Norman Stone - The Atlantic and Its Enemies

After that, recovery happened, as it did, famously, throughout the Atlantic world, and by 1986 Pinochet was confident enough to introduce the transition back to democratic practices. Pinochet had appointed the mayors and had organized local government to favour his rule — thus municipal change meant that in Santiago there were very rich boroughs and also very poor ones that could not pay their way. The number of boroughs went up from sixteen to thirty-two and the Santiago area was enlarged for development, out of which of course money was made; and the poorer elements were shifted in much the same way as was done with Glasgow, as the boundaries stretched to the Andes and farmland was cleared. The pobladores were moved out of middle-class areas, and their old areas gentrified: 150,000 people were moved out of shanty towns, where they had sometimes been squatters. The población of La Hermida was shifted away from middle-class Ñuñoa to a new area called Peñalolén with a per capita income under 1 per cent of Ñuñoa’s. A prosperous area such as Providencia with a population of 116,000 did well from the decentralization money and in the five years after 1982 built health clinics and night schools, whereas La Florida, with nearly 200,000 people, could hardly have a wooden day-centre for children. Self-help groups started. The rich, in the eighties, had the life of their equivalents in every other country, mobile telephones, jeans and business schools well to the fore.

With education there came a certain militarization, with soldier-rectors in the Catholic University and the University of Chile; patriotism was to be stressed, and there were purges. As an American writes, ineffably, the generals ‘disagreed with the vision of a university as a place for the free exchange of ideas’. Beyond twelve specialist areas the universities lost their monopoly in the sense that any private entrepreneur could offer any subject. Business schools proliferated (some sixty). Readers of Eighteenth Brumaire complained into their beards; tuition fees were introduced and the state support for universities fell from two thirds to half. The exiles went to town: they now understood how dangerous for their cause was the growing prosperity of the country. Perhaps this accounted for the stupid chasing of the prominent exiles by DINA, the Chilean secret police.

Early in 1988 a ‘No’ (to Pinochet) campaign started (with American help for the opposition, at least with computers). In October 1988 the ‘No’ campaign succeeded; the architect of the recovery in 1983-6 joined the ‘No’ campaign, and in the election Pinochet lost. A middle-road Catholic, Patricio Aylwin, at the head of a sixteen-party coalition, formed the government in March 1990, having become president elect in December 1989. Soon, there was a woman president, and, a few years down the road, the ancient, wheezing Pinochet was arrested in a small-hours raid on his hospital bed in London. Margaret Thatcher went into battle on his behalf, and he was released after a few very embarrassing months. As he left England she gave him a silver Armada Plate, originally designed in celebration of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Sir Francis Drake in 1588. The Spanish were very angry indeed. But, in the end, the arrest of Pinochet was the best comment on his reign. He was not a man of much interest in himself, but he deserved well of his country, and pursuing him in old age to London was childish vindictiveness.

Turgut Özal in Turkey was in some ways a comparable figure. He was the product (indirectly, and not the cause) of a military coup, and his problems and solutions were Pinochet’s, although the Turkish army conceded free elections quite quickly, such that octroyed solutions, as in Chile, were not, in anything other than the short term, possible. As with Pinochet, the intelligentsia were very hostile, and with the two films Midnight Express and Yol they produced damning, superbly made and, as with most political films, mendacious evidence. But as the outcome of the Turkish coup of 1980 the country was on the map again, and a figure or two spells it out. Turkey, in 2000, counted as twentieth economic power in the world. F16s made in Kirikkale, in the middle of Anatolia, won prizes. Istanbul had become an important financial centre, and the standard of living, overall, was such that Russians migrated to Turkey. At home, they died at sixty; Turks died at seventy. Back in 1923, when Turkey started off, she had been very backward. In the 1970s, the country was still in large part backward, and almost torn by civil war. By 1990 there had been a transformation, and Turkey was the only country between Athens and Singapore that attracted refugees — 2 million of them.

The repression after the Turkish coup followed Pinochet lines. The army had bided its time, and then moved massively. From 1980 to 1984 there were 180,000 arrests; 65,000 people were imprisoned, 40,000 were sentenced, and there were 326 death sentences (though in the end only twenty-seven executions). On the other hand, twenty-six rocket-launchers and 750,000 handguns were seized, and the casual killings stopped overnight. Meanwhile the politicians were kept aside — the nationalist Alparslan Türkeş with the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan on Uzunada near İzmir, the others at a village near Gallipoli. Hundreds of the politicians were banned. A new constitution was adopted, by referendum, in November 1982, and an election was held a year later; but this time the politicians were supposed to act under severe restriction. The system of proportional representation was abolished, because it had allowed small parties to make the running, and a vote of 10 per cent was needed for any representation at all in parliament. There would be State Security Courts with great powers, and order was at last restored. On previous occasions the generals, taking power, had tended to scratch their heads and drift, but now, in 1980, they had a strategy in mind: the political confusions must be stopped, and that meant coherent behaviour. There was one very significant difference with Chile: it was not a general who took power, the senior one, Kenan Evren, contenting himself with the mainly ceremonial presidency, and spending his time painting (at which he was good).

The overall idea seems to have been to collect moderates of the Demirel and Republican sides perhaps under the leadership of one of the generals’ trusted Republicans, such as the veteran Turhan Feyzioğlu. Oddly enough, the old politicians, even in internment, held to illusions, perhaps precisely because their internment was so mild; they never imagined that the National Security Council could do without them, and Demirel, especially, was constantly being telephoned by senior civil servants and politicians whom the generals consulted. One man was essential — Turgut Özal, the international money-man. He was not particularly keen to have any sort of state-oriented political team in charge. The generals, for their part, despised the politicians, and when they found they could not easily re-form a civilian government, on 18 September they simply handed full powers to the commanders of the martial law districts and nominated an admiral as prime minister. Özal was happy enough with this solution, for he could push through the economic reforms that he and his business friends wanted to see. Authority tended therefore to settle lower down in the pyramid, and Özal found it coming his way, as under-secretary of the plan.

Özal did not believe in plans — he used to laugh, as to how, coming back through the customs at Istanbul airport, he waddled, because he had worn layers of smuggled tights for his wife in thick layers, to avoid paying duty. He had worked at the World Bank and been an irrigation engineer. Turks older than him would also have been engineers or economists, but they would have been from the urban middle (or higher) classes, and secular. Özal was the product of the Turkey that they had created, in so far as education and mobility had reached far into the depths of Anatolia, and had affected places such as Malatya, where he came from. He was part Kurdish, and in religion belonged to one of the stricter orders ( tarikat : the often-used ‘sect’ is a mistranslation, because the differences are in practice, not theology). An engineering training, at the Istanbul Technical University, had not dented the piety, and when he was at the World Bank he had his prayer mat at the ready. No drink, of course, but far too much to eat, and far too many cigarettes (the combination killed him almost absurdly early, in 1993: as with Atatürk, who had also died far too early, this time from cigarettes and rakı , you wonder what would have happened if he had gone on longer, for he was a great creative force). Özal was obviously the Americans’ man, and he could deliver the IMF. He might just have remained as the vital cog in the generals’ machine, but events pushed him into prominence. The generals did not, on the whole, like him: they were very firm secularists, were generally from Western-leaning Thrace or the Aegean, and were even sometimes of Alevi origin, regarding ultra-pious Islam as so much ju-jitsu. Besides, they, without complaint, worked within the State and did not in their heart of hearts see why the economy could not be run like the army, orders issued and obeyed. They even tried to run politics through a dummy party, with two others to represent a sort of emredersin (‘yessir’) opposition.