The Atlantic and Its Enemies

23. Brumaire: Two Coups

But it was not just the internal blockage that gave Reagan his financial troubles. He had also decided on a course of rearmament, known as the ‘Second Cold War’, and it proved expensive, only really justified by a belief that matters could not be left to drift. The background, as in most matters, lay in Carter’s failures. The experience of détente had not been positive, and part of the Reaganites’ strategy was a challenge to the USSR. This included defiance over weaponry. It also meant a new spirit in the CIA, rather cowed since Vietnam days: why not challenge the Soviet Union directly? Its civilian economy worked, everyone knew, badly. Why was it now building a very large navy, exploiting any advantage on the edges of the Middle East — Ethiopia, then Afghanistan — and probing mineral-rich southern Africa? The spirit in the United States became antagonistic. European misgivings were swept aside; a ‘working breakfast’ between Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State, and Helmut Schmidt, early in 1982, was marked by enraged shouting, over Poland. At the time Caspar Weinberger was preparing a document as to how the offensive should be undertaken. The general idea was to identify which technologies really mattered to the USSR, and to invest ‘in weapon systems that render the accumulative Soviet equipment obsolescent’. William Clark for the National Security Council said that ‘trade and finance should emerge as new priorities in our broader effort to contain and roll back Soviet operations worldwide’. But it was not just trade and finance or even brilliant new weaponry, such as ‘smart bombs’ and laser-beam anti-missile technology. The Americans had looked hard, since the Vietnam disaster, and considered what had gone wrong; and they now had two concrete cases from which to build up arguments.

The twentieth century was to end with a grotesque joker from the seventies crisis pack. In 1999 a very frail 84-year-old Chilean general, long in retirement, was arrested in London, in the watches of the night, in his hospital bed. The general, Augusto Pinochet, had his drip-feed detached, and he was taken off to prison, there to face charges that related to events that had occurred a quarter-century before, half a world away from London. The legal details were also bizarre. A Spanish judge, who had himself served a dictatorship quite faithfully as chief prosecutor, had issued a warrant for the general’s arrest, on human rights charges; it was to Spain, not Chile, that the old man was supposed to be extradited. But, in Spain, even had he been convicted, he could not have been imprisoned: people over seventy-five were let off. The Pinochet case was, in other words, absurd.

But it was very deeply felt, by the general’s enemies. The ‘Pinochet coup’ on 11 September 1973 had acquired worldwide significance, and was viciously remembered by the generation of 1968. The Chilean armed forces had struck, and deposed one of its heroes, Salvador Allende, the Marxist president of Chile. He died when his presidential palace was stormed, and became a martyr. Pinochet was said to have overthrown Chilean democracy and, with sinister American advisers, to have initiated a reign of terror: there were voluble exiles, with tales of ‘disappearances’, of mass executions in football stadiums, of torture in dank basements or freezing, sub-Antarctic camps. When the people of 1968 came to office in Washington, with President Carter in the later 1970s, they wanted to distance themselves from Pinochet. The Americans had been involved in the coup, which was even said to have originated with the CIA, and Carter accused Nixon of destroying ‘elected governments, like in Chile’. In 1977 the US representative at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva stated his ‘profoundest regrets’ for the ‘despicable… acts of subversion of the democratic institutions of Chile, taken by certain US officials, agencies and private groups’. It was characteristic of the hatred displayed that the New York Times ran sixty-six articles on the Chilean affair and the opposition to it, but only three on Cuba and four on Cambodia.

Allende had died as his presidential palace was stormed in the 1973 military coup — suicide, in all likelihood, though even in 1990 his wife was claiming murder. It was the end of a three-year attempt to turn Chile into a popular, socialist democracy, and much romanticism was attached to Allende by a cohort of foreigners, such as the British Communist Brian Pollitt (who also had experience in Cuba, and whose books, along with the multivolume E. H. Carr history of Soviet Russia, were burned when the military took over) and the Frenchman Régis Debray, one-time supporter of Che Guevara in Bolivia. At this time, in the outcome of 1968, of the Vietnam wars of the intelligentsia, there were romantic films. There was, for instance, Z, in which the veteran Yves Montand played a left-wing Greek politician, done to death by the Colonels who had staged a military coup in Athens in 1967, allegedly with help from the CIA. It was (like the later Midnight Express) a very well-made film which, like so many such, distorted reality.

Allende became the absent hero of a film, Missing, by the maker of Z, Costa Gavras, and he stood, in a vague way, for ‘liberation’. There was a revealing little scene when he was overthrown. A left-wing young girl, in jeans, was told by a policeman that, once order had been restored, she would be wearing a less provocative set of clothes. In the Latin, Catholic world at the time, modesty was still required, clothing was political, and divorce was forbidden. Women had had the vote in chile since 1949, but there were separate polling booths for men and women, even in 1973, and although the country’s problems were obviously owed in large measure to demographic pressure, clinics for contraception were not opened. There was an element of cultural war in the Chilean affair, and Allende was recognizably a liberation figure, promising equality, liberty and fraternity, or at any rate socialism. In reality, Chile would be remembered, not for the Allende experiment, but for the ‘Pinochet solution’ — a period of authoritarian rule, during which economic reforms could be carried out, without political disruption. This happened, and Chile, on the whole, prospered. Democratic ways were restored; Pinochet did indeed organize a free election, and when it went against him, he retired without fuss, only with a proviso that he and others should be given immunity from prosecution. In 1975, after General Franco died in Spain, forty years after launching a brutal civil war and then a full-scale Fascist dictatorship, his successors agreed that the slate would be wiped clean: no prosecutions, of either side. But Pinochet’s enemies were in no mood to wipe slates.

There was another military coup, seven years almost to the day after Pinochet’s, on 12 September 1980, in Turkey. Military coups do not generally turn out at all well, and in Latin America they had been both frequent and ridiculous — men in preposterous uniforms, with epaulettes like fruit tarts, seizing power and then appointing their cronies and relatives to state posts, as in Peru. Argentina, once a very prosperous and advanced country, had been wrecked in a pattern of demagogues and attitudinizing generals (in 1980 a ‘junta’ of senior armed forces commanders). In the case of both Chilean and Turkish coups, the matter was far from simple, and the similarities are striking. If there is such a thing as a good coup, both succeeded in their aims: order was indeed restored; new economic rules — monetarism, of a sort, and worked out under IMF supervision — were brought in; after a bad patch, prosperity grew; democratic elections then happened. The costs in terms of bloodshed were also limited — in Chile, far less than with similar coups in Brazil or Argentina, which had not received attention from film-makers or The New York Times. The Left in both countries was, however, comprehensively defeated, and remained very bitter for decades afterwards.

Since universities had been at the centre of the trouble in both countries — in Turkey there had even been policemen standing in the corner of lecture rooms — there was much voluble complaint. A work that was very frequently read at this time was Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. It is the great-great-grandfather of Z. There had been revolutions all over Europe in the spring of, 1848, but the one that got the greatest attention of the world was French: would it repeat the experiences of 1789, Rights of Man, abolition of kings, aristocrats and, this time round, bankers? There was a Republic; in the June Days of 1848 part of the city was taken over by enraged, unemployed building workers (the first political photograph taken was of a barricade, from a rooftop). The middle-class National Guard, with troops and an assortment of rowdies from what Marx called the Lumpenproletariat, meaning in effect ‘underclass’, dealt bloodily with this, and 15,000 men and women were summarily executed or exiled. To Marx, this was the class war, and so it was for any observer of it; there were some very clever ones, not least Alexis de Tocqueville, who had written about democracy in the United States. He called the June Days a ‘servile war’, comparing them with the slave rebellion, under Spartacus, that had rocked ancient Rome. The liberals who were really behind the revolution of 1848 were nonplussed. Finally, there was the army: ‘the uniform was the peasant’s national costume’ and the army ‘the dregs of the peasant Lumpenproletariat ’. So: bankers, seedy journalists, a huge bureaucracy, isomorphous magnitudes of peasants, an army of bravos led by opera-mustachioed generals in corsets, and the clergy, but all of it likely in the end to fail. All of this, read in a university in Santiago in 1973 or in Istanbul in 1980, meant a great deal more than the long-ago historical events that were involved. The opposition to these military coups felt strongly that it had had history on its side, that it had been cheated. To this day it is vindictive.

Allende had been a veteran figure of Chilean politics — a Marxist, claiming that he wanted ‘a Chilean road to socialism’, i.e. without the assorted bloodbaths. He was a Valparaíso doctor and a cultivated man, reading widely, playing the guitar, able to discuss paintings. In Catholic countries, the anti-clerical tradition often did push doctors and engineers to the Left, and Allende therefore had a considerable number of intellectual cousins in Latin Europe: they agreed with his diagnosis of Chile’s condition, and a prominent member of the French Left, Régis Debray, who appeared in Chile, might easily point to the comparisons of Allende and Mitterrand, later the French president. In some ways it was a Kulturkampf as tended to happen in Catholic countries. They had a view of the world that went quite logically from macro-America via capital and ‘comprador class’ — minority or foreign middlemen — to micro-paterfamilias and the foreman cracking his whip at downtrodden peasants.

Such people applauded when Allende stated his creed at the United Nations late in 1972, in a speech that the American ambassador called ‘one of the most memorable speeches ever heard in the great hall’. It was a classic statement of a view, then widely held, that countries such as Chile were held back by ‘international capitalism’. Multinational firms extracted raw materials such as copper, paying low wages, and the copper would soon run out. If there were protests, these firms would bribe local politicians; ‘the power of corporations is so great that it transcends all borders’; ‘we are victims of a new form of im — perialism, one that is more subtle, more cunning, and for that reason more terrifyingly effective’; ‘the financial-economic blockade against us… is oblique, subterranean, and indirect… We are the victims of almost imperceptible actions, generally disguised in phrases and declarations that extol respect for the sovereignty and dignity of our country.’ One problem was that the great corporations repatriated the profits from their investments, many times over, such that Chile, and Latin America generally, had contributed $9bn to the rich countries over the preceding decade. Chile, potentially a rich country, therefore lived in poverty, apart from the hangers-on of the multinationals; ‘We go from place to place seeking credits and aid, and yet — a true paradox of the capitalist economic system — we are major exporters of capital.’ The Chilean answer must therefore be — nationalization of the country’s resources: as Lenin had put it, the expropriation of the expropriators, though Allende did not quote him. There was this to be said for him, that copper had declined in price, unlike other raw materials, from £620 per ton in 1969 to £412 in 1972: the vagaries of international capitalism. At the time, many people would have agreed with Allende as to this dictionnaire des idées reçues on the reasons for the troubles of the ‘Third World’. In fact, the Americans accepted the diagnosis often enough and in an effort to improve their popularity had produced a sort of Marshall Plan for Latin America, called ‘Alliance for Progress’, in 1961. They spent $20bn but, not being in occupation, found that much of the money went to thieving oligarchies.

But was Chile ‘Third World’ at all? She was very varied in character, with 9 million people over 3,000 miles of coastline, stretching from the sub-tropical copper-producing north to the near Antarctic south: great estates here, small peasant plots there, with modern cities and Indian tribes, a considerable problem of population growth, and, on the outskirts of the towns, callampos, shanty towns (literally, ‘mushrooms’). Half of the population lived in the central valley, and large estates accounted for 80 per cent of all land, up to the 1960s; there was a native Araucanian Indian population, though in scale it did not compare with those elsewhere in Latin America (the Chileans having exterminated many). Chile had in some degree faced the same demographic problem as Latin America as a whole, where the population went up from 211 million to 261 million between 1961 and 1968, and by 1984 had reached 408 million. In Chile it grew at almost 2.5 per cent every year, a figure matched today by Uganda, which has the fastest-growing population in the world, and the cities began in places to be choked. The same was true of Turkey in the same period, adding the population of Denmark (4 million) every year to herself. As with Marx’s Paris, shanty towns, ‘dangerous classes’, woeful sewage, epidemics were a constant reminder that revolution was at the gates.

Chile, with her weird geography and often unpleasant climate, had remained much poorer than Argentina: her people migrated there, and it was usual for them to be in such jobs as house-portering. But with a population derived from the Basque country and Galicia, she also had reasonably civilized politics. There was a moment of military takeover at a particularly bad time in the thirties, but even then it was much less nasty than elsewhere, and the military regime did not last long. There was a strong enough parliamentary tradition, but the divisions of the country were reflected in a multiplicity of parties, proportional representation doing nothing to correct this. As in so many other countries, there were unstable coalitions; the centre usually dominated affairs, and was Catholic or Christian Democrat. Marx simply did not understand religion, thought it absurd, and dismissed ‘Christian Socialism’ as ‘the holy water with which the priest assuages the heart-burnings of the aristocracy’. But there was more to it. Many Christian Democrats had no objection whatsoever to land reform, for the benefit of Catholic peasants; they did not like banks. Their spending on welfare was considerable, and associated with an inflation that already reached 30 per cent in the later 1960s. Dating back to the worldwide slump of the early 1930s, the State was widely involved in the economy — half of industry was controlled by it, through an agency called CORFO — and although the right-wing coalition (‘National Party’) might have tried to dismantle the institutions concerned, and to co-operate with the Americans in the liberalization of trade and investment, the Catholics and of course the Left had different notions. There were elections in 1970, and the left-wing coalition won more votes than either of the others, though not much more than one third. Salvador Allende, its leader, was duly and constitutionally elected president, with the votes of the centre. The essential point about Catholic democracy was made in an Italian context by Indro Montanelli, veteran journalist: Liberals and Catholics said different things in the same language, Marxists and Catholics the same thing in a different language.

Allende then set about reforms and was given further support when he took office. In the first place, the Americans behaved unintelligently. Washington took alarm: another Cuba? Kissinger said at a briefing, ‘I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins, there is likely to be another free election in Chile… massive problems for us, and for the democratic forces and pro-US forces in… the whole Western Hemisphere.’ Richard Helms of the CIA wanted to stop Allende, using the small armed Right, and there was an alarmist lunch with the head of Pepsi-Cola and the editor of a right-wing newspaper. Two excitable Chilean generals were roped in, and a constitutional-minded commander was murdered. This, naturally, backfired, creating a great anti-American constituency, and thereafter the Americans behaved more circumspectly. It was then Allende’s turn to make mistake after mistake, and his position was not very strong. He had almost no parliamentary majority, three of the parties in his ‘Popular Union’ coalition were small and likely to defect, and there was also a Constitutional Court able to block legislation where necessary. Then there was the army.

For a Marxist, here was an interesting challenge, both Czechoslovakia and Italy offering obvious points of similarity: a large Communist element (though Allende did not call himself ‘Communist’) in a position of some dominance. Why did Czechoslovakia get 1948, and Chile 1973? There was also Cuba, standing up to the USA and promising revolution throughout Latin America. As things turned out, Allende was a weak man, leaning this way and that way, but he started off quite well. In the first instance, Allende could advance a programme that would bring in allies from the Catholic centre, especially land reform and anti-Americanism. His coalition had two fifths of the parliamentary votes, and he took over 1.5 million hectares while nationalizing the copper industry, which accounted for four fifths of exports. He offered in the first instance money for various worthy causes — free housing, health, etc. — such that in municipal elections, in April 1971, he took nearly half of the vote. It also mattered that even then there was 25 per cent abstention — and apathy was in its way a revolutionary characteristic. His minister of the economy, Pedro Vuskovic, announced that ‘state control is designed to destroy the economic base of imperialism and the ruling class by putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production’, and three of the largest copper mines, American-owned, were taken over, without indemnification. Allende’s first year went well, buoyed by spending of reserves and by high copper prices. He himself later on said that his greatest mistake had been not to hold a referendum on constitutional reform at that time. He was soon to run into trouble.

His Communist supporters were, at the time, quite moderate: for Moscow, relations with the USA were very important, and that might easily mean just abandoning Allende; in any case, Lenin himself had had sharp words to say about left-wing ‘infantilism’. The Communists had some 15 per cent of the vote but they also controlled the trade unions, and they appealed to Radomiro Tomić’s Christian Democratic Left for a common reformist platform. But there was also a romantic Left in Latin America, the MIR, or Movement for the Revolutionary Left, and it was not very interested in such reformism. Quite the contrary, it provoked. It set up the Che Guevara Población around ‘bourgeois’ Santiago, and installed 1,200 families in occupation. The great symbolic figure, Castro, came for a three-week visit at the end of 1971, during which he made inflammatory speeches: ‘we have already learned more than enough about… bourgeois, capitalist liberties’, etc. Allende himself shook his head with disapproval at the antics of the MIR, which denounced his ‘reformism’ as an ‘illusion’, and wished to take power at once, by arming the inhabitants of the shanty towns. Land expropriation took, in all, 9 million hectares of land, and in some cases the land had already been occupied by peasants; and this even affected farms with no more than eighty hectares. In 1972 the university boiled over, as thousands of students went off to the countryside for ‘consciousnessraising’ exercises; by now, thousands of foreigners were flocking in to participate in a socialist revolution, and the secretary-general of Allende’s own socialist party, the upper-class Carlos Altamira, announced that the battle with ‘the bourgeoisie and imperialism’ though postponed was on the cards. Nationalizations went ahead, and the United Nations Economic Council for Latin America contained Marxist economists who gave Allende their sanction. The parliament gybed at this, and some of the nationalization was pushed through by a device close to fraud. A law already in existence allowed firms to be sequestrated if they were badly managed, and it was easy enough for Allende to push up wages, drive a firm into bankruptcy, and then sequestrate it; strikes might have the same effect. The State had run forty-three enterprises in 1970 but, by 1973, had 370 on its books, as administrative chicanery was used to demonstrate that they had been incompetently run in private hands. At any rate, Allende was bypassing Congress, by executive action, and this naturally threatened American investments, which, in copper and with the multinational ITT, were considerable. Nixon, late in 1970, had resolved to give no credit to Chile, while also using the US influence to prevent others from giving it.

If Chile had been Cuba, no doubt matters would then have come to a breach. But Castro had come to power in the outcome of a revolution that had destroyed the old army; there was no parliament or constitution of any significance. Allende did not have Castro’s tools. Without dollar support, by September 1971 inflation was going up. It always was a problem in the state-dominated Chilean economy, with a balance of payments deficit, and with swollen employment rolls and pay-packets; Allende imposed price controls. These had the usual effect, of driving down supply, and, besides, the consequence of the land seizures was also to cause shortages, which in turn could be made up only through imports, of $280m (including French chickens). These led to the creation shortages and queues, and there was a sign of things to come when 5,000 middle-class housewives, banging saucepans, were met by teargas.

Matters worsened up to the summer of 1972, as, even on official figures, the cost of living rose 163 per cent. The government tried to control prices (through a Cuban in the Directorate of Industry) but hardly knew what it was doing: the lorry drivers, on whom Chile, a very ‘long’ country, depended, went on strike, and the queues lengthened. ‘Planning’ had been reinforced, and what it entailed was the taking on of more and more labour for concerns that were unsuccessful: ‘floods of red ink on the books of nationalized firms,’ said the American ambassador (himself not at all anxious for any kind of American intervention: he did not do his career any good). Investment fell off, as people bought black-market dollars or went abroad. One outcome of the land reform was predictable: harvests dropped by one quarter in 1973. Trade union elections were ‘rigged’, so that ordinary workers’ behaviour could be dictated, despite their own wishes, from the radical Left, and such ‘rigging’ became easy enough because so many workers were standing in queues or otherwise making ends meet: apathy, the abstention of the voters, generally does occur on a great scale in the course of a ‘revolutionary situation’. Even in the great October of 1917, in elections for the trade unions, most people did not bother to vote, because they were tired, bored and bewildered. The Bolsheviks got their majority at last.

At the turn of 1972-3 there was a long-standing row over the free press, much of which was of course bitterly critical. A great newspaper concern was squeezed by the government, with taxes and extra rules, and it was threatened with bankruptcy and expropriation — an obvious way of preventing opposition media from operating at all. In the University of Chile there was a long battle between the Christian Democrat Rector and a Marxist governing board. The Left seized the television station for eight months, and was able to defy court orders; there was a clique of journalists at the government’s bidding, and the print or delivery unions were used to muzzle the right-wing Mercurio. There were restrictions on travel, though many of the better-off and mobile had already left, foreseeing the worst. In the summer of 1972 Allende was making no effort to control the MIR in the universities, perhaps hoping to provoke the Right into a premature uprising. On top of everything else, and despite promises made to the Christian Democrats, a law for ‘Unified National Education’, which would affect the private schools, was to be pushed through at the turn of 1972-3. But Allende had gone too far.

He now faced challenges. His actions were undertaken by executive authority, and he was regularly condemned in the parliament; the majority against him was just short of the two thirds needed to overturn his presidential veto, and the constitutional court became involved (though it shrank, as yet, from conflict). The Christian Democrats joined up with the Right, to face elections in March 1973, and, with claims of electoral corruption and fraud, took over half of the vote. As small shopkeepers went on strike, the government attempted to take over the also striking lorry drivers, and met its match: nails welded together as tyre-bursting devices, lorries hidden in forests, or banded together in such great numbers as to require regular siege. Perhaps, if the Chilean Left had been adequately led, it would have staged its revolution: after all, no Communist worth his salt would have bothered about hostile parliamentary majorities. Armed peasant squatters and shanty towns would have been ‘Red Guards’, there would have been a terroristic secret police, Communists would have penetrated the army and elections would have been ‘rigged’ with ballot boxes ‘stuffed’ with fake votes — the story of any Communist takeover in peacetime. These things did indeed happen, but on a small scale, and the Left seems to have succumbed to infantilism — supposing that it was destroying the economic base of imperialism, whereas the reality was just play-acting. True, Jacques Chonchol, the agriculture minister, romantically pursued his land reforms, and a Communist ideologue, Volodia Teitelboim, stirred up the shanty towns; the interior minister, Carlos Prats, went with Allende to Moscow in November 1972, and workers themselves struck against the lorry drivers’ strikes, but none of this amounted to a serious attempt to take power in the Communist manner: indeed, when a mass demonstration was staged against ‘Fascism’, Prats shrieked from his podium, ‘If you are against Fascism, jump!’ A hundred thousand people then jumped. The Soviet ambassador, standing next to his American colleague, remarked that there were more effective ways of fighting Fascism. But if Allende could not seize power, he could at least create chaos, and that was Chile’s condition. He had printed money — more than a 100 per cent increase in 1970, 171 per cent in 1971, with a deficit of 40 per cent in 1972 and a 163 per cent increase in the cost of living. There was a small sign that the armed forces would intervene when a brief mutiny occurred, squashed by other elements in the military. Allende then mobilized some Red Guards, and alienated the military in general.

But he was now being widely condemned. The government itself was beyond the law; the coup, though long drawn-out and ineffectual, was Allende’s, not the army’s. General Pinochet was acting quite constitutionally. In June 1973 an all-services committee of fifteen drew up contingency plans for a takeover, although they were not put into effect until 9 September. Some study was made of the little Soviets that the Left had established in the shanty towns; there were photographs of people to be arrested, and since the army could search for weapons, the soldiers had an opportunity for arrests. Allende himself would not opt for a revolutionary way forward — he did not ‘arm the workers’ — but he would also not act against the extreme Left, although even the Communists were uncomfortable with it. In the summer of 1973 matters went downhill — a 40 per cent devaluation, an attack by the government on Catholic schools, a collapse of export earnings, strikes by buses and even by doctors, and another strike by truck drivers, threatened by nationalization; there was a constant parliamentary crisis. Congress, the constitutional court and the controller-general (who oversaw the legality of administration) all condemned the government, which argued that, if all cabinet members signed a document opposing a decision of the court, then that must stand; whereupon the opposition introduced proceedings to impeach ministers, whose signatures would then not be valid. In the end, there were rumours of a mutiny in the navy at Valparaíso, instigated by the revolutionary-minded Altamira. In another attempt to placate the military, Allende agreed to the removal of his own general, Prats, and his place was taken by Augusto Pinochet. That day — 22 August — the Chamber of Deputies passed a resolution declaring that Allende was outside the law and the constitution.

This had happened before in Chile, when a president, disavowed in 1891, had killed himself. Allende contributed a note of black farce, arguing that in the cold and rainy winter, there would be flour only for three days, and by the end of August the generals were in more or less constant session, confronting a situation of anarchy. The lorry drivers’ strike was into its second month. On 2 September airline pilots, dentists, chemists and the merchant marine struck. Women demonstrated again, banging saucepans, and were met by counter-demonstrating women and young men hurling rocks; on 6 September Allende made an extraordinary speech, indicating penury to come. By 9 September all of the senior figures in the armed forces had agreed on the plans for a takeover. The American ambassador was given an indication, and it is probable that the CIA were involved, though the Americans were in general quite prudent, having been caught out in the hopeless effort, three years earlier, to stop Allende.

The coup itself came in the early hours of 11 September. It was easy enough: troops took over television, blocked the roads, imposed a curfew. Allende, in the presidential palace, had his guards, but there was not much that they could do against aircraft firing rockets into the building. In the event, the building on fire, he seems to have shot himself with a rifle that had been an elaborate present (his remains were examined in 1990 and suicide was confirmed). In all, perhaps 5,000 people were killed, and thousands went into exile. They were generally articulate, and mobile — Chonchol, who had been the supposed mastermind of agricultural reform, taught in a French university. The conscience of post-Vietnam America was touched, and even in the twenty-first century, the name ‘Pinochet’ resounds; his family is harassed by courts. But the Chile which he took over was in a condition of collapse, and Allende had been condemned by any and every constitutional institution. Pinochet’s real crime was to show that the Left had had its day: the Moneda in Santiago was the Winter Palace of the Left.

The ‘Pinochet solution’ — its example was to grow and grow — became a spectre, haunting the Communist world. This turned out to be in the sense of a ghost-face literally true. The Communist leader Luis Corvalán was exchanged for a Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, at an airport in Switzerland (oddly enough the American ambassador there, demoted for behaving correctly, had been ambassador in Chile at the time of the coup). Corvalán proposed to fight underground, and, to do so, had plastic surgery in Moscow, after which, with a false passport, he went back. His underground activities were unfruitful; in 1987 Pinochet, by then leader of a tolerably prosperous and ordered country, agreed to hold proper elections, which Corvalán wanted to contest. He had to be smuggled back out to Moscow for a reverse face change, to qualify for his old passport. The Eighteenth Brumaire did indeed repeat itself as farce, though black.

It had an equivalent in Turkey, also in the context of a near civil war and of inflation, though in this case that of the second, doubling, oil price shock rather than the first, quadrupling, one. On 24 January 1980 the Guardian’s Turkish correspondent, David Barchard, arrived at the railway station in Ankara, from Istanbul. It was on that very day that the prime minister announced economic reforms along Pinochet-solution lines, courtesy of the International Monetary Fund. Ankara was an inviting theatre for these. His taxi could not go far up the hill to Çankaya, the modern part of town, where the diplomats and professional classes lived. The street lights had gone out, and he had to struggle with his luggage through the snow, all the way to the hotel. On most such nights, at the time, it was usual to hear gunfire. Turkey was experiencing an acute version of the general crisis of the later 1970s, and there was a grim surrealism to it all. This or that part of town was controlled by one or other of the warring political groupings, and in the preceding year roughly twenty people were being killed every day in the country at large. The Middle East Technical University had been set up, with American money, as a tribute to Turkey’s loyal membership of NATO, in the 1950s. It had excellent facilities, and a setting quite rare in the centre of the Anatolian plateau, because it was well-watered and wooded. The battling inside it was such that the American ambassador’s car was set on fire (curiously enough, he — Robert Komer — had been in charge of the ‘Phoenix’ programme in Vietnam) and policemen controlled the lecture halls, taking names. University authorities, brought up in the liberal tradition, wrung their hands in helpless lamentation; one, in Istanbul, was assassinated, with his daughter, in his car. In the capital, electricity stopped functioning except for six hours every day, and the town was dominated by a foul-smelling smog — product, mainly, of the cheap and low-quality coal, from mines on the Black Sea, which was all the fuel most people could afford. Little girls walked to ballet school with face masks. There were queues for elementary items — lavatory paper, olive oil and the like; you could be arrested for having a packet of foreign cigarettes, an offence against the tobacco monopoly. One scene in particular symbolized what had happened. Well-trained economists, statisticians, met in the ministry building to devise the next five-year plan, complete with complicated calculations about foreign trade, much of it bartering. The entire session proceeded by candlelight, and the bureaucrats wore their overcoats. Inflation, represented by grubby and crumpled notes that had passed fast through market hands, was at Chilean proportions, and the situation was comparable: another Brumaire. The generals took power on 12 September, seven years almost to the day after Pinochet. Here, too, something of an economic miracle followed; here, too, free elections were soon allowed; here, too, a good part of the educated population never forgave.

There were of course obvious differences between Chile and Turkey: the one colonized, the other a colonizer, with a fivefold difference in population (though there are interesting points in common between Turkey and Spain). But the chief matter in common was America, and if Washington wanted to simplify things, then there were many points for comparison. Chile, until Allende, had been part of an American system. So was Turkey, and September 1980 shows remarkable similarities with the September 1973 that brought Pinochet to power. We can assume that the Turkish generals had examined the story of Pinochet. The choreography was similar. They are not likely to have read Eighteenth Brumaire; one of their complaints at the National Security Council was that Marx was given an import licence, at the expense of other, more pressing uses for paper.

It was the end of a dream. For two generations, Turkey had counted as a model of successful Westernization, and crowning acts in that had been democracy, participation in the Korean War and membership of NATO — much of it a straightforward outcome of Stalin’s bullying. The country had emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War, and a leader of genius, Kemal Atatürk, had established her independence. He went on with Westernization. In 1923, when Turkey was at last independent, she had a very poor infrastructure (railways, at that time, for Anatolia, the equivalent of a Moon landing) and under Atatürk there was an extension of elementary hygiene, given that the very capital, Ankara, was subject to malaria and the French embassy was the station buffet. Progress happened; 700 German professors, headed by Einstein (he did not stay for long, because he was expected to teach and did not want to), arrived when Hitler came to power; Istanbul saw for a time the best German university in the world; Turkish opera singers such as Leyla Gencer had their place in the repertoire; the ‘Fisherman of Halicarnassus’ became a vastly translated author; Galatasaray Lycée or Robert College in Istanbul, Ankara College in the capital — where Denis Hills taught, as a refugee from post-war England — produced graduates who could teach Western civilization to the multitudes. Ankara University, where Ernst Reuter, later the mayor of Berlin, taught Town Planning, had a School of Political Science (Mülkiye) that had its esprit de corps and laid down Westernizing models. It produced a good part of the foreign ministry, and the foreign ministry, after 1950, was anxious to co-operate with the Americans. They, for their part, recognized an ally, and encouraged it towards democracy and elections.

These did not prove to be a simple matter. Turkey had been built on waves of refugees, from the Caucasus, the Balkans and the Crimea, and they had brought with them the ‘nation-building’ techniques that they had had to learn in a very cruel way from the ‘Christian’ states that had taken over. You got rid of minorities; 7 million people had had to flee to Anatolia, and they made up half of the urban population of republican Turkey, with villages of their own dotted up and down the land. There was hardly a family that did not remember tales of disaster, and even the government quarter of old Istanbul had been swamped by these refugees in 1912. From the Balkans, the Turks had learned how a new nation was to be established. This was a business involving considerable artificiality — for Romania, even the name of the state was false, since the original ‘Romania’ had been the Latin kingdom of the Crusaders in Thrace; Bulgaria was cobbled together by American missionaries; in Greece the need to classicize run-of-the-mill but, for the peasants, unknown concepts was sometimes funny. In Turkey there was also a new national language, because the peasants needed to be made literate, and could not manage that under the existing Arabic script; words had to be invented (Ernst Reuter, who had been a prisoner of war in Kazakhstan, knew something about Turkic languages; he was put on the language reform commission within months of his arrival from Buchenwald concentration camp, and advised learnedly on the Uzbek word for this and that, designed to displace the Ottoman original). In economic matters, state boards were established to run this or that industry; people were arrested for selling the national currency without authorization; police and army were powerful; in Turkey the capital had even been moved away from sophisticated, historic and cosmopolitan Istanbul, to Ankara, in the bleak centre of the Anatolian plateau. There, you did not hear a mosque, and people of country dress were turned away if they appeared. The Western admirers of Atatürk did not really see this side of things, and he himself had a considerable sense of moderation, knowing when to stop. In his day, the Christian minorities were recognized as necessary, or even vital: they were Turkey’s passport to the West. When Hitler started his campaign against the Jews, Turkey’s doors were opened to (some of) them. Four and a half centuries before, the Jews of Iberia had been expelled by the crusading king. The Sultan had let them into his empire, and their descendants, many of them converts to Islam, contributed much to thirties Turkey, which was run with a sense of mission. Atatürk, who had saved his people from conquest and massacre, had enormous charisma, and now stands as a symbol of an old-fashioned Progress, of which Turkey’s neighbours are not exemplars. He died in 1938, and his successors suffered from excessive caution.

Enlightenments eat their parents. The medical improvements, considerable in their own way — in Ankara, malaria had been a mass killer until the Republic, with its Çubuk reservoir and its devoted doctors — also resulted in a demographic explosion. This was worst in the partly Kurdish east, where polygamy, starting for a boy in his mid-teens, with a girl even younger who was soon ditched, was standard, though not legal. Then again, as France had discovered post-Napoleon, education creates an unappeasable intelligentsia; a Russian reactionary, Konstantin Leontiev, sagely said that, in Russia, ‘the tavern does less damage than the school’. The best products of the educational system, as with developing countries from the Third Republic or united Italy onwards, went into technical services and were very good indeed, but there were others, hanging discontentedly around the media or the educational institutions, and thinking that they knew it all. This was to be an enormous problem in the Turkish seventies, more or less as happened in Chile; and such men and women tended to look on the peasantry, trooping into the towns, as isomorphic magnitudes like a sack of potatoes. Migrant peasants occupied huge areas on the outskirts of the main cities, especially Istanbul. By law, they could not be evicted if they managed to put up a house during one night’s work. These ‘night constructions’ (gecekondu) formed rings round historic Istanbul and Ankara, a terrible affront to modernizing Turkey. Ankara had been planned by central European architects and their Turkish associates in the 1930s, and they had aimed higher than this.

Migrant rurals even besieged the old part of Ankara, where Atatürk had established the modernizing State. You could leave the official entertainment palace of the foreign ministry, where, once, Atatürk had danced the waltz with Western ambassadresses, and perhaps discussed the principles of Bauhaus architecture with Bruno Taut, luminary of Weimar, Moscow and Tokyo. (Taut, out of gratitude, said that he would design Atatürk’s catafalque gratis. He then designed something resembling a huge gilded eggbox. The Turks did not know how to respond. Taut let them off the hook by himself dying, and being buried in it, at Edirne.) Then you would smell kebabs, and have to avoid large, religious-clad women driving their brood along the pavement towards a multifarious bazaar. Istanbul’s population grew from 2 million to 10 million (and by some accounts, even 15 million). There had been 12 million Turks in 1922. By 1950 there were 20 million, by 1975 35 million and by 1980 45 million. The infrastructure could hardly respond to this. Schools were too few, the electricity network was overburdened, and even the sewage system suffered. It was a variant of what western Europe had undergone in the later nineteenth century, but on a much greater scale, and in a much shorter time. In the 1970s order was breaking down.

All enlightened, reforming states encountered a political problem: how far could liberty be sacrificed for the sake of progress? This problem was well-known in Russia or Spain, two countries with which Turkey had a great deal in common. Pushkin had said that ‘the State is the only European in Russia’, and in such countries the army had a role in public affairs that it did not have in more advanced places. It took in ambitious boys from the provinces, sometimes even the peasantry, gave them discipline and education, and so caused them to rise in society (e.g. the chief of staff in 1960 came from a tobacco-farming family, and a later military saviour, Kenan Evren, was the son of a bank clerk in the Balkans). Military schools taught medicine and engineering, and the Turkish officer corps had had a role in the modernization of the country ever since the early nineteenth century. Under Atatürk — himself, in Salonica, a one-time cadet, refugee from a religious school — this went on: the army was at the centre of the State. On the other hand, there was much pressure for political change, in the direction of greater freedom. In the later 1940s there was a split in the ruling single party, the Republicans, partly because of foreign pressure, and partly because the two wings grew further apart. The Republicans, under İsmet Inönü, represented bullying Westernizing virtue, and Inönü had a statue of himself, bigger than the National Monument itself, designed for Taksim Square, where once had been an Ottoman barracks. But there were rivals, interested in prising open the State and, in some grubby cases, using primitive nationalism to expropriate the property of the minorities, especially the quarter-million Greeks in Istanbul. They were also prepared to open up to the peasantry, especially as regards the legalization of religious practices that the Republicans had regarded as ridiculous. The Republicans were by this stage unpopular, as they were associated with a police state.

In 1950, under American pressure, Inönü allowed free elections, and the free-market, liberalizing element, established as the Democratic Party, won an enormous victory. The old Republicans survived in any number only because local prefects had done deals with Kurdish chieftains in the east, whose tribes voted en bloc as instructed. The Democrats were in power for ten years, and started well: American aid flowed in, some of the state restrictions were lifted, a large concrete mosque was put up in the middle of Ankara (with a supermarket underneath) and the Democrats’ leader, Adnan Menderes, won respect abroad because of his NATO connections (he said, ‘Whatever America does is right by us’). Then came the worst mistake of modern Turkish history. The Greeks of Istanbul occupied much of the best real estate and ran the best shops; they were half of the stock exchange. Some were even deputies of the Democratic Party. On 5-6 September 1955 there was a riot in the European part of Istanbul, and the great avenue running through it, once called Grand’ rue de Péra, was filled with broken glass and goods flung out of shop windows, while the police stood by. This was ostensibly done because the Greeks on Cyprus were behaving intolerably against the Turkish minority, but the main factor was simply greed, and stupid greed at that, on the part of Democrat associates. The Greeks (and many Armenians) left Istanbul, except for a tiny remnant, even then — in the Fener district — overshadowed by true-believing Moslems at their truest-believing noisiest, and having to be protected by the army and the police. The Greek district was then taken over by rural migrants, and took two generations to recover. So did the country. Menderes was later executed because of this, though, oddly enough, the Greek Patriarch appeared as a witness on his behalf. The Democrats made whoopee with the budget, lost control of finance, split, had to attempt a fiddling of elections, then tried to govern in authoritarian style. They encouraged religion, whereas Atatürk had determinedly kept it out of public life. Secular Turkey hated all of this, and there was a military coup, on 27 May 1960. A general, Cemal Gürsel, now became head of state, and tried, in close co-operation with Inönü, to produce an updated version of Atatürkism. Professors of law produced a revised constitution, in the extraordinary belief that the decreeing of things on paper would mean their realization in practice. The Americans offered almost immediate recognition and $400m credit; more professors — Dutch — arrived with a Plan.

But the outcome was Menderes’s revenge. In the first place, the demographic boom went ahead — by 1980 two thirds of the urban population was under thirty-five, and the villages moved to the towns (and also moved to German towns, in hundreds of thousands). The Democratic Party had been banned, but it carried on in another form, as the Justice Party (Turkish parties sometimes have names with an almost untranslatable religious reference, to the seven deadly virtues — chastity, sobriety, thrift, etc.). The Americans had a soft spot for it, and its leader, the wily Süleyman Demirel, had worked with them, in a company that built the Bosphorus Bridge and the Middle Eastern Technical University. The Republicans, by contrast, were turning increasingly towards the Left, and old Inönü was eventually forced out by a man who had the makings of a Turkish Allende, Bülent Ecevit: very cultivated, a Sanskrit scholar, a considerable poet and quite hopeless in politics. He had to deal with a very divided party. Part of it was rigidly secularist, regarding Islam as a disease. Another part came from a very heretical element of Islam, the Alevis, who treated women as equals, drank wine in the Christian manner, and regarded the holy month of Ramazan, when nothing was supposed to pass the mouth during daylight hours, as ridiculous. Then there were Kurds, also a rough fifth of the population, whose chiefs tended towards deadly rivalry, and were generally willing to change party allegiance according to favours. Already in the early 1960s an uncomfortable pattern was setting in. Roughly 40 per cent of the vote would go to parties with some form of religious programme; another 40 per cent would go to their opposites, some of them veering towards the Left. Then there would be small parties, set up to champion a leader’s ambition. But the large parties themselves only held together if there was a leader with all of the strings in his hands, prepared to behave dictatorially and even corruptly. Coalitions succeeded each other, and the army waited in the wings. A counterpoint of bullying and irresponsibility then went ahead. The trick in politics was to establish personal influence, whether to do favours for your electors at home or for your friends in the capital. There was an element among the educated youth that wandered off into terrorism — much as had happened with ‘Land and Liberty’ in Tsarist Russia, where students had imagined that the masses could only become seriously revolutionary if the police made their lives hellish, by mistake. They provoked trouble, and brought another military coup in 1971, a pointless one. As happened in Chile, the Turkish Left had a great deal more responsibility for its fate than it ever, generally speaking, admitted to.

In the seventies, Ecevit with his rough 40 per cent matched Demirel, with his rough 40. In the hothouse atmosphere of the other 20 per cent, there were strange growths. Certain parts of Turkey had a strongly Islamic tradition, especially Konya, south-east of Ankara, and the Erzurum region, far to the east. Here, in secular eyes, were brainwashed peasants with a vengeance, but the real point was hatred of the corruption that came from Istanbul and Ankara. The leader was a professor of water engineering, Necmettin Erbakan, who had taught in Germany and had been a colleague of Demirel’s; if he got anywhere, it was because his hands were clean. Ecevit took up an alliance with him, both sides anxious to repel the military, in 1973. Demirel could to some extent rely on another small party, the Nationalists, whose real power came partly from inflation. In an inflationary period, small suppliers, not paid on time by large receivers, suffered. A visit from Nationalist bully-boys would cause debts to be repaid faster than if the business had gone through the courts, and in populous, unsavoury areas the Nationalists did tolerably well. The Nationalists also tended to do well in districts close to areas of Kurdish or Alevi migration, such as Gaziosmanpaşa or Sütlüce in Istanbul. It was a dismal period, each party throwing money at voters (Ecevit even paid twelve of Demirel’s men cash, to desert their party and join his, as ministers for this or that: one suggestion was ‘weather-reporting’), and inflation got under way. The oil shock meant that the economy, almost entirely dependent upon imported energy, ran down; it survived only by contracting debts, which went up from $2bn in 1970 to $20bn in 1980. Between 1975 and 1980 there was also an eightfold rise in prices, as the government’s deficits became uncontrollable, covered only by paper.

Matters were made worse because relations with the United States turned sour. This had to do with Greece and Cyprus. That island had become independent in 1960, and the position of the Turkish minority — one fifth of the population — was supposedly guaranteed under the constitution, which reserved certain rights. Great Britain, Turkey and Greece were supposed to guarantee the constitution, with a right to military intervention where required. Quite soon after independence, Greek Cypriot nationalists started to persecute the Turks. This was not wise. Left alone, a third of them would have become Greeks, a third would have emigrated, and a third would have remained as picturesque folklore, cooking kebabs and dancing in a masculine line as evidence of the great tolerance towards minorities displayed by Greek civilization. Instead, there was stupid and nasty persecution, beginning at Christmas 1963 with the killing of a wedding party. A United Nations force arrived to hold a ‘Green Line’ supposedly separating the two sides. This meant, as such ‘peacekeeping’ ventures generally did, that excuses were found for the stronger side, which then pushed the Turks into small enclaves, mostly dependent for survival on foreign charity, itself sometimes diverted by Greek Cypriot officials. Potatoes rolled around the floor of the customs shed at Famagusta, because the sacks were slit open. Matters then became pointlessly complicated, in the manner of the Levant. There was a military coup in Greece in 1967, and in 1974 there was a coup within the coup, which led to crypto-Fascists taking power. They tried to overthrow the government of Greek Cyprus, assuming that its leader, Archbishop Makarios, was playing up to the Soviet Union, given that Cyprus stood on the edge of a Middle East which was, just then, boiling. A civil war on Cyprus resulted, a number of Greeks disappearing. The local Turks, held together by a remarkable figure, Rauf Denktaş, could justly fear a return of persecution, expulsion, but Ecevit and Erbakan, with their unlikely coalition, were presented with an opportunity. The Turkish army went in, and, given the paralysis of America, through Watergate, and England, through money, was not resisted. In the outcome, the Turks occupied nearly one third of the island, and resisted international condemnation. The Turks of Cyprus remained poor and isolated, but they survived. Denktaş said, quite rightly, that they had avoided the fate of the Gaza Strip Palestinians. Nevertheless, the simple solution — recognition of Turkish Cyprus’s independence — evaded international bureaucrats, and a good part of the Turkish Cypriot population simply ended up in London.

In Turkey, Ecevit became hugely popular. He decided to exploit this, with an immediate election, which would let him dispense with his odd-bedfellow Islamic ally. But parliament would not allow early elections, and fell into paralysis; when they were held, six months later, Ecevit narrowly lost. Demirel and the smaller parties put forward a ‘National Front’ government, with a majority of four seats, early in 1975. In the provinces, and some of the ministries, the smaller parties, Nationalists and Islamists, used their power disproportionately for changes of personnel; and besides, their strength was such that an institution designed to train clergymen (Imam-hatıp) was opened for ordinary schoolchildren, segregated between boys and girls, and subjected to solid religious education, including koranic Arabic, which Turks simply repeated syllabically, without understanding; prizes went to the hafiz, who knew the lot off by heart. They had been started (in effect) in 1951, and grew from seven to over one hundred in 1975, and 383 by 1988; in 1971 they were functioning at middle-school level as well, and were teaching 300,000 pupils. Half of the curriculum was religious, and the secularists grumbled. Under Demirel’s National Front governments (1975-7 and after the June election, 1977-8) the desecularization of modern Turkey, in a sense, got under way. In some universities, during Ramazan, the canteens closed; there was tension between observers and non-observers since the observers got up early to have something to eat before sun-up, and woke up the non-observers by their talk about football and so forth, while non-observers’ smoking after lunch similarly irritated observers; there were fights and, on occasion, ambulances. The call to prayer was now heard, loudly amplified, in the very centre of great cities, and in Ankara there was a big row when the mayor put up a statue of one of the secularists’ symbols, the stag of the Hittites (Indo-Europeans, not Arabs), and the religious-minded interior minister stopped construction again and again until the courts ruled otherwise. On one level, no doubt desperately childish, but on another deeply serious, and to do with the nature of the country and the upbringing of children, especially daughters. At any rate it divided the country very deeply. Perhaps Demirel and Ecevit themselves would have preferred to co-operate, as the great industrialists (Vehbi Koç and Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı) wanted them to do. But each was prisoner of his supporters, in no mood to compromise. When Ecevit visited an Alevi centre in Cappadocia (Hacı Bektaş) his cortège was fired on by the orthodox Sunni in Nevşehir; in the mixed town of Maraş a regular battle developed between Alevis and Sunnis, and a hundred people were killed. The police lacked training and equipment, as only seventeen of sixty-seven provincial sections even had a camera; and the prisons were in chaos, some of them unable to pay their telephone bills because prisoners abused their rights to long-distance telephone calls (in a country where in any event talking on the telephone is a national curse). In 1979 a Fascist murderer, Mehmet Alı Ağca, was able to slip out from Ankara prison, where he had been tried for the murder of a famous newspaper editor, Abdı İpekçi (from an old dönme family, a stout secularist, and descendant of Jews who had converted). Ecevit sought a way through the mess with a combination of nationalism and restated left-wing orthodoxies. He approached the Soviet Union (in vain) for oil; he toured Yugoslavia and irritated the army chiefs by praising its supposedly non-professional and voluntary territorial defence system. In 1978 he made a considerable blunder, of refusing to apply for membership of the European Economic Community at precisely the same moment as Greece did apply. His government fell apart, and Demirel returned, with a minority government.

Demirel could at least bring back the Americans. There had been a revolution in Iran, hitherto America’s ally. Turkey was needed again, even more so when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened, and support was offered. However, this would mean new men. Demirel therefore had, as under-secretary for planning, a very clever one, Turgut Özal, who had worked in the World Bank and knew America very well indeed. His title was lowly; in that way, he would not appear to be a political threat to better-known people. However, the under-secretary for planning had the right to countersign anything; Özal became the centre of the regime. On 24 January 1980, as the Guardian correspondent struggled up through the snows towards Çankaya, Turgut Özal produced his set of economic measures. But to put them through was very difficult: Demirel’s was a minority government, and parliament was by now so paralysed that in 1980 the deputies would not agree on a new president: in farcical repeats, they voted more than one hundred times without result.

The financial position was terrible — a debt of $20bn, with low exports and high inflation. And by now the ‘Friedmanite’ medicine was proposed, the businessmen’s association, TÜSİAD, being in sympathy. Ecevit in effect lost the Americans’ confidence that summer (oddly enough he never gained the Russians’ — they preferred to deal with Demirel, as they did not want a ‘Finlandized’ Turkey, which would be too unstable). American backing meant an end to giveaway finances, strict austerity over credit, a wage freeze. Erik Zürcher, a considerable commentator on Turkey, who wishes it were Holland, mutters about the ‘Pinochet solution’, and that is right. The army was preparing to restore order. In fact its chiefs conducted meetings, in theory to head off civil war, in reality to take power. In December there was a formal meeting at the old Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul, where Florence Nightingale had once nursed. Then, it was decided simply to let the politicians make such a mess that no-one could conceivably object to a coup, which is more or less what then happened. Demirel and Ecevit would not agree on a coalition of ‘repair’, Ecevit denouncing the Özal proposals of 24 January. He remained incorrigible — even secretly approaching Erbakan for informal alliance, and refusing a deal with Demirel.

The army could obviously have moved in at this moment, and already had the martial-law powers to do so. However, it had blundered over earlier coups that had proved to be pointless: you took power, your general opined on television at 3 a.m. to the national anthem, professors of political science wrote you a constitution and then, after a short while, you got Demirel back again: burasi Türkiye, i.e. that was Turkey for you. The army therefore bided its time, heeding the Leninist lesson of ‘the worse, the better’. In 1977 already, 230 people had been killed, one fifth of them in Mayday events in Taksim, in Istanbul, when the Left had been shot at. After that, the figures were between 1,200 and 1,500 every year. In Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast, guns were routinely carried, and were frequently used: there was almost a war between town and gown, in the latter case, the Black Sea Technical University. But there were endless cases reported casually every day in the newspapers. A good review of this aspect of things was produced in Ankara (1992) by the National Security Council — 12 September in Turkey and After. It is the country as the generals then saw it — everything divided, with unions of Left and Right for police and teachers, but the Left itself also dividing, and sometimes murderously. The book takes day-by-day excerpts from newspapers. On 5 January 1978 there were fist-fights in parliament, an Ankara café was machine-gunned, a bomb exploded at Istanbul High School, with fifty-one people killed and 444 wounded that month; a car manufacturer was asking for a price rise of 400,000 Turkish lire (over $8,000 at the rate of late 1979, while on 24 January devaluation brought the dollar to 80 lire, from 47). In September 1979 the Islamic party’s leader was ranting against ‘the tyranny applied by Zionism… all Westerners will be eliminated’; a headline runs, ‘Gazi Teachers’ Training School in Ankara was occupied by 800 right-wing students’ — the deputy dean of Political Science at Istanbul university was strafed in his car by four terrorists, including a woman, and there was further shooting even at his funeral. On 2 September 1980 twenty people were killed; on the 3rd twenty-nine, including the three-year-old son of a police sergeant in Bingöl, a largely Kurdish town; on the 4th eighteen; on the 5th a nightwatchman, a village head and his son in Adana, and two more people in cafés in Istanbul and Eskişehir; the Konya prison was raided, and seven people freed; there was a murder in Fatsa on the Black Sea, and, next day, five more in Ordu, along the coast; a raid at Diyarbakır, the chief Kurdish town, got away with 2 billion lire. On 6 September it was the Islamists’ turn, when beards, green flags, Arabic, and Islamic dress appeared, with slogans to the effect that ‘Iran is the only way’, and demands for the introduction of the shariah law. When on 12 September General Kenan Evren took over, face on television to national anthem, tanks in streets, he rightly made the point that two years’ terrorism had cost the country almost as many casualties as had the three-week battle of the Sakarya, in 1921, which had saved Turkey from the Greeks.

The terrorism went on almost to the last moment — a cinema queue machine-gunned in Mersin, a bag-bomb killing six in Kurdish Siirt, and after a great demonstration against NATO it was discovered that the slogans on the posters had been booby-trapped: fifty of them had to be cleared. On the last day, the army leaders were careful. General Evren saw the acting president for tea and gave nothing away (for which he later apologized, as he did to the defence minister Ihsan Sabri Çağlayangil, who had not been told, although that, given his political instincts, may have been by choice). Lights went out gradually in the military buildings. Abroad, people did guess, and Nuri Çolakoğlu, for the BBC in London, certainly knew. However, the senior American general was only told five minutes beforehand, even if the chief American expert, Paul Hentze, seems to have been in the know (he was able to tell Carter, at Fiddler on the Roof). Then, in the evening, the directors of television and the post office were invited to headquarters and politely detained. Under escort, they went off to block the telephone connections of the deputies and links with the outside world (incidentally, somewhat more professionally than happened in Poland, where soldiers, in December 1981, smashed the telephone wires with heavy axes). The politicians lived in their own compound, and it was easy enough to proceed there. The general behaved humanely. He knew that Turkish politicians, some of them given to heavy overeating, might have heart attacks if faced by soldiers at 3 a.m. He therefore arranged for their best friends to accompany the arresting parties, and to be first visible when the door opened. The arrests went ahead smoothly enough, and the various men met in the VIP lounge at Esenboğa airport, on their way to internment at Gallipoli. One thing the military had learned: not to make martyrs. There was to be no hanging. The politicians were personally banned from entering politics again, and the parties themselves were also banned. But the imprisonment was in easy circumstances, and did not last for more than a few months in most cases. The military had also learned from previous coups, and, perhaps at American behest, from the experience of Chile, although this cannot be demonstrated one way or the other. The deputy chief of staff, Haydar Saltık, planned the operation (‘Flag’) and in a fifteen-page typescript outlined certain essentials: for instance, the need to suppress the small parties. There was a certain fear that in the gecekondu districts the army would not be able to appear, but things went quite smoothly — the army had timed the coup very well, and it was greeted with great relief in nearly all quarters, from Joseph Luns at NATO headquarters (who embraced the Turkish ambassador, Osman Olçay) to ordinary Turks in Anatolian small towns. The only hitch was that the central television aerial could not, for some time, be made to work — the signal to the units to move. The general made his broadcast, on lines by now somewhat traditional, but this time the generals had learned: they did indeed promise a return of democracy, but not at once. Parties were banned. But Turgut Özal went ahead with the IMF programme of 24 January. As was already happening with Pinochet, this was ‘the Washington consensus’ in action, and it was to work remarkably well.