Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Erdoğan had tagged his Kayseri rally on to the opening of a new, PPP-funded state hospital – one of his tried and tested tactics to show just how much he is doing for his country. Days earlier he had promised to raise the state pension – a sure winner for the men with heavy moustaches who gathered around me as I pulled out my notebook in the crowd. Mostly, though, they wanted to talk about Europe.

  ‘I like his tough stance against the foreign enemies – Greece, Armenia, France,’ said one. ‘They all support terrorism. And we don’t trust the EU! They don’t keep their promises.’

  The others talked over one another, each wanting their quotes to be the ones I scribbled down. Each of them echoed the last.

  ‘None of our other leaders defended our rights in the international community,’ said another. ‘That is why the world doesn’t want Erdoğan to lead us – because he’s against their colonialism.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said his friend, ‘which European city has new hospitals opening? I lived in Germany for forty years and they don’t!’

  I felt like pointing to the figures that could show him exactly how many billions in grants and investments the EU has poured into Erdoğan’s Turkey over the years. I had added it up; nearly four billion euros to bridges, tunnels, rail links – and hospitals. But a rally is no place to argue reasonably. The familiar music started and the MC came on stage to warm up the crowd. The speakers were turned up so loud I could feel each word hitting my eardrums. My interviews came to an abrupt end – it was almost impossible to hear anyone over the racket. But one of the men leant over to give me a final thought, holding up his index finger and striking it through the air to emphasise each word like a conductor leading an orchestra.

  ‘Tek millet! Tek bayrak! Tek Vatan! Tek lider!’ he shouted over the din – a twist on one of Erdoğan’s campaign slogans: ‘One nation, one flag, one Motherland, one state’.

  My interviewee had added his own ending: ‘one leader’.

  Erdoğan’s about-face on Europe is the most startling aspect of his metamorphosis. Back in 2003 he promised to be the man who would take Turkey into the European Union. Now, he often appears to be trying to get Turkey kicked out before it has joined.

  ‘After [Erdoğan] became prime minister he did more to seriously move forward the EU process than any other government. When I think about Turkey today and how it got there … Erdoğan is the best politician in Turkey,’ says one diplomat based in the country during the 1990s and early 2000s. But when Erdoğan began his snarling slide into real populist authoritarianism after 2016, the EU made an easy fall guy. Turks were already fatigued with the endless accession process – both Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Nicolas Sarkozy had said that the country would never become a full member, even back in the days when Ankara was playing nice. The final insult came when the Schengen visas Turks were promised under Davutoğlu’s 2016 deal to stop refugees flocking to Europe failed to materialise in Erdoğan’s Euro-Hate era. Brussels said the sticking point was the same as always – Turkey’s refusal to liberalise its anti-terror laws, a condition for Schengen access. Erdoğan, then in the opening throes of his new war with the PKK, was never going to make concessions on that – and after the coup attempt in July that year the human rights outlook worsened. Soon the two sides were trapped in a spiral of mutual abuse – Europe criticising Turkey’s latest human rights breaches, and Erdoğan picking up on their words to spit back to the adoring crowds at his rallies, with asides about hypocrisy and Turkey-phobia in Brussels.

  ‘From my perspective, when Sarkozy and Merkel said never to the EU membership, Erdoğan was liberated from having that as a national aspiration and he was able to substitute it with his own aspiration,’ the diplomat says. ‘And I think that is one of the reasons why we are where we are today … But I also think that people will look back and say that the secularists did not fight for their country. In 2003, the big business people were thinking that Erdoğan was great. They tried to ride the tiger but things did not work out the way they wanted them to. Secondly, there are secularists like the CHP party that never organised themselves to provide an alternative vision of what Turkey could become instead of no to Erdoğan. They provided nothing to the larger group of people.

  ‘When this history gets written, we will see that Erdoğan holds the most responsibility for Turkey today, but some of it also belongs to the opposition and to Europeans who made a strategic error.’

  Erdoğan’s personal views on Brussels have always been far muddier than those of his AKP co-founders. He fits more naturally with the leaders of Muslim countries, who tend to look up to and flatter him, while among the leaders of Europe he appears awkward and surly. Turks’ views on the EU have also shifted, so that now most say they do not want to join compared to the two-thirds who were in favour in 2002. Doubtless that is partly down to the endless agitations of Turkey’s pro-Erdoğan media (one tabloid newspaper published a front page of Angela Merkel mocked-up as Hitler during the height of the row between the two countries in 2017). But as the EU bloc is engulfed by economic woes, squabbling over refugees, and its own rising swell of populism, it no longer looks the good bet it was at the start of the AKP’s tenure. Turks believe they have other relationships they can turn to, in Russia, the Balkans – and post-Brexit Britain.

  Back in Ankara there are few people left in Erdoğan’s inner circle who can either speak truth to power, or who are sufficiently Europhile to push for a reconciliation with Brussels. Hours after Erdoğan was re-inaugurated following his election win – an event billed in the Turkish press as ‘the first day of the New Turkey’ – he announced his new, hand-picked cabinet. Twenty-six ministries had been streamlined down to sixteen. One of those culled was the ministry for EU affairs, now absorbed by the foreign ministry. It is a clear sign of how far any thoughts of joining the bloc have slipped down Erdoğan’s agenda. When I met with former president Abdullah Gül six weeks before the elections, it was the crumbling of the prospects for EU membership that disappointed him the most. ‘I am not happy with the current situation. In the first five years [of the AKP’s rule], all of us embraced the people, the different and we focused on the future. We did this. The soft power is the democracy. It is the separation of power. The transparency. The accountability. We proved this. If devoted politicians prove that they are on this line, it would be a wonderful gift to world peace,’ Gül told me.

  ‘We became the model for many surrounding countries. We became a source of inspiration. We were trying to be good Muslims but at the same time we were democratic. These were the soft policies. It created influence in our neighbourhood. I have always defended soft power … In my last years of presidency I was telling our friends in Europe that they should not block our progress [to join the European Union], that they should help us complete the negotiation process. I asked why they were opposed to all these things. I asked to finish the process, and maybe Turkey will be like Norway in the end. Maybe we would not be a full member [but] what is important is to reach that level and to adopt those [European] standards … We are in a very different position now [regarding] the EU, foreign affairs, the region.’

  The void left by men like Abdullah Gül, Ahmet Davutoğlu and Bülent Arinc as they have drifted from the party or been shunted aside has been filled with ultra-loyalists, sycophants and yes men. Several ministers stayed in their posts following the election, but Erdoğan’s appointment of his son-in-law Berat Albayrak to the treasury, his childhood friend Mustafa Varank to the industry and technology ministry, and Hulusi Akar, the army chief who stayed loyal on the night of the coup, to the defence ministry, showed he has little concern for diversity of opinion in his cabinet. Gone is the man who was once willing to learn, to hear outside voices and listen to criticism.

  ‘Read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch: the classic closing-in and narrowing of a circle of advisers around a … highly successful leadership personality,’ said one diplomat based in Turkey at the time it all fell apart
. ‘One by one, founding members of the AKP were purged or simply fell away.’

  The guest list for the official celebration of Erdoğan’s inauguration in July 2018 is a good place to start if you are searching for hints of where the country might stand in the world in the years to come. His win met with a lukewarm reception from Western countries. Monitors from the OSCE observed that the vote was ‘free but not fair’; although they had not witnessed any significant tampering with the ballots, the skewing of media coverage in Erdoğan’s favour during campaigning had left the opposition at a crushing disadvantage. His early victory call squashed any debate about the results or the fairness. Once the crowds were on the streets it was all over.

  No one from Washington or London flew in to sit among the crowd in the gardens of Aksaray, his presidential palace, though both had offered congratulations on his win. The only heads of state from the European Union were Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Bulgaria’s Rumen Radev – both of whom face charges of undermining the bloc’s democratic norms. Brussels sent its representative for migration, clearly keen to keep the refugee deal on track. Silvio Berlusconi, the corrupt and frisky former Italian prime minister was there, as was Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro, a fan of both Erdoğan and Turkey’s neo-Ottoman TV series. North Cyprus, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Sudan, Pakistan, Equatorial Guinea, Somalia, Qatar, Kuwait … all were represented as Erdoğan did a slow walk of honour through the crowd with Emine, to applause and the boom of cannon fire.

  It didn’t take Erdoğan long to start exercising his new powers. He had announced the cabinet within six hours of being sworn in. By the next morning he had issued his first presidential decree, appointing Hulusi Akar as the new head of the armed forces and changing the chain of command. The military’s higher appointments council, once a group of generals who decided who would fill the top positions, was abolished. Now, the commanders of the navy, air force and army are all under the direct command of the president, and all officers down to the level of colonel are appointed by him.

  Meanwhile, Erdoğan’s crackdown widened. The day after the election, the nationalist leader Devlet Bahçeli, whose party went into the parliamentary polls in alliance with the AKP, took out full-page adverts in two national newspapers, listing the names of seventy journalists who had criticised or mocked him and using the headline: A THANK-YOU MESSAGE. Bahçeli’s MHP had looked set to be the election’s big losers, with everyone expecting them to haemorrhage their vote to Meral Akşener’s rival-nationalist Iyi Party. Bahçeli had barely even campaigned – but the MHP increased its share of the vote, taking 11 per cent. It is now the kingmaker in the parliament – Erdoğan’s AKP needs the support of Bahçeli’s nationalists in order to keep its majority of seats. That means that any hopes for a new Kurdish peace process have died – and that Bahçeli now wields a dark new kind of power. Erdoğan did not grant him any formal cabinet position, and the newspaper stunt may look petulant. But the MHP preserves strong ties with the underworld, right-wing mob bosses who were only too happy to wipe out troublesome journalists and other opponents back in the 1990s and would not hesitate to do so again. ‘It’s as good as a target on their backs,’ an outraged contact told me.

  The day before Erdoğan is officially sworn in comes the largest single round-up of suspected Gülenists, almost two years on from the coup attempt. Eighteen thousand people, including soldiers, policemen and judges, are either sacked or arrested. The website of the Official Gazette crashes as Turks rush to check whether their names are on the list. The number of those dismissed now tops more than 180,000. The judiciary has lost more than a third of its manpower since the purge began – and under the new system, the top judges will be appointed jointly by Erdoğan and by the parliament that Erdoğan controls. The state of emergency has been lifted – almost two years to the day since it was first brought in – but that will make little difference now that Erdoğan has hollowed out the state and filled it with his loyalists, and rules by presidential decree anyway. Amendments to the anti-terror laws pushed through just before emergency rule ended allow the police to detain suspects without charge, for up to twelve days in some cases. Local governors, directly appointed by the government, can continue to restrict access to public areas on security grounds, and demonstrations can be banned on an even broader set of pretexts than under the emergency law.

  Meanwhile, the foreign press corps is informed that the agency that issues our press cards – our tickets to stay in the country – is to be taken under the direct control of the presidency. Separately I receive a message from my oldest contact within the government.

  ‘I am afraid we are no longer cooperating with you, Hannah,’ it reads. ‘People are unhappy.’

  Immortal Atatürk

  My train journey had really been a means to an end – the very end of Turkey, and an event a friend and I had been vowing to see since we first heard of it years before. Bradley, a British photographer, was one of the first people I met in Turkey. Like me, he had lived in Antakya during the early stages of the Syrian war, covered the conflict, and then moved up to Istanbul at the same time as I did – when the odds of survival for Western journalists in Syria started lengthening. Over six years we had lived, travelled and worked together, and talked endlessly about whether it might be better to leave Turkey for an easier place. Like him, I always thought of what it might be like to live in another city, where I didn’t have to hustle through hordes on the pavements or swear at people to get jobs done. But then I would catch one of the perfect sunsets over the Bosphorus, or a busker’s melancholic tune on the ferry will hit exactly the right note for my mood, and would realise that I could never leave this place without leaving a huge chunk of my heart behind.

  We arrived in the city of Kars, 620 miles east of Ankara, late on a Saturday night. It looked more like a post-Soviet town than one in Turkey, full of dark grey stone buildings and odd statues – and free of the huge posters hung by the loquaciously ambitious local mayors celebrating Erdoğan’s election victory back in Istanbul and Ankara. The next morning, we found a driver to take us the final sixty-five miles to Damal.

  The tiny town sits in huge folds of grasslands next to the Georgian border. In the last days of spring the velvet green was daubed in purple and white wildflowers, and the rippling grasses caught the sunlight in gentle waves. Our driver, Ali, was determined that we do a language swap on the hour-and-a-half journey along the smooth, newly built road, so we pointed to the things we passed and shouted out their names, like toddlers.

  ‘I˙nek!’ Ali cried.

  ‘Cow!’ we screamed back.

  In my imperfect Turkish I tried to explain to Ali what I love about his country – still, despite everything. ‘It’s so different, everywhere you go,’ I told him. ‘Every province, every town there is something different.’

  ‘No!’ he batted back. ‘Turks are one. After the coup we all came together, you saw!’

  I explained that I was talking about the geography, not the people – the dusty deserts of the southern borders, the seaside party-towns of the western coasts, the luscious mountains of the Black Sea, the pounding metropolis of Istanbul … I wanted to tell him too that he was wrong, the people are also different. Erdoğan had once recognised that, with his old brand of neo-Ottoman pluralism. His nationalist-tinged rebrand had now put paid to that – and six years in this country had taught me when it was best to keep my mouth shut.

  We stopped in a village to ask our way up to the viewing point. Everyone knew which way we should go. We followed their fingers up a winding track and there we found it – a small children’s playground, a couple of shaded seating areas, and rows of benches laid out down the natural slope of the hill. At the top there was a concrete shelter like a bus stop, covered in Atatürk-themed graffiti.

  Three young men sat chatting and smoking in one of the seating areas. In the other, three generations of one family – a tiny girl sucking on a carton of juice, flanked by her father and a well-preserved old lady with b
leached-blonde hair, leopard-print trousers and a gold necklace in the shape of Atatürk’s signature.

  We looked across at the mountain opposite, and the shadows that were beginning to creep across it. Bradley thought he could see the shape of two eyes and a nose appearing. I squinted to make it out.

  ‘No, not yet,’ the woman, whose name was Nesilhan Akcan, told us. ‘Fifteen minutes more, and you’ll see him.’

  It turned out that Nesilhan was the best person to ask, because it was her brother, Adıgüzel Kırmızıgül, who had first seen the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk appearing in the shadows on the mountain. ‘He came home and told us, and we all thought he was crazy!’ she said, laughing to show the two gold caps on her front canines. ‘But then we came and saw it for ourselves.’

  It was 1954, sixteen years after Atatürk’s death and when Turkey was in the full throes of Adnan Menderes’s reforms. The shadow, a perfect replica of that famous profile, is cast when the sun sets just right over the plains. Fleeting and impermanent, it appears for only half an hour each evening for one month of the year. Slowly the news of it spread and in 1975 the Turkish army sent a photographer to capture the image. The nearest hamlet renamed itself Atatürkköy (Atatürk Village). And, eventually, the local council built the viewing platform and pilgrims started thronging to watch the spectacle.

  A wedding party arrived as the sun started its descent, the bride holding up huge layers of satin and tulle as she picked her way through the benches. Then some families pulled up in their cars, and a gendarmerie patrol, too. Food hawkers turned up with ready-bagged popcorn and a portable kettle, and started boiling up strong tea.

  The shadow was taking shape, stretching from right to left in a series of curves that sharpened before my eyes. The wedding band, a clarinet player and drummer, began belting out Balkan music and the guests arranged themselves into a circle. More people arrived and the benches filled up. One young couple had dressed their tiny sons in miniature soldiers’ outfits. And with the huge shadow face watching over them all, the wedding group started to dance.