s courtroom as nervous young gendarmerie officers stood guard. But as proceedings got underway, we realised that even this stage was to be denied him – Demirtaş did not appear in the courtroom at his own trial. The judge said he was ill.

  Almost everywhere else, from Taksim to the gecekondu districts, it was Tayyip’s stern face that gazed down on you. His face was on billboards in bus stations and bunting fluttering over ancient alleys. Every day, millions of Istanbullus riding in taxis and buses along the raised highways that cut through suburban-sprawl Istanbul caught Erdoğan’s eye countless times, as he watched them from storeys-high banners pasted onto the tower blocks.