Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Demirel could at least bring back the Americans. There had been a revolution in Iran, hitherto America’s ally. Turkey was needed again, even more so when the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan happened, and support was offered. However, this would mean new men. Demirel therefore had, as under-secretary for planning, a very clever one, Turgut Özal, who had worked in the World Bank and knew America very well indeed. His title was lowly; in that way, he would not appear to be a political threat to better-known people. However, the under-secretary for planning had the right to countersign anything; Özal became the centre of the regime. On 24 January 1980, as the Guardian correspondent struggled up through the snows towards Çankaya, Turgut Özal produced his set of economic measures. But to put them through was very difficult: Demirel’s was a minority government, and parliament was by now so paralysed that in 1980 the deputies would not agree on a new president: in farcical repeats, they voted more than one hundred times without result.

The financial position was terrible — a debt of $20bn, with low exports and high inflation. And by now the ‘Friedmanite’ medicine was proposed, the businessmen’s association, TÜSİAD, being in sympathy. Ecevit in effect lost the Americans’ confidence that summer (oddly enough he never gained the Russians’ — they preferred to deal with Demirel, as they did not want a ‘Finlandized’ Turkey, which would be too unstable). American backing meant an end to giveaway finances, strict austerity over credit, a wage freeze. Erik Zürcher, a considerable commentator on Turkey, who wishes it were Holland, mutters about the ‘Pinochet solution’, and that is right. The army was preparing to restore order. In fact its chiefs conducted meetings, in theory to head off civil war, in reality to take power. In December there was a formal meeting at the old Selimiye Barracks in Istanbul, where Florence Nightingale had once nursed. Then, it was decided simply to let the politicians make such a mess that no-one could conceivably object to a coup, which is more or less what then happened. Demirel and Ecevit would not agree on a coalition of ‘repair’, Ecevit denouncing the Özal proposals of 24 January. He remained incorrigible — even secretly approaching Erbakan for informal alliance, and refusing a deal with Demirel.

The army could obviously have moved in at this moment, and already had the martial-law powers to do so. However, it had blundered over earlier coups that had proved to be pointless: you took power, your general opined on television at 3 a.m. to the national anthem, professors of political science wrote you a constitution and then, after a short while, you got Demirel back again: burasi Türkiye , i.e. that was Turkey for you. The army therefore bided its time, heeding the Leninist lesson of ‘the worse, the better’. In 1977 already, 230 people had been killed, one fifth of them in Mayday events in Taksim, in Istanbul, when the Left had been shot at. After that, the figures were between 1,200 and 1,500 every year. In Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast, guns were routinely carried, and were frequently used: there was almost a war between town and gown, in the latter case, the Black Sea Technical University. But there were endless cases reported casually every day in the newspapers. A good review of this aspect of things was produced in Ankara (1992) by the National Security Council — 12 September in Turkey and After. It is the country as the generals then saw it — everything divided, with unions of Left and Right for police and teachers, but the Left itself also dividing, and sometimes murderously. The book takes day-by-day excerpts from newspapers. On 5 January 1978 there were fist-fights in parliament, an Ankara café was machine-gunned, a bomb exploded at Istanbul High School, with fifty-one people killed and 444 wounded that month; a car manufacturer was asking for a price rise of 400,000 Turkish lire (over $8,000 at the rate of late 1979, while on 24 January devaluation brought the dollar to 80 lire, from 47). In September 1979 the Islamic party’s leader was ranting against ‘the tyranny applied by Zionism… all Westerners will be eliminated’; a headline runs, ‘Gazi Teachers’ Training School in Ankara was occupied by 800 right-wing students’ — the deputy dean of Political Science at Istanbul university was strafed in his car by four terrorists, including a woman, and there was further shooting even at his funeral. On 2 September 1980 twenty people were killed; on the 3rd twenty-nine, including the three-year-old son of a police sergeant in Bingöl, a largely Kurdish town; on the 4th eighteen; on the 5th a nightwatchman, a village head and his son in Adana, and two more people in cafés in Istanbul and Eskişehir; the Konya prison was raided, and seven people freed; there was a murder in Fatsa on the Black Sea, and, next day, five more in Ordu, along the coast; a raid at Diyarbakır, the chief Kurdish town, got away with 2 billion lire. On 6 September it was the Islamists’ turn, when beards, green flags, Arabic, and Islamic dress appeared, with slogans to the effect that ‘Iran is the only way’, and demands for the introduction of the shariah law. When on 12 September General Kenan Evren took over, face on television to national anthem, tanks in streets, he rightly made the point that two years’ terrorism had cost the country almost as many casualties as had the three-week battle of the Sakarya, in 1921, which had saved Turkey from the Greeks.

The terrorism went on almost to the last moment — a cinema queue machine-gunned in Mersin, a bag-bomb killing six in Kurdish Siirt, and after a great demonstration against NATO it was discovered that the slogans on the posters had been booby-trapped: fifty of them had to be cleared. On the last day, the army leaders were careful. General Evren saw the acting president for tea and gave nothing away (for which he later apologized, as he did to the defence minister Ihsan Sabri Çağlayangil, who had not been told, although that, given his political instincts, may have been by choice). Lights went out gradually in the military buildings. Abroad, people did guess, and Nuri Çolakoğlu, for the BBC in London, certainly knew. However, the senior American general was only told five minutes beforehand, even if the chief American expert, Paul Hentze, seems to have been in the know (he was able to tell Carter, at Fiddler on the Roof ). Then, in the evening, the directors of television and the post office were invited to headquarters and politely detained. Under escort, they went off to block the telephone connections of the deputies and links with the outside world (incidentally, somewhat more professionally than happened in Poland, where soldiers, in December 1981, smashed the telephone wires with heavy axes). The politicians lived in their own compound, and it was easy enough to proceed there. The general behaved humanely. He knew that Turkish politicians, some of them given to heavy overeating, might have heart attacks if faced by soldiers at 3 a.m. He therefore arranged for their best friends to accompany the arresting parties, and to be first visible when the door opened. The arrests went ahead smoothly enough, and the various men met in the VIP lounge at Esenboğa airport, on their way to internment at Gallipoli. One thing the military had learned: not to make martyrs. There was to be no hanging. The politicians were personally banned from entering politics again, and the parties themselves were also banned. But the imprisonment was in easy circumstances, and did not last for more than a few months in most cases. The military had also learned from previous coups, and, perhaps at American behest, from the experience of Chile, although this cannot be demonstrated one way or the other. The deputy chief of staff, Haydar Saltık, planned the operation (‘Flag’) and in a fifteen-page typescript outlined certain essentials: for instance, the need to suppress the small parties. There was a certain fear that in the gecekondu districts the army would not be able to appear, but things went quite smoothly — the army had timed the coup very well, and it was greeted with great relief in nearly all quarters, from Joseph Luns at NATO headquarters (who embraced the Turkish ambassador, Osman Olçay) to ordinary Turks in Anatolian small towns. The only hitch was that the central television aerial could not, for some time, be made to work — the signal to the units to move. The general made his broadcast, on lines by now somewhat traditional, but this time the generals had learned: they did indeed promise a return of democracy, but not at once. Parties were banned. But Turgut Özal went ahead with the IMF programme of 24 January. As was already happening with Pinochet, this was ‘the Washington consensus’ in action, and it was to work remarkably well.