Strongmen

ERDOĞAN A Normal Man ^{Burhan Sönmez}

Victim

WHEN ERDOĞAN STARTED to run for office in 1994, he took his wedding ring from his finger. He held it up to the people during a speech. “That is my only wealth,” he said in front of the press. Five years later, in 1999, he stated, “If some day you hear that Tayyip Erdoğan has become so rich you should consider that he has committed sinful things.”

This was the year when he ascended to the peak of his fame as a victim. Erdoğan was convicted by the Turkish state for reciting a poem during a rally. The poem, written by Turkish nationalist Ziya Gökalp a century before, was said to be changed from its original by Erdoğan; he added in some extra elements.

At that time, Erdoğan was the mayor of Istanbul. Reciting the poem got the attention of the secular-sensitive judiciary. Having been sentenced to ten months in prison, Erdoğan served four months in jail. The prison was not a prison. It was a prison in name only. They had converted it into an office for him. He had a secretary in the prison with him. The secretary’s name is Hasan Yeşildağ, who deliberately committed a small crime in order to get into prison and welcome Erdoğan. They prepared a special ward for Erdoğan. It had a television, a fridge, and a sofa. Visitors came daily to see him. National and international luminaries came to see him. Their interest suggested that they saw him as a figure of political promise for Turkey.

When Erdoğan left prison, he did not wait long to depart from his political party, which was saturated in traditional Islamist discourse. Erdoğan had learned a lesson. Not to abandon Islamism, but to walk away from its traditional—and marginal—form. He said he had changed, but he never pointed out what parts of his ideology had changed.

These were the years of turmoil for the Turkish economy and for Turkish politics. Erdoğan met with international celebrities, such as George Soros, and with elected officials from the United States. He was seen as a moderate Muslim leader who could provide a positive example for the Middle East.

In 2002, Erdoğan’s newly-formed political party—Justice and Development Party (AKP)—won a surprising victory in the elections. It won thirty-four percent of the vote and—because of the system of Turkish politics—sixty-six percent of the seats in the parliament. Erdoğan had the complete support of almost all Western governments and the European Union. He was seen as a symbol of change and moderation as well as a bridge between cultures—the cultures of the West and Islam. When the Constitutional Court investigated the AKP in 2008 on the allegation that it had breached the secular basis of the Turkish Republic, none other than Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain paid an unexpected visit to Turkey. She was a guest of Turkish President Abdullah Gül—Erdoğan’s man. The visit was interpreted as support of the West for Erdoğan and his government. Two months after Queen Elizabeth’s visit, the Constitutional Court rejected the proposal to close the AKP. The vote in the Court was close—six judges won over five. Four of the five judges who voted to close down the AKP said that the party was at “the centre of anti-secular activities.” It was of no consequence. Erdoğan got away with it, backed by the West.

Erdoğan sees himself as the victim. He has pushed for and supported the fabricated and politically motivated cases against journalists, army officers, and dissident politicians over the past few years. But their problems are not his. “Where were you when I was sent to jail?” he responds plaintively when he is asked about the detention of the dissidents. Everyone can be victimized, but Erdoğan is the one and only real victim. It first appeared that he was playing a political game. But now it seems that this is Erdoğan’s genuine sensibility. He truly thinks of himself as the victim. Erdoğan The Victim.

Erdoğan does not care about those who are not on his side. In 2011, he visited a small town in north-eastern Turkey. The locals protested the government’s anti-environmental policy, which had terrible effects in the region. The police acted with violence against the protestors. A school teacher was killed. Erdoğan was asked about this during a live television program. He neither showed remorse nor expressed any sadness about the death of the school teacher. No one could be named a victim while Erdoğan himself was a victim.

After nearly two decades, Erdoğan read the same poem again that was the reason for his imprisonment. This time no official body opposed him. Official bodies—such as the police, army, judiciary, universities, and media—are now on his side. There is no one left to defy him.

This is a snapshot of where our story begins and where it has now ended.

Innocent

The Turkish Constitution says that a candidate for the presidency must have graduated from an institution of higher education. This means that the president has to have been at university for four years.

Erdoğan graduated from Aksaray High School of Commerce in 1981. That was a two-year school at that time. When he was prime minister and when he prepared to run for the presidency, Erdoğan claimed that his former high school had merged with the University of Marmara and that it had been converted into a four-year school in his last year. It was all a bit confusing. The University of Marmara was founded in 1982. Erdoğan’s school joined it in 1983. Erdoğan graduated in 1981.

Journalists as well as parliamentarians questioned Erdoğan’s version of events. They looked at the documents that he had produced. There was something wrong with the documents. The documents from the 1980s used two fonts—Calibri and Malgrin Gothic. But Calibri was only introduced in 2005, while Malgrin Gothic came on the market in 2008 from Microsoft.

Erdoğan loves to talk about himself and about his past. His stories suggest that he is the chosen one. He has so many memories of his life, including of his time as a student—except for his period at university. Some journalists asked those who studied with Erdoğan to come forward and tell their stories, or just to provide pictures of their time at school. No one dared to speak up. At the last minute, the University of Marmara claimed that Erdoğan was their student—even though it was founded two years after Erdoğan graduated from his school.

Erdoğan ran for the presidency and he won the election. No one could legally challenge his claim that he has a four-year college degree. Erdoğan does not like to be questioned about this matter. He is happy to send all his rivals to prison. But the “fake diploma” is the only subject that one can raise without being sent to prison. If he goes after the accuser in a court, then he will have to prove—formally—to the court that his university diploma is genuine. Erdoğan is stuck in a cul-de-sac. Although this has not hurt him at all.

Erdoğan now has de facto immunity; his heavy hands are capable of squashing anyone. The institutions of the law are not able to question him or his relatives. When his son was accused of money laundering a few years ago, all the officers who dared to file the dossier were removed from their posts. When his son-in-law’s emails were leaked by hackers last year and published, the Turkish journalists who used those documents were arrested. There is no room to mention his other activities—manipulation and theft during the time of elections or sending his most effective opponent—Kurdish leader Selahattin Demirtaş—to prison. Demirtaş wrote a poem—“Contagious Bravery”—while behind bars. It could not be published. A prosecutor forbade it. Erdoğan calls Demirtaş a zealot while reminding his audience of his own imprisonment for reciting a poem. Erdoğan is the only victim; he does not want to share the pleasure of being a victim with anyone else.

Erdoğan’s mind works in two parts, with two different mechanisms. He has recently stated that those who go abroad to study return home as the agent of foreign forces. “They become voluntary agents and dedicated disciples of the West,” he said. But Erdoğan’s four children studied abroad. His two daughters went to Indiana University, while his sons went to Harvard University and the London School of Economics.

A victim is always innocent. He never makes a mistake. If there is a mistake, then someone else is to blame. Not the eternal victim. Erdoğan was once the best friend of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Their families spent time with each other. When the alliance of the United States and the Saudis began their assault on Syria, Erdoğan took part in it. He blamed Assad at a personal level. “He lied to me, he deceived me,” he said. This rhetoric of personal betrayal is now commonplace. Erdoğan used it to describe the oscillating relationship he has had with Germany’s Angela Merkel and Barack Obama of the United States.

The most significant deception has not been by a foreign leader, however, but by a formerly close domestic ally—the Gülen movement led by Fethullah Gülen. Gülen and his movement were Erdoğan’s best allies for two decades. This is the largest Islamist movement in Turkey and in the Turkish diaspora. Gülen comes from a right-wing background. He supported the military coup in 1980 and enjoys close relations with the United States, where he now lives. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Gülen has been the most influential political figure in Turkey in the twenty-first century. With a long view and a powerful organizational structure, Gülen has been able to occupy all the main institutions of the country—including the universities, the police force, the military, and the judiciary. His followers could be seen in parliament, in the embassies, and in the media.

It was Gülen who persuaded Erdoğan to depart from the traditional Islamist political party and ideology and to found a new political party—namely the AKP. It was Gülen who introduced Erdoğan to the Western world, including leaders of the United States. It was Gülen who packaged Erdoğan as the promise of change and reform in the region. Erdoğan, the good student, began to use the language of liberalism—speaking about democracy, tolerance as well as justice, including language about class relations and LGBT rights.

In the second decade of their “sacred” alliance, Erdoğan and Gülen apparently felt that the time had come to occupy everything—to put their hand on every institution in Turkey. But the real question was—whose hand would be on top? Tensions rose in the alliance, and then the rift opened up.

In December 2013, the police and prosecution services published information about how some politicians and businessmen had been involved with bribery and corruption. Around the same time, the recordings of conversations with these people were leaked on social media platforms. Four ministers in Erdoğan’s cabinet were implicated. There were also recordings of conversations between Erdoğan and his son about money laundering. It was seen—immediately—as a salvo in a war between Erdoğan and the Gülen movement, the latter having its tentacles in the police, in the office of the prosecutors, and in the judiciary. Erdoğan reacted fiercely. He fired police officers, prosecutors, and judges involved in the case. He had to sacrifice the four ministers in his cabinet who were caught on tape.

Erdoğan and his son came out unscathed. So did two other crucial figures. Reza Zarrab, an Iranian businessman, had been at the center of the operation of bribery and corruption. He was accused of illegal gold trafficking between Iran and Turkey. He had been arrested, but then—at Erdoğan’s orders—was released. The police found millions of dollars hidden in a shoebox in the apartment of the director of Halkbank, Süleyman Aslan. He was arrested. Erdoğan had him released. He stopped all legal processes by appointing friendly police officers and judges.

The tussle between Erdoğan and Gülen did not end easily. In 2016, Gülen’s men took a final step. They attempted a military coup, which was unsuccessful. Since Erdoğan got information of the plot beforehand, he let it take place. When the coup failed—largely because the authorities knew it was going to happen—Erdoğan used it to strike out against the Gülen movement. He spoke to the press, while hundreds of people were being killed on the streets, and said: This move is a great gift from God to us. Erdoğan took advantage of this “gift” and began to smash his rivals by declaring a state of emergency. The government suspended the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and extended the detention period for those arrested to thirty days from two days. The entire state structure shuddered as Erdoğan’s government fired 150,000 public service workers—including 5,800 academics and fifty-one thousand school teachers. The purge did not spare the army or the police. It ran through every institution of the state. Apart from being the biggest jailer of journalists (170 in prison at last count), the government now went after lawyers (one thousand in prison). About eighty mayors went to prison along with a dozen parliamentarians—all of whom from the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP), the party of Demirtaş who wrote his poem in prison.

Turkey now struggles to survive the war between these two Islamist powers. When the forces of Erdoğan and Gülen began to fight each other, the left-wing organizations and the Kurdish opposition were the ones who were targeted. Most of the academics and school teachers who were dismissed and most of the media outlets that have been shut down belong to the progressive movement. Since the “failed coup” of 2016, the country has been in a permanent state of emergency. Parliament has been bypassed. It has become a mere template with no real role in the making of policy. Erdoğan rules from his newly built White Palace. His palace has sealed off the Turkish parliament. What Erdoğan has done was Gülen’s dream. It is now Erdoğan’s reality. It is the kind of dream that has thrown the whole nation into a nightmare.

The last time that we saw the great alliance between Erdoğan and Gülen was during the Gezi Park uprising in May 2013. Millions of people took to the streets for two weeks to resist Erdoğan’s plan to turn the tiny Gezi Park in the heart of Istanbul into a shopping mall. The resistance around Gezi amplified the voice of people who had been silenced under the long shadow of religious power. Erdoğan, like all autocratic leaders, used two tools: violence and deceit. He refused the claim that he planned to build a shopping mall in the park at the same time as he sent in the police—manned by Gülen supporters—to break up the protestors. The result was that the authorities arrested five thousand people, wounded four thousand people and killed eight young people. Gezi Park was saved.

When the police were criticized for using excessive force, Erdoğan appeared on the stage and used his usual language of mercilessness. “They ask about who gave the order to the police. Me. I gave the order,” he said. He accused the protestors of hurting the economy. It was their protest, he said, that raised the value of the US dollar from 1.8 to 1.9 Turkish lira. He called the protestors enemies of the state.

Things are worse now. It costs four Turkish lira to buy a dollar. Erdoğan accuses others for this. Nothing is his responsibility.

His policies are innocent. He is innocent.

Normal

Having returned from abroad after some years I went in a smart-phone shop in Turkey as I wanted to buy a charger for my cell phone. The seller offered me an expensive one and said, “This is original.”

“But it is expensive,” I said.

“Then, I have that one, five times cheaper,” he said.

“Okay, if this is original, what is that one?” I asked.

“It is the normal one,” said the shopkeeper.

Such phones would have been called “imitation” or “artificial” phones. But that’s in the past. Now they are “normal.” Our language shows us how much has changed in our politics and in our culture. Since the original and true things are lost, anything fake and artificial can replace it and become “normal.”

In this new century, Erdoğan stands for normality. His reign has already lasted longer than that of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who founded and ruled the modern Turkish Republic for fifteen years from 1923 to 1938. Erdoğan counts the years when he compares himself with Atatürk. He believes that the destruction of the Ottoman Empire—carried out by Atatürk and his comrades a century ago—was a mistake. Erdoğan has given himself the historic task of reversing Atatürk’s work and reviving the empire. That is what he believes and that is what his followers desire. They see Erdoğan as the chosen one for the nation not only of the Turks, but also for Muslims.

Erdoğan’s prominent supporters define the modern Turkish Republic as a “bracket” between the Ottoman Empire and another kind of empire. This “bracket,” they believe, opens up a mysterious sentence; it is now time to close that sentence. Erdoğan says that to end that period of history, the period between the “brackets,” there is no need to respect the law. “Two drunkards” made that law, he says. It is not difficult to understand what he means by this phrase. The “two drunkards” he refers to are Atatürk and his friend İsmet İnönü, who became president after Atatürk’s death. They are well known for their love of raki, that milky alcohol of the Turkish people.

Drinkers apparently obsess Erdoğan. In 1989, he ran for the mayorship of Beyoğlu District in Istanbul, but lost. He objected to the outcome of the election and took the case to the court. When the judge appeared to go against him, Erdoğan called him a “drunkard.” He was detained for a week and made to pay a fine.

Erdoğan’s conservative political worldview is one thing, but his temper is another. It is not easy to manage. There are rumors that he slapped some cabinet ministers. That he has attacked ordinary citizens is no rumor. In 2014, Turkey experienced a mining disaster when 301 miners died underground. It is said to be the biggest mining accident in the world. The accident came due to poor working conditions. There was no administrative surveillance of conditions in the mine. A few days after the incident, Erdoğan visited the small town where the miners’ families lived. A protest greeted him, with angry slogans filling the air. At one point, Erdoğan had to take refuge in a shop inside the market. There, Erdoğan grabbed a protester and began to hit him, while calling out, “You are the Jew’s semen.” Someone in the shop filmed this attack. It appeared on social media platforms. Before long the film disappeared, like so many other things. It vanished. Erdoğan’s cyber-farm did its work well. The farm’s workers erase and destroy anything on the Internet that is against Erdoğan. Even some of Erdoğan’s speeches are inaccessible. Erdoğan’s conversations with his son about hiding money—and many other recordings—have disappeared. Thousands of websites, including Wikipedia, are forbidden inside Turkey. Twitter and Facebook are shut down whenever the government thinks they are too aggressive against Erdoğan. This is Turkey’s normal.

Erdoğan began his life as a conservative Islamist. Then he changed his status to being a moderate Islamist. Now he is on the march to becoming a new kind of sultan. It has been a long march—taking charge of the traditional authoritarian systems in society and in the state as well as creating new kinds of institutions in both state and society to consolidate his power.

In the 1970s, Erdoğan got involved with the youth division of the Islamist MSP—the National Salvation Party. The military coup of 1980 changed the political field in Turkey. The coup leaders arrested 650,000 people, closed down parliament, shut down trade unions, and shuttered publishing houses. Political parties—including those of the right and of the religious variety—were closed down. The coup was a right-wing coup, but it could not tolerate right-wing parties. It was a total suffocation of Turkish society. This was at the height of the Cold War. In the Middle East and South Asia, the United States was playing with a policy of the Green Belt—the support of Islamist elements, however extreme, to quell communist influence. Erdoğan’s political framework developed in this period. His normal is the normal of an alliance between the imperialist West and the Islamist East.

It was no surprise when Erdoğan, in 2015, chose İsmail Kahraman to be the spokesperson of the Turkish Parliament. Kahraman comes to the AKP from the extreme right. His youth was spent in battle against the anti-imperialist youth who wanted to stop the visit of US warships to Istanbul in the 1960s.

The army smashed the progressive reservoirs of Turkish society and politics. The attack on the left was even sharper after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Islamism, long cultivated by the army and the United States, rose in Turkish politics. In 1994, a marginal politician such as Erdoğan managed to become the mayor of Istanbul, the biggest city in the country. His language resonated with anti-secularism (“A man cannot be both a Muslim and secular at the same time”) and with misogyny (“Men and women cannot be equal. This is against their nature”) and with ruling-class ideology (“We use the state of emergency for the benefit of our business world. When there is a possibility of a workers’ strike we immediately stop it by using the state of emergency”).

They call this the state of precious loneliness. It has become Turkey’s destiny, they say. The Western world, they say, is jealous of Erdoğan as a world-historical leader. The West wants to block the dawn of the Turkish and Muslim nation, which is the bright star of mankind.

Erdoğan and his people in the media use the language of loneliness, of precious loneliness. Anyone who is against Erdoğan is said to be against the nation. This is the cliché of populism—still finding buyers everywhere, from the United States to the Philippines.

At a certain point, the fake becomes normal and insanity turns into normality.

Lucky

Ahmet Şık, an investigative journalist, was preparing a book about the secret organization of the Gülen movement in the official institutions. While he was in the process of writing his book, the police arrested him and confiscated his manuscript, titled The Imam’s Army. This was in March 2011. The arrest appeared to be an operation to save the Gülen movement. Erdoğan was on the stage again. This was six years before his rift with Gülen. “There are some books that are more effective than bombs,” he said in support of the imprisonment of Şık.

After the “failed coup” in 2016, there was a funeral for the victims of the coup at a mosque. Erdoğan was present. An imam gave a sermon that condemned educated people instead of the coup plotters. “O mighty god,” he said, “protect us from the evil of educated people.” This was not a sentence pronounced accidentally. When a pro-Erdoğan academic said, “The most traitors are found among well-educated people” on a television show, it was seen as utterly normal. No one objected. What is there to object to when this is a normal statement?

Left-wing groups and parties, trade unions, students, journalists, writers, intellectuals of different forms—these have been the most determined in the opposition against Erdoğan. In the lead is the Kurdish resistance. This unity is the base for a democratic opening in Turkey. If they have been unsuccessful thus far, it is because they have never united against Erdoğan’s government. They are divided for different reasons. Their division gives Erdoğan a great advantage.

Erdoğan has built himself a White Palace. It has a thousand rooms. The White Palace has been at the center of a set of debates—it is not only seen as a white elephant, but it was also built illegally on public fields. Erdoğan’s regime did not bother to ask for permission from any government office, nor did it bother to apply for an official permit for the construction of this palace in the heart of Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. If Erdoğan is normal, then his practice is normal too—if he is the norm, then his building is the norm as well. No inspector or judge will question the lack of permits, just as no one questions his wealth. His wedding ring was his only asset. Now he is among the richest statesmen in the world. His wealth, he said in 2014, is in the multiple millions of dollars. It was the same year that uncomfortable videos of Erdoğan began to disappear from the Internet including the video in which he said, “If some day you hear that Tayyip Erdoğan has become so rich, then you should consider that he has committed sinful things.”

“Erdoğan” is now a familiar name in such leaked documents as those revealed by WikiLeaks and by the Süddeutsche Zeitung (the Panama Papers). When a journalist asked Erdoğan how his son managed to buy a ship, he responded, “A ship and a shipish [a smaller ship] are different things.” His personal wealth has swollen upwards while the national economy has withered. Turkey’s external debt has reached $432 billion (2017). Fifteen years ago, when the AKP came to power, the external debt was $129 billion.

That is the picture of a country where some men have been lucky, while the majority have been slipping downhill. Erdoğan is a lucky man.