The Atlantic and Its Enemies

25. Floréal

Moscow and Peking had supposed that the Third World would rescue them. In the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks had really won because they had recruited the earliest version of it: you could tell assorted downtrodden Eastern peoples that colonialism was the enemy, that Marxism was the friend. After they had won the civil war, in September 1920, the Bolsheviks had staged a congress of ‘the toiling peoples of the East’ at Baku on the Caspian; 2,000 attended, some taking time off for their prayers, others trading, and had been addressed first of all by Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Comintern, screeching his Moscow-Jewish German, and then by the Turkish Enver Pasha, nephew-in-law of the Sultan, former commander of the Turkish army, who addressed them as ‘comrades’, and flounced out when he was told he could only have five minutes (he responded by circulating his vast address). The enemy was imperialism. There was obvious sense in this strategy, as was later displayed in China in 1949, and Vietnam in 1975. The Russians had accordingly gone into the Middle East and Africa, a process culminating in the invasion of Afghanistan. On America’s door-step, they had taken up alliance with the revolutionaries of Nicaragua, who agreed — as had happened with Republican Spain in the civil war — to pretend to establish a popular front rather than a people’s democracy, so as to rope in Western allies who would not have liked an outright Communist takeover. But in 1983 the Third World was not working out as intended. Iran had gone very badly wrong. So had the invasion of Afghanistan. And two very vulnerable places, Chile and Turkey, had shown that the Soviet formula was quite misplaced. The eighties economy was defeating not just Marx, but Lenin and Mao Tse-tung as well.

The most characteristic book of the eighties was written not long after the decade ended, Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992). The title seemed funny when the book appeared, and seemed even funnier afterwards, but it was not senseless. The claim (a quote from Hegel) was that democracy and capitalism (‘free markets’) had spread from period to period after the Second World War, that dictatorships, Communism, wars, etc. would be things of the past, and that the world would move more and more in the direction of, say, Denmark. The essential was a decent level of prosperity, after which politics could move from Third to First World. Walt Rostow, back in the 1960s, had said much the same about industrialization. A point came when a country could ‘take off ’ into self-sustaining growth: England at the time of the Industrial Revolution, Germany somewhat later. ‘Big picture’ books of this sort were easy enough to pick apart, but they did connect with a substantial literature of Europe around 1900, when it was perfectly obvious that Western civilization had produced something unique, which needed explanation, and which countries such as Japan or Turkey might copy. Fukuyama’s contribution was only hesitantly stated. Its centre was that a modernizing dictatorship, or at any rate a period of rule without real elections, might be necessary for the ‘take-off ’, whether political or economic, to be arrived at. The question would have been accepted by any Communist in the 1930s: the peasants, Marx’s quadrupeds, would only accept progessive change if they were forced to. Modernization from the Left was a standard line, and was accepted very widely indeed. Since the Second World War a school of development economics had emerged, with the Swede Gunnar Myrdal in the lead, and its adepts were all around, whether in Africa or Latin America, arguing in effect that the peasantry and the small bourgeoisie should pay for heavy industrialization, courtesy of the State.

But in 1976, by the time Mao Tse-tung had died, that scheme of things looked much less promising. China, after all, had gone through convulsions, disasters, tens of millions of people dead of starvation, and the USSR was also hardly an advertisement. Development economics had grown out of the Marshall Plan, and something had gone badly wrong: the more aid, the more backwardness, however you were to explain this. In remote relationship, much the same happened with the Keynesian assumptions as regards public spending and unemployment: much of England was Third World, in German eyes, though there were only low-level civil wars. And now there was a Pinochet, creating considerably more prosperity than anything Communist; quite soon thereafter, 2 million Soviet citizens were taking refuge in, of all places, Turkey. What was going right, and what, wrong?

In Chile, in the first four years, to 1977, the aim was consolidation of the regime, a depoliticization of life, and a suppression of political parties and labour unions: farmers to farm, workers to work, students to study. There would have to be a currency reform, to put an end to the inflation: the State, printing its own money, was paying for its hangers-on at the expense, in taxes and rising prices, of people just trying to do a useful job outside the system. These matters had been analysed by political economists since the time of Adam Smith, two centuries beforehand, and economists in that tradition had swept the board in the nineteenth century. The State should be confined to its proper functions, in the way of defence, the rule of law and a money the value of which could be trusted. This brought about extraordinary progress in the later nineteenth century. But then had come 1914 and the big State had seemed to be the answer: world wars and the great crash of 1929, when finance and trade had collapsed, had seen to that. But this generated problems of its own, and these had been obvious enough to a particular school of political economists in central Europe even before 1914. The Austrian empire had been a very peculiar place, never really captured by western European liberal economics. Even in 1914 it employed a quarter of the population, and there was a legendary tragi-comic bureaucracy, the tax laws taking up three huge volumes, printed in two columns in small print on thin paper. Lawyers swarmed, and the general atmosphere was summed up by the great journalist of the era, Karl Kraus, when he said that Vienna was an asylum where you were allowed to scream. By 1934 there was a semi-dictatorship, trying to assert financial (and other: divorce was banned) orthodoxies. Its leader, Engelbert Dollfuss, faced a revolt from the Left. The army brought up artillery against a huge fortress-like public housing development called Karl-Marx Hof in Heiligenstadt, otherwise an upper-middle-class district; shells flew. The photographs of that, in the snows of February 1934, became one of the great Comintern tableaux, and two very prominent British Communists, one of them a major spy, became involved with left-wing Austrian women of that vintage. But that atmosphere also produced a school of political economists who looked upon the whole business and wondered what had gone wrong with the comfortable certainties of 1914. Like Keynes, they had a weakness for answering the problem in terms of mathematics. Hayek and Schumpeter had got out, via London, to Chicago and Harvard. Ludwig von Mises got out to Switzerland, and the oddest remark made, upon the outbreak of the Second World War, was made by him at Bern station to Wilhelm Röpke, later the architect of the West German economic miracle, whom he encountered by chance, as he transferred from Istanbul to Switzerland: if the Anglo-French free-trade treaty had been ratified by Louis Napoleon, this war would not have happened. In its surreal central European way, this stated a truth: countries that ignored the economic rules would distort everything and end up with a disaster. This ended up with the bombardment of the Karl-Marx Hof by the artillery of Prince Schönburg-Hartenstein. It also ended up with the Pinochet coup. The University of Chicago took in the Austrian school, Hayek in particular. In the USA universities competed with each other, and there was freedom in ideas. Chicago had always striven to acquire a character different from the Ivy League places, which listened to grand siren voices from England. Milton Friedman and others of his tendency worked there. In Chicago, at any rate, there were young men and women who had listened to what Hayek and his disciples had to say, and there were young Chileans who had attended the same classes. There had, since 1956, been a formal link between Chicago and the Catholic University in Santiago. In Allende’s Chile, Friedman had much to chew upon, and Pinochet’s Chile became the test case for an experiment that was to prove to be of worldwide importance.

Allende himself had stood on what appeared to be a formidable rock of thinking. Why was Chile poor, much poorer than Argentina? The Argentinian Raúl Prebisch argued powerfully that in Latin America big estates counted as a bottleneck, and in Chile they predominated — 80 per cent of the land held by 7 per cent of the farms, each with a thousand hectares on average, whereas 37 per cent of the farms held 0.2 per cent of the land. These figures seemed to reflect ‘social injustice’, and development economists argued that, because there were so many very poor peasants, there was not proper demand for industrial goods. The rich just imported them, and otherwise did nothing for economic growth except employ servants who, in the poorest countries such as Haiti, themselves employed servants. In the USA, there was a great deal of head-shaking as to what had gone wrong, the role of the USA included. Kennedy, as part of a campaign to limit the appeal of Castro, promoted an ‘Alliance for Progress’, with grants of money for ‘structural reforms’ in Latin America, and the Chilean Christian Democrats promoted land reform, though they did so prudently: carried out too quickly it could damage production. There was a problem for Chile, in that half of the population lived in the central valleys, not in the immense areas to north and south: vast estates on endless tracts of valueless land hardly made any difference, one way or the other, and some of them worked efficiently enough. They would have worked more efficiently, as experience was to show, had Chilean produce been freely bought and sold in the richer markets. But these protected their own agriculture: no-one knew Chilean wines until much later. Over the pace of land reform, the Christian Democrats split three ways, and their alliance with the Right disintegrated, which was the background to the election of Allende. That had ended in tears.

The concomitant of the big state was printed money, which produced inflation, and inflation distorted everything. Augusto Pinochet led the field in what was to become a powerful counter-attack. His first move was to cancel the 300 per cent wage increases sanctioned by Allende, and some of the controlled basic prices were hugely increased. The great mass of the population had had its energy sapped, and accepted the immediate troubles easily enough, though no doubt the presence of the military helped. The essential move was to restrict the output of paper, which in turn meant a drastic curtailment of the State’s spending. There was no great secret in this: you needed some foreign support, high interest rates to prevent an expansion of borrowing, devaluation, and maybe bond sales at a well-judged rate, to attract some of the excess paper. These things had been done in 1923 in Germany, and a great inflation, which had brought the Mark to 11 billion against the dollar, stopped more or less overnight, in the context of a Communist takeover in Saxony (suppressed by the army, in what was known as a Reichsexekution) and then Hitler’s first attempt to seize power, with the Putsch in Munich. There, the change had come about because, at last, a government stretching from some way into the Left to some way into the Right had been strong enough to maintain control. There were problems in the short run, with bankruptcies and unemployment, but there followed an economic recovery. Now, the first step in Chile was to carry through the money reform. Reducing inflation is a slow business, and in 1974 it still stood at over 500 per cent. Milton Friedman came on a visit in March 1975, and an economic recovery programme was announced. There were three phases of liberalization — the first to 1977, then a council of state in 1981 and a constituent assembly in 1985 with direct election every eight years provided for. A constitutional article forbade attacks on the family. Control of inflation meant, not just management of a paper currency, but attacking the causes of the inflation — what a prominent English politician, Sir Keith Joseph, with excellent American contacts, famously addressed at this time.

There would have to be a dismantling of the State. It meant privatization, to encourage efficiency through competition. The State, with ignorant investment of other people’s money, with over-employment, with automatic further credit from some puppet bank and with inappropriate political appointments, could in effect ruin concerns to the point at which no-one would buy them. No-one would make a profit out of them. In Chile some of the firms taken over by Allende had not been so ruined, and by 1978 all of the 259 sequestered firms had been returned to the stockholders, and ninety-nine others were sold off cheaply, mainly to conglomerates. There were two concomitants. The peso, though stable enough, was devalued, to the point at which imports from Chile became very cheap, and a further concomitant concerned the outside world: trade was widely liberalized, with foreign competition allowed. Tariffs sank to 10 per cent by 1978. There was a recovery, led by exports, and not just by the copper and other raw materials that Chile produced. There was now a property boom in Santiago, and there was a rehousing of the poor, away from the shanty towns into tower blocks well-segregated from middle-class areas, which experienced a property boom, because the tax on capital gains in property was abolished, and conglomerates (piranhas) made great gains out of the proceeds. Prices, generally, were removed from controls. On the sixth anniversary of the coup, Pinochet made a speech referring to the ‘seven modernizations’, which included a new labour code, and a new principle, of privatization, to be followed. This latter included social security: there would now be competition among private firms to provide insurance, rather than blanket coverage by the State. The new principle meant that education was also devolved — first onto the municipalities — while private schools were encouraged. The University of Chile and the Catholic University had been placed under the military, and were now expected to be self — financing. Privatized universities now became part of the intellectual agenda: this reflected the success of the American model, as against the decline of state universities in every other country.

Sergio de Castro became finance minister in December 1976 and surrounded himself with Chicago Ph.D.s who proposed textbook answers to the various problems. These became, quite soon, the stock-in-trade of the Western world, from the Atlantic to Turkey. There would be liberalization of foreign trade, and an end put to the practice of import substitution; the peso would be devalued as far as might be necessary to promote exports. On the other hand, credit would be restricted and interest rates put up in order for inflation to be stopped. These two aims were not always easy to combine, because high interest rates could push up the value of the peso, which might damage exporting. There was a further problem, that the course of privatization brought, at least in the short term, unemployment, although to some extent public works were used to counteract this. Given the overwhelming strength of the army, there was of course nothing that the trade unions could do while the reforms went ahead. Wages fell in purchasing power by half. Then matters began to improve, as the end of inflation meant that people started to save again.

The regime then had to contend with the ‘second oil shock’, when, in 1979, petrol prices doubled, and the country suffered from further difficulties when, in 1979, the British and Americans launched their own inflation cures, with a great fall in demand in 1980 and 1981. The rise of the dollar disrupted the exchanges, and in Chile, in 1982, there were many bankruptcies — 824, as against twenty-four in normal times, and unemployment reached beyond 20 per cent, while output fell by over 14 per cent. In 1983 the unemployment figure rose to 28.5 per cent and inflation also went up, from 9.9 per cent to 27 per cent. One problem was that the peso had been overvalued, and there had not been proper supervision of banks, which took dollar loans and lost the money in speculation. The de Castro team imagined that there would be some automatic adjustment, but by 1983 Pinochet himself realized that he must contain the crisis by state action. The claim was that the rich grew richer and that the gap between them and the poor widened — a not improbable claim. By 1978 conglomerates had emerged in force — Vial controlling twenty-five companies, Cruzat-Lorrain thirty-seven of the 250 largest ones, and six conglomerates held over half of their assets; there were press empires, and two of them took over 75 per cent of social security arrangements. Banks borrowed heavily from foreign fringe banks and then somewhat later ran into difficulties. In the later seventies interest rates were low and there was much borrowing once inflation had been halted: imports, debts and interest costs grew in 1980-81 as the dollar rose, and by 1982 a debt problem had emerged (in 1973 it had stood at $3.67bn but by 1982 it was over $17bn). The gremios — new private companies — suffered from foreign competition and in the last years of the seventies there were 1,338 bankruptcies. Even Vial and Cruzat-Lorrain went bankrupt and some bankers were prosecuted.

De Castro left office, succeeded by a more flexible man, José Piñera, who reorganized the entire world of pensions and welfare, devalued by 35 per cent and imposed tariffs again — not part of the original programme at all. Some of the banks were taken over, and their debts were underwritten by the State. Real wages were held down; they had fallen by one third between 1973 and 1975, and even in 1989 were still 90 per cent of the 1970 level. There was some labour unrest in 1983 and the copper workers staged a day of protest against the police, but wages were generally held down, and growth, at over 7 per cent, returned. Now, trade opened up: for instance, Chilean wine could be exported, and enterprising farmers worked out how they might grow new fruit — kiwi for instance. Once recovery was in place, by 1986, there was more privatization — utilities, mining and some services, and the banks that had been taken over were also sold off, as going concerns, this time with military money involved as ‘people’s capitalism’.

After that, recovery happened, as it did, famously, throughout the Atlantic world, and by 1986 Pinochet was confident enough to introduce the transition back to democratic practices. Pinochet had appointed the mayors and had organized local government to favour his rule — thus municipal change meant that in Santiago there were very rich boroughs and also very poor ones that could not pay their way. The number of boroughs went up from sixteen to thirty-two and the Santiago area was enlarged for development, out of which of course money was made; and the poorer elements were shifted in much the same way as was done with Glasgow, as the boundaries stretched to the Andes and farmland was cleared. The pobladores were moved out of middle-class areas, and their old areas gentrified: 150,000 people were moved out of shanty towns, where they had sometimes been squatters. The población of La Hermida was shifted away from middle-class Ñuñoa to a new area called Peñalolén with a per capita income under 1 per cent of Ñuñoa’s. A prosperous area such as Providencia with a population of 116,000 did well from the decentralization money and in the five years after 1982 built health clinics and night schools, whereas La Florida, with nearly 200,000 people, could hardly have a wooden day-centre for children. Self-help groups started. The rich, in the eighties, had the life of their equivalents in every other country, mobile telephones, jeans and business schools well to the fore.

With education there came a certain militarization, with soldier-rectors in the Catholic University and the University of Chile; patriotism was to be stressed, and there were purges. As an American writes, ineffably, the generals ‘disagreed with the vision of a university as a place for the free exchange of ideas’. Beyond twelve specialist areas the universities lost their monopoly in the sense that any private entrepreneur could offer any subject. Business schools proliferated (some sixty). Readers of Eighteenth Brumaire complained into their beards; tuition fees were introduced and the state support for universities fell from two thirds to half. The exiles went to town: they now understood how dangerous for their cause was the growing prosperity of the country. Perhaps this accounted for the stupid chasing of the prominent exiles by DINA, the Chilean secret police.

Early in 1988 a ‘No’ (to Pinochet) campaign started (with American help for the opposition, at least with computers). In October 1988 the ‘No’ campaign succeeded; the architect of the recovery in 1983-6 joined the ‘No’ campaign, and in the election Pinochet lost. A middle-road Catholic, Patricio Aylwin, at the head of a sixteen-party coalition, formed the government in March 1990, having become president elect in December 1989. Soon, there was a woman president, and, a few years down the road, the ancient, wheezing Pinochet was arrested in a small-hours raid on his hospital bed in London. Margaret Thatcher went into battle on his behalf, and he was released after a few very embarrassing months. As he left England she gave him a silver Armada Plate, originally designed in celebration of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Sir Francis Drake in 1588. The Spanish were very angry indeed. But, in the end, the arrest of Pinochet was the best comment on his reign. He was not a man of much interest in himself, but he deserved well of his country, and pursuing him in old age to London was childish vindictiveness.

Turgut Özal in Turkey was in some ways a comparable figure. He was the product (indirectly, and not the cause) of a military coup, and his problems and solutions were Pinochet’s, although the Turkish army conceded free elections quite quickly, such that octroyed solutions, as in Chile, were not, in anything other than the short term, possible. As with Pinochet, the intelligentsia were very hostile, and with the two films Midnight Express and Yol they produced damning, superbly made and, as with most political films, mendacious evidence. But as the outcome of the Turkish coup of 1980 the country was on the map again, and a figure or two spells it out. Turkey, in 2000, counted as twentieth economic power in the world. F16s made in Kirikkale, in the middle of Anatolia, won prizes. Istanbul had become an important financial centre, and the standard of living, overall, was such that Russians migrated to Turkey. At home, they died at sixty; Turks died at seventy. Back in 1923, when Turkey started off, she had been very backward. In the 1970s, the country was still in large part backward, and almost torn by civil war. By 1990 there had been a transformation, and Turkey was the only country between Athens and Singapore that attracted refugees — 2 million of them.

The repression after the Turkish coup followed Pinochet lines. The army had bided its time, and then moved massively. From 1980 to 1984 there were 180,000 arrests; 65,000 people were imprisoned, 40,000 were sentenced, and there were 326 death sentences (though in the end only twenty-seven executions). On the other hand, twenty-six rocket-launchers and 750,000 handguns were seized, and the casual killings stopped overnight. Meanwhile the politicians were kept aside — the nationalist Alparslan Türkeş with the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan on Uzunada near İzmir, the others at a village near Gallipoli. Hundreds of the politicians were banned. A new constitution was adopted, by referendum, in November 1982, and an election was held a year later; but this time the politicians were supposed to act under severe restriction. The system of proportional representation was abolished, because it had allowed small parties to make the running, and a vote of 10 per cent was needed for any representation at all in parliament. There would be State Security Courts with great powers, and order was at last restored. On previous occasions the generals, taking power, had tended to scratch their heads and drift, but now, in 1980, they had a strategy in mind: the political confusions must be stopped, and that meant coherent behaviour. There was one very significant difference with Chile: it was not a general who took power, the senior one, Kenan Evren, contenting himself with the mainly ceremonial presidency, and spending his time painting (at which he was good).

The overall idea seems to have been to collect moderates of the Demirel and Republican sides perhaps under the leadership of one of the generals’ trusted Republicans, such as the veteran Turhan Feyzioğlu. Oddly enough, the old politicians, even in internment, held to illusions, perhaps precisely because their internment was so mild; they never imagined that the National Security Council could do without them, and Demirel, especially, was constantly being telephoned by senior civil servants and politicians whom the generals consulted. One man was essential — Turgut Özal, the international money-man. He was not particularly keen to have any sort of state-oriented political team in charge. The generals, for their part, despised the politicians, and when they found they could not easily re-form a civilian government, on 18 September they simply handed full powers to the commanders of the martial law districts and nominated an admiral as prime minister. Özal was happy enough with this solution, for he could push through the economic reforms that he and his business friends wanted to see. Authority tended therefore to settle lower down in the pyramid, and Özal found it coming his way, as under-secretary of the plan.

Özal did not believe in plans — he used to laugh, as to how, coming back through the customs at Istanbul airport, he waddled, because he had worn layers of smuggled tights for his wife in thick layers, to avoid paying duty. He had worked at the World Bank and been an irrigation engineer. Turks older than him would also have been engineers or economists, but they would have been from the urban middle (or higher) classes, and secular. Özal was the product of the Turkey that they had created, in so far as education and mobility had reached far into the depths of Anatolia, and had affected places such as Malatya, where he came from. He was part Kurdish, and in religion belonged to one of the stricter orders (tarikat: the often-used ‘sect’ is a mistranslation, because the differences are in practice, not theology). An engineering training, at the Istanbul Technical University, had not dented the piety, and when he was at the World Bank he had his prayer mat at the ready. No drink, of course, but far too much to eat, and far too many cigarettes (the combination killed him almost absurdly early, in 1993: as with Atatürk, who had also died far too early, this time from cigarettes and rakı, you wonder what would have happened if he had gone on longer, for he was a great creative force). Özal was obviously the Americans’ man, and he could deliver the IMF. He might just have remained as the vital cog in the generals’ machine, but events pushed him into prominence. The generals did not, on the whole, like him: they were very firm secularists, were generally from Western-leaning Thrace or the Aegean, and were even sometimes of Alevi origin, regarding ultra-pious Islam as so much ju-jitsu. Besides, they, without complaint, worked within the State and did not in their heart of hearts see why the economy could not be run like the army, orders issued and obeyed. They even tried to run politics through a dummy party, with two others to represent a sort of emredersin (‘yessir’) opposition.

The reforms announced on 24 January 1980 had followed lines that the IMF and Washington had been recommending with increasing insistence since they had proved to be successful in Pinochet’s Chile. Price controls were at least relaxed, and the state enterprises lost less — $62m as against $290m earlier. Quota lists for imports were cut to six months, as against the earlier twelve, and the trade deficit continued, but the IMF gave a standby credit of $1.25bn — the greatest ever given to date. An essential was to stop the inflation, which meant initial pain, as it did in Chile or for that matter England. There would be serious devaluation — in effect, almost by half — and there would be reliance on an export-led recovery. This would mean freeing foreign exchange from controls — and in Turkey these had been very onerous indeed. You even paid a tax if you left the country. Taxes in general were heavy, and if you bought anything at all, you were required by law to keep the sales record. There was very widespread evasion, the black economy accounting for a good half of sales, and at some stage the system would have to be overhauled, but the budget must first of all be brought nearer to balance. Of course these things were difficult to achieve, and the civil service was deeply unsympathetic; the generals were very irritable, and the large private concerns would much have preferred to co-operate with Demirel, whom they knew (not least as a Mason) from old. Özal, in the eyes of the establishment a rough peasant, though nominated deputy prime minister, was quite isolated, and when the generals sensed his ambition, they drove him out. But he came back, for an odd reason.

The January measures of 1980 could only really be pushed through if, initially, wage levels were held back. This was difficult. Half of the economy was controlled by the State, with monopolies of this and that, and the trade unions were powerful. There were subsidies for (some) agriculture, and there was elaborate protection for the Koç industrial dynasty, the head of which, old Vehbi, was very astute indeed. (He owed his origins to Ankara. As a small boy he had seen Armenians and Greeks going around on horses, whereas he had his donkey; he wondered how you got a horse. As he grew up, he got the franchise to sell refrigerators in the main square of the town, which had meanwhile become the capital. An oak forest was to grow from this acorn.) The Karabük works on the Black Sea, started with Soviet help and finished with British, produced indifferent steel with coal, from nearby Zonguldak, of atrocious quality, but everything was interlocking, and the system resisted liberalization on 24 January lines. Telling the workers not to have index-linked wages at a time of high inflation was very difficult indeed. Stopping strikes for a time was easy enough, as in Chile, but for how long? Initially all that happened was that the banks were freed from the restrictions hitherto prevailing. Gold was freed altogether; banks now kept four fifths of their hard-currency earnings instead of handing them to the State. It became legal to hold dollars (or Marks), and the Turkish currency was devalued, from 47 to 80 lire against the dollar; there were fourteen further devaluations up to May 1981, as the government did not bother with the exchange rate. This meant, for the banks, very easy money indeed, as you just shifted in and out of Turkish money as and when, making a huge profit if you happened to have warning that a devaluation was forthcoming. Interest rates were unnaturally high, in Turkish money, and inflation or Turkish paper-money creation tended to rise faster than the dollar. Given the world recession that continued until the turn of 1982-3, the liberalization in Turkey was not an easy matter, and the money that it generated, given the odd combination of liberalization and restriction, produced profiteers and Ponzi (pyramid) schemes. There was, in Turgut Özal, too much of the grasping provincial, and his (second) wife loved flashy jewellery; her sons were very badly spoilt. This was a Turkish (and Russian) peculiarity. In western Europe, money took four generations to move Buddenbrooksfashion from four-square local dealer via business corner-cuttings and divorces to neurasthenic aesthete. In Turkey, the dynasties mostly did it in two generations.

Özal’s own fingers were burnt, and he dropped out of politics for a while. Then, in time for the election of 1983, he returned (from a weight cure in the USA, where he fell to 13 stone, but no doubt also took time off to talk in Washington). Of all oddities he, standing with a permitted opposition party, ANAP or ‘Motherland’, now gained in popularity precisely because the generals, with their dummy parties, had had to bear the brunt of the blame for the liberalizing policies that Özal himself had introduced. Besides, the Americans regarded him as extremely useful. Their own interest was straightforward, the big base at İncirlik, on the edges of Iran, Iraq and Syria, with a network of listening posts and small garrisons stretching from Sinop on the Black Sea through Diyarbakır on the Tigris. When the Russians went into Afghanistan, the Americans found themselves in alliance with Islam, and, in Turkey, Özal had his links in that quarter (as indeed had Menderes before him, also, for much of the time, the Americans’ man). In 1983 there was an election, and ANAP swept in. Boom ensued. The gamble on exports was a success, as they doubled (to $6bn) between 1980 and 1986; for the first time, Turkey became a part of the world economy, selling manufactures rather than just raw materials. Money poured into Istanbul, especially, and the growth rate also doubled (to 7 per cent in industry).

But there was at the heart of it all a great problem. Özal’s regime was based mainly on relatively upstart Istanbul (or İzmir) money, and provincial Anatolia was also coming into the picture (places such as his own Malatya, and more especially Antep). The men who emerged in such places were generally pious, though in a rather lazy and not consistent way, and under the generals of 1980 Islam made much progress. It was helpful against Marxism, or at any rate might counter the role of so many Alevis, heretical and easily secularized, on the Left. In the seventies, the observation of Ramazan, the fasting month, when nothing — not a cigarette, not a drop even of water — had been supposed to pass the lips, sunrise to sunset, had not been much observed: how, in a hot month, in a proper job in a city, could that fail to turn people into murderous vegetables? Now, its observance grew. In the two decades after the 1980 coup Turkey became in some degree desecularized, and even in the very centre of Istanbul, the ezan, the five-times-a-day call to prayer, resounded, microphones turned up. In Galata the techno-music stopped somewhere around 3 a.m. and then, with dawn coming up over the Bosphorus, the first (from his accent, Kurdish) muezzin cleared his throat very audibly in the Ağa Cami near the Galata Tower, and charged full-tilt, followed by ten others, for a good hour. Of course, these things were not as intended by the military in 1980, and one of them, driven to distraction by the waking of his small child, finally shot a megaphone, but they had opened the door, to their subsequent regret.

One particular set of measures did considerable damage to the country’s public image. The generals had become enraged with the leadership of the universities. Decree 1402 after the coup allowed dismissals and there were some forty, who made a noise; beyond that, some 15,000 fled abroad, there to spread news of the Pinochets’ taking over of the country (ten or more years later, they were looking foolish, and many returned). The fact was that the universities had often become ungovernable, or at any rate were not controlled. Now, a Higher Education Council was set up, with strict control of appointments, and İhsan Doğramacı ran it. He set up the first of the private universities in what might be called the European space, Bilkent (it means ‘science park’). Doğramacı was an organizer of genius. He had studied the American system, because the old European (and Turkish) system had been failing. That failure was obvious, everywhere. The State took on too much, expanded the number of students, jerry-built horrible buildings; educational reforms meant that the students were less and less well-prepared (in England, spelling became a problem) and inflation then impoverished everyone and everything. The American system was better prepared to resist these developments, and Bilkent was stamped out of the ground as a private university. Doğramacı (originally a paediatrician, from a grand Ottoman-Iraqi family) took a long view. A university enriched its surroundings, such that people would want to live within the area, driving up property prices. He therefore took over some barren land south-west of Ankara (there were still wolves on the campus, ten years on), and developed a partnership with two banks and a construction company, Tepe Holding. The State gave the water and electricity (and grants for research, mainly scientific), and the companies’ profits went into the endowment. The other third of the income came from fees. As Istanbul and İzmir flourished in the middle and later eighties, parents were prepared to pay $10,000 in tuition fees provided their children got a decent education. That meant good English, and there was already a critical mass of Turks to adapt to that. The weight was on the natural sciences, and good connections opened up with the United States, but there were also schools for business and tourism, for which, again, parents were prepared to pay. As income was generated, the university could expand: the academics had very decent accommodation, and the professional classes of Ankara started moving to the housing that went up around Bilkent, complete with the services that their American equivalents would expect — a shopping mall (Real, complete with its Praktiker, a German do-it-yourself shop, and the British Marks and Spencer). Profits from it all went back into the university, which spiralled upwards. It spent more on its library than did ten British universities put together, and the internet connections were of international class. Since Bilkent was not bound by state regulations as regards salaries, it could afford to pay the academics decently, and a good half of the staff consisted either of Turks returning from the USA or of foreigners. Here was another upwards twist in the spiral: they needed a good English-language school, and the Bilkent School, again, became the prestige school in Ankara, taking over from the old Ankara College, where Denis Hills (and many other legendary men and women) had taught. Keeping all of this together involved a feat of organization and leadership, and İhsan Doğramacı’s son, Ali, who had taught engineering at first-class places in the USA for twenty years, could keep all the balls in the air. He took over the rectorship, had charisma and intuitional judgement, and, within twenty years, put Bilkent on the world’s map. It was an extraordinary performance. İhsan Doğramacı, who had been offered senior political roles and turned them down, instead worked at the very infrastructure of the country, a sort of counter-Gramsci. He braved extreme unpopularity, deserved well of the Republic, and received the best sort of flattery, in that there are now two dozen imitations of Bilkent in Turkey, and private universities all over the European area.

America in a Turkish mirror made for a contrast with Chile. In Chile there was a general in charge, and there were no elections for ten years while Chicago economists sorted things out. Then she experienced the end of history. Turkey did not, although there was a brave try. There, the army did not want formal power: no Pinochet. It was happier with professors of Political Science, and wanted figureheads. Turhan Feyzioğlu had thought that he would be indispensable to the generals, as an old, reliable republican alternative to the wayward Ecevit. There, he was wrong: this was a military coup with a big difference. This time round, the generals had thought things through; Turkey was the front line of front-line countries; it would not do for it to be run on non-democratic lines; there would have to be a democracy, the only one for a considerable number of miles to the east, north and south. Democracy generally meant Demirel, whom the military did not want at any price. They got Özal instead. In his way, he was a sort of South Korean politician, and this was an era when South Koreas shot into worldwide prominence, more interesting and productive than assorted European Legolands where a large part of the gross domestic product consisted of divorced men’s taxes, paying for other men’s divorced wives to have jobs as divorce counsellors, all paying VAT. He did not believe in the State, or at any rate not the Republican, Atatürk state. Özal was the IMF’s trusted man: he had served at the World Bank for two years, and worked closely with the Sabanci dynasty, where he understood directly the virtues of private enterprise (as distinct from state-dependent enterprise, the Sabancis being, on the whole, less dependent than other great enterprises) and the German government helped. As director of the employers’ union, he had been quite tough. Demirel had been his original patron, though as Özal rose the relationship became tense (in 1990 Özal put up a memorial to Menderes, and Demirel, who regarded himself as rather more successful, was put out; he brought back the bones of Enver Pasha from Kirghizia as a come-back, the Democrats being children of the Young Turks).

Özal won in 1983 because he had outmanoeuvred the generals. They took the blame for the 24 January measures, and the Özal party, ANAP, counted as opposition. His reign was very Second Empire, even to the point where, at its end, horizontales arrived from the Soviet Union in battalions (and caused such havoc among traditional religious marriages on the Black Sea coast that a law was passed against adultery: like the Atatürk hat law, it was a declaration of intent, much criticized by humourless people). Money showered, old quarters of Istanbul were bulldozed for motorways to take fancy motor cars, and there were always the tarikat connections to make hand wash hand in Anatolia (in Özal’s case, the Nakshibendi, who were quite open: his main Kurdish ally, Kâmran İnan, was one of their leaders, a Sheikh, with a Lausanne degree in law and a Swiss wife). Islam in Turkey was not at all dissimilar from Catholicism in Italy, and this had long, long origins. Even in mid-Byzantine times, Anna Comnena had divided the Anatolians into Greeks, barbarians and semi-barbarians, meaning the Turks. Özal was a very clever man, sitting on his exercise bike (it failed: he was huge) and zapping CNN, driving a BMW at absurd speeds, taking parades in a baseball cap and telling the generals to turn up to lunch. He was a far more interesting man than the wooden Pinochet, and moved his country forward in an extremely interesting direction. But he failed. The problem goes back to 1986, the return of inflation. Özal gave up, and was diverted, like Margaret Thatcher, into foreign policy, an entertainment not vouchsafed to Pinochet, who could get on with the job.

Özal’s government did remarkably well in the first period, with a cabinet largely made up of American doctorates and engineers (the chief Treasury minister, Kaya Erdem, clearly knew his business). Currency liberalization had to be pushed through the hostile bureaucracy; its style had been to present 13,000 pages, now reduced to fifteen; it retained valuable property — large offices, summer houses, shares, gold, etc. Inflation fell back — roughly to 30 per cent — as protection came down (only 200 items being banned for import; by 1988 thirty-three needed approval, and after 1984 only three were entirely prohibited). Tariffs, wharf charges, VAT had meant that the real rate of protection stood at around 60 per cent (c.i.f.) and it had often changed. Motor cars had incurred duty of 112 per cent in 1980, 145 per cent in 1986, 74 per cent 1989. Exporters’ tax rebates were accelerated, and after 1980 they were allowed to retain $40,000 and then more (earlier there had been compulsory clearing at the central bank, to pay for imports). The exchange rate itself was unified, as against the variable earlier rates, and income tax, hitherto the largest item on the revenue side, was cut from 40 to 25 per cent, and on companies to under 50 per cent, while VAT was raised at 10 per cent. Up to $3,000 could be bought per person, without restriction. Later, this was altogether freed. By 1987 income tax contributed only a quarter of income, indirect taxes one third. Parts of the country began to flourish, particularly the ultra-Western areas — Istanbul and the north-west, İzmir, some places on the south coast; there was a shift in trade towards Europe, and a growth of part-manufacture, particularly for Germany. By any index, Turkish prosperity was growing. One sign was the freedom to travel — people could now move more than once every three years, though a hundred-dollar tax remained until 1996.

However, there was much difficulty as regards the disciplines of monetarism: how could government expenditure be reduced? It was all very well to liberalize foreign trade and currency exchange: these things were vital. But what Pinochet had done in domestic matters was a different matter altogether, and here Özal was stuck; perhaps he even wanted to be stuck, because he had an excuse to channel state funds in the direction of his friends. Privatization might have been an answer, but in practice there were great problems — not least because the constitutional court kept striking down the proposals on the grounds that they were against the national interest. Public spending took a quarter of the GNP in 1980, a fifth in 1984, slightly more than that in 1987, and there was a constant deficit, 3-5 per cent of GNP, to which the State boards’ deficits might be added (6 per cent). The outcome was chronic inflation. Up to 1985 the lira had fallen steadily, in fact faster in dollar terms than in domestic prices. This was, overall, healthier than the alternative which set in after 1985, when Turkey joined efforts at managed exchange rates. After 1985 domestic prices rose faster than the dollar. More paper emerged from the Turkish printing press, and it could be freely exchanged for dollars, as insurance, at a crawling-peg rate. Time deposits could be held at will and switched, after very large interest rate gains, into dollars, and the upshot for anyone with savings was a 25 per cent tax-free annual dollar profit.

The technicality was that the dollar rose from 14 lire in 1975 to 47 in 1979, 76 in 1980, 163 in 1982, 225 in 1983, 522 in 1985, 1,422 in 1988 and 2,609 in 1990 (by March 2000 it had reached 600,000, and in 2003 1.6 million). The US price index rose from 56.6 per cent of the figure for 1985, reaching 95 per cent in 1981, after which there was stabilization (by 1990, 113). From 1985 to 1990 the Turkish price index rose from 100 to 769. In other words, the Turkish currency was appreciating by roughly 25 per cent every year against the dollar. By then, about half of the Turkish money supply was in dollars (or Marks). If you had access to foreign currency you could, with sufficient agility, make substantial (and tax-free) interest. In this way the banks became lazy. There has never been an inflation quite like the Turkish one. With that level, either the currency takes off into hyper-inflation, as in Latin America, or there has to be some stabilization, usually exceedingly painful and sometimes with blood on the streets. This did not happen. The technicians at the central bank were very competent, knowing how to judge interest rates and bond yields. But beyond that was always the notion that Turkey was too important to be allowed to go: the IMF would always step in (as indeed it did). But this was hardly a healthy business: inflation was a sort of hidden taxation, hitting especially the poor, and it rewarded parasitism or even straightforward criminality. The Left of Bülent Ecevit had failed in dealing with this, and so, in the event, did Özal, though his failure was much more interesting: eventually, his legacy was to be taken over by an astute Islamic party endorsed by the Americans. House prices in Istanbul at the highest level showed what vast sums of money were available, in a country whose nominal GDP per head was at least in theory of Third World type.

In effect there were two or perhaps even four economies at work in the Özal era, apart from the criminal (drugs-related) one. Exports did very well indeed with the reduction of corporation tax and tariffs. They accounted for one fifth of GNP in 1989, more than double what they had been ten years before, and considerably more suitable for a country without oil. Export earnings grew at almost 20 per cent annually, from 1980 to 1988, which was all the more remarkable as world trade slowed in the early part of that period. Their character also changed. In 1976, agriculture had accounted for two thirds (just over a billion dollars) but by 1989 18 per cent ($2.1bn). Industrial exports rose from one third ($600 million) to four fifths ($9bn) and manufactures accounted for nearly all of this, as distinct from half-finished items. Textiles accounted for half, followed by chemicals and then steel, of which Turkey had hardly supported any in the 1970s, despite the enormous Karabük plant. Now, Turkey’s exports were worth $1.5bn, an astonishing feat, given where she had started from. There was also a change of direction. The Middle East took more, in volume, but much less, in proportion; OECD countries, and especially Germany, now took two thirds of the exports. It became quite common for representatives of Turkish businesses to travel the world, probing markets — not a feature seen by the world since the later sixteenth century. Turkey could now, at least on economic grounds, advance her candidacy of the European Common Market which had been tabled as early as 1963; Europe in 1981 had accounted for about a quarter of trade, but by 1995 well over half ($28bn). In fact she weighed more than all other candidate countries put together, and then some. The same had of course occurred elsewhere, especially with Japan, in the fifties, and South Korea and Taiwan in the sixties. Was Turkey now catching up, and why had it taken her so long? The short answer was: other ‘miracles’ had had an American occupation. Turkey had a semi-demi American occupation, and Özal was its symbol. Overall it had been a great success, but the price was debt — the international one rising from $13.5bn to $40bn, interest on which took 70 per cent of export earnings. By 1997 the World Trade Organization was optimistic about Turkey — noting that exports had grown by 11 per cent per annum as against a general 7 per cent. The Istanbul stock exchange, trading $300m every day, was among the top four of the ‘emerging’ ones; imports at $67bn, and exports at $57bn (including the estimated $10bn-15bn to Russia) were creditable, especially in the light of Turkey’s past. The Bosphorus was three times busier than the Suez Canal.

Americanization was the watchword, and not one greatly liked by the old republican establishment. It stood for a sort of Turkish sixties, and in not dissimilar circumstances — in 1980, 60 per cent of Turks had lived on the land, and there was then a great flight, as happened a generation before in Italy or Spain — and it happened at every level. There was insider dealing in politics, and Özal’s own family was involved. The Emlak Bank would make loans, its manager taking part of the proceeds, where no other bank would have lent; eleven state banks gave out loans that no private bank could have contemplated. In the cities there was illegal building, some of it of such poor quality that it collapsed in earthquakes that left stoutly built housing blocks unimpaired. Özal just waved such corruption aside: to him, as to others of his way of thinking, it was less expensive than honest but idiotic state wastage. But the Westernization of Turkey went ahead in other ways. Students went to the West in great numbers — 25,000 to the USA. On the military and scientific level, the co-operation was intense: in Britain and the USA there was a substantial Turkish professional emigration, whereas in continental Europe ‘the Turks’ were, on the whole, of rural origin.

Private business might flourish, but much of the economy was still in the hands of the State. This was the same unhappy business as elsewhere — 2 million workers retiring early and underproducing, in factories varying in output from steel to pickles. Public enterprises undertook about a third of manufacturing. The State owned over half of the usable land, i.e. excluding mountain and forest, and there were a million farms and small plots, many simply squatted. The army owned almost one fifth of Ankara (often distinguished by tree-planting, sign of a military presence), and there was famous clientelism at work, with soft loans. Özal himself believed in privatization but this was difficult — it even constituted a vicious circle. There was not enough capital in Turkey; it could only come from abroad; but because of inflation, and perhaps also opaque business practices, this would not happen until finances had been stabilized, which could only happen through privatization. Otherwise the budget deficit just went on and on, worsening in 1986 when ANAP spent money for the election (in which its vote fell to one third, although this meant two thirds of the seats). Privatization did not happen — or at any rate only on a small scale (under $3bn in eleven years). Meanwhile, state managers became demoralized; there was not much investment (and the railways especially suffered, though the resulting lengthy journeys could be romantically old-fashioned). The Zonguldak mines (employing 30,000 people) would have cost less had they simply been closed down; meanwhile, foreign investment banks for some time made fortunes out of advice to then naïve Turks, and nothing much followed. Özal’s one real contribution was a build-operate-transfer system for capital projects, by which foreigners could make their profit for some years before transferring the project to the State (as happened with the Bosphorus Bridge).

The Özal years split the country. The foreign trade element had done enormously well, and continued to do so; and this was far from being just a matter for Istanbul and İzmir, as there were places far to the east, such as Antep, that were lifted off, and the new motorways through Kayseri, the chief town of Cappadocia, to the east and south became arteries of European trade. The perennial question, as to whether Turkey could become a member of the European Union, was debated endlessly at ministry level, but it was in effect being settled by voting with feet, or at any rate wheels. Maslak, where once, during the Crimean War, the French army had trained on the European shore of the Bosphorus, saw one Manhattanish skyscraper rise after another, and the multinational hotels also built. It meant the ruin of parts of the city, an especially scandalous instance being the destruction of the old Park Hotel, next to the former German embassy in Gümuşsuyu. It had been a Pasha’s house, had been turned into a grand hotel, and in its place half of a gruesome car park went up until it was stopped. The counterpart was that, as the money poured in, so did migrants. The city became, like Mexico City, a megalopolis, and although old Stambul survived, it was squashed in with concrete or clapboard suburbs, each taken over by a region in the east. It was a demonstration of the trickle-down effect, in that the crumbs from the tables of Maslak rolled down into Sütlüce, and the parking arrangements of Galata were taken over by a Kurdish mob from Bitlis, near Lake Van.

The later years of Özal have a shadowy resemblance to the later years of Margaret Thatcher, when the machine ran beyond the monetarist desert and entered upon richer and much more intractable soil. The real parallel for this is Italy, in the Christian Democrats’ blue period: a veneer of piety, and the sound of the till. ‘Social control’ was maintained by Islam, but the ANAP itself split, on religious matters: at a conference, the culture minister even fought a very large minister of state as to whether the Aya Sofya should become a mosque again. Özal, putting in his wife as chairman of the Istanbul branch, distanced himself from the kutsal ittifak element, the ‘holy alliance’. There had always been an element of Islam to the Özal mixture, and it sometimes seemed to be taking over — for instance, in 1988-9 the old question, whether women should be allowed to wear head-coverings in universities, came up, a matter of vast symbolic importance that Özal himself preferred not to take up: he said, just leave the question alone, dealing with it is for later. His supporters wanted their girls to be virgins when married, and (in theory) thought drink the mother of all evils. There was another side to this, perhaps Iranian in origin: secularists were assassinated, and even Moslem modernizers. By 1989 the ANAP was down to one fifth of the vote in local elections, Inönü’s (renamed) SPP taking nearly one third; the ANAP majority was now artificial. By 1991 new elections put Demirel ahead of ANAP by under a quarter, and bizarrely he struck up an alliance with another old dispossessed party, the SPP (‘Socialist’ etc.), now renamed Republican (CHP), and this introduced a period of political kaleidoscopes, governments of various coalitions succeeding each other until 2002, when a sort of Islamicized (and American-leaning) version of ANAP appeared, as the Justice and Development Party. Özal had really failed with the resumption of inflation in 1986, and the clash of the external and internal economies. The same had happened with Margaret Thatcher, and, like her, he now made his reputation in foreign affairs. However, Turkey had some real weight, not least as the only Moslem country in the world, apart from Jordan, with serious credentials (as a wise historian, Hasan Ali Karasar, remarked, ‘Islam, politics, economics — choose two’). How would she use it? The most imaginative answer would have been the annexation of northern Iraq, on the lines of the National Pact that had been pushed by Mustafa Kemal sixty years earlier.

Iraq came up. Saddam Hussein was possessed of megalomania, and the country that he ran, an artificial creation from the First World War, contained dissident elements, held together by oil money. He stood between Turkey and Iran, which, run by megalomaniacs, was Shia, from a branch of Islam so different as almost to constitute a different religion. The key factor was that, in northern Iraq, there were Kurds. That opened up, for Turkey, an enormous problem, the greatest that she had had to deal with. The Kurds are a people who never took off as a nation. There are perhaps 25 million of them, spread over Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, where they formed the bulk of the population of the south-east, bordering Iraq. Kurdish, like Iranian or Hindi, is an Indo-European language, and some of the words are recognizable to a western European (‘new’ is nu; ‘me’ is min; ‘two’ is du; ‘four’ is char, cf. French quatre; ‘valley’ is dal, cf. German Tal; and the grammar is fairly familiar). In Xenophon’s Anabasis people called Curtaroi are mentioned. His 10,000 Greek mercenaries, unpaid, unwept and unsung, were finding their way back home from fifth-century BC Persia, came to a river in some mountains, and found Curtaroi offering attitude on the opposite bank. They wondered what to do, encamped. Next morning, they found the Curtaroi engaged in fisticuffs, and crept past towards the sea. Nearly two millennia later, at the time of the Crusades, the Arabic Ekrad (plural for ‘Kurd’) were well-documented as mountain warriors, of whom the great Saladin was one (‘Selahattin’ in Turkey is generally a Kurdish name). But they were split up over various states, and the language was never standardized. It has divided into several variants, and though a specialist can recognize what is being said, people on the ground have to communicate in Turkish or Arabic once they leave their home area. There were historical differences noticeable even in the sixteenth century, as Kurdish emirates fought; and there was even rivalry between the two chief Moslem brotherhoods of the area, the Kadiri and Nakshibendi. One of the chief Kurdish elements in Iraq, the Behdinandi, simply refused, under the British Mandate, to use the Sorani Kurdish that was expected, and preferred Arabic. The outstanding pioneers of these matters were Russian and British, in this case D. N. McKenzie. In Turkey the chief Kurdish language is called Kırmanç, but it is split into dialects (Dimili) and there is another version, possibly a different language altogether, called Zaza. There are theories to the effect that the Zaza-speaking Kurds are not even of Kurdish origin. Some may even have been Armenian, and when the Turkish army found PKK — Kurdistan Workers’ Party — corpses, these were sometimes not circumcised. At any rate, regardless of the linguistic divisions, many Kurdish parents did not want their children educated in anything other than Turkish, so that they would get on in life. In Van, in the 1960s, there was the moving sight of young men studying in the street lights, with a view to just getting on. Most did: there was intermarriage, and, whatever was said about the Kurdish question later on, most Kurds voted for ordinary Turkish parties and, if they went into politics, shot up that tree. Turkey was simply so far above Iraq or Iran in terms of interest and development that no Kurd in his senses would have wanted to live anywhere else. However, something went badly wrong. A terrorist movement, the PKK, developed, and made the running for the latter part of Özal’s reign.

The Turkish government and army were blamed for this, but it was simply not an easy question, and the Kurds themselves did not know what the answer was. In the end, this had to do with a more general failure, that of the Turkish Left. It had had its chance in the 1960s, and it was even not far from power in the 1970s, when Ecevit ran things. However, it did not know what to do with the Kurds, regarding them as a weird amalgam of Armenians and gypsies. It did not help that Kurdish society (many parts were much less than that whole) was significantly different, in that Şafi Islam reigned, harsher than the Turks’ Sunni version. Ordinary Kurds (there were many extraordinary Kurds) behaved differently towards women, especially, who did not rate very highly: polygamy went on, though given religious rather than legal sanction, and there was a great demographic problem. This imposed a terrible strain on every sort of infrastructure, and matters were again complicated because the south-east of Turkey worked by dry agriculture. The State had responded with a scheme for great dams to divert the water of the two biblical rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, towards irrigation and hydro-electricity, but this would take time, and in any case the profits went towards the tribal chiefs, the Agas, who mainly ran affairs in these parts, clan-fashion. The Turkish Left were no good at these matters, and bear some responsibility for the troubles that followed. Sprigs of Istanbul grandee families, Henri Barkey or Çağlar Keyder, thinking beardedly about their own local version of Eighteenth Brumaire and looking to jobs in America, could hardly be bothered, at the Ankara School of Political Science, with some hairy peasant from Siverek called Abdullah Öcalan.

Öcalan was a megalomaniac, given to comparing himself with Mao and Lenin. His family background was not entirely unlike Stalin’s, in that he had a weak, henpecked (sılık) father and a bossy (Turkish) mother. His first enthusiasms (like Stalin’s) were religious. His first intention was to work in the State, but as a student he encountered Kurdish nationalism. This had complicated origins. There had always been uprisings by Kurds against the State but they did not have a nationalist side until late in the day. There was no doubt a vague idea of Kurdishness, but the realities were religious and tribal. The Republic, declared in 1923, was secular, and the last Caliph was dismissed in 1924. In 1925, and again in the 1930s, there were Kurdish uprisings, the last one (in Dersim, from 1936 to 1938) put down with much harshness. On all occasions, the State used tribes against each other — they had fought all along, whether over access to water, or over some hereditary grievance such as sheep-stealing, and in any case some were strictly Moslem, adhering to the Şafi version of Islamic law, which required its adepts to perform ritual ablutions if they had been in the same room as a foreigner or a woman, while others were Alevi. By the later sixties, Kurdish banners figured in student demonstrations. In 1969 ‘eastern revolutionary cultural hearths’ were set up in Kurdish towns, but after the coup of 12 March 1971 the organizers fled to Europe.

Öcalan went on to a surveyors’ school and then the department of Political Science at Ankara University, which had been a training ground for the bureaucratic elite of republican Turkey (it was called Mülkiye, after an Ottoman equivalent, but the original inspiration had been the modernizing École des Sciences Politiques in Third Republican France, also a country that took a very robust view of peasant dialects). As the university civil war of that period got under way, he was associated with the Left (and spent seven months in prison after the coup of 1971) and took up with his Krupskaya, Kesire Yıldırım; but no-one remembered anything much about him. The university Left, usually products of the professional class and as likely as not to regard themselves as way above village Kurds with a background in surveying, probably played its part in driving him towards Kurdish nationalism. They seem to have regarded him as a possible police agent as he talked ‘in a very gauche [toy] way’ about a Kurdish state, and the Turkish Left hardly bothered to include Kurdish banderoles.

The custom, at that time, was for small student groups to gather at the Çubuk reservoir park outside Ankara, where families might go for excursions at weekends — reservoir parks, as with Rooken Glen outside Glasgow, being a hallmark of progressive towns, but in this case out of sight of the police. There, on 21 March 1973, the PKK appears to have been founded, although its formal establishment came a few years later, in a village of Lice district, in the south-east, in Diyarbakır province, on 27 November 1978. Before this, Öcalan sent off representatives to the Kurdish east, there to spread the word, and setting up assorted protection rackets. For this, they used the grievances of one tribe against another, such as, for instance, the government’s grants of agricultural machinery to one rather than another — in this case, on the Syrian border, the Süleyman and Paydaş clans, respectively for and against the government.

PKK propaganda is entirely predictable, written in wooden language, and based on the analysis of almost any Third World Communist movement of the era. There is ‘imperialism’. It has local supporters, the ‘comprador class’, among the bourgeoisie of the State; in the particular locality there is ‘feudalism’, in this case the Kurdish tribal leaders and their hangers-on. Women are oppressed. Religion is regarded as part of the oppression. There are rivals on the Left, but they are potentially treacherous — they might just come to terms with ‘imperialism’ or at any rate show no sympathy for the cause of national liberation. The Turkish Left, in this case, was dismissed as ‘social chauvinism’, another well-worn phrase (it went back to the 1920s) — ‘feudal petty bourgeois and children of family’, meaning Henri Barkey and Çağlar Keyder. And now, in 1978, came the ‘First Congress’ of what is almost the last National Liberation Front of the old school and this time round there were Palestinian (and Bulgarian) connections. Öcalan’s outfit elected its central committee, its organizational and political bureaux, and had its officials for media affairs, military affairs, etc. The name was now changed to ‘PKK’ and its manifesto was issued. It invoked a version of Kurdish history, going back to the Medes, and emphasized the Indo-European as against Turkic origins of the people; it talked of ‘Turkish capitalism’ in the 1960s, referring to toprak ağaları (‘landowners’) ve kompradorları, and developed a version of the Vietcong programme, for a ‘national democratic revolution’ in which the ‘working classes’ would take the lead; these, it was claimed, were emerging from the peasantry; the enemies were ‘feudal, comprador exploitation, tribalism, religiosity [mezhepalık] and the slave-like dependence of women’.

Here are Dostoyevsky’s Demons: a gathering of perhaps two dozen people, most of them vaguely educated (Selim Çürükkaya, an interesting defector, says he was very impressed by Öcalan’s reading: he himself had struggled up from a village, and Alevi-Kurdish, Zaza-speaking, background, and had managed to graduate from sheep-watching to a high school at Mersin on the south coast; another was a schoolteacher of Laz background, i.e. Moslem Georgian, from the Black Sea coast). Of the original members, seven were killed on Öcalan’s orders as ‘agents’, five fled, and were denounced as traitors, and another five, though not classed as traitors, were downgraded. Two committed suicide, and another was murdered by a rival group in northern Iraq. Öcalan’s own wife fled, with another of the originals, and set up a rival PKK (‘Vejin’, though, here, for translation, the Indo-European is not helpful) in Paris. The first action occurred in July 1979, at Kırbaşı, a village in Hilvan. The area was run by a tribal chief, Mehmet Celal Bucak, who was also deputy, for the Justice Party, of Siverek. The PKK’s strategy — following the Maoist one — was to ally with one tribe against another; the Bucaks, strong in the Urfa region, were at odds with the Türks. The PKK blamed ‘feudalism’ for the plight of the Kurds, and decided to make an example. In the event, they attacked a Bucak during an iftar, the fast-breaking dinner celebrated in Ramazan, and wounded the chief, though they also killed a maid and a small boy. The main activity thereafter was partly to fight the Turkish Left, but also to levy a tribute on the timber trade of a government minister. At the turn of 1979-80, as the military stepped up arrests, Öcalan became alarmed, and before the coup of 12 September 1980 he moved to Syria. At this point the PKK became heavily involved in the politics of the Middle East.

In fact his style became very much that of a Middle East dictator. The truth was that Öcalan himself despised the Kurds as zavallı, ‘poor mutts’, who could only be kept in place by Stalinist methods. In 1980, established in Syria, he took up links with one of the two large Kurdish factions in Iraq, Celal Talebani’s PUK, based on the Iranian side (and using its own language), and he opened up a training camp in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, copying his ways from the PLO. Its attitudinizing leader, Yasser Arafat, had been allowed to address even the United Nations, generously conceding that he would deposit his revolver on the lectern as distinct from leaving it in its holster. Kurds: Palestinians? For Turks and most Kurds, unimaginable, but how should the problem be dealt with? Games were then played, the basic reality being that the Kurds moved in hundreds of thousands to western and central Turkey, and became assimilated. But the south-east remained a problem.

The Turkish state operated an alliance, never entirely reliable, with the other Iraqi Kurdish group, Mustafa Barzani’s PDK — Kurdistan Democratic Party — and four-cornered fighting might then develop; there were also problems, from time to time, with the Syrians, who sometimes opposed Saddam Hussein, with whom the PKK had, on the whole, good relations. In this atmosphere, Öcalan built up his own cult of personality, and ran affairs very strictly. One former close associate, Selim Çürükkaya, defected in the end, and wrote memoirs. He had come from a village, struggled up to the teachers’ training school at Tunceli, and spent eleven years in prison, there organizing hunger strikes. Then he was smuggled out, via Greece and Serbia, to Öcalan’s camp — the ‘Mahsun Korkmaz Military Academy’, where there was much marching about by young women in camouflage suits and boots. His estranged wife was there, and she had turned into a Rosa Klebb: she ticked him off for smoking, saying that no-one smoked when the Leader was present; she even ticked him off for crossing his legs, such informality being an offence against discipline. The camp was full of informers, and it had its own prison. The place was, generally, run by men who, in Turkish prisons, had not ‘resisted’, as Selim Çürükkaya claimed he had done, but had obeyed orders (a small version of the problems that arose in the satellite European countries after 1945, between Communists who had spent their time in Moscow and Communists who had been part of the anti-Nazi resistance movements). Öcalan himself was puritanical in sexual matters, though he did surround himself with a little group of fanaticized young women; the camp even had its own Orwellian language, imprisonment being called uygulama or ‘treatment’, and there were provisions for self-criticism sessions, with detailed questionnaires being served on people who had emerged from prison, as to their conduct before and during the imprisonment. There was even a version of the witch-hunt against Trotskyists in the Stalin era — one Mahmut Şener, then exiled in Germany. There was a grotesque leadership cult, Öcalan issuing a sort of catechism, comparing himself with the Mahdi, with evocations, in the Party Central School, of ‘The way of life of Apo, the way of work of Apo, the way of striking [enemies] of Apo’; after grandly named congresses (‘Congress of Victory’) there would be purges and liquidations. Apo was supposed, in Turkish, to mean ‘Daddy’, but it was also the name for the German terrorists of the seventies, Ausserparlamentarische Opposition (‘non-parliamentary opposition’), and the PKK’s prose was very Germanic.

The PKK learned its tactics from a school that, by 1984, was already quite venerable. It had a political wing, ERNK, which took twelve of the sixty-five seats in the exile parliament, a dummy body which reflected the Greek Communists’ ways in the Second World War, of ELAS/ETAM. But there were other instances. Mao Tse-tung had matched his Communist guerrillas with village politics, and General Vo Nguyen Giap in Vietnam had famously succeeded by similar methods. In the case of the PKK, tribal politics had a similar part, but this time there was a different element, in that small-town intelligentsia were recruited. Schoolteachers, emerging from the peasantry, had had a role in terrorism as far back as the Russian anarchists and the Armenians who had learned from them. The argument was that atrocity would cause counter-atrocity. The Turkish authorities would overreact against simple villagers, whose sympathies would then be with the rebels. Later, in the 1990s, there was also forced recruitment of boys and young men, just as had happened in the Greek civil war, who could be made to take the blame for an atrocity. It often happened that, upon capture by the army, they would spend time in Diyarbakır prison or elsewhere. There, they would receive lessons in Marxism. This had been a device of Balkan Communists between the wars, and, both in Greece and in Yugoslavia in the early thirties, the Communists took a fifth and more of the vote. In Greece, for instance, they took votes from the Macedonian minority, from the dock workers of Salonica, from the tobacco-growers of Thrace and from children of the refugees who had arrived from Anatolia. Add the sons of some rich and educated families, and you have a model for the Communism of the whole area. A great book, Eleni, describing how, in a village in north-western Greece, the locals could be made far more radical than they might otherwise have been, is the prototype and, curiously enough, after Orthodox services in Greece collections would solemnly be taken to buy rockets for the PKK. Its managers had learned from earlier practices, and they behaved atrociously. In 1985, in a village of Çatak district in Van, they killed a man and his two baby daughters, and then poured paraffin on the house to burn it down, with the wife and two children, of eight and ten. In February 1987, using Turkish uniforms as camouflage, they shot up four houses, in Şırnak, when the villagers guessed who they were, the women and children fleeing. Road ambushes, even stopping local trains, were frequent enough in Bingöl and Bitlis, the travellers being killed with Kalashnikovs. Another speciality became economic targets — the ferro-chrome works and their clerks. Obviously, from the PKK point of view, the more economic distress, the better. Another method was to prevent education by the simple enough device of shooting schoolteachers — over one hundred. In April 1990, in a village near Elazığ, they attacked a primary school, roped in the teachers’ wives and children, and shut them up in the headmaster’s room. Then they killed a teacher. His wife, pregnant, was spared, but when she said that she did not want to survive, they obliged. There was another element. In accordance with Kurdish ways, young men were married off very early, produced two or three children, did their military service, took a second wife, and then a third one. The boys of the first marriage found their mother last in the queue, old before her time; children of the more prosperous years were favoured. According to Turkish military intelligence, the PKK recruited such boys. Of these, there were many. Naturally, local poverty helped the PKK, which then perpetuated it — shooting up chicken farms, for instance.

The State responded as it had done since the first Kurdish rebellion in 1925, nominating ‘village guards’, who were given weaponry. These tactics were dangerous, in that the guards themselves might hand over the weaponry, and the PKK specifically attacked them — sometimes wiping out entire families or even villages. The army could hardly defend each and every mountain hamlet, and in the later 1980s it was outmanoeuvred: in much of the south-east, the PKK controlled roads as soon as night fell, and it took the military some time to work out proper tactics. These were harsh — the forced evacuation of hamlets, the population being despatched to towns, especially Diyarbakır, which doubled and trebled in size, with hastily erected tower blocks and tent cities. Foreign journalists, seeing the resultant overcrowding and misery, blamed the Turkish state, and its officials, in turn, were sometimes clumsy in handling this — expelling critics or even putting them on trial. Martyrs were created. The wife of the mayor of Diyarbakır, Leyla Zana, demonstrated upon taking the oath in parliament: she used Kurdish and created an uproar (though she went on to take the oath formally in Turkish). She received an eleven-year sentence, and the European parliament took up her cause. All of this allowed the PKK to make the running when it came to propaganda in foreign countries, particularly in Germany (which tolerated the PKK networks), France (where an Institut kurde was set up) and Belgium, which stood host to a Kurdish parliament in exile that was in effect controlled by Apo (though in the end he worked against it). In Sweden there was an ostensibly enlightened policy, of allowing immigrant children education in their own languages. Absurd preaching teams from Sweden then arrived in south-eastern Turkey, with a view to standardizing Kurdish, in a country where basic textbooks were lacking.

But there was also an ostensibly non-terrorist Kurdish political element, which gained parliamentary representation in the early 1990s when it struck an electoral pact with a left-wing party. It itself was promoted by the leader of the Türk tribe, Ahmet, using the tribal patronage machine as his brothers had earlier (1967) been involved with the Republican or Justice Party, depending upon the swings of local patronage. Twenty-four members of the ruling family had been killed in vendettas, and Ahmet Türk was himself imprisoned on suspicion of concealing a member of the PKK. However, he resurfaced as a purportedly moderate, culturally oriented, would-be politician. Through a political group that called itself variously ‘People’s Democratic Party’ or ‘Democratic People’s Party’, demands ostensibly of a purely cultural nature could be advanced — arguments for education in Kurdish, for instance, which appeared to be entirely reasonable but in practice would have required the creation of a standardized Kurdish with a far bigger vocabulary, i.e. almost the same creative effort for a Kurdish State that had gone into the making of the Turkish Republic itself. Why, thought most Turks and Kurds, bother? The party operated summer schools in Romania. There was a further problem, in that a good part of the Kurdish population of the south-east was strongly religious, and there was fighting between militant Islamic groups and the PKK, which was, at least in the first decade, very strongly secular, and dedicated to the emancipation of women. One prominent Kurd, Abdülmelik Fırat, grandson of Sheikh Said, might have served as overall spokesman for the cause, but the secularism of the PKK put him off. In the later 1990s the Turkish Kurds in the south-east divided between nationalists, with PKK connections of this or that depth, and Islamists; elsewhere in Turkey their votes simply went to the existing Turkish parties. In all of this, Greece was well to the fore. There were training camps on Greek soil, and Greece was the favoured place for PKK people to be smuggled through, via Belgrade, to Syria. Rich businessmen, army officers and politicians all took a hand and in the end Öcalan was kidnapped by Turkish military intelligence from the Greek embassy in Kenya. Western Europe played its part. The Kurdish cause was taken up by some French people, including Danielle Mitterrand, in 1989, in connection with the revolutionary bicentennial. In Italy the Communist network could be used, as was shown when Öcalan in 1998 was forced out of Syria and tried to find refuge among allies in Italy, the government of which, for a time, was craven and would not expel him, despite Interpol most-urgent arrest warrants. There was an element of smuggling of people and of drugs into western Europe which made the PKK merge with existing criminal networks, and a constant barrage of propaganda put the Turks on the defensive. They themselves did try manfully to respond to such Western criticism. For instance, one result of the film Midnight Express was for Turkish prisons to be run on liberal, reformist lines, the prisoners assembling, running much of their own life, and equipped ultimately with e-mails or cellular telephones. In the outcome, they became little Marxist universities. Eventually, the authorities felt strong enough to decree a change of regime, with single cells, where prisoners could not be intimidated. There followed hunger strikes by people whom the terrorists simply nominated. Later, as the cause became more desperate, there was a similar attempt at suicide-bombings, and various girls would again be nominated to pretend to be pregnant, and then blow themselves up against a state target. These were not in fact successful — the girls lost their nerve, blew themselves up in the wrong place, or simply could not go along with it. Of a dozen suicide bombings, only two succeeded. There had been a moment, in the early 1990s, when Turgut Özal appeared to be suggesting some sort of Turkish-Kurdish confederal arrangement and there was even a long wrangle in the cabinet, when the éminence grise of Turkish politics, Kamran İnan, himself of prominent Kurdish origin (he was related to the Bucaks), argued the cause. Özal’s suggestion, if in fact it was seriously advanced, was very unpopular. But it would have been a good thing.

For Turks, and great numbers of Kurds, the answer was assimilation in Turkey. This was very far from senseless, but the bad feeling that had developed since the 1960s was difficult to overcome. For Turkey there appeared to be two solutions — one, the assimilation of millions of Kurds in the more prosperous west and south; two, the advance of the GAP project, the bringing of water and hydro-electricity, on an enormous scale, to south-eastern Turkey, through a project of endless dams and hydro-electrical works, to bring prosperity and hope to an area beset by dry agriculture, a demographic nightmare, and endless throwing away of rubbish. A whole team of social engineers was attached to this project, to bring education to the children and enlightenment to the women, to remind them that polygamy and chadors (the word means ‘tent’) did not have to be their lot in life. Which would win: Kurdish nationalism, or a modern Turkey, following the European patterns? Özal’s success was to make Turkey prosperous enough for this problem to have a worldwide dimension. His failure was not to see it through, with a strategy. And that was the verdict on the eighties as a whole.