Tough times for Turkey’s generals
Mar 14th, 2008 by MESH
From Malik Mufti
Turkey’s democracy has long rested on a delicate equilibrium between the guardians of the unitary secular-nationalist paradigm who dominate the civilian and military state bureaucracies on the one hand, and the populist politicians who appeal to the particularistic sub-identities of Turkey’s diverse civil society on the other. The proper functioning of this dynamic depends on the quality of leadership on both sides, for imbalances can lead to “corrective measures” such as the military interventions of past decades. While Turkey’s elected leaders have exhibited highly variable levels of statecraft, moreover, the remarkable corporate identity and professionalism of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) in particular have yielded—especially since the 1970s—commanders of generally impressive judgment and prudence. This has been a major factor in keeping Turkey, occasional hiccups notwithstanding, democratic at home as well as a stabilizing regional influence and American ally abroad.
Recently, however, two episodes have highlighted the challenge TAF commanders face balancing the conflicting pressures from Turkish public opinion and from their own ideological constituency, including in the junior officer ranks.
The first episode arose when President Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s term reached its end last year. Aware that the governing Islamic-based AK Party (whose members dominated the parliament that elects Turkey’s presidents) would likely field one of its own as a candidate, Chief of Staff Yaşar Büyükanıt said that Sezer’s successor must uphold secularism “in both word and deed.” When the AK Party went ahead and nominated Abdullah Gül anyway, the TAF General Staff posted a statement on its website on the eve of the first round of parliamentary voting warning that “no one should doubt” the military’s resolve to carry out its mission as the “unequivocal defender of secularism.” Simultaneously, the TAF lent its support to a series of massive anti-AK Party demonstrations in major cities, even as the equally secularist state judiciary threw legal obstacles in the path of Gül’s election. Seeking to break the impasse, the AK Party called for early national elections.
The results of the July 22 elections indicated a significant popular backlash against the TAF’s campaign, with the AK Party raising its vote from 34.3 percent in 2002 to 46.6 percent—a crushing landslide by Turkish electoral standards. Even so, on the eve of the last round of the new parliament’s vote for president on August 28, General Büyükanıt posted another note on the TAF website warning against “centers of evil” seeking to erode secularism. Gül won and became president anyway. A series of subsequent public snubs by TAF commanders of Gül and his headscarf-wearing wife further highlighted the growing gulf between hardline secularists and a public opinion in which, according to one poll, over 70 percent have no problem with Gül’s wife covering her hair.
The second episode centered on Turkey’s other main internal cleavage, between the unitary and multicultural views of Turkish society. The TAF command, alarmed by the consolidation of Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq after 2003, and confronted by the resumption of the PKK insurrection in 2004, began pressuring Prime Minister Erdoğan for military action. In a series of press conferences during the summer of 2007, General Büyükanıt insisted that an incursion into northern Iraq was necessary, and mused whether it should target just PKK elements or the Iraqi Kurdish leadership there as well. The TAF, despite evident reluctance on the part of both Erdoğan’s government and the United States, finally launched air and artillery attacks in December, followed by a land incursion on February 21, 2008.
On February 29, however, just one day after U.S. Defense Secretary Gates arrived in Ankara to urge a rapid end to the incursion, it ended. The Turkish public, led by a sensationalist media into expecting a decisive victory over the PKK, was taken wholly unprepared. Opposition leaders Deniz Baykal and Devlet Bahçeli–whose parties have been closely aligned with the TAF, and who had accused the AK Party of treason for advocating a political solution to the Kurdish question—also expressed disappointment, and drew a link between American pressure and the incursion’s abrupt end. This prompted General Büyükanıt to deny any such linkage, to claim that the incursion had limited objectives all along, and to post yet another note on the General Staff website denouncing the criticisms as “ignoble attacks… that have caused more damage than the [PKK] traitors” themselves. This extraordinary polemic between the TAF and its traditional allies continued as the latter asserted their democratic right to question any aspect of Turkish policy.
As gingerly as possible (given laws against insulting the military), several Turkish commentators have lamented what Lale Sarıibrahimoğlu, writing in Today’s Zaman on March 13, called “the dangerous, self-damaging course the [TAF] is taking.” The dilemma is that both recent episodes reflect a deeper evolution in Turkey’s political development that is placing unprecedented stresses on the unitary secular-nationalist paradigm championed by the TAF command and its allies—stresses that cannot simply be suppressed. To the extent that the TAF allows its discourse to appear at odds with popular sentiment, whether on the expression of religious or ethnic identities, it will undermine its own still-necessary function as a counterweight in Turkey’s fragile democratic equilibrium. That in turn could have very destabilizing consequences for Turkey’s role abroad, which explains why in recent days American officials have been emphasizing the need for compromise solutions to Turkey’s problems.
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2 Responses to “Tough times for Turkey’s generals”
Malik Mufti very nicely describes the conflicting pressures facing the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF). I would add that those same pressures—societal challenges to the conventional Kemalist understandings of secularism (religion strictly subordinated to the state) and national unity (a unity based on a universal and homogenous Turkish identity)—are subjecting the Kemalist establishment as a whole to stress. And like the military, the other parts of that establishment are at a loss as to how to respond.
But they do know they don’t like what they see. Turkey’s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, is now asking the Constitutional Court to ban the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party) on charges of undermining secularism. As Malik noted, when the military warned the AKP-led parliament not to elect Abdullah Gül president of the republic, the AKP called early elections and won in a landslide. Now the chief prosecutor is upping the ante and trying to have the party shut down and 71 of its members banished from politics for five years. Last November Yalçınkaya asked the court to shut down Turkey’s “Kurdish” party, the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi). No decision has yet been made.
Another point I would like to make is that the reason why the TAF distrust any politics that smacks of Islam is not so much because they see Islam as an illiberal force inimical to democracy or corrosive of Turkey’s putative pro-Western orientation but for a simpler reason: they see doctrinal Islam as a source of crippling weakness. Foreign commentators typically portray the TAF as a bastion of pro-Western sentiment and values in Turkey. Although not entirely incorrect, this depiction is oversimplified. The Turkish Republic was not borne out of an experiment to realize the ideals of liberal democracy but instead out of a desperate effort to salvage for Ottoman Muslims a chunk of territory—Anatolia—from a crumbling empire under long-term assault by the Great Powers. That attempt was successful, and the forerunners to today’s TAF played the key role in it. It was also exceptional. It is worth remembering that only two major countries in the Middle East have escaped European occupation: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
In their search for an explanation for their once invincible empire’s inability to beat back the European powers, the Young Turks at the turn of the century identified Islam as a reactionary force that had impeded their society’s ability to match European advances in technological, economic, and military might. Many Ottoman military officers, including but by no means limited to Mustafa Kemal, subscribed to this general view, which drew heavily upon the materialist and positivist philosophies then considered cutting-edge in Europe. Thus when they established the Turkish Republic, they were determined to subordinate Islam to the state and contain its influence over society.
An ancillary reason why the TAF are deeply suspicious of Islam in politics is that it might suggest a loyalty to something beyond the Turkish state and in particular an affinity to Turkey’s Middle Eastern neighbors, and Arab neighbors especially. The Turkish Republic’s officer corps has, by and large, traditionally been allergic to closer ties to the Arab world, seeing it as at best a geopolitical quagmire to be avoided and at worst a source of cultural contamination that would undermine the republic should it be embraced too closely.
To return to Malik’s point, the TAF and Turkey’s secularist establishment as a whole will continue to find itself under stress. The current environment is a confusing one for the TAF as an institution. The TAF rests on a world view that is not only obsolescing but that is today arguably counterproductive to its two main goals, the perpetuation of a modern and unified society. Sharp minds within the TAF recognize this, although the war in Iraq renewed the Turkish military’s nightmare of separatism (in this case Kurdish) backed by neo-imperial powers (read the United States and the EU) and jolted the TAF to revert to its instincts and templates of threat assessment it inherited from the late Ottoman period.
But even when confused and under stress, the TAF remains a remarkable and powerful institution, and one which should not be discounted or underestimated.
Michael Reynolds is a member of MESH.
Both Malik Mufti and Michael Reynolds make incisive points about the role of the military in Turkish society and the current stresses on Turkey’s officially secular political order. Two of Reynolds’ points should be amplified primarily because I don’t believe he went far enough.
First, observers should be deeply skeptical of any claims that the Turkish armed forces are or have been committed to the principles of liberal democracy. Although supporters of the officers are quick to remind that the TAF returned the government to civilians after each of the four coups d’etat between 1960 and 1997, each episode coincided with the officers’ successful efforts—through some shrewd institutional engineering—to narrow Turkey’s political arena.
Second, the portrayal of the officers as deeply opposed to Islam is, as Reynolds suggests, erroneous. Turkey’s commanders have used Islam for what they perceived to be political advantage. For example, in order to gain support from religiously conservative notables in the Anatolian interior during the nationalist struggle, Mustafa Kemal himself used Islam as a mechanism of political mobilization for his project. After the 1980 coup, the officers went on a mosque- and imam-hatip school-construction binge in a misguided endeavor to depoliticize Turkish society after a decade of left vs. right violence.
Finally, to the larger point that Mufti and Reynolds have made about the stresses on Turkey’s secular system: Dare I suggest that these strains are the result of the failure of Kemalism to achieve ideological hegemony? Turkey has become too complex and differentiated for the drab conformity that Kemalism demands. In the end, AKP and DTP may be shut down, but these efforts reveal that the principles of Kemalism can only be enforced through coercion, which is the least efficient means of political control. The avatars of Turkish secularism like Yaşar Büyükanıt and Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya are, despite themselves, presiding over Kemalism’s deathwatch.
Steven A. Cook is Douglas Dillon Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.