The Atlantic and Its Enemies

by Norman Stone

  Matters worsened up to the summer of 1972, as, even on official figures, the cost of living rose 163 per cent. The government tried to control prices (through a Cuban in the Directorate of Industry) but hardly knew what it was doing: the lorry drivers, on whom Chile, a very ‘long’ country, depended, went on strike, and the queues lengthened. ‘Planning’ had been reinforced, and what it entailed was the taking on of more and more labour for concerns that were unsuccessful: ‘floods of red ink on the books of nationalized firms,’ said the American ambassador (himself not at all anxious for any kind of American intervention: he did not do his career any good). Investment fell off, as people bought black-market dollars or went abroad. One outcome of the land reform was predictable: harvests dropped by one quarter in 1973. Trade union elections were ‘rigged’, so that ordinary workers’ behaviour could be dictated, despite their own wishes, from the radical Left, and such ‘rigging’ became easy enough because so many workers were standing in queues or otherwise making ends meet: apathy, the abstention of the voters, generally does occur on a great scale in the course of a ‘revolutionary situation’. Even in the great October of 1917, in elections for the trade unions, most people did not bother to vote, because they were tired, bored and bewildered. The Bolsheviks got their majority at last.

  At the turn of 1972-3 there was a long-standing row over the free press, much of which was of course bitterly critical. A great newspaper concern was squeezed by the government, with taxes and extra rules, and it was threatened with bankruptcy and expropriation — an obvious way of preventing opposition media from operating at all. In the University of Chile there was a long battle between the Christian Democrat Rector and a Marxist governing board. The Left seized the television station for eight months, and was able to defy court orders; there was a clique of journalists at the government’s bidding, and the print or delivery unions were used to muzzle the right-wing Mercurio. There were restrictions on travel, though many of the better-off and mobile had already left, foreseeing the worst. In the summer of 1972 Allende was making no effort to control the MIR in the universities, perhaps hoping to provoke the Right into a premature uprising. On top of everything else, and despite promises made to the Christian Democrats, a law for ‘Unified National Education’, which would affect the private schools, was to be pushed through at the turn of 1972-3. But Allende had gone too far.

  He now faced challenges. His actions were undertaken by executive authority, and he was regularly condemned in the parliament; the majority against him was just short of the two thirds needed to overturn his presidential veto, and the constitutional court became involved (though it shrank, as yet, from conflict). The Christian Democrats joined up with the Right, to face elections in March 1973, and, with claims of electoral corruption and fraud, took over half of the vote. As small shopkeepers went on strike, the government attempted to take over the also striking lorry drivers, and met its match: nails welded together as tyre-bursting devices, lorries hidden in forests, or banded together in such great numbers as to require regular siege. Perhaps, if the Chilean Left had been adequately led, it would have staged its revolution: after all, no Communist worth his salt would have bothered about hostile parliamentary majorities. Armed peasant squatters and shanty towns would have been ‘Red Guards’, there would have been a terroristic secret police, Communists would have penetrated the army and elections would have been ‘rigged’ with ballot boxes ‘stuffed’ with fake votes — the story of any Communist takeover in peacetime. These things did indeed happen, but on a small scale, and the Left seems to have succumbed to infantilism — supposing that it was destroying the economic base of imperialism, whereas the reality was just play-acting. True, Jacques Chonchol, the agriculture minister, romantically pursued his land reforms, and a Communist ideologue, Volodia Teitelboim, stirred up the shanty towns; the interior minister, Carlos Prats, went with Allende to Moscow in November 1972, and workers themselves struck against the lorry drivers’ strikes, but none of this amounted to a serious attempt to take power in the Communist manner: indeed, when a mass demonstration was staged against ‘Fascism’, Prats shrieked from his podium, ‘If you are against Fascism, jump!’ A hundred thousand people then jumped. The Soviet ambassador, standing next to his American colleague, remarked that there were more effective ways of fighting Fascism. But if Allende could not seize power, he could at least create chaos, and that was Chile’s condition. He had printed money — more than a 100 per cent increase in 1970, 171 per cent in 1971, with a deficit of 40 per cent in 1972 and a 163 per cent increase in the cost of living. There was a small sign that the armed forces would intervene when a brief mutiny occurred, squashed by other elements in the military. Allende then mobilized some Red Guards, and alienated the military in general.

  But he was now being widely condemned. The government itself was beyond the law; the coup, though long drawn-out and ineffectual, was Allende’s, not the army’s. General Pinochet was acting quite constitutionally. In June 1973 an all-services committee of fifteen drew up contingency plans for a takeover, although they were not put into effect until 9 September. Some study was made of the little Soviets that the Left had established in the shanty towns; there were photographs of people to be arrested, and since the army could search for weapons, the soldiers had an opportunity for arrests. Allende himself would not opt for a revolutionary way forward — he did not ‘arm the workers’ — but he would also not act against the extreme Left, although even the Communists were uncomfortable with it. In the summer of 1973 matters went downhill — a 40 per cent devaluation, an attack by the government on Catholic schools, a collapse of export earnings, strikes by buses and even by doctors, and another strike by truck drivers, threatened by nationalization; there was a constant parliamentary crisis. Congress, the constitutional court and the controller-general (who oversaw the legality of administration) all condemned the government, which argued that, if all cabinet members signed a document opposing a decision of the court, then that must stand; whereupon the opposition introduced proceedings to impeach ministers, whose signatures would then not be valid. In the end, there were rumours of a mutiny in the navy at Valparaíso, instigated by the revolutionary-minded Altamira. In another attempt to placate the military, Allende agreed to the removal of his own general, Prats, and his place was taken by Augusto Pinochet. That day — 22 August — the Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution declaring that Allende was outside the law and the constitution.

  This had happened before in Chile, when a president, disavowed in 1891, had killed himself. Allende contributed a note of black farce, arguing that in the cold and rainy winter, there would be flour only for three days, and by the end of August the generals were in more or less constant session, confronting a situation of anarchy. The lorry drivers’ strike was into its second month. On 2 September airline pilots, dentists, chemists and the merchant marine struck. Women demonstrated again, banging saucepans, and were met by counter-demonstrating women and young men hurling rocks; on 6 September Allende made an extraordinary speech, indicating penury to come. By 9 September all of the senior figures in the armed forces had agreed on the plans for a takeover. The American ambassador was given an indication, and it is probable that the CIA were involved, though the Americans were in general quite prudent, having been caught out in the hopeless effort, three years earlier, to stop Allende.

  The coup itself came in the early hours of 11 September. It was easy enough: troops took over television, blocked the roads, imposed a curfew. Allende, in the presidential palace, had his guards, but there was not much that they could do against aircraft firing rockets into the building. In the event, the building on fire, he seems to have shot himself with a rifle that had been an elaborate present (his remains were examined in 1990 and suicide was confirmed). In all, perhaps 5,000 people were killed, and thousands went into exile. They were generally articulate, and mobile — Chonchol, who had been the supposed mastermind of agricultural reform, taught in a French university.
The conscience of post-Vietnam America was touched, and even in the twenty-first century, the name ‘Pinochet’ resounds; his family is harassed by courts. But the Chile which he took over was in a condition of collapse, and Allende had been condemned by any and every constitutional institution. Pinochet’s real crime was to show that the Left had had its day: the Moneda in Santiago was the Winter Palace of the Left.

  The ‘Pinochet solution’ — its example was to grow and grow — became a spectre, haunting the Communist world. This turned out to be in the sense of a ghost-face literally true. The Communist leader Luis Corvalán was exchanged for a Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, at an airport in Switzerland (oddly enough the American ambassador there, demoted for behaving correctly, had been ambassador in Chile at the time of the coup). Corvalán proposed to fight underground, and, to do so, had plastic surgery in Moscow, after which, with a false passport, he went back. His underground activities were unfruitful; in 1987 Pinochet, by then leader of a tolerably prosperous and ordered country, agreed to hold proper elections, which Corvalán wanted to contest. He had to be smuggled back out to Moscow for a reverse face change, to qualify for his old passport. The Eighteenth Brumaire did indeed repeat itself as farce, though black.

  It had an equivalent in Turkey, also in the context of a near civil war and of inflation, though in this case that of the second, doubling, oil price shock rather than the first, quadrupling, one. On 24 January 1980 the Guardian’s Turkish correspondent, David Barchard, arrived at the railway station in Ankara, from Istanbul. It was on that very day that the prime minister announced economic reforms along Pinochet-solution lines, courtesy of the International Monetary Fund. Ankara was an inviting theatre for these. His taxi could not go far up the hill to Çankaya, the modern part of town, where the diplomats and professional classes lived. The street lights had gone out, and he had to struggle with his luggage through the snow, all the way to the hotel. On most such nights, at the time, it was usual to hear gunfire. Turkey was experiencing an acute version of the general crisis of the later 1970s, and there was a grim surrealism to it all. This or that part of town was controlled by one or other of the warring political groupings, and in the preceding year roughly twenty people were being killed every day in the country at large. The Middle East Technical University had been set up, with American money, as a tribute to Turkey’s loyal membership of NATO, in the 1950s. It had excellent facilities, and a setting quite rare in the centre of the Anatolian plateau, because it was well-watered and wooded. The battling inside it was such that the American ambassador’s car was set on fire (curiously enough, he — Robert Komer — had been in charge of the ‘Phoenix’ programme in Vietnam) and policemen controlled the lecture halls, taking names. University authorities, brought up in the liberal tradition, wrung their hands in helpless lamentation; one, in Istanbul, was assassinated, with his daughter, in his car. In the capital, electricity stopped functioning except for six hours every day, and the town was dominated by a foul-smelling smog — product, mainly, of the cheap and low-quality coal, from mines on the Black Sea, which was all the fuel most people could afford. Little girls walked to ballet school with face masks. There were queues for elementary items — lavatory paper, olive oil and the like; you could be arrested for having a packet of foreign cigarettes, an offence against the tobacco monopoly. One scene in particular symbolized what had happened. Well-trained economists, statisticians, met in the ministry building to devise the next five-year plan, complete with complicated calculations about foreign trade, much of it bartering. The entire session proceeded by candlelight, and the bureaucrats wore their overcoats. Inflation, represented by grubby and crumpled notes that had passed fast through market hands, was at Chilean proportions, and the situation was comparable: another Brumaire. The generals took power on 12 September, seven years almost to the day after Pinochet. Here, too, something of an economic miracle followed; here, too, free elections were soon allowed; here, too, a good part of the educated population never forgave.

  There were of course obvious differences between Chile and Turkey: the one colonized, the other a colonizer, with a fivefold difference in population (though there are interesting points in common between Turkey and Spain). But the chief matter in common was America, and if Washington wanted to simplify things, then there were many points for comparison. Chile, until Allende, had been part of an American system. So was Turkey, and September 1980 shows remarkable similarities with the September 1973 that brought Pinochet to power. We can assume that the Turkish generals had examined the story of Pinochet. The choreography was similar. They are not likely to have read Eighteenth Brumaire; one of their complaints at the National Security Council was that Marx was given an import licence, at the expense of other, more pressing uses for paper.

  It was the end of a dream. For two generations, Turkey had counted as a model of successful Westernization, and crowning acts in that had been democracy, participation in the Korean War and membership of NATO — much of it a straightforward outcome of Stalin’s bullying. The country had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and a leader of genius, Kemal Atatürk, had established her independence. He went on with Westernization. In 1923, when Turkey was at last independent, she had a very poor infrastructure (railways, at that time, for Anatolia, the equivalent of a Moon landing) and under Atatürk there was an extension of elementary hygiene, given that the very capital, Ankara, was subject to malaria and the French embassy was the station buffet. Progress happened; 700 German professors, headed by Einstein (he did not stay for long, because he was expected to teach and did not want to), arrived when Hitler came to power; Istanbul saw for a time the best German university in the world; Turkish opera singers such as Leyla Gencer had their place in the repertoire; the ‘Fisherman of Halicarnassus’ became a vastly translated author; Galatasaray Lycée or Robert College in Istanbul, Ankara College in the capital — where Denis Hills taught, as a refugee from post-war England — produced graduates who could teach Western civilization to the multitudes. Ankara University, where Ernst Reuter, later the mayor of Berlin, taught Town Planning, had a School of Political Science (Mülkiye) that had its esprit de corps and laid down Westernizing models. It produced a good part of the foreign ministry, and the foreign ministry, after 1950, was anxious to co-operate with the Americans. They, for their part, recognized an ally, and encouraged it towards democracy and elections.

  These did not prove to be a simple matter. Turkey had been built on waves of refugees, from the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea, and they had brought with them the ‘nation-building’ techniques that they had had to learn in a very cruel way from the ‘Christian’ states that had taken over. You got rid of minorities; 7 million people had had to flee to Anatolia, and they made up half of the urban population of republican Turkey, with villages of their own dotted up and down the land. There was hardly a family that did not remember tales of disaster, and even the government quarter of old Istanbul had been swamped by these refugees in 1912. From the Balkans, the Turks had learned how a new nation was to be established. This was a business involving considerable artificiality — for Romania, even the name of the state was false, since the original ‘Romania’ had been the Latin kingdom of the Crusaders in Thrace; Bulgaria was cobbled together by American missionaries; in Greece the need to classicize run-of-the-mill but, for the peasants, unknown concepts was sometimes funny. In Turkey there was also a new national language, because the peasants needed to be made literate, and could not manage that under the existing Arabic script; words had to be invented (Ernst Reuter, who had been a prisoner of war in Kazakhstan, knew something about Turkic languages; he was put on the language reform commission within months of his arrival from Buchenwald concentration camp, and advised learnedly on the Uzbek word for this and that, designed to displace the Ottoman original). In economic matters, state boards were established to run this or that industry; people were arrested for selling the national currency w
ithout authorization; police and army were powerful; in Turkey the capital had even been moved away from sophisticated, historic and cosmopolitan Istanbul, to Ankara, in the bleak centre of the Anatolian plateau. There, you did not hear a mosque, and people of country dress were turned away if they appeared. The Western admirers of Atatürk did not really see this side of things, and he himself had a considerable sense of moderation, knowing when to stop. In his day, the Christian minorities were recognized as necessary, or even vital: they were Turkey’s passport to the West. When Hitler started his campaign against the Jews, Turkey’s doors were opened to (some of) them. Four and a half centuries before, the Jews of Iberia had been expelled by the crusading king. The Sultan had let them into his empire, and their descendants, many of them converts to Islam, contributed much to thirties Turkey, which was run with a sense of mission. Atatürk, who had saved his people from conquest and massacre, had enormous charisma, and now stands as a symbol of an old-fashioned Progress, of which Turkey’s neighbours are not exemplars. He died in 1938, and his successors suffered from excessive caution.

  Enlightenments eat their parents. The medical improvements, considerable in their own way — in Ankara, malaria had been a mass killer until the Republic, with its Çubuk reservoir and its devoted doctors — also resulted in a demographic explosion. This was worst in the partly Kurdish east, where polygamy, starting for a boy in his mid-teens, with a girl even younger who was soon ditched, was standard, though not legal. Then again, as France had discovered post-Napoleon, education creates an unappeasable intelligentsia; a Russian reactionary, Konstantin Leontiev, sagely said that, in Russia, ‘the tavern does less damage than the school’. The best products of the educational system, as with developing countries from the Third Republic or united Italy onwards, went into technical services and were very good indeed, but there were others, hanging discontentedly around the media or the educational institutions, and thinking that they knew it all. This was to be an enormous problem in the Turkish seventies, more or less as happened in Chile; and such men and women tended to look on the peasantry, trooping into the towns, as isomorphic magnitudes like a sack of potatoes. Migrant peasants occupied huge areas on the outskirts of the main cities, especially Istanbul. By law, they could not be evicted if they managed to put up a house during one night’s work. These ‘night constructions’ (gecekondu) formed rings round historic Istanbul and Ankara, a terrible affront to modernizing Turkey. Ankara had been planned by central European architects and their Turkish associates in the 1930s, and they had aimed higher than this.