The attempted Turkish coup d’état

Lessons

In last weekend’s attempted coup in Turkey there are valuable lessons for nations that take heed. Many eminent thinkers have painstakingly derived and presented those lessons: resilience of democracy, people standing up for their champion, power of public opinion, etc. While I realise that my own eminence is as yet merely imminent, I must say that I am not overly impressed with most of these analyses. That’s because, had the coup been successful, the same analysts would have attributed Erdogan’s great fall to his authoritarian, hard-handed, dictatorial policies. In my opinion, the real lessons to be learnt from the failed coup are as follows.

First of all, all self-respecting coup-plotters know that the time to strike is past the stroke of midnight. With prevailing urban lifestyles, the best hour is probably about two-thirty in the morning. Even the rookies that the Turkish coup-makers turned out to be can’t be excused for choosing 7:30 pm as zero-hour. Why, it’s the start of prime time for crying out loud! A country couldn’t be more wide-awake than at that hour. Any wonder then that the tanks weren’t where they should have been? Or that Erdogan eluded them? Or that the pro-president crowd thronged the streets in such numbers?

Secondly, it helps to know exactly who the coup is against, or exactly against whom the coup is (if you are an English purist). If it’s against the army chief, you capture him. If, on the other hand, it’s against the president, you get the president. If it’s against both, you get both – simultaneously. You definitely don’t alert the opposition by advertising the conspiracy far away from where the real action ought to be: in this case, the coastal resort where the president was holidaying. In fact, the whole botched up coup was a study in messed up prioritisation. It was exceedingly naïve to assume that it would be sufficient to arrest the army chief and to merely announce that Erdogan was president no more. Also, no coup plotter worth his salt would have ignored restraining the constitutional head of the government. Prime Minister Yildirim, while he plays second fiddle to Erdogan, is obviously no Mamnoon Hussain – a crucial distinction lost on the coup-plotters.

Thirdly, the coup-makers showed a marked lack of intent and decisiveness.  Being humane is an admirable quality, but it is hardly something an aspiring coup-maker would put on his curriculum vitae. Successful coups are executed by ruthless troops. From the many narrations of compassion displayed by the coup-makers it would appear that the temperaments of most of those deployed – soldiers and fighter pilots alike – were more suited to the fields of nursing and social work – an obvious career counseling failure.

Fourthly, if not restraining Erdogan was a blunder, allowing him to leisurely circle around in an airplane was downright stupid. Modern psychology tells us that there is a great likelihood, in these situations, of the sacked not seeing eye to eye with and the sacker in the matter of his sacking. With all the freedom at his disposal, it was hardly surprising that Erdogan got his supporters to resist the coup by taking to the streets. After appearing on Facetime and riling up a counter-coup, Erdogan probably took some selfies, updated his status, and still had enough time left for his favorite video.

Fifthly, the manner in which the TV stations were ‘neutralised’, especially the one where arguably the most attractive journalist of the country worked, wasn’t very clever on the part of the coup-makers. That’s because odds were that the president had her on speed-dial, no-doubt under a male alias. If handling TV stations proved to be such a tall order for the coup-makers, what chance they could successfully shut the internet down? Their intelligence as well as technical knowhow left much to be desired.

Sixthly, the cockiness of the coup-plotters leading to failure to take the task seriously was probably the best explanation for their sloppy planning and execution. In a similar situation, Gen. Zia-ul-Haq had famously shown the way by charmingly tempering his confidence with his characteristic humility. Up until the writing of these lines, there has been no report of the Turkish equivalent of ‘Marwaa na dena, Murshid’ or a similarly humble quote from the senior coup-makers.

Finally, the coup-makers were unprofessional even in surrender. A true soldier knows when to be belligerent, but he also recognises a lost cause when he sees one. The undeniably harmful effects of pent up anger notwithstanding, spraying bullets on random citizens after it was clear that the coup had failed wasn’t a very smart idea. The violent public beating that many of them received later was for the most part avoidable.