A Detailed Critique of “The Historical Blindness of Turkey’s Detractors” – By Aliza Marcus in Foreign Policy

So many people have asked to me to comment on Aliza Marcus’ piece in the FP that I decided to go over it paragraph by paragraph to show how badly researched it was. Having done so, I am now forced to say that Aliza is flat-out delusional about Turkey due to her failure – deliberately or because of ignorance – to touch upon the conditions in pre-1980 Turkey and to her invalid assumptions since 1980. One cannot truly evaluate anything that took place in Turkey in the 80′s without examining the developments and the resulting state of anarchy in late 1970′s.

Here is my critique paragraph by paragraph:

1. “Thirty years ago this month, Ilhan Erdost, a leftist Turkish publisher, was beaten to death by soldiers in Ankara’s Mamak military prison. He had been detained by the military regime, which had just taken power in a coup d’état. His crime was publishing a book by communist theorist Friedrich Engels. He was 35 years old.”

There were abuses and beatings during the coup. Whether it was for publishing a book alone needs to be corroborated. Every single leftist I know who was abused in those days says he was totally innocent and that pre-1980 days were the democratic days. Ask other Turks if they were. Electricity was cut off daily, people had water once every 2 or 3 says, you could not find toilet paper or chicken to buy. American cigarettes and jeans were banned, etc. Plus you were not allowed to open your shop on Sundays. You certainly could not go out at nights for fear of getting shot. If you saw soldiers with machine guns around, you felt safe because the police – like teachers, bureaucrats, workers – were split into leftists and nationalists (the right). You could travel outside of Turkey once every three years and could take only $500 with you. No, I am not talking about the post-1980 coup days. I am talking about the days preceding the coup.

2. “Erdost’s widow, Gul Erdost, marked the anniversary by announcing that she planned to file a lawsuit against those she holds accountable for the killing: the generals who staged the Sept. 12, 1980, coup.

OK. Let her. I am all for it. Let’s see if she wins going against the 92% approval that bad constitution got in the referendum. No, it did not get 92% because people were forced to; it got 92% because people were tired of infighting and trusting the generals, wanted to put it past them . The general population, of course. Not those who were tortured. There was some torture. Arguably not because of orders from the top, but out of frustration and the desire to avenge the bad days. Not right, but those were the circumstances… unlike today when the political conditions are more or less normal.

3. “Gul Erdost has Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, to thank for the chance to finally challenge the military. Thirty years to the day that tanks rolled through Turkish cities, giving rise to arguably the most brutal and anti-democratic period in the country’s history, voters approved a package of amendments to the constitution drawn up by the former military rulers. These changes included removing the article that granted the military rulers perpetual immunity from prosecution.”

Really arguably and depending on who you were in the late 1970′s. Yes, 92% of voters approved it. Like it or not. And what changes? They were no changes. That was a yes or no vote for the whole constitution. Not the single yes or no vote for 26 separate and unlinked clauses that people had to vote for this past September (Oh yes, a violation of the 2006 Venice Commission’s Code of Good Practice on Referendums). I despise the 1982 constitution but that is a different matter. Facts are facts and should presented that way for people to judge on their own.

4. “Yet to hear many U.S.-based analysts tell it, Erdogan is tearing down Turkey’s democracy, not building it up. These critics — out of either willful disregard or sheer ignorance — misrepresent what Erdogan has accomplished and why voters continue to support him. They depict Erdogan’s government as an ominous departure from Turkey’s past — ignoring the abuses that occurred under the country’s previous governments.”

So, if we don’t agree, it is out of either willful disregard or sheer ignorance? What makes Aliza such an expert?

5. “He has approved changes, however limited, giving Turkey’s Kurdish population greater cultural rights. He has also done away with state security courts, whose mix of civilian and military judges ruled on alleged offenses against the state.”

Giving Turkey’s Kurdish population greater cultural rights like granting them representation via lifting of the 10% threshold for the Kurdish party to get into the parliament? Erdogan has done away with the state security courts only in name and form, turning them into “special criminal courts” which the gov’t is currently using for the ergenekon case.

6. “Turks, clearly, are pleased with Erdogan’s efforts. In 2007, they returned Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to office, five years after the party first swept to power. And with Erdogan’s support, the recent referendum on the constitutional amendments passed by more than 15 percentage points.”

Oh yes, so clearly 100% of Turks! How does one reach the conclusion that the results of a referendum, which did not have to do with economic or foreign policy, translate into being pleased with Erdogan’s efforts without going over what exactly was voted.

7. “Anti-AKP critics are not convinced. They portray Erdogan as a power-hungry Islamic radical intent on turning Turkey into an authoritarian, fundamentalist state. They claim that the government has concocted an “elaborate political fiction” that the Turkish armed forces planned a coup in a plot dubbed “Ergenekon.” The arrest of some 60 military officers and civilian supporters for allegedly planning this coup, they say, was done solely to harass and stifle their opponents. Allegedly, the evidence against the military officers and civilian backers has been fabricated, creating a “climate of fear” for secular Turks.”

Untrue that there is no climate of fear for Turks who disagree, let alone secular Turks? What about the students who just got jail time for protesting? Or this guy named Mehmet Haberal, who is still in jail without an indictment even after he won a civil case against the judges for keeping him in prison without a good reason?

8. “In this false narrative being peddled by the AKP’s critics, human rights abuses are rampant and Turkey’s courts have been turned into pawns of the government’s repressive policies. U.S. policymakers, desperate for a moderate Islamic state, are oblivious to the prime minister’s true agenda, according to these analysts. Few people are aware of what is really going on because the Turkish media, the story goes, are too blinded by their hatred of the military to investigate Erdogan’s abuses, thoroughly cowed by threats of legal action, or under the control of Islamists.”

Can she prove that the opposite is true? One can conceivably claim it was essentially (though still a stretch from a political control point of view) a similar situation with the judiciary prior to the AKP. But it is easy to prove that the judiciary is now controlled by the executive branch much more directly as most members are directly or indirectly elected by the legislative and executive branches, both of which are practically handpicked and thus controlled by Erdogan himself.

9. “But, in fact, Turkey is more democratic and more respectful of human rights today than it has ever been. Progress is slow and imperfect — and there are still abuses of power, some quite serious — but things are much, much better.”

What does she say here? Unintelligible writing.

10. “After the 1980 military coup, the junta suspended all civil liberties and then severely curtailed them when it drew up a new constitution that enshrined the military as the ultimate arbiter in Turkish politics. Upwards of 650,000 people were arrested during the period of military rule, many of whom were tortured and killed. Kurds had it the worst: In Diyarbakir Prison, then run by the military, detainees were sodomized with batons, forced to eat their own excrement, left in rat-infested cells, and given water mixed with detergent to drink.”

There is some truth here but again since there is no examination of pre-1980 conditions, most are mispresented. The military did suspend liberties, but returned all and then some more within three years. The fact here is that it was a badly written constitution. Yet it did not make the military the ultimate arbiter, especially as time progressed and many clauses were changed by the parliament. If the military had been the arbiter, then Ozal would not have been allowed to win as the military backed the party that lost in the 1983 elections. Moreover, the 1987 referendum to allow the banned politicians to run for office again did pass, once again against the wishes of Kenan Evren, the general who was elected the president after the coup, and although the military was against it.

11. “The 1990s were marginally better for the average Turk — but not for Kurds. More than a dozen Kurdish journalists, at least 62 officials from the Kurdish political party, and hundreds of Kurdish activists were mysteriously murdered from 1990 to 1995. The culprits, in many cases, are credibly alleged to be members of the security forces or allied groups. Thousands of court cases were filed against journalists who wrote about the Kurdish issue, the military’s brutal tactics against suspected rebel sympathizers, or human right abuses in general.”

The Kurdish situation deteriorated in the 1990′s. However, she does not mention the PKK increasing terrorist activity in SE Turkey. !990′s were not good days for the Turkish people as she claims, with 100+% inflation and the worst corruption the nation had seen. The deep state did grow big with mobs infiltrating the state thanks to inept and corrupt politicians. And has the AKP gone after the deep state of the 1990′s? No, not at all.

12. “The mainstream Turkish media were generally compliant, if not outwardly supportive, of the repression. During my trial, one well-known Turkish columnist, Oktay Eksi, complained that the government should never have allowed the trial to go ahead because it made me famous. Others wrote about my possible hidden agenda or simply claimed I must have been tricked by Kurdish activists. Still, I was lucky: I was acquitted, though forced to leave the country. Turkish and Kurdish reporters fared much worse.”

I do not know about her particular case. But Turkish politicians have always loved to keep the journalists in check, Politicians loved it much more than the military. Turkey was horribly governed in the 1990′s. Proof? The Islamist party winning 21.5% of the vote in 1995 for the first time ever.

13. “Take the so-called mass trial under way in Turkey against 152 Kurdish politicians accused of working for the PKK rebels, as well as the Ergenekon trial. Supposedly, such mass trials are “becoming the norm” — yet another sign of creeping authoritarianism in Turkey.”

The two are not comparable. The Kurdish politicians are accused because of laws – as faulty as they might be – that have been on the books for a long time and which the AKP did not bother to change despite having sufficient majority to do so. Ergenekon, on the contrary, is case that appears to be built on unprovable imaginary grounds – tens of thousands of pages, the first 5000 of which Gareth Jenkins has read and wrote about – based upon which no one has yet been convicted in the two and a half years it has been going on, but hundreds have been imprisoned, some without even an indictment.

14. “One case against members of the leftist Dev-Yol group opened in 1982 with 700 defendants. Eighteen years later, the trial is still continuing. Two other Dev-Yol trials, since concluded, each had about 900 defendants. The trial against the DISK trade union had more than 1,400 defendants. The fact that Turkish law allows mass trials — and schedules hearings so that cases drag on for years — has nothing to do with Erdogan and everything to do with the deliberately imperfect system the former military junta bequeathed to Turkey’s current leadership.”

Again incomparable. Dev-Yol and DISK had committed serious violent acts in the 1970′s, threatening and bullying people with guns to join the leftist union. My own parents’ small factory was raided by DISK, and my parents were threatened at gunpoint to make their workers join the union. When I was a freshman in college in the USA in 1979, my dad had to fly to see me because he was on the death roll of the leftists. Bombs and machine gun fires were going off all over the place in the days leading to the 1980 coup. Those cases had to do with what went on in Turkey in the late 1970′s and were clean-up following the coup. Whether one agrees with them or not is debatable, but they were undertaken under exceptional circumstances that can hardly be described as normal. There was a civil war going on. You can interview many ordinary Turkish citizens who had to endure those days and get the truth. No one talks about the responsibility of the politicians in letting the situation get out of hand. Plus those were the cold war days. The Ergenekon case entails no such circumstances. Period.

15. “The military, after all, has made a habit of staging and planning coups — it seized power in 1960, 1971, and 1980, and engineered a “soft coup” in 1997, when it forced the resignation of Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan.”

1971 was not a coup. They asked the Demirel gov’t to resign via a warning, and Demirel did. The military did not take over.

Following the 1960 coup, the military held elections in 1961, and following 1980 (again the PM brought down was Demirel), in 1983.

In 1997, the military gave the Erbakan gov’t a warning on Feb.28th, and Erbakan resigned in June. According to Demirel, who was the president at the time, he or the generals did not ask Erbakan to resign. But no one ever bothers to ask him anything about coups in Turkey, even though he was brought down twice as the PM and was also the president in 1997. He was also around n 1960. He should be interviewed for sure. He is the only guy who can tell anyone what coups are all about in Turkey. He experienced every single one of them. Yet, shockingly, not a single foreign journalist has bothered to interview him with regard to military coups in Turkey.

16. “There are good reasons why some still find Turkey’s judiciary and policymaking bodies wanting. Erdogan has not fully upended the faulty and easy-to-abuse judicial, civil, and political systems he inherited. And Turkey is not a Western, liberal democracy just yet. But it is moving in the right direction. Over the past eight years, Turkey has improved its civil rights protections, strengthened its free market economy, and moved closer to fulfilling the demands for EU membership. Erdogan has also pushed Turkey’s military out of the political decision-making process and pressed the judiciary to investigate military officers implicated in extrajudicial executions of Kurds in the 1990s. These are positive changes, though you’d never know that by reading the new wave of anti-AKP commentators, many of whom seem to think that another military coup is needed to put Turkey back on the right track.”

This paragraph is just plain fantasy. Almost none of it is true. Even the free market economy part. Turkey’s military wanting to be in the political decision-making process, on the other had, is just an ignorant assumption. The rest is simply untrue.

17. “Of course, the situation in Turkey could change. Reforms could stall. Erdogan could become too power-happy. But one thing is for sure: The only real fiction here is that Turkey was a freer and more democratic place before Erdogan’s AKP party took office.”

You cannot say it was freer before the AKP. But neither can you say it is freer now. However, despite all its problems, one can argue that it was more democratic prior to AKP’s eight years in power.

Last but not the least, what is more shocking to me than Marcus’ seriously flawed piece is the fact that a magazine like Foreign Policy would overlook its mediocrity and jeopardize its own credibility by publishing it.

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