Hannah Lucinda Smith - Erdogan Rising

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Hannah Lucinda Smith 2019

Cover image © Getty Images/Bloomberg/Contributor

Hannah Lucinda Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Maps by Martin Brown

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008308841

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008308865

Version: 2020-08-06

For my dad, who planted so many seeds

Yet the school of Turkish politics was so ignoble that not even the best could graduate from it unaffected.

T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Cast of Characters

Acronyms

Timeline

Introduction

1 Two Turkeys, Two Tribes

2 Syria: The Backstory

3 Building Brand Erdoğan

4 Erdoğan and Friends

5 Syria: The War Next Door

6 The Exodus

7 The Kurds

8 Peace, Interrupted

9 The Coup

10 Atatürk’s Children

11 Erdoğan’s New Turkey

12 Spin

13 The Misfits

14 The War Leaders

15 Erdoğan’s Endgame

List of Illustrations

Picture Section

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Publisher

Turkey

Syria and Turkish border region

Refugee smuggling routes from Turkey to Europe

Kurdish region of Turkey, Iraq and Syria

Istanbul

Areas where Turkish army is fighting in northern Syria

It is less than forty-eight hours since rogue soldiers tried to kill him and here Erdoğan is, back on stage. The sun is setting and the call to prayer is sounding, and the president is wiping a tear from his eye.

‘Erol was an old friend of mine,’ he starts, then breaks. ‘I cannot speak any more. God is great.’

Erol Olçok: Erdoğan’s ad man, his trusted spin doctor, his loyal friend. One of the first to race to the Bosphorus bridge, his corpse now before us in a coffin.

Nothing will be as it was before, for Olçok’s family, for Erdoğan, or for Turkey. Two nights ago, as Istanbul’s glitterati sat drinking on the banks of the Bosphorus, tanks filled the bridge and war planes split the skies. The army was revolting against Erdoğan – but soon Erdoğan’s own infantry was on the streets, with Erol Olçok at the first line. Bare-chested young men stood side by side with headscarved women in front of machine-gun fire on this midsummer night; others lay down on tarmac in front of rolling tanks. And as fortunes turned against the putschist generals, Erdoğan’s angry, shirtless, sweaty men removed their belts to whip the coup’s surrendering foot soldiers. Their twisted faces were lit with the perfect aura of an early summer’s morning in Istanbul: a glorious backdrop of dawn over the city that spans two continents. The images flew around social media within minutes. They were beautiful, and they were horrifying.

The coup has been crushed but the toll is huge. Two hundred and sixty-five people have died over the bloody span of this night, more than half of them civilians who came out to resist in Erdoğan’s name. Erol Olçok was shot dead alongside his sixteen-year-old son, Abdullah, as soldiers fired into the protesters on the bridge. Thousands more have been injured. There are still sporadic bursts of fighting as suspected plotters resist arrest; Istanbul’s airspace reverberates with the roar of patrolling F-16 fighter jets. The streets have been hauntingly quiet all weekend, as Turks stay inside, watch the news and pray.

Among the dead: a local mayor shot point blank in the stomach as he tried to speak with the soldiers; the older brother of one of Erdoğan’s aides; a famous columnist with the pro-government newspaper Yeni şafak . A crack team of special forces soldiers had burst into the Mediterranean resort where Erdoğan was holidaying, ready to kill him if necessary and missing him only by minutes.

Erdoğan has already bounced back, his close brush with death seemingly leaving no dent. He has returned to Istanbul, banished the soldiers back to their barracks, and called the coup attempt a ‘gift from God’ that will allow him to finally cleanse the state of those trying to destroy it. Six thousand people have been detained by the time he addresses the thousands-strong crowd at Erol Olçok’s funeral, at a mosque on the Asian side of Istanbul. The imam implores God as he leads the prayers for the slain man and his son: ‘Protect us from the wickedness of the educated!’

A weight is descending on Turkey. Each night Taksim Square fills with huge crowds of Erdoğan’s supporters, turning out to make sure his enemies don’t come back. Within days a state of emergency is declared, and every day thousands more suspected collaborators are arrested. The alleged ringleaders are paraded on state television with black eyes and bandages around their heads.

Privately, friends tell me they are worried. Goodbye to the Republic , writes one by text message. Goodbye to democracy .

The heart of my Istanbul neighbourhood, which usually bustles at all hours with street sellers, taxi drivers and prostitutes, is near-silent the morning after the coup; the pavements empty, the traffic thinned down to a few lonely cars. The only people I bump into as I walk around the deserted streets are the women who always stand on the main thoroughfare on a Saturday, selling black-and-white postcards to the shoppers. Usually they ask for five liras for this low-resolution print of Atatürk, father to the Turkish nation. Today, a middle-aged woman with blonde perm presses one silently into my hand.

‘Man, this is nothing but a country of cults,’ says my friend Yusuf a few days later, dazed and still trying to make sense of what is unfolding. ‘It’s Jerusalem in the Year Zero.’

In the years that have passed since July 2016, as I have filled newspaper column inches with stories of Erdoğan’s swelling crackdown on his opponents, his skewed election wins and questionable wars, I have been asked the same question time and again: ‘Why doesn’t the West just cut Erdoğan off? Make him a pariah, and leave him and Turkey to go their own way?’