[A-List] Turkey: The Erdogan Experiment

["Sabri Oncu" <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Sorry for this long post. This is also useful to keep in the
archives. If my expectations are not way off the wall, we are
looking at a "regime change" also in Turkey. If only I knew when
and how. But I expect that if that happens, the new regime will
be a coalition of the Military and the Istanbul Bourgeoisie, with
some fascistic elements. We will see.

Best,

Sabri

++++++++

New York Times
May 11, 2003
The Erdogan Experiment
By DEBORAH SONTAG


The new prime minister of Turkey stood stiffly in his formal
office in Ankara, his mustache pulling his mouth into a frown.
Serious pouches hung beneath his eyes as he shook hands briskly
and positioned his lanky frame on a high-backed chair. Like a
patient nodding to the dentist, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, 49,
signaled he was ready to be interviewed. It seemed clear that he
would have preferred to stretch out on the carpet and go to
sleep.

There was no trace of Erdogan's famous charisma, of the fiery
oratorical skills on display just the previous day in Parliament,
when I found myself responding instinctively to his booming
voice's cues, knowing, without understanding the Turkish, when I
was supposed to rise, to clap, to cheer. Rather, during that
evening interview last month, at several points while his remarks
were being translated, Erdogan's head bobbed forward and his
eyelids drooped shut. He could be forgiven; his party's first
months in office had been grueling.

The war in neighboring Iraq was drawing to a close, much to
Erdogan's relief. The war was unpopular in Turkey and costly to
Erdogan. Because he is a pragmatist, Erdogan supported America's
request to use Turkish soil as a staging ground. Yet, despite the
fact that his party held two-thirds of the Parliament, he failed
to win legislators' approval for the request. It was a
significant failure, damaging his new government's relations with
the Bush administration, depriving Turkey of billions in loans
and grants and provoking questions about Erdogan's competence and
control of his party.

As he also backpedaled on the ever-divisive Cyprus issue, fumbled
with Turkey's wrecked economy and confronted Kurdish riots in an
earthquake zone it seemed that Erdogan was extinguishing all too
quickly the hopefulness that his fledgling party's emphatic win
in the Nov. 3 general elections had produced. Influential Turkish
columnists abandoned their infatuation with the young Turk who
had vanquished the old guard. One, Cengiz Candar, told me he had
''stopped even pronouncing Erdogan's name publicly.'' (It is
pronounced EHR-doe-ahn, by the way).

Such pressure would have taxed the most seasoned politician, and
Erdogan, once a popular mayor of Istanbul, was a novice on the
national stage. Yet Erdogan was accustomed to proving himself. A
pious man in a country where secularism is worshiped, and once a
kid from the wrong side of the tracks, he had always been an
outsider. And now, though he was tired, he was, more precisely,
annoyed. It had been only a month since he assumed the
premiership. He clearly felt, not unreasonably, that he deserved
the benefit of the doubt.

The stakes were high, as not only his advisers but also
opposition leaders told me. Tayyip Erdogan was an experiment for
Turkey with ramifications that went well beyond Turkey. As a
devout Muslim with an Islamist past who had nonetheless evolved
into a modern, pro-Western democrat, Erdogan had the potential to
set a powerful example for the region. If he could ease Turks
into a less hostile separation of mosque and state, if he could
help Turkey undertake long-overdue democratic reforms, then
perhaps one day he would exemplify a way in which Islamic faith
and democratic principles not only coexisted but also
collaborated.

But first he needed to be given a chance to succeed. The
transition to statesman after a life of struggle with the state
was not a simple one. Fingering the Turkish flag on his lapel,
Erdogan crossed his legs. ''Our people made us the governing
party,'' he said defiantly. ''Those who claim to respect
democracy, why don't they respect the vote of the people?''

Erdogan knows that many in the establishment distrust him or look
down on him or do both. He knows they can't quite believe that
Erdogan is their prime minister; indeed, many seem embarrassed by
his ignorance of foreign languages and by the head scarf that his
wife wears as an emblem of her faith. He knows they are
suspicious of his claims that he has evolved and that they
imagine him to have a secret plan to impose religion on the
nation. ''I have faced this all my life,'' Erdogan said.

But he is weary of it. ''Before anything else, I'm a Muslim,''
Erdogan said. ''As a Muslim, I try to comply with the
requirements of my religion. I have a responsibility to God, who
created me, and I try to fulfill that responsibility. But I try
now very much to keep this away from my political life, to keep
it private.'' Poker-faced, he exhaled. ''A political party cannot
have a religion. Only individuals can. Otherwise, you'd be
exploiting religion, and religion is so supreme that it cannot be
exploited or taken advantage of.''

To understand Erdogan's dilemma, it helps to understand the
depths of Turkey's commitment to secularism. It began with the
very establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923, and the
founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's rejection of traditional
Islam as incompatible with his goal of establishing a modern
European state. Ataturk shut the Islamic caliphate, dissolved
religious courts, outlawed mystic sects and secularized schools.
He replaced the Arabic script with Latin script. He outlawed the
fez and all but imposed the homburg. He adopted the Swiss civil
code and granted women the vote.

As secular nationalism became Turkey's religion, the military
took on the role of protecting Ataturk's legacy, which meant
keeping elected officials on a leash and overthrowing or
undermining them if necessary. Erdogan himself is unofficially on
probation. Turkey's ''deep state'' sees its duty as preventing
the nation from backsliding into religion and ethnic, especially
Kurdish, separatism. Islam was, of course, never snuffed out.
While most Turks came to consider themselves Turks first, they
were still Muslims. And from the start, especially in the
heartland, traditional Islam survived despite repression. To this
day, in what seems an arcane, self-defeating expression of
Turkey's secularism, women wearing head scarves are not allowed
to attend universities or work in government. Prime Minister
Erdogan's two daughters, in fact, go to Indiana University, where
they are free to cover their hair and get a degree at the same
time. His wife does not appear at state functions lest her
designer head scarf provoke fears of an imminent theocracy.

Erdogan's family comes from a devout world in the Black Sea
region. His father, Ahmet, migrated to Istanbul in the 1930's,
settled in Kasimpasa, a rough working-class quarter, and found
work as a captain with a state maritime company. Kasimpasa has a
body language all its own, and Turks say that Erdogan retains the
Kasimpasa swagger, a way of leading with his right shoulder.
Although the district was infamous for its gangs and pickpockets,
Erdogan remembers the neighborhood as an idyll, with fruit trees
and fields, where kids could get their hands dirty. ''I was
shaped by that mud,'' he said, ''not like the poor kids of today
who are surrounded by asphalt.''

Near the now-ramshackle mosque where Erdogan studied the Koran as
a child, the district manager of Kasimpasa, Ali Riza Sivritepe,
spoke of growing up with him. They fetched water from the same
well, flew kites and shot marbles over the irregular paving
stones. (Erdogan, steely in his ambition even then, always won.)
''He was a very serious child,'' Sivritepe said. ''Everyone
respected him here and called him Big Brother.''

His father, according to a biography, was an authoritarian with a
temper that could be tamed best by Erdogan's kissing his shoes.
Once, Erdogan's father punished him for using bad language by
hanging him from the ceiling by the arms. ''After that day, I
never swore again,'' Erdogan said.

When Erdogan was 7, Prime Minister Adnan Menderes -- ''God bless
his soul,'' Erdogan said -- was hanged. Elected in 1950 in
Turkey's first free elections, Menderes was a secularist but
demonstrated a tolerance for religious practice that his
predecessors had not possessed. Over 10 years in government, he
faltered and became repressive, and when the Turkish military
overthrew him, the coup was largely welcomed. But when Menderes
was sent to the gallows, many Turks were horrified. ''Some are
saddened by things like this, and they give up,'' Erdogan said.
''In my case, this sadness turned into an attraction for
politics.''

Part of the Erdogan lore is that in fifth grade he refused to use
a newspaper as a prayer rug in a religion class. It was
inappropriate, he told his teacher, who took a special interest
in him and persuaded Erdogan's father to send him to a state-run
Prayer Leaders and Preachers school, which offered a secular
curriculum amplified by religious instruction. Erdogan was
particularly good at reciting nationalist poetry. During poetry
contests, Sivritepe recalled, Erdogan would hide a Turkish flag
inside his shirt and whip it out for dramatic effect.

Erdogan was also good at soccer, but he kept his playing secret
from his father for years, hiding his soccer shoes in the coal
bin. His father considered soccer a diversion from education and
faith. In truth, politics was the real diversion. Erdogan juggled
soccer -- playing professionally for 11 years -- political
activism and school for more than a decade. He graduated with a
degree in management at age 27.

During that era, political Islam became a force in Turkey, and
Necmettin Erbakan, a German-educated engineer, emerged as its
leader. Erbakan preached a return to religious values, which
resonated in the heartland and in the poorer urban neighborhoods.
While Erbakan's first party, National Order, was banned for
fomenting fundamentalism, the authorities later encouraged him to
try again, seeing him as a counterweight to leftist parties. But
his second party, National Salvation, grew steadily more radical
and anti-Western, inspired by the Islamic revolution in
neighboring Iran.

Erdogan was one of Erbakan's disciples. His political climb began
when he was appointed chairman of National Salvation's youth
group. Young Erdogan would practice his fiery rhetoric on
abandoned ships, facing into the wind as he rehearsed his
salutation: ''My sacred brothers whose hearts beat with the
excitement of a big future Islamic conquest. . . . ''

Erdogan's future wife, Emine, belonged to an Islamist women's
group, the Idealist Ladies Association, and she was mesmerized by
his oratory. After six months of chaperoned dating, the couple
became engaged and married in 1978. Two years later, National
Salvation was dissolved along with all other parties in another
military coup. Not to be suppressed, National Salvation was
reborn as the Welfare Party, which is where the Islamists, some
of whom saw an Islamic state as their goal and some of whom
aspired only to greater tolerance of religion, hit their
organizational stride.

Erdogan named a son after his leader, and Erbakan made him
chairman of the Welfare Party's Istanbul branch. They built a
political machine that provided social services as it secured
political power, appealing to the needy and disgruntled as well
as to the faithful. But they did not always agree. Erdogan
stopped kissing Erbakan's hand because it struck him as
retrograde, and he subtly pushed for greater democracy within the
party and for broader outreach. Erdogan was not Erbakan's first
choice to be the Welfare Party candidate for mayor, but the older
man bowed to the will of the party. Erdogan took his campaign
into pubs, discotheques and even bordellos, and computerized the
campaign offices. He made women the worker bees of his
organization and involved secular men too.

In 1994, Erdogan was elected the first Islamist-oriented mayor of
Istanbul. His victory stunned the country. It meant that the
Islamists were succeeding in reaching beyond the mosque
communities. It also meant that Erdogan was a force to be
contended with. Indeed, many found Erdogan a more compelling
package than his mentor. Whereas Erbakan was a flashy dresser and
and an autocratic figure, Erdogan styled himself as an authentic
representative of the masses. ''In this country, there is a
segregation of Black Turks and White Turks,'' Erdogan once said.
''Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.''

At the Hope Barbershop in Kasimpasa that Erdogan used to
frequent, Ibrahim Azak, a barber, called him ''the best'' at
politics for just that reason. ''He was raised in a place like
this,'' Azak said. ''He doesn't come from a palace. When he
shops, he carries the bags himself.''

As mayor, Erdogan adopted modern management practices and proved
singularly adept at delivering services, installing new water
lines, cleaning up the streets, planting trees and improving
transportation. He opened up City Hall to the people, gave out
his e-mail address, established municipal hot lines. He was
considered ethical and evenhanded. (One building-trade
professional, however, told me that the corruption endemic to
Istanbul City Hall persisted under Erdogan and that donations of
equipment and vehicles were still solicited in exchange for
building permits.)

Yet from the moment he pronounced himself the ''imam'' of
Istanbul, Erdogan began both provoking anxieties and recoiling
from the fact that he had provoked them. He banned alcohol from
municipal establishments, which created concern that he would
eliminate alcohol from restaurants too. But he never did. He
revived an elaborate project for a mosque complex in the city's
heart, then backed off when there were protests. He never clearly
allayed secular concerns, keeping them alive instead with
comments like: ''Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to
your stop, you get off.''

Meanwhile, the Welfare Party finished first in a close national
election, and Erbakan became the country's first Islamist prime
minister in 1996. With his rhetorical cannons firing away, he
declared Turkish politics a pitiful imitation of the West and
announced a campaign for worldwide Muslim solidarity. He
overreached. After 12 months, the military forced him to resign.

There had long been differences between the younger party
leaders, who came to be known as the modernists, and Erbakan and
his men -- whom they called the Politburo. When Erbakan was
ousted and subsequently banned from politics, the modernists had
their opening. But first they had to withstand the legacy of
Erbakan's radical provocations of the establishment, a crackdown
that would pave the way for Erdogan's rise.


In December 1997, the Welfare Party sent Erdogan to a political
rally in southeastern Siirt, an impoverished, religious district
where his wife's family originated. On that day, as he had
several times before, he recited a quatrain by Ziya Gokalp, an
ideologue of Turkish nationalism: ''The mosques are our
barracks,/the domes our helmets,/the minarets our bayonets,/ and
the believers our soldiers.''

Erdogan told me that the poem had been approved for textbooks by
the education ministry, and he added, somewhat disingenuously, I
think, that it principally served oratorical purposes. ''It was
an attention getter,'' he said. ''It would make the people
spirited.'' In the speech following the poem, however, Erdogan
went on to proclaim that Islam was his compass and that anyone
who tried to stifle prayer in Turkey would face an exploding
volcano.

It was what one observer, Asla Aydintasbas, a New York-based
columnist for the newspaper Sabah, described as an ''Al Sharpton
moment.'' Erdogan was playing to the crowd and prodding the
military. And the military took the bait. Erdogan was charged
with inciting hatred on the basis of religion, and convicted.

But this time, it was the bureaucracy that had overreached.
Erdogan's conviction not only enhanced his popularity among
religious Turks but also disturbed many secular Turks. ''It's not
right what happened to him,'' said Cuneyd Zapsu, a businessman
who owns the Azizler holding company. ''I don't want to live in a
country where someone goes to jail for a poem. He was persecuted
because they sensed his power, and I think it was not religion
but a class thing. The so-called elite has never lived in this
country's reality. They've always been afraid of the people.
That's why all our laws are restrictions, not freedoms.''

In 1999, thousands accompanied Erdogan to the gates of the prison
in western Thrace where he would serve five months. Erdogan told
me that when the door clanked shut behind him it marked a
breaking point as well as a turning point. ''Prison,'' Erdogan
said, ''matures you.''

Zapsu visited Erdogan in prison frequently. A free-spirited
46-year-old, Zapsu first met Erdogan when he was running for
mayor. Erdogan had been looking for a liaison to the business
community, and he heard that Zapsu, whose grandfather was a
well-known Kurdish poet, was a maverick with an open mind. '' 'I
don't want your money,' '' Zapsu said Erdogan told him. '' 'I
want your help. Nobody from the establishment wants to talk to
me.' '' At that time, Zapsu said, Erdogan was more rigid. He
wouldn't shake the hands of Zapsu's daughters; he hugs them now.
But Zapsu said there was something special about Erdogan. During
Erdogan's incarceration, Zapsu worked to persuade him to break
with Erbakan and his anti-Western philosophy. It wasn't that
hard, Zapsu said. Erdogan was coming to that conclusion himself.
And Erbakan never visited anyway.

For the modernists in the Welfare Party, Erbakan's ouster
followed by Erdogan's conviction undeniably demonstrated that
confrontation with the establishment wasn't getting them
anywhere. Fehmi Koru, columnist for an Islamic-oriented
newspaper, told me: ''When I first started writing about
democracy, some members of the community criticized me openly,
saying Islam and democracy were incompatible. But they grew ready
for a change.''

They decided to start a new party that would aim for a broader
political base. They would stop conducting politics with
religious symbols and demonstrate instead how true belief informs
politics wisely. Metin Heper, a political scientist, said that
Erdogan believes in the potential of Islam to unite people around
an ideal and build morality, integrity and drive. ''He believes
in a kind of Islamic version of the Protestant work ethic, where
you work hard for the benefit of the country because it is the
good and right thing to do according to Islam,'' Heper said. A
poll taken to determine the public's chief concerns generated the
party name, Justice and Development, and its symbol, a glowing
electric light bulb.

Justice and Development would be a party in which religious
people could feel at home, but it wouldn't be a religious party.
Its members would be Muslim Democrats in the mold of Europe's
Christian Democrats. It would entice Westernized Turks from
abroad, like Egemen Bagis, 33, a businessman living in New Jersey
until Erdogan recruited him to run for Parliament without, Bagis
said, ever asking whether he drank (he does) or whether his wife
covered her hair (she doesn't).

Zapsu, a founder of the party, introduced Erdogan to Ishak
Alaton, an industrialist who is part of Istanbul's small Jewish
community. The avuncular Alaton told me that he came to see
Erdogan as a ''practical man of good will'' who represents ''the
forces of change'' in Turkey.

Just as Zapsu was Erdogan's Henry Higgins, advising him on how to
deal with the establishment and the West, Alaton took on
introducing Erdogan to the American Jewish community and helping
him send signals that he would maintain Turkey's relationship
with Israel. It required a little re-education first. ''They had
this impression that the world was run by Jews,'' Alaton said.


On Nov. 3 last year, Erdogan's 16-month-old political party
captured the first single-party majority in 15 years and the
first substantial one in 50 years. It won 34 percent of the
popular vote, which translated into a phenomenal 363 seats out of
550 seats in Parliament. All but one of Turkey's established
political parties -- the Republican People's, founded by
Ataturk -- failed to reach the 10 percent threshold needed for
representation.

The victory was a resounding rejection of the old, corrupt,
mismanaged and fragmented Turkish political order. It was also an
embrace of Erdogan personally but not of Islamism. On election
night, Erdogan immediately sought to reassure the establishment
that he would not be an agent of unwanted change. In a news
conference, he said that his government would not interfere with
anyone's way of life, would uphold Turkey's Western-oriented
foreign policy, would abide by an International Monetary Fund
rescue plan and would continue the battle for admission to the
European Union. The Turkish markets soared.

Even then, many distrusted his transformation. ''He's saying all
the right things about Europe and moving westward,'' an American
diplomat told me, ''but I fear he's like a wolf in sheep's
clothing.'' Those who knew him well, though, took him at his
word. ''He wanted to change the system, but the system changed
him,'' said Rusen Cakir, one of Erdogan's biographers. Alaton
said he had no concerns that Erdogan was a closet fundamentalist.
''He came to power partly because he had this religious platform,
but he knows it's a dead end. He knows confrontation with the
bureaucracy on religion would break him.'' One Turkish lawyer put
it to me more cynically: ''He believes in profits, not
prophets.''

After his victory, Erdogan had a problem: banned from politics in
1998, he could not become prime minister. So Abdullah Gul, who is
now the foreign minister, assumed the premiership temporarily. In
early December, President Bush invited Erdogan, still only
chairman of the party, to the White House. This caused
considerable controversy in Turkey, since it meant the United
States was according international legitimacy to a leader
considered illegitimate by the Turkish military.

According to Bagis, who served as Erdogan's interpreter during
the December meeting, Bush raised the issue of faith that Erdogan
has worked so hard to keep in the background. Startling the
Turks, Bush said: ''You believe in the Almighty, and I believe in
the Almighty. That's why we'll be great partners.'' Erdogan left
Washington with Bush's backing for Turkey's long-frustrated
accession to the European Union and headed to Europe to lobby for
a firm date for talks. There he faced his first serious setback.
The E.U. scheduled negotiations to begin in December 2004, but
only if Turkey had undertaken sufficient reforms.

Erdogan's party, meanwhile, speedily passed a reform of a more
self-interested variety, amending the Turkish constitution so
that the ban on Erdogan could be lifted. Conveniently, the
results of elections in Siirt were nullified because of
procedural irregularities, opening up a few seats in Parliament.
So Erdogan was preparing to run in by-elections just as the
United States was moving closer to war in Iraq.

Erdogan had been open in his disdain for Saddam Hussein and
calculating in his backing for the American request to base tens
of thousands of troops in southern Turkey. The Turkish public,
however, was adamantly antiwar, and many in Erdogan's party,
especially the more hard-line religious members, firmly opposed
him on this issue. Erdogan was quickly learning that his
high-wire act wasn't going to be easy to pull off. He was
supposed to be the anti-Erbakan, so he was not about to impose
his will on his party. Critics of Erdogan's performance, however,
say that he should have done just that. ''Leaders have to lead,''
the columnist Candar said, adding cuttingly, ''Being the darling
of the simple people is not enough during such turbulent times.''

Erdogan's advisers said that the United States did not fully
grasp the political risk that he was taking and how much he
needed written agreements demonstrating what Turkey would get in
return for cooperating. ''They were used to dealing with our
generals and not a politician trying to be democratic,'' Zapsu
said. The Turks were insulted when the Americans sent a State
Department negotiator rather than a senior leader to work out an
agreement with them. They acknowledge that they misjudged the
United States' determination to launch a war, with or without
Turkey's help, and that they bargained inexpertly. They were
thin-skinned too when details of the financial bartering were
leaked and cartoons in American newspapers portrayed them as
bazaar hagglers. ''There was a very ugly campaign against my
country,'' Erdogan said.

In the end, Gul, the acting prime minister, had to go to
Parliament with promises but no signed guarantees from the
Americans. The military establishment didn't want to help
Erdogan, so the generals, whose support for Turkey's
participation in the war might have persuaded opposition members
to vote for it, kept a low profile. Parliament failed -- by three
votes -- to authorize the stationing of American troops in
Turkey. The Americans were furious.

In early March, Erdogan was elected to Parliament and Gul
prepared to step aside. Erdogan told me that Bush called to
congratulate him, saying he'd never known any politician who had
won 85 percent of the vote; Bush also asked him to try again in
Parliament. Erdogan, however, told the American president that he
needed to wait for Parliament to formally approve him as prime
minister first, which his Turkish critics saw as cheeky, immature
standing on ceremony.

By the time Erdogan was installed as prime minister, the
Americans were asking only for the right to fly over Turkish
airspace, and they got it, Erdogan said. Luckily for Turkey, the
war was quick and contained. As it was drawing to a close, during
that April interview, Erdogan insisted that Turkey had done more
for the U.S. war effort than any other country except England.
Turkish airspace was a singularly essential ingredient, he said.
''How could they feel let down by our doing all this?'' he said
defensively.

arlier this year, when Muslim faithful were traveling to Saudi
Arabia for the hajj, the new Turkish authorities shrouded a
billboard at the airport that featured a model in an itsy bitsy
bikini. Arch-secularists wrung their hands: this must be the
first sign of the coming fundamentalism, they cried. The swimsuit
company sued the government, and secularists cheered it on, until
one day some realized that they were rushing to the defense of a
pretty cheesy picture. Suddenly, everyone got quiet. Overnight,
the billboard was moved to a discreet location and uncovered. It
was a small, common-sensical compromise. But it raised the
possibility of grander, more profound ones.

Alaton argues that Erdogan should be given more time by his own
people and more open support from Europe and America. ''Erdogan
shouldn't be punished,'' he said. ''Maybe people of good faith
should understand how important he is.''

And even Kemal Dervis -- a leading opposition figure and, as an
elite, polyglot former World Bank official, the antithesis of
Erdogan -- told me he thinks the government's success, remote as
it seems now, would truly reverberate. ''It would send the
message that you can be an overtly Muslim country and part of the
club of developed nations too,'' Dervis said. ''The significance
of that for the world at large would be incredible.''

Unfortunately for him, Erdogan has been scrambling on several
fronts. His government rattled the business community by
advocating a pension increase, just the kind of populist spending
measure that Turkey didn't need. Further, while he had pledged to
push a plan to reunify Cyprus, his government ended up backing
away from a showdown with Rauf Denktash, the Turkish Cypriot
leader, and the Turkish military at a critical moment. This
greatly disappointed those who thought he would be an agent of
change. To take on the military too soon might be suicidal, they
acknowledged, but to defer confrontation could also render him
impotent.

Slipping confidence in Erdogan, as always, has been colored by
distrust of his intentions -- or at least his party's
intentions -- on the religion issue. But maybe that concern is
misplaced.

Maybe Erdogan doesn't have the guts or power to push through any
serious reforms, least of all on religion. Or maybe Erdogan,
straddling two worlds, is the perfect person to defuse the
tensions between secular and religious forces in Turkey.

Deborah Sontag is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine.