Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  ‘This is what we prefer, we like to lead a modest life. We have never hidden behind the fact that we are his relatives. We never took advantage of it,’ says Feyzullah, when I point out how different they are to the descendants of Mehmet VI, the last Ottoman sultan. After his banishment in 1923, they established themselves as part of the European jet set, holidaying in Monaco and, in 2010, opening a court case against Turkey to reclaim some of their lost riches. Now, they are also trying to weigh back into Turkish politics. In early 2017, with the post-coup euphoria just starting to wane, Erdoğan has called a referendum on Turkey’s constitution, and whether it should be changed to one that hands him almost uncontested powers. Erdoğan’s plan to switch Turkey’s system from parliamentary democracy to executive presidency has been floating around since the turn of the decade, and gained momentum after he became president in 2014. If he manages to secure a majority of votes for his Evet, or Yes, camp, Erdoğan will be able to rule by decree and handpick the cabinet. The top ranks of the judiciary will be appointed directly by him and the parliament. The reforms will do away entirely with the system bequeathed by Atatürk.

  In the final weeks before voting day, Sultan Mehmet’s descendants have surfaced on state media voicing their support for Erdoğan’s plans. In contrast, Atatürk’s family rarely speak to the press; I’m the first foreign reporter to meet with them. I’m touched at the way they’re dressed in their best clothes for this occasion, and how Birsen has spent hours preparing huge piles of delicious Hatay cuisine – the thing I miss most from my time living in this part of Turkey. The region’s delicacies are famed across the country but difficult to find in their true form outside this province. Warmly spiced lentil soup, peppered beans and little parcels of meat wrapped in ground bulgur – the table is bejewelled with delicacies. Ağca, one of the cousins, has drawn out the family tree for me by hand and taken the day off work to join us. We chat a little about the ancient city of Antakya, my old home, and about the tens of thousands of Syrians who have now found sanctuary there. There is a family of them living next door, Feyzullah tells me. They are all empathetic; after all, the Aldırmas and the Kuzulus are the descendants of refugees themselves.

  ‘Our family’s journey started in Thessaloniki … from there we went to Istanbul, Bursa, then finally to here,’ Feyzullah says. ‘Dörtyol is where all the migrants went – it was the designated area. That’s why most people here look like foreigners – they came from the Balkans.’

  Atatürk’s immediate family, including his mother, sister and cousin, Abdurrahman, were among the first Ottomans to find themselves uprooted as the empire crumbled. They left their home city of Salonica, now in northern Greece and known as Thessaloniki, during the Balkan war of 1912–13. The fledgling Christian nation states of Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro had united to boot the Ottomans out of their last bastions in Europe. The victory was celebrated in the capitals of Western Europe – but the toll was wrought on the Muslims of the Balkans, who were slaughtered and deported to Anatolia.

  Over the coming decades, millions more would follow this initial and involuntary exodus, while the revenge exacted by the Turks against the minorities in Anatolia would send millions of Christian citizens of the Ottoman Empire fleeing in the other direction. It was the great tragedy of the Ottoman twilight – the bloody curdling of a once-mixed population. The ghosts still haunt Istanbul, a city once teeming with followers of all three Abrahamic religions but which today largely identifies itself as Muslim. Even so, lying in bed on a Sunday morning, I can still hear the sound of one lonely tolling church bell – a reminder of my neighbourhood’s past as a district filled with Greek bourgeoisie. On a scruffy backstreet, where I would not venture were it not for my love of pork, is the city’s last remaining Greek butcher. There is the air of a secret society within his cool, white-tiled walls; a conspiracy of guilty appreciation for his sausages and bacon.

  Muslims from the European reaches of the empire fled or were banished back to the Turkish heartlands, where they could find safety and acceptance in their common religion. But by their features, pale-skinned and blue-eyed compared to the darker-skinned Anatolian Muslims, they were marked as outsiders. Later, they became weapons in Atatürk’s war of Turkish independence.

  ‘People from the Balkans were sent to Hatay because the region came under the control of the French and Armenians,’ explains Ağca. ‘The Turkish state wanted to use the Balkan refugees to populate this region.’

  We talk on, past lunch and into the afternoon. şarap shows me photos of their ancestors, and tells me stories about how people react to them when they learn of their famous connection. Today, they bring out their few keepsakes, including Atatürk’s ceremonial sword, a gorgeous swoosh of engraved silver. The younger members of the family admit to using it in play fights as children. Apart from these last few prized possessions, they have given everything to museums, including the Cadillac Atatürk drove down here when he visited his cousin in the 1930s. He left it behind when the engine wouldn’t start. It stayed outside the family’s house until the 1960s, when the state-owned İşbank came and asked for it, along with a haul of old photos. They are now on display in Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara.

  ‘That was Atatürk’s ethos,’ says Feyzullah, ‘to share all he had with his nation. He used to say, “Even the clothes I’m wearing belong to the people!”’

  The family wish they had at least been mentioned on the plaque beside the Cadillac. ‘They wrote “This is a gift from İşbank”!’ says Feyzullah, with a sad and incredulous shake of his head. ‘We were going to donate the sword, too, but we changed our mind after that.’

  All day, as I’ve listened to their stories and caressed their keepsakes, I’ve been sneaking glances at their faces, searching for resemblances to Turkey’s most recognisable man. None of them have the giveaway laser-blue eyes, or the shock of fair hair. But in Deniz, a smart, funny university student, I sense something of the force of personality.

  ‘Atatürk is being removed from everything, from school books, from coins,’ she says suddenly, and I detect the first trace of tears in her eyes. ‘Lately, in the university, everyone can say everything in the open. The people who want to praise him do, but others feel free to insult him. I don’t understand why the lecturers don’t say anything. This is the man who established the republic. I can’t bear it.’

  Law 5816 – insulting Atatürk

  The hundreds of Turks who have served time in prison for breaking Law 5816 might feel differently. Under that statute, anyone deemed to have insulted Atatürk, his image or memory faces up to three years behind bars. Anyone who encourages another to insult Atatürk may be prosecuted as if they had committed the crime themselves. If the insult was carried out publicly or in the press, the maximum sentence may be extended by half. And if the crime occurred at Atatürk’s mausoleum, the perpetrator could be imprisoned for up to five years.

  The law is not a quaint anachronism. Hundreds of people have spent thousands of days in jail because of it. Professors, poets, mayors and men of religion have fallen foul of the canon, some of them unwittingly, others in a protest of conscience. International human rights organisations and freedom of speech watchdogs have railed against it. But this law is not something Atatürk himself put in place. The notice declaring the new law was published in the Official Gazette on 31 July 1951 – thirteen years after Atatürk’s death, and amid the first pushbacks against his reforms.

  In May 1950 the Demokrat Partisi seized power from Atatürk’s CHP in Turkey’s first free elections. Its leader and now prime minister, Adnan Menderes, claimed that the will of the people had been realised, and that the rule of the bureaucratic elites was over. Modern-day Turks would recognise the rhetoric – it is almost identical to the claims Erdoğan has repeated, and repeated again, since his AKP took power in 2002. There are other similarities between the two leaders: both sympathise with Turkey’s religiously conservative masses – although Menderes was decid
edly less personally pious than Erdoğan – and both sought to indulge them by loosening some of Atatürk’s firm secularism.

  The first law Menderes enacted when his party took power was to reintroduce the Arabic call to prayer. In 1932, Atatürk had passed a law decreeing that it should only be recited in Turkish, to the horror of the devout. So symbolic was this tussle in the greater struggle between secularism and religion in Turkey that it featured in the trailer for Reis, a cringeworthy cinematic hagiography of Erdoğan released in early 2017.

  The film tells the story of Erdoğan’s early life, back when he was just plain Tayyip from the tough streets of Istanbul. It casts him as a devout boy guided by his moral compass, unwilling to bend to peer pressure and winning both admirers and enemies because of it – a broadly accurate portrayal. But the trailer showing young Tayyip singing the Arabic call to prayer in defiance of the law? Erdoğan was born in 1953 – three years after Menderes reintroduced the Arabic recitals. By then there was nothing to defy.

  Soon after, sensing a new wind of religious freedom, the Ticanis, members of a conservative Islamic order, began attacking Atatürk’s statues. The sect had originated in the North African reaches of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century, but grew radical and notorious with the birth of Atatürk’s modern republic. They numbered several thousand, but were concentrated in Ankara. Since the Atatürk statue attacks were soon happening across the country, it seems impossible that all of them were carried out by Ticanis. Historian Jacob Landau suggests that the activity soon also caught on with student and youth protest movements. Nonetheless, the blame was levelled entirely at the men of religion.

  Menderes faced a dilemma. He wanted to allow religious Turks a little breathing space, but he didn’t want them going that far. It was Atatürk who had given Menderes his first job in politics, and there was still a lingering loyalty. Neither was he so personally invested in Islam as some members of his party – his wife was an opera singer, a purveyor of a very European art form. So he drew up a law making it a crime to attack Atatürk’s memory.

  It was a deeply controversial move. Much of the opposition came from the CHP – the party of which Atatürk is the ‘Eternal Leader’ – which thought the law undemocratic and unconstitutional. But Menderes also faced revolt from within his own ranks, with the more religious members of his party dismayed at the ‘deification’ of a mortal. One independent member of the house argued that the law would mean university professors could be prosecuted for their lectures – prophetic, since that is exactly what happened in later decades.

  The bill was rejected by a sliver on its first vote, by 146 votes to 141, and sent back to the justice committee for redrafting. Word went round that the government was planning to retract the law – and then, the statue attacks escalated. On a single day, two Atatürk monuments in Ankara were defaced in broad daylight, right in front of an army base. The head of the Ticani sect was arrested, along with a dozen of his members, but the vandalism spree continued. Within a month, more than a hundred of the order’s followers had been rounded up, and the investigations spread to the Nakşibendis, another conservative group. On 12 July 1951, the interior minister held a press conference vowing to ‘liquidate the snake whose head needs to be crushed’. When the slightly amended bill came back to parliament twelve days later, it was approved by 232 votes to 50. Six members of the house abstained. Atatürk’s honour was enshrined in law.

  Cumhuriyet recorded the tumultuous scenes in parliament as the bill progressed. ‘Deputies for and against the law made a lot of noise, banged on the desks, and some got into verbal fights,’ wrote the newspaper’s parliamentary correspondent.

  Bedii Unustun, the MP for Çanakkale – the place where Atatürk led his soldiers to glorious victory in the Battle of Gallipoli – opposed the law with a poetic speech. ‘Running the state as a dictatorship is like sailing a boat in a pool,’ he said. ‘Democracy is sailing in the open seas. This proposition is the government’s way of locking open waters into a pool. The government is putting heavy burdens on its people in the disguise of Atatürk love … Its ship will lose its way and get smashed on the rocks.’

  Most of what Unustun said was lost in the din of the shouting and banging. There was loud applause when the vote was passed. But some thought it didn’t go far enough. Nadir Nadi, editor of Cumhuriyet, pondered in an opinion piece days before the law was passed:

  Imagine we caught all the Ticanis and changed the penalty for statue destroyers and Atatürk insulters to ten years. Will we be able to protect the revolution and the living memory (other than the stone and the brass) of Atatürk this way? If the proposed law passes as it is, will it stop people from abusing religion? Will the fundamentalists who are afraid of attacking statues refrain from attacking the revolution? Will overt and covert propaganda such as covering the women at home [with headscarves], bringing back the Arabic script, and overwriting the civil law and replacing it with Sharia stop with such measures?

  Nadi supported the law, but also lobbied for similar punishments to be brought in for those who refused to obey Atatürk’s dress-code reforms, or his introduction of the Latin alphabet.

  Menderes eventually fell on his sword. As his tenure progressed, he grew bad-tempered, thin-skinned and corrupt, jailing journalists and rigging elections in a bid to cling to power. In 1960 the Turkish army – the ultimate guardians of Atatürk’s legacy – stepped into politics for the first time, overthrowing Menderes and putting him on trial on a colourful array of charges including ‘extravagance’, fathering an illegitimate child, and embezzlement. The court found him and several other high-ranking figures within his party guilty of violating the constitution, and sentenced them to death by hanging. Menderes swung in September 1961. It was only three decades later, under the presidency of the whisky-loving but pious Turgut Özal, that his memory began to be rehabilitated.

  Erdoğan has taken it a step further. Now, you will find boulevards, airports and parks named after Menderes. He is one of only three Turkish leaders, including Atatürk, whose graves have been turned into mausoleums (the other is Turgut Özal). And in 2013 the island in the Sea of Marmara where he was tried and hanged was renamed ‘Democracy and Freedom Island’.

  Yet it was Erdoğan’s government that, in May 2007, enacted another parcel of legislation designed to keep Atatürk’s reputation safe, this time in response to a very modern problem. In the age of the internet, the statue-smashers of the 1950s now make their feelings known in homemade films, in blog posts and on comment threads. Law 5651 allows websites to be blocked on a wide range of grounds including child abuse, indecency and copyright infringement. The law’s original impetus, however, was the increasing criticism of Atatürk on the ungoverned space of the web. Over the next two years, more than 3,700 websites fell foul of the law, including MySpace, Google and several Kurdish news sites. But the big target was video-hosting site YouTube, which had refused Turkey’s repeated requests to take down videos criticising Atatürk. In 2009 the Organisation for Security and Economic Co-operation in Europe tallied that 2,972 websites were blocked in Turkey for various alleged crimes against Atatürk – more than were blocked because they involved prostitution.

  The ironclad limits of these laws leave little room for academic or even casual debate regarding Atatürk’s life and work. Most Turks’ knowledge of their founding father wanders little from the script of the ‘Long Speech’ – a thirty-six-and-a-half-hour blockbuster that Atatürk delivered to parliament over six days in 1927. In it, he outlined the history of the war of independence, and the principles of the new republic. He also delivered damning criticisms of everyone from the sultans and their court to the foreign occupying powers, while glossing over the Ottoman Empire’s own misdeeds and errors in its final acts.

  Above all the treachery and misfortune in this narrative sits Atatürk – part saviour, part prophet – who foresees and then orchestrates the Turkish nation’s rebirth. This is the folklore narrative taught in schools,
in universities, in films, and it has captured the official version of history even beyond Turkey’s borders. Writing in Turkish Studies, an academic journal, in 2008 a Finnish historian totted up only six theses, in any language and published in any country, which examine the Long Speech with a critical eye. So is it any wonder that those Turks who aim to break the mould, to shake things up a bit, to question, are usually rounded on by the rest of their society?

  Some of those who have done so recently include historian İpek Çalışlar, whose study of Atatürk’s short-lived marriage landed her in court. The alleged offence? To have repeated an anecdote told to her by a relative of Atatürk’s wife, Latife, about how the couple swapped clothes so that he could escape a group of rebellious soldiers who were plotting to kill him. ‘In Turkey, we always have legal obstacles for writers. Like learning how to swim, you learn how to write without getting in trouble with the law,’ Çalışlar told me.

  Can Dündar, a well-known journalist writing for the pro-Atatürk Cumhuriyet, was repeatedly hauled into court for scenes in his 2006 documentary Mustafa, which showed Atatürk smoking and drinking heavily. One of Dündar’s staunchest supporters was CHP veteran Ertuğrul Günay, who had joined the AKP in 2007 when it seemed like the party of liberal ideals.