by Suzy Hansen
I had not made the connection between such products and imperialism when I visited a small museum in Istanbul near my house called the Museum of Innocence. The novelist Orhan Pamuk had famously built the museum—in one of the remaining wooden houses in old Beyoğlu, down the street from where I now live—as a memorial to his novel of the same name. In essence, it was a fictional museum; on each floor, meticulously constructed dioramas portrayed the many scenes in the novel, which was as much about obsessive love as it was about the 1970s, the years before Turkey, too, opened itself up to Western markets. Pamuk’s museum, a museum of old Turkey, is a paean to the old Turkish products—the Turkish wine, the Turkish fruit soda, the Turkish cologne—before the market was subsumed by Western ones. An American oblivious to this notion of national sovereignty could not have known how the arrival of Colgate would eventually disturb the Turkish or Egyptian people. Ibrahim’s The Committee includes a long, satirical tirade against the tyranny of Coca-Cola: “While the words used for God and love and happiness vary from one country to another and from one language to another, Coca-Cola means the same thing in all places and all tongues.”
In Ibrahim’s novels, corporations like Coca-Cola are regarded with almost the same anguish as an insolent army, and I could see a deep nostalgia in Pamuk’s museum, with its little bottles of Turkish shaving cream and, of course, the locally produced Samsun cigarette packs that preceded the Parliaments I smoked while speaking in Soma to a group of former tobacco farmers. The Egyptian activist who told me wistfully in 2007 that the Turks built their Metro themselves had been referring, in part, to the Egyptians’ even more devastating period of Al-Infitah, as had been so many Egyptians I met in 2011 and 2012. But in those years, Egypt’s Mediterranean neighbor to the north was also trying to hold on to its dignity. In Turkey, the 1970s were the last years of political alternatives, before the country settled on a direction from which it never turned back.
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IN 2014, VASIF KORTUN, the founder of the art space Salt, told me that he was saddened and fascinated to rediscover speeches by one of Turkey’s leaders during the 1970s, Bülent Ecevit. “We have completely lost this history,” Kortun said. “We have no memory of it.”
Kortun looked melancholy, largely because of the disappointment that had set in over the authoritarian and religious conservative tendencies of Tayyip Erdoğan. I looked up Ecevit’s speeches and discovered one from 1974, after he announced his decision to continue poppy production in Turkey against the wishes of the United States. “Our nationalism is not just inscribed on street walls,” Ecevit cried into the crowd. “Our nationalism is inscribed on the soil of Cyprus, the seabeds of the Aegean, and the poppy farms of western Anatolia.” His last clause was a response to American pressure to halt poppy production, which sustained the lives of thousands of Turkish farmers, because too much heroin was flowing into New York City.
The anti-American fury of the 1960s had temporarily ended in 1971 with another military coup, for which many Turkish leftists suspect the involvement of American spies. The coup did little to quell the fractiousness of the nation. Instead, Turkish nationalism, my old obsession, mutated even more into a nationalism of self-protection, which split between two general political spheres. One was Ecevit’s leftist nationalism. The other resembled the anti-imperialist Islamist nationalism of the Muslim Brotherhood. In 1969, Necmettin Erbakan, who would someday be mentor to a young man named Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had founded the Islamist movement called Milli Görüş, or national view, which counseled Turks against accommodating the West, urged a closer relationship with the Muslim world, and advocated for a more Islamic society. Turkey would split between these left and right spheres even more violently in the 1970s.
On the leftist side were Maoists, Communists, Leninists, Socialists, trade unionists, students, and social democrats, many of whom shared the sympathies of Ecevit. The pro-American trade union Türk-İş split in two, and a radical new union emerged, DİSK, which was anti-American and Marxist. The influence of these godless trade unionists prompted a harsher response from the right—including from Islamists, right-wingers, nationalists, the Gray Wolves and, often, members of the Turkish army. They were known in leftist parlance as the “Fascists.” It was unclear who exactly was behind this civil war. Both sides believed that the other was being used by one of the two Cold War powers: the left by the Soviets and the right by the United States.
The spiral of violence continued throughout the decade. On May 1, 1977, unknown snipers fired into a crowd celebrating Labor Day in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, killing some forty people and injuring hundreds. In the Anatolian city of Kahramanmaraş, in a single week in December 1978, a movie theater was bombed, left-wing assassins hit a coffee shop frequented by right-wingers, two teachers were murdered, and another’s home was bombed. More than one hundred Alevi citizens, many of them leftists, were eventually killed in a right-wing pogrom. The journalist Mehmet Ali Birand compared the atmosphere to 1920s Chicago’s, gang-style violence, a daily cycle of attacks and retribution. Prime Minister Ecevit began questioning whether the United States’ “stay-behind organizations” were responsible for some of the carnage. He discovered that these extrajudicial groups had been established in the covert operations section of a 1959 bilateral treaty with the United States, as a way of mobilizing secret fighters in the event of a Soviet invasion. These groups were suspected of being part of what would become known as the “Deep State.”
While Turkey’s towns and cities were being wrecked by fighting, Ecevit contended with global pressures, mainly an arms embargo by the Americans for invading Cyprus, and an IMF credit squeeze during an economic period in which breadlines were common. But during that miserable year of 1979, Turkey became even more important to the Americans. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. The rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran had further imperiled America’s interests in the region. Inside NATO meetings, American generals began to complain to their Turkish counterparts about the chaos in their country: When will it end? When will you do something? The Turkish army had pulled off two military coups before, they knew what NATO was saying. When the Turkish expert at the National Security Council Paul Henze said to a Turkish general, “I hope that you will not allow things to get out of hand in Turkey,” the Turkish general replied, “Merak etmeyin” (Don’t worry).
The military coup in Turkey on September 12, 1980, was a trauma from which the country never recovered. Fifty people were hanged, three hundred died in custody, and five hundred thousand were imprisoned, many of them artists and intellectuals. “Should we not hang them?” General Evren asked crowds at public rallies. “Should we go on feeding them?” Turkey became known for its torture techniques, the most notorious of which were falaka, or the beating of the bottoms of feet, and the act of forcing prisoners to eat their own excrement. “The policy was not necessarily to kill you in jail,” said one former prisoner, the painter Orhan Taylan. “They would abuse you to the point of death, then release you so you would die soon on the outside.” Thousands more lost their jobs, often university professors and journalists, and countless leftists and rightists, accused of militancy, fled the country. DİSK, the radical labor union that would descend on Soma in the wake of the mine accident, was shut down, while Türk-İş, the one to which the miners would belong, remained open, albeit with severely limited bargaining power. The day of the military coup, in the White House Situation Room, an officer had made a call to Paul Henze: “Your boys have finally done it!”
Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan’s secretary of defense, said later, “We admire the way in which order and law have been restored in Turkey,” and the United States quadrupled its aid to the military government. Some Americans and Europeans pushed for the inclusion in the new government of a man named Turgut Özal, who would go on to become Turkey’s prime minister in the 1980s. The West, and especially the IMF, admired Özal for one reason: he pledged to bring capitalism to Turkey, just as Sadat had done in Egy
pt. Turkey soon passed sweeping IMF-mandated reforms to open the country up to foreign markets.
Military coups and economic intervention abroad had profound effects on the generations that experienced them, including their growing suspicion that they were not in control of their own lives. In 1972, a year before he was killed in an American-backed military coup, the Chilean president Salvador Allende spoke at the UN about “serious aggression” from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and USAID, against the state companies of Chile—an array of forces “more subtle, more cunning and terrifyingly effective in preventing us from exercising our rights as a sovereign state,” he said. “The entire political structure of the world is being undermined.” The news video of the coup attack on Allende’s palace is worth watching, as I suspect that many Americans sometimes think that such military coups are pulled off in some gentlemanly fashion, if only to later maintain plausible deniability. During the attack, the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace on a city street almost as dense as in New York. It would be as if someone fired on the New York Public Library.
A military coup, as much as a war, is a horror. Imagine a military coup in the United States staged by China or Russia or Iran. Imagine the imposition of political and cultural ideas completely antithetical to your own. Imagine the outrage, and the paranoia one might have, forever suspecting that some incalculably arrogant force might come and upend your life forever. Imagine this as an American, for whom the definition of one’s identity is to be forever impervious to such an unimaginable fate. I met many people over my time in Turkey for whom the 1980 coup was the most formative experience in their lives. A taxi driver once held up his hands to show me where the military regime had tortured him so badly that he lost half a finger. For the young people of my generation, there were less visible scars. In 2016, the Turkish writer Kaya Genç, who is my age, recalled the years after the coup:
We lived in a country totally isolated from the world. We lived in a continuous present—talking about history was dangerous, historians were despised. A repressive nationalism demanded from people to repress their individuality, religious and ethnic identity. The modernist coup was a big project to cleanse public life from “dirty” things like identity, individualism, religious beliefs, expressions of sexuality. With my family I used to travel to London and feel surprised about how, despite being a constitutional monarchy, Britain was a much freer society: they were okay with having a history, veiled women on the street, punks protesting the state, conservatives and leftists in the parliament, etc. Back in Istanbul, it was all clean and military-like and soulless and dead. The coup made us all self-repressors.
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THOSE WHO DID NOT self-repress barricaded themselves against the Turkish state in other ways. The true-blue leftists I had met over the years in Turkey—the young Communists throwing rocks at May Day parades, the Kurdish intellectuals who merely wanted to preserve their independence, the members of the labor union DİSK who still sounded like they lived in the 1960s—were frozen in time at the point where they had been cut off by the 1980 coup. Entire neighborhoods of Istanbul existed in this parallel universe, still holding on to not only their leftist values but a part of their history. This rebellious leftism eventually, for some, became focused on ethnic identity. The long-oppressed Kurds, the ones who rebelled against Atatürk’s daughter Sabiha Gökçen, who could not legally speak their language or watch Kurdish television shows, and who suffered from discrimination in the workplace, on the street, and in school, began agitating for independence. Many Kurds joined a militant group called the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. When I moved to Istanbul, in 2007, most of the Kurds I met had a family member who had, as they said, “gone to the mountains,” to join the PKK and fight the Turkish state.
One of the Kurdish neighborhoods in Istanbul was called Okmeydanı, which I began visiting in 2013. Okmeydanı had once been a gecekondu area, made up of homes illegally “built overnight,” some of which still had little yards, as if in the countryside. Other buildings sagged from neglect, and most had been decorated with leftist graffiti, the names of martyrs painted and stenciled across storefront facades. One evening, boys giggled on street corners in the poor street lighting, like on some film noir set, and a lingering fog hung in the air. It was actually tear gas: every week—seemingly every day—the people of Okmeydanı clashed with the police. Originally many of the migrants who came to Okmeydanı were left-wing Alevis from the east, who traditionally had opposed right-wing Sunni Turks like Erdoğan. In the 1990s the Kurds fleeing the military’s war against them arrived, and Okmeydanı took on the character of resistance. “Thugs” or “Fascists” didn’t dare come to Okmeydanı, just as they didn’t go to Gazi Mahallesi, or Sultangazi, because they knew that the Kurds who lived there would fight them. In Okmeydanı, residents who suspected an imminent attack by Fascists—or the police—sometimes openly policed the neighborhood with guns. As the war against the Kurds began again in 2015, the police intensified its daily harassment of Okmeydanı.
“The armored police vans have been circling, peering inside shop windows, which is a provocation,” one storekeeper told me. No one in Okmeydanı wanted me to use his name. “There is a lot of rage waiting to explode.”
The Kurds had even begun to look elsewhere for true independence from their Turkish overlords. Kurds from Syria, allied with those in Turkey, began to form an independent state in a Syrian region called Rojava, which was even attracting leftist intellectuals from my friend Caner’s university and beyond. I met one man in Okmeydanı who had lost his son in Syria. He had been fighting against ISIS for the PKK. “The Kurdish youth knowingly go to death—they stand in front of the tanks,” the father said. “It’s a very brave fight and I’m proud of it.” He looked at me with tenderness and some pity, knowing that Americans couldn’t understand why the Kurdish people are willing to die for such beliefs.
I left his house that evening with Caner, and a group of Turkish and Syrian Kurds who lived nearby.
“I can’t speak Kurdish—you know why?” said one, laughing. “This animal country. They would lock me up in a room if I spoke Kurdish.”
“Why doesn’t America help the Kurds build a state?” one asked me, the American. “There are thirty million Kurds.”
“They don’t. No one does!” said another.
“They only help the Kurds when the Kurds help them,” I said.
Silence.
“Kurds always help them!” Caner said.
“I know, they always claim to love the Kurds, but they don’t ever really help them,” I said. “Now because of Erdoğan … they love him. I mean, they don’t love him, they hate him, but they need him.”
“It has always been like that,” he replied. “The United States prefers the large states more than the people without power.”
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IN SOME WAYS, military coups were no more violent during the 1970s and 1980s than economic intervention—especially in Egypt, where, by the time of the invasion of Iraq, the period of forced political and economic submission had become unbearable. Under Hosni Mubarak, American-style neoliberalism meant that “the collective well-being of the nation is depicted only in terms of how it is adjusted to the discipline of monetary and fiscal balance sheets,” as the academic Timothy Mitchell writes. Through its myriad aid agencies and NGOs, America administered an insidious form of empire. But why hadn’t the Turks or the Egyptians ever said no to the United States? “Simply because we are forced to say yes,” writes the Egyptian economist Galal Amin. “Coercion is not exercised directly by the hand of the colonizer but at the hand of his local agents.” Thus the schemes of modernization theory through right-wing dictatorships that had been drawn up at the most esteemed educational institutions in America had succeeded in vanquishing human will. When Egyptians protested the invasion of Iraq of 2003, the Mubaraks threw them in jail and tortured them on America’s behalf.
Americans tend to believe the Musli
m hatred for the West is irrational. “Since the rejection of the West is existential, the argument goes, Western nations can do little to appease Arab and Muslim wrath,” the historian Salim Yaqub writes. But the problem with the theory of the clash of civilizations is that it dismisses grievances against the West that are completely genuine: its blind support for Israel, its propping up of dictators, its brutal economic policies, and its stunning carelessness with Arab lives. “Bin Laden rejected the secular, liberal language of universal human rights and international law,” Makdisi writes, because “they had done nothing to protect Muslims around the world.” The Americans have over the course of sixty years made the Arabs feel as if they could be broken. By 2013, a military dictator was back in power in Egypt. The Egyptian-American journalist Mohamed Soltan, who was sent to jail under this new regime, later spoke of his experience in the notorious Egyptian jails. “The one thing that everybody in the prison had in common—the ISIS guys, the Muslim Brotherhood guys, the liberals, the guards, the officers,” he said, “is that they all hated America.”
The Iraqi man I met in Istanbul in 2012 said to me, “Your country had so much to do with what Iraq was like in the eighties and nineties. We know so much about you. And you don’t know anything about my country at all.” There had not been even a hint of accusation in his voice, though I couldn’t know his true feelings. He sounded as if this particular difference between Iraqis and Americans was but one in a constellation of millions. To me, it was like a burst of wind, that old revolutionary shock, and then the customary slamming of mental doors; the force of what he said brought to life, once again, my resilient and cowardly American reflexes: Why would Americans know anything about life in Iraq? I thought. I still had no control over those reflexes. What I meant was: why would it be necessary, why would they bother, you are just one country of many. This was it, this was the gulf, this was the distance between us. This imbalance of power between people and nations was violent even in the absence of violence.
