Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  In the hours in between, the two sides of Turkey collided in a sweaty tangle of rumours, gunfire and fear, as a putsch from a different era met the resistance of 2016. Istanbul shops sold out of bottled water and cigarettes while F-16 fighter jets broke the sound barrier above them, shattering windows in apartment blocks and setting the street dogs howling. The mosques sounded an eerie funeral prayer in the witching hour as soldiers kicked in the doors of television news studios and pulled the presenters off-air. While the devout rushed into the streets wielding wooden planks and murmuring prayers, the bohemians who had been drinking in Istanbul’s hipster bars retreated back into their homes. It was a coup planned via WhatsApp but announced in a message on state television:

  Valuable citizens of the Republic of Turkey … The President and the government with heedlessness, heresy and betrayal are undermining fundamental rights and freedoms based on the separation of powers. The indivisible unity of the nation and the state will eliminate the dangers faced by our Republic and ensure its survival.

  By the time it was read out by a stunned blonde newsreader with a gun just off-camera levelled at her head, almost everyone had already switched to social media to find out what was really happening.

  The real news was that, slowly, the balance was tipping away from the coup plotters. General Ümit Güler, the commander of the First Army, appeared live on the pro-Erdoğan channel A Haber and announced that the coup was merely a revolt from a small group within the ranks. The façade of a fait accompli started cracking. More generals joined Güler, declaring their loyalty to Erdoğan and swearing that the coup would be crushed. Then Erdoğan himself appeared, quashing the rumours that he had fled by private jet to Germany. Unlit, without make-up and appearing against a pale blue curtain reminiscent of a photobooth backdrop, the president spoke to his nation via Facetime, live from an undisclosed location. He looked old and terrified.

  The studio cameras zoomed in on Erdoğan’s image on the phone screen, held in the manicured hand of a CNN Türk news anchor, and every channel still operating independently switched to the live feed. Having spent a good part of his presidency railing against social media and bringing court cases against those who used it to ridicule him, Erdoğan was now using it to save his own skin. His aides had spent a frantic hour trying to set up a traditional television link before turning to the twenty-first-century option, a press man later told me.

  ‘I urge the Turkish people to convene at public squares and airports. There is no power higher than the power of the people,’ Erdoğan said. ‘Let them do what they will at public squares and airports. The chain of command has been violated. This is a step by the lower ranks against their superiors.’

  It was in that moment that Turkey’s cities turned into war zones, when the rattle of gunfire began echoing through the streets and the enraged masses steamed into battle. They poured into Taksim Square, onto the Bosphorus bridge, and crowded to the airports and government buildings. The coup plotters, unnerved, ordered their men to fire on the people. In Ankara, they attacked the intelligence headquarters with helicopters and bombed the parliament with F-16 jets. But on the streets, the soldiers who had parked their tanks only six hours earlier, full of assurances from their seniors that they would be taking charge of the country, now began to lose faith. They started to surrender as dawn broke, spilling out and shedding their guns on the tarmac before they threw their hands in the air. Victorious and furious, swinging belts and fists, the civilians set about the men in uniform. The soldiers looked no older than teenagers, frightened young boys wondering what on earth had gone wrong.

  The aftermath

  The death toll mounted through the morning hours, as bodies were cleared from the streets. The politicians held an emergency session in the bombed parliament. In Istanbul, Erdoğan addressed the crowds outside Atatürk airport.

  ‘They have pointed the people’s guns against the people,’ he said. ‘The president, whom fifty-two percent of the people brought to power, is in charge. This government, brought to power by the people, is in charge. They won’t succeed as long as we stand against them by risking everything. I have a message for Pennsylvania: You have engaged in enough treason against this nation. If you dare, come back to your country.’

  The coup was over, and the battle for its narrative began. Journalists questioned the scale of the arrests and the speed with which blame was pinned on Fethullah Gülen. Other vital information emerged – that the Turkish intelligence services had received a tip-off about the imminent revolt as early as 2.45 p.m. on 15 July, a full seven hours before the first tanks rolled onto the Bosphorus bridge. Why had they not taken action to stop it, and what happened in those hours? If the government was so sure the officers behind the revolt were Gülenists, how had they been able to stay in their positions until now?

  Turkey requested the imam’s extradition from the US less than twenty-four hours after the coup attempt began, even as the last rebellious soldiers were making their final stand in Ankara’s Genelkurmay.

  The European Union and the US issued statements urging Erdoğan to be restrained in retribution. Three days on from the coup, 7,500 people had been arrested and more than 9,000 dismissed from their public sector jobs. Four days on, the total number of people sacked or sitting in a prison cell had hit 50,000.

  On the streets the crowds called for hangings. In Taksim they held aloft nooses and signs: I˙dam istiyoruz! (We want the death penalty!). Erdoğan played their soundbite back to them as he spoke from stages across the city. ‘I don’t look at what Hans and George say. I look at what Ahmet, Mehmet, Hasan, Hüseyin, Ayşe, Fatma and Hatice say!’ he told the delirious hordes.

  ‘This stuff about the death penalty is rhetoric, I think,’ one Western diplomat in Istanbul told me as the fervour grew. ‘But we are watching Erdoğan closely. There is a danger he may become unhinged.’

  The winners

  I mingle with the throng in Taksim one humid evening as the sun is setting. Erdoğan has told people to stay on the streets to guard against unknown and fugitive coup plotters coming back for a second strike. I spot the flags of Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the three-starred banner of the Syrian rebels, all mingled with the fluttering, ubiquitous Turkish star and crescents. There are other placards too: Amrika 0 – Millet 1 (America 0 – The nation – 1), reads one. Anger at Gülen, whom everybody now accepts organised the coup, has flash-morphed into anger at the US, whom everybody accepts is sheltering him.

  Some of the men here are flashing the hand gesture of the ultra-nationalists – thumb clamped up to the outstretched ring and middle fingers and index and little finger extended skywards to make the shape of a wolf’s head. Others let off huge coloured flares, and I fear a spark may catch the cheap synthetics of the flags and set the whole lot ablaze. There are chants of Allahu Akhbar, Tebkir, Bismillah – the war cries of the Islamists. I have heard them in protests across the Middle East, but never before in Turkey. All the fare gates are open on Istanbul’s public transport system so that the masses from the suburbs can travel in to mix with the elites from the inner districts – there are women in burkas next to teenage girls with bare shoulders. Three years ago this square was the scene of the Gezi Park sit-ins, when leftists and Kurds and football hooligans came together in the first mass show of opposition to Erdoğan. Now, it is the gathering place of his faithful.

  The local council has set up a stage here, flanked by two screens and speakers. They blast the usual rota of Ottoman marching music and AKP anthems, but then a video starts rolling onscreen – a glossy CGI-enhanced short film. The chanting dies down as the crowd in Taksim watches. In the film, a grey and faceless assailant is cutting the chain on a flagpole, sending the Turkish flag plummeting towards the ground. Across the country Turks watch in horror as it casts a shadow over buildings, fields and sea. Then they start running – students, housewives, Kurdish farmers and fishermen – as Erdoğan’s sonorous voiceover reads the words of the national anthem. They throw th
emselves into the Bosphorus and start swimming, ants moving together as the camera takes in a swooping bird’s-eye from above. Finally all converge on the flagpole and make a human pyramid around it – bodies in a pile, each climbing on top of the other to reach higher. The young man at the top grabs the loose end of the chain and pauses for a second before he leaps off the tower of people, sacrificing himself for the nation. The flag is raised again, and the crowd goes wild around me. Then the screen fades to an image of Erdoğan, smiling and with his hand on his heart.

  The film, Millet Eğilmez, Türkiye Yenilmez (The Nation Does Not Bend, Turkey Is Invincible), was made by Erol Olçok’s agency, Arter, for the AKP’s local election campaign in March 2014. Back then, it was banned on the grounds that a Turkish flag cannot be used in a political party’s advertisement.

  The grey frontage of the Atatürk Cultural Centre, a modernist monolith that borders the north side of the square, looms up behind this ecstatic congregation in Taksim. The centre was built in the 1970s as an opera house and arts space, but within the space of only two decades its brutal lines already looked tired. Decommissioned in 2008, it was used as a base by the riot police during the Gezi protests. Until now, a picture of Atatürk has adorned the building’s frontage, flanked by two Turkish flags, but this banner has now been removed, to be replaced with a portrait of Erdoğan. When news of the switch flashes across social media it causes uproar, so much so that a few days later Atatürk is rehung. But Erdoğan stays up alongside him.

  Four days after the coup, İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan’s spokesman and one of his most trusted aides, invites a group of foreign journalists to the Ottoman-era Yıldız Palace for a press briefing. It feels like weeks since I last saw my friends. Dominique, a correspondent with the Associated Press, is eight and a half months pregnant and went on maternity leave three hours before the coup attempt started. With the solid good humour I got to know when we worked together in Iraq amid Isis’s takeover and the 45-degree temperatures, she is now back at work and praying she won’t go into labour. Everyone else just looks exhausted.

  Kalın has brought us here to give us the blow-by-blow account of Erdoğan’s escape from the coup-makers, and his quick recovery to overthrow the revolt. It’s a gripping tale that will make the pages of all our newspapers tomorrow:

  ‘Three helicopters were sent to Marmaris … a group of elite forces sent to kill the president and his family. Their orders were to bring him to Ankara, dead or alive. He left thirty minutes before they landed. Seven people were left at the hotel for security reasons; one was killed and another injured in the shootout. They were going room to room trying to find Erdoğan. When we found out about the attempt we mobilised our forces and agencies. The president made the calls on what should be done. When he saw the tanks and planes in Ankara he became aware of what was happening, and immediately decided to go to Istanbul. Once he landed safely at Atatürk airport, he coordinated everything from there.’

  We scribble our notes as Kalın continues in his measured, perfect East Coast accent. This most loyal member of Erdoğan’s inner circle wrote his Ph.D. at Georgetown University. Unlike his boss, he bears the polished finish of a Western intellectual. But he is still an Erdoğan man.

  ‘It is important to remember what happened, to grasp it fully,’ he tells us. ‘You need to get the narrative right. We have seen some appear to be disappointed that the coup did not succeed. We have received strong international support, condemning the coup unequivocally. That is the way it should be. But when people start talking about how the law should be upheld, it sounds as if the coup didn’t happen!’

  By now, Western leaders are looking on with concern. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has reminded Erdoğan that Turkey is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans the death penalty. A group of European foreign ministers and US Secretary of State John Kelly express public alarm at the talk of executions.

  There are also rumours that a state of emergency is about to be imposed. When one of our group asks Kalın if these are true, the otherwise placid intellectual explodes.

  ‘This is like speaking to the US about the failure of its foreign policy the day after 9/11!’ Kalın booms. ‘We expelled this coup in the name of democracy. We got on the streets and shed our blood. You should all get your facts right!’

  Three days later, parliament passes the state of emergency. It will last for three months, and allows the government to rule by decree. Those rulings can include shutting down businesses and other organisations, and sacking people from public sector jobs. Passports can be cancelled. Those arrested can be held for up to thirty days without charge, and in some cases detainees do not have the right to speak privately to their lawyer in case, for example, ‘crypto messages’ are passed back and forth. Those detained can have a ten-minute telephone conversation every fifteen days; their relatives must make an application if they want to visit them. The government has the right to impose curfews and ban rallies, and to censor any publication or broadcast it deems a threat to national security.

  One week on

  The ground at Silivri is parched to bone white. At plastic tables around the scrappy strip of cheap cafés outside the prison gates, men and women sit pale and silent. Most hold their heads in their hands. All wear the drab, modest clothes of the rural poor.

  I linger around the back of the stalls so that the gendarmerie officers milling about the entrance won’t catch sight of me. They are nervous at first, these Turks who found themselves cast out of their own society in the space of one terrible evening, but they do begin to talk.

  ‘He started his military service on Thursday and on Friday there was the coup,’ says a woman from Diyarbakır. When she found out that her son had been arrested she got into her father’s battered old car and drove the 850 miles west to Silivri, this fortress on the edge of Istanbul.

  ‘He called me the next day,’ she continues. ‘He said an officer had sent his unit to the TRT headquarters, and then to Taksim Square. The next night he called again, and we’ve had two more calls from him since. The last call was from his lawyer’s phone – he was in the court – and he asked for 10,000 liras [for his work]. I sent my son to defend the country. If he hadn’t gone, they would have called him a traitor. But he went and he’s still a traitor. I have to lie to my other family members about where I am, what has happened.’

  In the car park behind the cafés, şükriye and şükrü Esoğlu stretch out on the sleeping mats they have pulled from their car boot. They too have driven here from Turkey’s periphery: from Kilis, the town near the Syrian border that has taken in a great number of Syrian war refugees. Sükrü Esoğlu is a farm labourer on a day rate of 30 lira. They have no money for a hotel. They have heard nothing from their son, twenty-year-old Kadir.

  ‘He had been in the military one month,’ says şükriye, who still has traces of henna on her hands from the party they threw for Kadir before he left for his compulsory military service. The rich can buy their way out of it – the sons of Erdoğan have never served. But for poor boys like Kadir, it is non-negotiable. His family spent 700 lira to rent a local band for his leaving party, and all his friends and relatives collected money for him, to help supplement his wages. Still, he had run short – after around twenty days in Istanbul he had called home to ask for some more. His parents could only spare 50 lira – around £12 – but they sent it to him anyway.

  ‘Before he started his service he took a test to go in at a level above private, but he failed,’ says şükriye. ‘But he wanted to be in the army – he wanted to serve in the east, to defend Turkey against the terrorists. I wanted him to serve in the west because it’s safer. I was the one who thought Istanbul would be OK. He didn’t know that he could be among terrorists – no, no, no, no! He was so happy to be serving his country. It is impossible that he could have been involved.’

  The Esoğlus watched the opening acts of the coup on the television, thinking it was a securit
y alert. Then they went to bed, only to be woken again by the sala prayer blasting from the mosques. They assumed it was an attack by Isis, over the border from Syria just a couple of miles down the road. Then they caught a few words about a coup, and ran to the streets to join their neighbours. They stayed out as the fear turned to anger and defiance, and then finally to jubilation as they realised the revolt had failed. It was only three days later that they got a call from their son’s unit, telling them that he was in custody. Then the duty lawyer called to say that Kadir could be in prison for a long while.

  This is the first time they have ever been to Istanbul. ‘The lawyer said our boy was cheated, that he was told it was a military exercise,’ says şükriye. ‘I have had a breakdown. I am using sedatives. I thought it would just be two or three days and then he would be out. But now my fear is getting bigger.’

  In the gleaming hallways of the Çağlayan Justice Palace, Nazlı Tanburacı Altaç shuffles her papers and speaks in a low murmur, looking out for anyone who might be unhappy to see her talking to the press. Blonde, preened, in her twenties and sharply dressed, her world would never have collided with that of şükrü and şükriye Esoğlu had it not been for 15 July. As a young duty lawyer in this Istanbul courthouse – opened in 2011 and the biggest in Europe – it is her job to take on the cases that the more senior, better-paid advocates don’t want to. But for these clients, she feels an extra sense of commitment.

  ‘I’ve been here for forty-eight hours – everyone’s busy,’ Nazlı says. ‘We asked to see the prosecutor and talk with him about the trial but he didn’t respond because of his extreme workload.’

  The courts are trying to process the ten and a half thousand now arrested and formally charged. But at the same time, the justice system itself is being purged. It was one of the strongholds of the Gülenists, the government says; so, one week on from the coup attempt, two thousand prosecutors and judges are among the tens of thousands already sacked from the bureaucracy.