Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

But the outcome was Menderes’s revenge. In the first place, the demographic boom went ahead — by 1980 two thirds of the urban population was under thirty-five, and the villages moved to the towns (and also moved to German towns, in hundreds of thousands). The Democratic Party had been banned, but it carried on in another form, as the Justice Party (Turkish parties sometimes have names with an almost untranslatable religious reference, to the seven deadly virtues — chastity, sobriety, thrift, etc.). The Americans had a soft spot for it, and its leader, the wily Süleyman Demirel, had worked with them, in a company that built the Bosphorus Bridge and the Middle Eastern Technical University. The Republicans, by contrast, were turning increasingly towards the Left, and old Inönü was eventually forced out by a man who had the makings of a Turkish Allende, Bülent Ecevit: very cultivated, a Sanskrit scholar, a considerable poet and quite hopeless in politics. He had to deal with a very divided party. Part of it was rigidly secularist, regarding Islam as a disease. Another part came from a very heretical element of Islam, the Alevis, who treated women as equals, drank wine in the Christian manner, and regarded the holy month of Ramazan, when nothing was supposed to pass the mouth during daylight hours, as ridiculous. Then there were Kurds, also a rough fifth of the population, whose chiefs tended towards deadly rivalry, and were generally willing to change party allegiance according to favours. Already in the early 1960s an uncomfortable pattern was setting in. Roughly 40 per cent of the vote would go to parties with some form of religious programme; another 40 per cent would go to their opposites, some of them veering towards the Left. Then there would be small parties, set up to champion a leader’s ambition. But the large parties themselves only held together if there was a leader with all of the strings in his hands, prepared to behave dictatorially and even corruptly. Coalitions succeeded each other, and the army waited in the wings. A counterpoint of bullying and irresponsibility then went ahead. The trick in politics was to establish personal influence, whether to do favours for your electors at home or for your friends in the capital. There was an element among the educated youth that wandered off into terrorism — much as had happened with ‘Land and Liberty’ in Tsarist Russia, where students had imagined that the masses could only become seriously revolutionary if the police made their lives hellish, by mistake. They provoked trouble, and brought another military coup in 1971, a pointless one. As happened in Chile, the Turkish Left had a great deal more responsibility for its fate than it ever, generally speaking, admitted to.

In the seventies, Ecevit with his rough 40 per cent matched Demirel, with his rough 40. In the hothouse atmosphere of the other 20 per cent, there were strange growths. Certain parts of Turkey had a strongly Islamic tradition, especially Konya, south-east of Ankara, and the Erzurum region, far to the east. Here, in secular eyes, were brainwashed peasants with a vengeance, but the real point was hatred of the corruption that came from Istanbul and Ankara. The leader was a professor of water engineering, Necmettin Erbakan, who had taught in Germany and had been a colleague of Demirel’s; if he got anywhere, it was because his hands were clean. Ecevit took up an alliance with him, both sides anxious to repel the military, in 1973. Demirel could to some extent rely on another small party, the Nationalists, whose real power came partly from inflation. In an inflationary period, small suppliers, not paid on time by large receivers, suffered. A visit from Nationalist bully-boys would cause debts to be repaid faster than if the business had gone through the courts, and in populous, unsavoury areas the Nationalists did tolerably well. The Nationalists also tended to do well in districts close to areas of Kurdish or Alevi migration, such as Gaziosmanpaşa or Sütlüce in Istanbul. It was a dismal period, each party throwing money at voters (Ecevit even paid twelve of Demirel’s men cash, to desert their party and join his, as ministers for this or that: one suggestion was ‘weather-reporting’), and inflation got under way. The oil shock meant that the economy, almost entirely dependent upon imported energy, ran down; it survived only by contracting debts, which went up from $2bn in 1970 to $20bn in 1980. Between 1975 and 1980 there was also an eightfold rise in prices, as the government’s deficits became uncontrollable, covered only by paper.

Matters were made worse because relations with the United States turned sour. This had to do with Greece and Cyprus. That island had become independent in 1960, and the position of the Turkish minority — one fifth of the population — was supposedly guaranteed under the constitution, which reserved certain rights. Great Britain, Turkey and Greece were supposed to guarantee the constitution, with a right to military intervention where required. Quite soon after independence, Greek Cypriot nationalists started to persecute the Turks. This was not wise. Left alone, a third of them would have become Greeks, a third would have emigrated, and a third would have remained as picturesque folklore, cooking kebabs and dancing in a masculine line as evidence of the great tolerance towards minorities displayed by Greek civilization. Instead, there was stupid and nasty persecution, beginning at Christmas 1963 with the killing of a wedding party. A United Nations force arrived to hold a ‘Green Line’ supposedly separating the two sides. This meant, as such ‘peacekeeping’ ventures generally did, that excuses were found for the stronger side, which then pushed the Turks into small enclaves, mostly dependent for survival on foreign charity, itself sometimes diverted by Greek Cypriot officials. Potatoes rolled around the floor of the customs shed at Famagusta, because the sacks were slit open. Matters then became pointlessly complicated, in the manner of the Levant. There was a military coup in Greece in 1967, and in 1974 there was a coup within the coup, which led to crypto-Fascists taking power. They tried to overthrow the government of Greek Cyprus, assuming that its leader, Archbishop Makarios, was playing up to the Soviet Union, given that Cyprus stood on the edge of a Middle East which was, just then, boiling. A civil war on Cyprus resulted, a number of Greeks disappearing. The local Turks, held together by a remarkable figure, Rauf Denktaş, could justly fear a return of persecution, expulsion, but Ecevit and Erbakan, with their unlikely coalition, were presented with an opportunity. The Turkish army went in, and, given the paralysis of America, through Watergate, and England, through money, was not resisted. In the outcome, the Turks occupied nearly one third of the island, and resisted international condemnation. The Turks of Cyprus remained poor and isolated, but they survived. Denktaş said, quite rightly, that they had avoided the fate of the Gaza Strip Palestinians. Nevertheless, the simple solution — recognition of Turkish Cyprus’s independence — evaded international bureaucrats, and a good part of the Turkish Cypriot population simply ended up in London.

In Turkey, Ecevit became hugely popular. He decided to exploit this, with an immediate election, which would let him dispense with his odd-bedfellow Islamic ally. But parliament would not allow early elections, and fell into paralysis; when they were held, six months later, Ecevit narrowly lost. Demirel and the smaller parties put forward a ‘National Front’ government, with a majority of four seats, early in 1975. In the provinces, and some of the ministries, the smaller parties, Nationalists and Islamists, used their power disproportionately for changes of personnel; and besides, their strength was such that an institution designed to train clergymen ( Imam-hatıp ) was opened for ordinary schoolchildren, segregated between boys and girls, and subjected to solid religious education, including koranic Arabic, which Turks simply repeated syllabically, without understanding; prizes went to the hafiz , who knew the lot off by heart. They had been started (in effect) in 1951, and grew from seven to over one hundred in 1975, and 383 by 1988; in 1971 they were functioning at middle-school level as well, and were teaching 300,000 pupils. Half of the curriculum was religious, and the secularists grumbled. Under Demirel’s National Front governments (1975-7 and after the June election, 1977-8) the desecularization of modern Turkey, in a sense, got under way. In some universities, during Ramazan, the canteens closed; there was tension between observers and non-observers since the observers got up early to have something to eat before sun-up, and woke up the non-observers by their talk about football and so forth, while non-observers’ smoking after lunch similarly irritated observers; there were fights and, on occasion, ambulances. The call to prayer was now heard, loudly amplified, in the very centre of great cities, and in Ankara there was a big row when the mayor put up a statue of one of the secularists’ symbols, the stag of the Hittites (Indo-Europeans, not Arabs), and the religious-minded interior minister stopped construction again and again until the courts ruled otherwise. On one level, no doubt desperately childish, but on another deeply serious, and to do with the nature of the country and the upbringing of children, especially daughters. At any rate it divided the country very deeply. Perhaps Demirel and Ecevit themselves would have preferred to co-operate, as the great industrialists (Vehbi Koç and Nejat F. Eczacıbaşı) wanted them to do. But each was prisoner of his supporters, in no mood to compromise. When Ecevit visited an Alevi centre in Cappadocia (Hacı Bektaş) his cortège was fired on by the orthodox Sunni in Nevşehir; in the mixed town of Maraş a regular battle developed between Alevis and Sunnis, and a hundred people were killed. The police lacked training and equipment, as only seventeen of sixty-seven provincial sections even had a camera; and the prisons were in chaos, some of them unable to pay their telephone bills because prisoners abused their rights to long-distance telephone calls (in a country where in any event talking on the telephone is a national curse). In 1979 a Fascist murderer, Mehmet Alı Ağca, was able to slip out from Ankara prison, where he had been tried for the murder of a famous newspaper editor, Abdı İpekçi (from an old dönme family, a stout secularist, and descendant of Jews who had converted). Ecevit sought a way through the mess with a combination of nationalism and restated left-wing orthodoxies. He approached the Soviet Union (in vain) for oil; he toured Yugoslavia and irritated the army chiefs by praising its supposedly non-professional and voluntary territorial defence system. In 1978 he made a considerable blunder, of refusing to apply for membership of the European Economic Community at precisely the same moment as Greece did apply. His government fell apart, and Demirel returned, with a minority government.