Turkish Contradictions

I first developed a keen interest in Turkey and her politics in the early 1990s.  Especially then, before Turkey’s importance in the world had grown to its current levels, people often asked me “Why Turkey?”  My answer was, and still is, “It’s complicated.”  

Turkey, just like the Ottoman Empire before it, remains full of complexity and contradictions.  Democratic since 1950 and blessed with a vibrant civil society, professional civil service, competent military, ample intellectual capital and a diversified economy, Turkey long ago became the envy of many developing states.  At the same time, Turkey often turned out to be the most intolerant of states towards its ethnic Kurdish minority, attempting to deny their existence and forcibly assimilate them with a zeal unmatched anywhere else.  Turkish democracy saw itself interrupted by military coup after coup, and stymied by innumerable caveats, exceptions and limitations (often known as “anti-terrorism laws”).  Much of civil society and the country’s intellectual elite became fully indoctrinated by the state’s official Kemalist mantras, or the “Muslimist” mantras of today’s government in Ankara.  The economy moved in fits and starts, growing explosively and then contracting dangerously, only to surge again after narrowly avoiding collapse. 

Things appeared a good deal simpler in neighbouring Syria, Saddam’s Iraq and to a lesser extent, Iran.  The states there control much more of civil society and the economy, and the red-lines remain clearer.  Contradict the government in any of these states and you wind up in jail, or worse.  In Turkey, however, the red-lines are grey and ever shifting.  What could once be spoken freely suddenly becomes forbidden, then permitted, and then again punishable.  This is probably why Turkey has more journalists in prison today than any other country, including much more repressive ones like Iran and Saudi Arabia.  

Today’s Turkish headlines and contradictions should therefore come as no surprise.  Prime Minister Erdogan’s government has done more than any previous administration to expand Kurdish rights, but also vies for the record in the number of peaceful Kurdish activists arrested and incarcerated.  At the same time that Ankara finally announces official negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) for a “Path to Peace,” 50 Turkish jets fly into Iraqi Kurdistan to run bombing sorties against PKK camps in the Qandil mountains.  

While democratic reforms demanded by the European Union Copenhagen Criteria continue, Turkish prosecutors this week demanded a 21-year prison sentence for 21-year old French-Turkish student Sevil Sevimli and four of her friends.  Their crime?  Participating in peaceful May Day demonstrations, unfurling a banner demanding “free education” and attending a concert by Grup Yorum, a left-wing rock band.  For Turkish prosecutors, this was apparently enough evidence to accuse them of having links to the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), a radical leftist group with a history of violence in Turkey.  Sevimli’s real crime, of course, may have more to do with being a secular, Kurdish, Alevi leftist who returned to her native Turkey to criticize Erdogan’s Muslimist, Turkish nationalist, Sunni, right-wing government. How else can one explain a request for a 21-year sentence, when Erhan Tuncel (the man who also shot the Pope) got 10 years for bombing a McDonald’s, or when those who shot Turkish Human Rights Association president Akin Birdal got no more than 19 years?

Everyone’s entitled to their opinions of course, so long as they don’t contradict those of Mr. Erdogan and his judiciary.  Because Turkey remains complicated, however, Sevimli and her friends will probably be acquitted of the charges against them.  Just harassing them with the indictments and court processes, like the government currently does to tens of thousands of other pre-trial detainees who are also entitled to their own opinions, turns out to be a much more subtle strategy than guilty verdicts from transparently kangaroo courts.    

All of which takes me to last week’s assassination of three Kurdish PKK activists in Paris.  By now we’ve heard a host of conspiracy theories about the event.  The three most compelling speculations point the finger at either the Turkish “Deep State”, which wishes the peace talks with Ocalan to fail, an internal PKK rift wherein hardliners want to put a stop to the talks, or Syrian-Iranian machinations to derail the talks.  Mr. Erdogan has managed to bring the rogue Deep State under control, however, so the first theory seems improbable.  While the second and third theories remain possible, I’ll add a fourth possibility that reflects the Janus-faced contradictions of Turkish politics: The Turkish state itself, under the normal chain of command, may have carried out the assassinations in the middle of negotiations with Ocalan and the PKK.  

Like this week’s bombing runs in Qandil, the message could be “compromise a bit more, or more things like this will happen.”  The “good cop bad cop routine,” or the “carrot and stick approach,” became standard interrogation and negotiation techniques for a reason, after all.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since August 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press).