All MIUC´s professors are interested in the political climate in which we are currently living, and we welcome student debate and involvement in current affairs. Professor Maria Blanco Palencia, one of MIUC´s experts in International Relations, shares her comments on the recent events in Turkey. Please feel free to join the discussion and share your opinions!
Erdoğan’s post failed coup ambitions: strongman reaction signals strategic weaknesses.
On the night of the 15th July, we witnessed a minute-by-minute account of an attempted military coup in Turkey. The events were followed by several hours of intense and uncertain information, with shocking television pictures showing streets overtaken by tanks and the sound of military planes flying over Ankara or Istanbul. While the Turkish military announced through a statement on public TV that it had taken control of the government, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was on holiday in the seaside town of Bodrum.
(Photo by Mehmet Ali Ozcan/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)
Upon hearing of the coup attempt, in the midst of military control of national television, the president spoke to satellite channel CNN Turk on FaceTime, insisting that he retained control of the country, and said that ‘this is a coup attempt by a faction in the military’. Erdoğan’s successful landing and speech at Istanbul airport to denounce the army coup attempt as an ‘act of treason’ marked the turning point of the night. The emerging narrative by the Turkish government has been that the coup was directed by a parallel military structure made up of adherents of the Gülen movement, a one-time ‘soft’ Islamist ideological bedfellow of the AKP which had fallen out of favour, whose leader, Fethullah Gülen, is based in Pennsylvania. Following Erdoğan’s urging, crowds filled Turkish streets.
The coup marks the culmination of a rudderless Turkish leadership. It put into evidence the strains on Turkish institutions and society of the so-called ‘neo-Ottoman’ policy that sought to re-establish Turkey as the key player in the region and a gateway power for Europe in the Middle East and Central Asia. At its most basic, the coup represented increasing irritation among sections of the military not in ideological terms, but with the seemingly thankless task of patrolling the huge and dangerous southern border as well as policing Kurdish nationalists in the south-East of Turkey. Both tasks resulted from Turkish leadership decisions. Yet far from securing Turkey’s importance abroad, the recent suicide bombings and police shootings in airports and regional cities demonstrated Turkey’s domestic insecurity, possibly a final straw for the majority of military men involved in the coup.
The declaration made on national television by the coup faction denouncing corruption and the threat to Turkey’s secularism as key motivational elements of their action was intended to mobilise a dissatisfied citizenry who had demonstrated peaceful for several years, including the famous Gezi Park protests. Far from helping the army units in Istanbul and Ankara, however, people on the streets climbed tanks and even gave their lives to stop the coup.
Initial Erdoğan’s reaction to the coup seemed to recognised the great strain on his society that his ‘uncompromising’ approach had sown in the last few years. However, the honeymoon did not last. Several observers have noted that the military coup seems to have strengthened Erdoğan’s power. In response to failed coup, Erdoğan declared a three-month state of emergency to ‘remove swiftly all the elements of the terrorist organisation involved in the coup attempt’. As part of the government’s investigation of possible coup organisers, military personnel, judges, prosecutors and civil servants have been detained or suspended from their jobs. These detentions have been surrounded by allegations of torture from the detainees’ families.
According to the Turkish constitution, the state of emergency will enable Erdoğan and his AKP government to bypass parliament, rule via decree, and suspend rights and freedoms as deemed necessary. In this situation, the discussion on death penalty has been revived in Turkey. They urged Parliament to consider their demands to apply the death penalty for the plotters. Turkish president responded by stating that ‘we cannot ignore this demand; in democracies, whatever the people say has to happen.”
Already, one consequence of the coup was the imposition of restrictions on Internet access, and the blocking of WikiLeaks after it leaked thousands of AKP emails. Moreover, on the 27th July, a new decree was passed ordering the closure of scores of media organisations. Soon after, three news agencies, sixteen television channels, twenty-three radio stations, forty-five daily newspapers, fifteen magazines, and twenty-nine publishing houses were shut down. As well as closing media outlets, the Turkish government has started arresting journalists on terror charges.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has denounced this ‘sweeping purge’ of the media, urging authorities to ‘release and drop all charges’ against them. UN Special Rapporteur and OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media have deplored the crackdown on journalists and media outlets in Turkey, and state that ‘he simultaneous arrests of independent journalists and shutdowns of print and broadcast media strike a major blow against public debate and government accountability’, strongly urging ‘Turkish authorities to reconsider these decisions and confirm their obligations to media freedom’.
Academics are also being targeted. The government has fired more than 15,000 employees in the education ministry and asked 1,500 university deans to resign. On the 21st July, several academic organisations issued a joint statement to collectively ‘note with profound concern the apparent moves to dismantle much of the structure of Turkish higher education through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed’. This marks the culmination of concerns over academic freedom. In January 2016, the ‘Academics for Peace’ petition criticising human rights violations, resulted in the detention of three academics, and the dismissal of another 30 as well as the suspension of 27 in what has been considered ‘part of his [Erdoğan] drive to banish, punish, and silence all critical voices in Turkey’.
All the aforementioned elements make the future development of the political and social situation in Turkey worrisome. Erdoğan has worked to consolidate his grip on power for some time now, and the attempted coup seems to have bolstered these moves. The succession of post-coup events have been said to signal ‘the end of the end of Turkish democracy’. However, it is likely that any gains from the coup have been short term and their time has already passed. The coup has been judged by some to have negative impacts in the longer term. What looks clear is that military unhappiness will not go away and that the harsh and worrying domestic crackdown will only alienate people further.
Author: María Blanco
