A state at war

A fierce battle is being waged for power and influence in Turkish politics with a seeming disregard for the voting public. David Lepeska makes sense of the daily drama.

A protester holds up a placard with pictures of the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, left, and the cleric Fethullah Gülen, reading ‘We will cast them down’, during a demonstration in Istanbul in December. AFP / Bulent Kilic
Powered by automated translation

The Turkish state has entered uncharted territory. In decades past, the upheaval of the past month would likely have prodded the military to step in to knock some heads together and hit the democratic reset button. But with many generals in jail, Turkey’s leaders have been forced to ride out this political cyclone, which has left even the most seasoned observers straining to describe the ­unprecedented turmoil.

“This is the most serious battle within the state ever,” says Mustafa Akyol, a columnist for Hürriyet Daily News and a New York Times contributor. “We’ve had political crises and military coups, certainly more violent episodes. But in terms of the unravelling of the state, this whole drama unspooling every day is just something we haven’t seen.”

Call it the Turkish Winter; this bitter season of political civil war marking the disintegration of the decade-long marriage of convenience between the country’s two great powers – the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has overseen Turkey’s re-emergence over the past dozen years, and the followers of the Pennsylvania-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, who are believed to control much of Turkey’s police and judiciary.

Born in eastern Turkey, Gülen is an acolyte of the moderate Sunni scholar Said Nursî, an advocate of science and education who died in 1960. His movement has as many as four million followers worldwide and operates schools and businesses in more than 130 countries.

Hakan Yavuz, a Gülen scholar at the University of Utah, argues that the movement is a democratising and modernising force in Turkey, expanding civil society and improving education. He also says that the movement is secretive and authoritarian, with Gülenists following the dictates of their ailing, 72-year-old leader without question.

The movement began to infiltrate Turkey’s staunchly secular state nearly two decades ago, seeking key posts in security and justice. “You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing your existence until you reach all the power centres,” Gülen said in a widely circulated sermon. He was in the United States for medical treatment in 1999, when Ankara charged him with trying to build an Islamic state, and he has stayed there ever since.

That same year, Turkey’s current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, spent four months in jail for publicly reciting a possibly Islamist poem. Once his new party, the AKP, came to power in 2002, a union between the two groups – both conservative, dominated by Anatolian professionals and seeking to undermine the secular Kemalist state – was a natural fit.

Their joint success in ousting the old-guard military establishment in a series of show trials over the past few years put them on a collision course. But the two had their differences from the start. Gülen advocates a moderate Islam, speaks often of building bridges between Muslims, Christians and Jews, and has met with Pope John Paul II and Jewish and Greek Orthodox leaders. The AKP, meanwhile, emerged from the ashes of the staunchly Islamist, anti-western National View party.

Erdogan has sought to propel Turkey via construction-driven economic growth, while Gülen, like Nursî, swears by the power of education. Gülenists run about 1,200 of Turkey’s 4,000 college-test prep schools, privately run tutoring facilities that provide the movement with steady streams of income and recruits. In November, months after the announcement of verdicts in the last of the military trials, Erdogan signed a bill to ban these schools.

Perceiving an existential threat, Gülenists seemed to up the ante in mid-December with a series of dawn police raids, detaining the sons of three ministers, an Istanbul district mayor and the head of the country’s largest construction firm, along with more than a dozen others. Though apparently politically driven, the largest corruption probe in recent Turkish history is grounded in nearly a year of ­investigation.

The arrests, mostly related to construction contracts, torpedoed Erdogan’s growth agenda and sparked an all-out political war. The two sides have since taken to lobbing accusations and counter-attacks like so many grenades. The news has read like a cheap crime novel. Millions of dollars found hidden in shoeboxes at the home of the head of a state-run bank. The environment and urban planning minister, one of Erdogan’s oldest allies, calling for the prime minister to resign during his own on-air political ­hara-kiri.

After accusing Erdogan of dispatching goons to threaten him, the lead prosecutor in the corruption case is, in turn, accused by a pro-government newspaper of running up a $40,000 (Dh146,920) Dubai holiday tab, paid for by the construction magnate implicated in the corruption probe. And, just last week, a row among parliamentarians involved punches, iPad projectiles and a flying roundhouse kick.

“I’m not surprised that [Gülen and Erdogan] finally got on one’s case, because that’s the rule of power,” says Soli Özel, a political-science professor at Istanbul’s Kadir Has University. “But the fierceness of this has been truly ­extraordinary.”

Gülen has denied any involvement, but in a recent sermon he referred to those obstructing the corruption investigation and asked God to “bring fire to their houses”. Erdogan has labelled the episode a “dirty coup” and called for a reopening of the earlier coup trials, which were overseen by Gülenists.

Many Turks believe those dozens of convictions against the military, which has staged three coups since 1960, cemented civilian rule. But observers generally agree that the cases – staunchly defended by the AKP until a few weeks ago – were tainted by fabricated evidence. The AKP hope, say Özel and others, is that the retrials will expose the illegitimacy of the earlier cases and thus discredit the Gülenist prosecutors of today’s corruption cases.

The government has also submitted a bill to parliament that would weaken the power of the state’s top judicial body and give the justice ministry control over the appointment of judges and prosecutors. Though nominally independent, Turkish justice has generally been controlled by a shadowy power. For the first eight decades of the republic, the military held the reins of the “deep state”, or “parallel state”. Judicial control seems to have shifted to Gülenists since the successful coup trials. Now Erdogan and the AKP are looking to secure it for the executive branch.

The European Union has warned that the new bill could imperil the judiciary’s independence and violate EU principles. Days after the recent parliamentary scuffle, which stemmed from concerns about the bill’s constitutionality, Erdogan offered to withdraw it in return for constitutional alterations to the judiciary.

“The rules seem to be changing every day,” says Özel. “We no longer even know what they are.” Police officers have refused to carry out prosecutors’ arrest recommendations, reportedly including one for Erdogan’s son, Bilal, who was recently implicated in a second corruption case.

During its Gülenist witch-hunt, the government has dismissed or reassigned some 2,000 police officials, including the Istanbul and Ankara police chiefs and the heads of antiterrorism, financial-crime, cybercrime and anti-smuggling units. The moves have remade the country’s security apparatus to the point that the EU has complained that it no longer knows with whom to cooperate on security issues.

“You can’t even look at the judiciary as an institution right now,” says Akyol. “All this is, of course, very destructive for the country.”

The Turkish economy has begun to suffer, with the lira falling to record lows and the country’s main stock index down about 10 per cent since the corruption scandal began. Economists from Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, HSBC and JPMorgan Chase have all downgraded their outlooks in recent weeks.

Turkey’s conservatives, held up as the great hope a few years ago, have not just failed to build a model democracy; they have fallen victim to a petty power struggle that is damaging the state. Neither is likely to emerge victorious; some analysts have begun to argue that their battle could lead to the re-emergence of the military. Either way, all this may have been just a prelude. New corruption arrests and government restrictions emerged this week, and most observers expect the battle to rage at least until local elections in late March.

Hard-core AKP supporters have tended to dismiss the corruption charges as meaningless or part of a conspiracy. But national AKP support has dropped from 47 per cent to about 42 per cent since November 2012, according to a recent poll. A dozen points now separate the AKP and the main opposition party, down from twice that in 2011 elections.

No politician in Turkey’s recent history has been as wily or as resilient as Erdogan, so prognosticators dismiss him at their peril. But with AKP loyalists resigning, the rule of law imperilled and Turkey’s economy under fire, this might be the year that Turks begin to say goodbye to their longest-serving prime ­minister.

“The AKP will lose some votes because of the loss of Gülen movement supporters, and the corruption will change some minds,” says Akyol. “If there is a big decrease, then we can speak of the decline of the AKP and maybe they won’t be around for long.”

David Lepeska is an Istanbul-based freelance writer and the former Qatar correspondent for The National. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Financial Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and other publications.