Hannah Lucinda Smith - Erdogan Rising

Over six years I have travelled to every corner of this huge, diverse, often baffling and always fascinating country, and have also reported on the chaos it borders in Iraq, Syria and south-eastern Europe. Along the way I have spoken to politicians, criminals, policemen, taxi drivers, warlords, flag-sellers, refugees … My notebooks are so stuffed with characters that the material could keep me writing for years. In Erdoğan, I have found the most compelling protagonist a writer could wish for.

But it wasn’t the coup attempt that spurred me to write this book, despite all its Hollywood drama and the front pages it garnered. That night in July 2016 was just the prologue, the scene-setter for the real tragedy that then unfolded. I started writing this book a year on, after the grandiose celebrations held on the first anniversary of the coup attempt revealed fully the depth of the personality cult that Erdoğan had assembled. By the time I had finished the first manuscript eleven months later, he had sealed power through the presidential elections that will keep him in his palace until 2023 – two decades at the top of Turkey.

This story is bookended by those two events, but at its core is the entire period in which I have taken a front-row seat at Turkey’s descent. When I arrived here in early 2013, thinking that I would stay for a few weeks to report on Syria before going back to my life in London, Erdoğan was just tipping over from being a flawed but largely tolerated democrat to a relentless autocratic populist. Within two years he had turned into a hate figure that the whole world had heard of – and then he led his country into its most turbulent era in decades. In the space of eighteen months in 2015 and 2016, Turkey suffered a refugee crisis, a wave of terror attacks, a fresh eruption of violence in its Kurdish region, and a coup attempt. Since then, even with some kind of daily stability and normality restored for most Turks, Erdoğan has consolidated his position further and stamped down harder on his opposition.

Spotting the narrative’s threads has not been easy: his path has not always been steady or clear. Multiple plot lines unfold simultaneously, linears converge and loop back on themselves. Events outside Turkey wash over its borders, feeding forces that are brewing inside the country while Erdoğan holds up his own skewed version of the world to his people like a fun-fair mirror. I worked forwards and backwards through shelves of my notebooks from Turkey and Syria as I wrote, trying to work out what I’d witnessed. I reread old diaries and rang up old friends, trawled through newspaper cuttings from the past twenty-five years and plundered the historical archives at The Times . I spoke to historians and political scientists and drew up huge lists of diplomats, Erdoğan’s insiders, lobbyists, advisers and opponents and contacted them all, asking them to speak either on the record or privately. Most of them ignored me, some of them refused. The ones that agreed usually did so on condition of anonymity, and each has shaded their own part of this portrait of Erdoğan and Turkey. Some names have been changed, usually in order to protect people who are still inside Syria or who have families there. In other cases I have referred to interviewees by first names only, or by the position they held. It is a mark of the current state of the country that I cannot thank or acknowledge by name most of the people who have helped me write this book; in the future, in better times, I hope I will be able to do so.

There is a vague chronology to this story, but Turkey never makes sense on a single timeline. To understand the present you need to link it to the past, and to unravel Erdoğan and his followers you must also acquaint yourself with all the other bit-part players who share his stage. Remembering recent history has become an act of rebellion in Erdoğan’s Turkey; memories are being erased and events rewritten as he fashions the country to his liking. By 2023, when the next elections are scheduled, the memories of the old parliamentary system will have faded and no one much under forty will have ever voted in an election in which he or his party did not, somehow, claim victory.

So this book is my attempt to document what I have seen, before it is erased from Turkey’s official story in the way that history’s winners always rub out the bits they do not like. It starts a year on from the coup attempt, in a country that has started to believe its own lies and the middle of a crowd high on the rush of its leader’s ascent.

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