Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

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

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

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

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

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

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