Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Both knew there was not enough room in Turkish politics for two charismatic and pious men. The smouldering Erdoğan–Gülen alliance combusted in December 2013, when a Turkish police investigation revealed a huge corruption scandal with all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. At its heart was a series of gold deals between Turkey and Iran that had helped Tehran evade US sanctions. A Turkish-Iranian gold dealer called Reza Zarrab had oiled the transactions with bribes to people in high places in Turkey – Rolex watches, primarily, and cash stuffed in shoe boxes. Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank was implicated, as were the sons of Erdoğan and four of his ministers.

  Turkey still crackled with the scent of uprising at the time: only seven months had passed since Gezi. As the intrigue grew, Istanbul exploded again into a riot of Molotov cocktails and tear gas. Graffiti covered the streets: Thieves everywhere, it read. I have never been tear-gassed so badly as I was during those protests of December 2013, nor seen demonstrators in Istanbul so intent on causing maximum damage. On İstiklal, the mile-long pedestrianised shopping street that runs through the heart of the city centre, they used fireworks as weapons and tore up cobblestones from the side streets to lob at the police – I saw one unfortunate onlooker take a glancing blow to the back of his head. Others used shop frontages and roadworks signs to build flaming necklaces of barricades along the street. When the police mounted their fight-back, it was savage. First they sent water cannon down İstiklal to douse the fires, then they used tear gas and smoke grenades, and then in the fug of panic and smog they fired rubber bullets into the crowd and down the narrow side streets where everyone was escaping.

  I barged into a bar with around twenty others in a scrambled attempt to avoid being hit. Thinking I had made it to safety, I started to relax and even thought about getting a beer as the chaos rumbled on outside. Then a fresh tear-gas canister landed right outside the window and its fumes leaked in through the side of the panes. Like everyone else I tried to escape the acrid cloud by running up to the next floor, but soon the entire place was filled with gas. Choking and almost vomiting, I dashed back out into the narrow street where the police were still firing rounds of rubber bullets and ran blindly, somehow making it to the other end and out onto the wide Tarlabaşı boulevard, haunt of Kurdish mobsters and transsexual prostitutes. Finally back in fresh air, I collapsed onto the kerb and heaved deep breaths as a kind shop owner passed me some water and gave me milk to splash on my burning face. The only good thing about tear gas is that its effects wear off almost as soon as you get away from it, leaving you feeling ridiculous for being so sure that you were about to drown in your own fluids only moments earlier.

  That night, it looked as if the government might fall, but everyone knew the scandal was not all it seemed. There was little doubt among the Turks on the streets that Gülenist police chiefs had organised the investigation, as true as its substance might be. Even at the height of the protests, those taking part knew what might happen.

  ‘We fear that we may be seen as acting with the Gülenists,’ one young woman who had joined the protests told me. ‘Actually, we want the people of Turkey to have the power.’

  Within days Erdoğan had accused Gülen of orchestrating the investigation in a bid to topple his government. Hundreds of high-ranking police officers were sacked, the case files were closed, and Erdoğan clung on to power by his fingernails. His party would never be the same again. In the days following the scandal, eight AKP deputies who raised their voices in protest at the way it had been handled by the government resigned from the party under threat of expulsion.

  Haluk Özdalga, who had crossed the floor from the CHP to the AKP in 2007, was one of them. ‘At that time [in December 2013], I had already begun considering to part ways with the AKP … I spoke out almost as soon as the graft case became public, even before the government made its position clear on the issue. There was credible evidence of graft against four ministers, so they must resign and be given a fair trial, and we all get to know if they are innocent or guilty. The party, after some deliberations, instead decided to avoid a legal process, and took a politically motivated vote in the parliament to sweep the case under the carpet.’

  Once he had re-entrenched his power, Erdoğan moved into all-out assault mode against the Gülenists. First, he ordered their network of private schools, which had been some of the most high-performing in Turkey, to be closed. Then the courts started targeting businessmen with links to the movement. One of the first was Akın İpek. His conglomerate, Koza İpek, was the umbrella for twenty-two companies spanning media, education, mining, tourism and air travel. In its stable was not only the halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, but also the Bugün newspaper and Kanaltürk television channel – both of them opposition voices.

  In September 2015 the Turkish government opened an investigation into İpek and his links with the Gülenists. There were certainly strong signs that he had been involved with the movement, although he denied ever having bankrolled it in return for leg-ups for his businesses. Up until late 2012, İpek had still been granted private audiences with Erdoğan, although they had been growing increasingly frosty – in the last, according to İpek, the fuming prime minister read out a critical Bugün column to his face. Now, İpek found himself the first victim of the war. The private university he had set up was closed down, and his brother and several other relatives were arrested while İpek himself fled into exile in London. In November 2015, three days before parliamentary elections, the courts seized his company and its $7 billion worth of assets. In the pro-government press İpek was accused of plotting alongside Gülen to unseat Erdoğan, and in one particularly unconvincing piece of joining the Freemasons in London. After a convoluted chain of emails with a man who appeared to be İpek’s assistant, I finally managed to get him to answer some written questions in March 2016.

  ‘In my whole life, I have never even committed a traffic offence,’ İpek told me. ‘We are a loving family who only helped poor people. The reason the government is attacking me is that I refuse to be part of the pro-government media. This is not about the Gülen movement. [The government] created two choices: you are with them, or against them.’

  The next big name to fall was the Zaman newspaper – the unofficial mouthpiece of the Gülen movement, and the biggest-selling title on Turkey’s newsstands. It had been a consistent voice of support to Erdoğan, even featuring his advisers as guest column writers, until the December 2013 graft scandal when it turned into a consistent voice of opposition.

  In March 2016 the courts ordered the takeover of Feza, Zaman’s parent company. Police officers entered the newsroom, detained the editor and chief columnist, and then looked over the remaining journalists’ shoulders as they typed their stories. The editorial board was sacked and replaced with caretakers who tossed away those stories anyway, and instead filled the paper with pro-government pieces apparently written in the newsroom of government-supporting Sabah. The last edition of Zaman sent to print, in the hours after the court ordered the takeover but before the police raid, featured a defiant front page declaring a ‘shameful day for free press in Turkey’. A day later, the front page bore a photo of Erdoğan and a story about how he was to lay the final stone on Istanbul’s controversial third bridge project, under the headline, EXCITEMENT BUILDS FOR HISTORIC BRIDGE.

  ‘It is like the paper died on Friday night and was resurrected in a different body on Sunday morning,’ Zaman’s foreign editor, Mustafa Edip Yılmaz, told me a week into the new regime. ‘This feels like the worst time in the history of the Turkish republic for freedom of expression. I have never seen in my life violations as bad as they are today.’

  The paper’s new direction hit its bottom line immediately. Within a week, its circulation dropped from 650,000 a day to 6,000.

  Since then, and particularly in the wake of the 2016 coup attempt, Turkey’s media has been scythed. Almost two hundred media outlets – some of them Gülenist but others Kurdish, leftist or just critical – have b
een closed down by government decree. Aydın Doğan, a moderately independent media baron who owned CNN Türk, Hürriyet and the Doğan News Agency, finally gave up after years of government pressure and sold his titles to a pro-Erdoğan conglomerate in April 2018. All in, 319 journalists have been arrested since the 2016 coup attempt and more than 80 are currently behind bars – the highest number of any country in the world.

  For fifteen months journalist Ahmet şık was one of them. His book, The Imam’s Army, revealed the Gülenists’ infiltrations into the Turkish state and led to his first arrest in 2011. Back then, in the era before the alliance between Erdoğan and Gülen broke down, the Gülenist-dominated courts accused him of being a Kemalist trying to overthrow the government. Now, in the post-alliance era, a justice system declawed by Erdoğan is charging him with links to the Gülenists and the PKK. şık was arrested in December 2016. In April 2018 he was convicted of ‘assisting’ banned terrorist groups, and handed a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence, suspended pending appeal.

  With Turkey’s press castrated and the Gülenists in flight, it would take four years and an unlikely hero to bust open the truth about what had really happened in Turkey in December 2013.

  When Adam Klasfeld opened the docket on his desk in March 2016, distant bells of recognition sounded in his head. This New York court reporter was used to covering cases that resonated outside the United States. In his decade working at the Southern District New York courthouse, one of the city’s federal courts, he had watched villagers from the Ecuadorian Amazon try to sue one of the world’s largest oil companies, while down in Maryland he had covered the enthralling progress of the military court martial against soldier-turned-WikiLeaker Chelsea Manning. He had visited Guantánamo, where he chipped away at the extent of the CIA’s use of torture against terrorism suspects held there. The painstaking, often tedious work of his day job bore fruit in the satisfaction he got from knowing that he was often the first on to something big. The newspaper correspondents would turn up at the end of the major trials, just in time for the denouement, but he was always there from the start. Often, he would be the one to turn everyone’s attention to the smoking gun that had just been revealed in the courtroom – the leaked document, the taped conversation, the killer testimony.

  The case of Reza Zarrab was clearly going to be a juicy one – though not for the reasons Klasfeld first assumed.

  ‘Back when it began, obviously the 2016 US presidential election campaign was going on [and] I was looking at it through a US-based lens,’ Klasfeld tells me down the phone one evening in his rapid-fire New York accent. It is the second week of 2018, and the US east coast is being lashed by blizzards and winds that the media has branded ‘bomb cyclones’. US President Donald Trump is battling his own storm: an explosive new book detailing the chaos at the heart of his administration. Klasfeld is huddled in a cubicle on the top floor of the courthouse, sipping his morning coffee from a novelty mug that reads Someone at the Pentagon loves me, and preparing for his next job covering a terrorism case.

  ‘When it really started getting attention was when Trump’s allies started being on retainer for Zarrab, including Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, including Michael Mukasey, a former US attorney general, a very influential Republican,’ he says. ‘But the gravity of the case was a very slow dawning, I think. I didn’t realise just how important this case was for the millions of people in Turkey.’

  Reza Zarrab: the gold dealer at the centre of the allegations of sanctions-busting, and the embarrassment who Erdoğan hoped had gone away.

  Zarrab had continued his high-rolling life in Istanbul as Erdoğan’s war against the Gülenists escalated after December 2013. He was often pictured dining in high-end restaurants with his Turkish pop star wife, with whom he had a daughter. They lived in a luxury villa on the shore of the Bosphorus, and kept seven yachts and a light aircraft. His friendship with Erdoğan endured. Zarrab had donated almost $5 million to a charity set up by Erdoğan’s wife, Emine, and received an award for it as a mark of thanks. Erdoğan himself referred to Zarrab as ‘a great philanthropist’. In Turkey, amid the growing crackdown on the Gülen-linked media, few journalists dared report on the now-closed corruption case lest they be labelled Gülenists themselves.

  But in March 2016 Zarrab, for reasons unknown and hotly debated, decided to take his family to Disneyland in Orlando, Florida. He must have known it was a risky move – the case may have been closed in Turkey, but there was nothing stopping the US authorities detaining and charging him as soon as he landed in Miami. That is exactly what happened. He was arrested, and an indictment against him was prepared by Preet Bharara, an attorney known for his cases against Wall Street fraudsters in the courthouse that Adam Klasfeld covers. Also named as defendants in the document were four Halkbank executives and Mehmet Zafer Çağlayan, Turkey’s economy minister at the time of the December 2013 corruption scandal and still a serving AKP member of parliament in March 2016.

  Bharara’s indictment made few bones about the links between Zarrab and Erdoğan’s government. ‘High ranking government officials in Iran and Turkey participated in and protected this scheme,’ it reads. ‘Some officials received bribes worth tens of millions of dollars paid from the proceeds of the scheme so that they would promote the scheme, protect the participants, and help to shield the scheme from the scrutiny of US regulators.’

  Çağlayan, the former economy minister, was accused of taking bribes in cash and jewellery totalling tens of millions of dollars for his role in concealing Zarrab’s transactions from the regulators. Back in Turkey, the pro-government press did a U-turn on fallen hero Zarrab, accusing him of links to Gülen. Erdoğan, though, took a special interest in his plight. While in New York in September 2016 he met with US Vice-President Joe Biden and lobbied for Zarrab’s release. A month later, the Turkish justice minister Bekir Bozdağ – a close ally of Erdoğan’s – flew to meet US attorney general Loretta E. Lynch to do the same. Phone calls from Erdoğan to President Barack Obama followed over the winter of 2016.

  When Donald Trump won the White House in November 2016, Erdoğan believed that he could build a relationship with the new US president – they had so much in common, after all. Despite Trump’s vitriol against Muslims and immigrants, the pro-Erdoğan press had nothing bad to say about him between the election and his inauguration. ‘We can work with him,’ one government official told me. Behind the scenes, Erdoğan and his people had started to lobby Trump and his people on the Zarrab case. It initially appeared to be bearing fruit. In March 2017, a year after Zarrab’s arrest, Trump fired Preet Bharara, the attorney who had filed the indictment. In the same month, Zarrab hired a new legal team including Giuliani and Mukasey, both men with strong links to the Trump administration. There were reports that Erdoğan had even tried to offer a prisoner exchange deal with the US to secure Zarrab’s return to Turkey.

  But in October 2017, a month before the trial was due to start, Zarrab disappeared. The Turkish foreign ministry found itself unable to contact him at the federal prison where he had been held. The Turkish press speculated that he was being held hostage by the American government. In reality, Zarrab had struck a deal: he pleaded guilty to the charges against him, and agreed to turn witness against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, one of the Halkbank executives named in the indictment. Zarrab took the stand on 29 November 2017 to deliver an explosive testimony fingering Atilla and the other Halkbank executives, and claiming that Erdoğan and his former economy minister, Ali Babacan, had personally signed off on the scheme.

  Klasfeld knew little of the building anticipation for the Zarrab case in Turkey when he started live-tweeting the trial, nor of its potential ramifications in Ankara. But within minutes, he was inundated with notifications of new followers.

  ‘It was instantaneous, once I just made it known that I would be live-tweeting the case,’ he says, still overawed by what happened next. ‘That was retweeted by a lot of the Turkey watchers in the US who follow
me. So that got some attention in Turkey and then it just happened. Within minutes. Thousands and thousands of people continuously started following.’

  The names of Klasfeld’s new audience were flecked with strange diacritics and often seemed unpronounceable. But otherwise, he found he had a lot in common with this growing group of Turks who were hanging on his every tweeted word from the courtroom. Many were highly educated and spoke great English. Some of them started translating his tweets into Turkish so that those who were not English speakers could follow too. Lots cracked Turkish witticisms – and where a lesser reporter might have stuck solely to the job at hand in the courtroom, Klasfeld fired some jokes back. He even learnt a few words of Turkish, and started opening each day’s tweets with Günaydın [good morning] from New York.

  ‘When I tweeted that I was going out to lunch, people would send me pictures of Turkish food and recommend that I eat it. I would get a lot of things like, “Visit Turkey! But just not yet”,’ he says. ‘Imagine thousands of people arriving at your front doorstep who largely speak another language and are being very kind to you. You become a little interested, more than a little interested, especially if they’re as fascinating as the Turkish people and Turkish country.’

  And amid the growing warmth and humour of these exchanges, Klasfeld realised something: he had become the go-to reporter for a news-starved country that he had never even visited. With Turkey’s pro-government media channels all bellowing that the trial was a Gülenist plot, and the battered opposition media barely brave enough by this point to counter that claim, Turks were consuming Klasfeld’s hard facts like a bone-dry sponge soaks up water.