Yet Erdogan is the master of all he surveys
While the Egyptian experiment in political Islam floundered in the very first year of the Freedom and Justice Party’s assumption of power, the one in Turkey began with a greater promise and has continued for over a decade to attract the attention of the world. Despite the contribution of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to the Turkish society being historic, some of its intrinsic failures are now beginning to become manifest. Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s brand of moderate Islamist politics is fast turning into Turkey’s bane.
Coming to power in 2003 Erdogan promised to turn a nation used to unstable coalition governments into one with a stable system. It was quite a challenging task to confront Turkey’s once all-powerful generals, end the civil and military bureaucratic stranglehold over the political process, and turn the country from a stagnant backwater to an economic dynamo with global ambitions.
Under Erdogan the GDP has continued to rise year. In 2010, it witnessed 8.9 percent expansion as Turkey bounced back from the global financial crisis and incomes tripled within a decade. The size of the economic expansion surpassed all previous records since the founding of the republic in 1923. The economic boom brought widespread popularity for the AKP. Now, what is fast corroding the party’s influence is Erdogan’s passion for absolute power, a trend that characterises Islamist parties and their leaders.
The Turkish Judiciary, which has traditionally been under the government’s thumb, was Erdogan’s first victim. The task was made easy as the Turkish judicial system was already dependent on the executive. The courts had no financial autonomy. The judges’ postings and transfers were under government’s control. Now if a judge is appointed to a less attractive place, he cannot help thinking whether any of his judgments may have ruffled some powerful feathers.
Emine Ülker Tarhan, who resigned as a judge from the Court of Appeals in Ankara, says judges are harassed under Erdogan. “Compliant judges appointed by the justice minister can freely go about their business,” she says. “But judges and prosecutors who are critical of the government are still being routinely wiretapped whenever the justice ministry feels it necessary.”
The European Court of Human Rights’ Turkish judge Işıl Karakaş maintains that judges in her country wear political glasses. They consider it is their fundamental job to ‘protect the state’. Thus judges and prosecutors feel less committed to the rights of the individual than to the protection of the state. This explains why styling the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan as “Mr Öcalan” was seen as a crime on the grounds that it was “praising the criminal,” in several cases in Turkey.
The judiciary can maintain that it has never deviated from a consistent line of thinking. In the past, the Turkish judges leaned on the devout, conservative and Islamist Turks in the name of fidelity to the dominant state ideology that was Kemalism. Today the same judges dispense heavy handed treatment to the Kemalists in the name of siding with the dominant state ideology that is Islamism.
The courts take decisions in line with government policies. This has encouraged Erdoğan to file several libel cases against critics on the ground that they were insulting him. Cartoonists who made Erdogan their target have been hailed with libel suits.
The liberty givenmohtasib and the mullah centuries back is no more available to the artist in present day Turkey. Last year renowned Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say was convicted of blasphemy and inciting hatred over a series of comments he made on Twitter, including one that comprised a quote from Khayyam.
Along with the judiciary, the axe has also fallen on the media.
More journalists are in the prisons of Turkey today than anywhere else in the world. The Turkish Journalists’ Union says 63 journalists are still behind the bars while more than 120 have been released pending trial. Since the Gezi Park protests, the biggest challenge to the AKP government so far, at least 75 journalists have been fired or made to resign, says the Turkish Journalists’ Union. Earlier this month 22 journalists were given sentences ranging from six years to life imprisonment in the Ergenekon case, alongside senior military officers, politicians and academics convicted of plotting a coup against the government.
The government’s softer tactics to muzzle the media include “whispering” to media bosses or editors, making complaints about certain headlines and boycotting newspapers which fail to meet specific demands. The more sinister methods include threats to put media houses on negative list. All major media groups in Turkey are now part of larger corporations with interests ranging from banking to the hospitality sector. As decisions to award big contracts are taken by Erdogan himself, the media owners know of the consequences of dissent.
This ensures self-imposed censorship by the media management. In the words of Can Dundar, one of the most well known media figures in Turkey, “I suppose they will continue the suppression until all the papers in Turkey come out with the same headlines, until all the columns write about the same things. We’re almost there.” As the protests at Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park were brutally crushed on May 31 by police, the Turkish mainstream TV stations, including MSNBC affiliated NTV and CNN Turk, failed to cover the initial protests.
Erdogan government is an enemy of the internet as it has already banned more than 15,000 websites, including the personal website of the widely known British scientist Richard Dawkins.
Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies also express themselves in his peculiar concept of security. The prime minister believes that Turkey’s security is synonymous with the AKP government. During the last elections he said he wanted 367 seats out of a total of 550 to be able to change the constitution alone without recourse to a referendum – or at least 330 with a referendum. He got less than 330. He said, he would knock at other party’s doors and he would be happy to work with them. But knocking at the others’ door while still insisting that they accept what he had in his mind is hardly the best way to create consensus.
What one sees in Turkey is the control of the entire institutional structure by the ruling party leading to division and polarisation in the country. As a Turkish journalist has put it, “The Turkey of 2013 is the short-cut proof that a country where the elected have absolute control over the appointed, including the men in uniform, is not necessarily a democracy”
The absence of consensus is affecting the economy also and growth levels are coming down. The institutional structures have failed to keep up pace with the growth through a process of building social consensus. Economy cannot continue to flourish in a society which is becoming increasingly polarised.
Breaking the grip of the AKP government remains a hard task. Erdogan is still the country’s most popular politician with three election victories under his belt. But the popularity of the AKP is gradually on decline. Some of the old sources of support are drying up. These include the Gulen movement which played a significant role in AKP’s success. There is also a greater resentment among sections of the population against authoritarian politics as witnessed during the Gezi Park protests.
The Republican People’s Party (CHP) which constitutes the major opposition has yet to get rid of the doctrinaire Kemalist deadwood in its ranks to emerge as a genuinely secular, inclusive and popular democratic party. The opposition in the Grand National Assembly is weak and fractured. Yet the local government elections due early next year would however pose a challenge to the AKP. It remains to be seen if they can throw up a new leadership. After all Erdogan too was the product of the 1994 local elections in Istanbul.
The writer is a political analyst and a former academic.
