Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Layer upon layer of history and blood shapes the contours of this region – the influx of Syrian refugees escaping the carnage over the border is only the latest coating. Just down the road from Feyzullah’s apartment I spot the old French military cemetery packed with the bodies of men who died for imperial misadventure. Years before, on a lazy summer’s weekend, my Syrian boyfriend and I took a trip to Vakıflı, a tiny mountain hamlet nestled between İskenderun and Syria and the last remaining Armenian village in Turkey. The people who live here are the descendants of a band of neighbours who refused to flee during the great expulsion and murder of millions of Armenians and other Christian minorities by Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in 1915, as the communities of the Ottoman Empire turned on each other. Instead, they gathered arms and holed up in their village high up in the mountains. Their suspicion and fear of Muslims has passed down through the generations; when my boyfriend and I went into a guesthouse to see if we could stay the night, the owner eyed his Arabic passport with misgiving. Eventually she agreed to let us stay; we guessed she assumed he was a Syrian Christian.

  Late in the day, as the sun is setting over this complicated little corner of Turkey and after I’ve filled my notebook with his family’s anecdotes, Ağca offers to takes me to The First Bullet Museum in Dörtyol, housed in the building where Atatürk – together with the leaders of the Hatay Turks – planned to bring the province into the republic.

  As we drive the short journey over there from İskenderun, Ağca starts talking about how he once had political ambitions of his own. ‘I studied public diplomacy at university, and under the old system I could have been a district governor after that,’ he says. ‘But then the AKP changed the rules. Now you have to have a political science degree. So I went to do my military service, and came back to work in an electrical appliances store.’

  I wonder, though, if the rough, macho politics of the new Turkey is the place for any of this family. I’ve tried to push them on how they might vote in the referendum, and to introduce the topic of the president, and how he divides the country’s opinion. They’re having none of it. Feyzullah says he doesn’t think that any leader of Turkey should be insulted, whether they are dead or alive. Others make noises about how it wouldn’t be right for all the power to be with one person, but don’t say who that person could be. When they do express strong opinions, it’s within the safe borders of local government and parochial issues. I take the hint: they are scared. So I drop the subject of Erdoğan and the referendum, and go back to speaking about the past – a place where they seem far happier.

  Ağca leads me into the small museum, an old Balkan-style wood-and-stone house, the upper floors overhanging the lower ones. Inside I find a very different view of Hatay’s history to the one told in the bucolic wine houses of Vakıflı. The heroes of the story told here are not the Armenians who stood firm in the mountains, but the Turks who led the attack against them. The name has been chosen because Dörtyol believes itself to be the place where the first shot was fired in Atatürk’s war of independence.

  In the attic room, we find the obligatory waxwork of Atatürk – and Ağca and I take the obligatory selfie.

  11

  ERDOĞAN’S NEW TURKEY

  April 2017

  The referendum campaign

  Even if she were not who she is, Selin Söğütlüğil would draw stares. Petite and pneumatic, she is a five-foot column of curves wrapped in black and topped with a Medusa-like mane. Her eyes are dagger blue; tattooed butterflies flutter up her forearms.

  ‘You know who I got the recommendation for the tattoo artist from?’ she asks. ‘David Beckham! A teacher at my daughter’s school passed it on!’

  Selin tips her head back and laughs, an infectious tinkle that floats above the music and the sound of glasses clacking on hardwood tables. I think how small and strange this world is, this elite international bubble where footballing legends share their tattooists’ phone numbers with the descendants of revolutionaries.

  Selin, a great-great-niece of Atatürk, is connected to the Aldırma and Kuzulu families in Hatay by a distant trace of blood. Hers is the branch of the family that stayed in Istanbul as the others moved on to Bursa and then Hatay. Today Selin flits between homes in Turkey and London: running marathons, writing poetry and editing a magazine, finishing her first novel and contemplating an entry into Turkish politics. She had already made a name for herself as a writer before she publicly revealed her blood ties to Atatürk in late 2016. Since then, she has played a starring role at many of the official days and celebrations linked to the founder, appearing in chic red outfits at Anitkabır to lay a wreath at the foot of his sarcophagus. But she is dejected with the state of the CHP, she says, and with Turkish party politics in general. I tell her I think there is still a chance that Erdoğan could lose the referendum, despite the odds stacked in his favour. Selin scoffs.

  ‘It will be a yes,’ she says. ‘Trust me, I know this country.’

  Tonight Selin and I are eating dinner in Istanbul’s Soho House, part of the London-based chain of members’ clubs for artistic and media types. It blends cool with old-school elegance in the same measure as any of its other venues in Manhattan, Miami or Malibu. Housed in a nineteenth-century Italian palazzo, it nestles in the centre of the twisting cobbled streets of Pera, a tiny triangle that has been the pumping heart of Istanbul’s debauched nightlife since the late Ottoman era. Bounded by Taksim Square on one side, the grand boulevard of İstiklal on another and the dilapidated Kurdish neighbourhood of Tarlabaşı on the third, Pera is a web of brothels and basement drinking dens. When the Gezi Park protests kicked off in the spring of 2013, the demonstrators used Pera’s maze to escape from the cops and the tear gas. One startled friend was saved from almost certain arrest by a group of transsexual prostitutes who flung open their door and pulled him inside at the last minute.

  In its former life as the United States’ Istanbul consulate, the walls of the palazzo were sheathed in white corporate plasterboard masking the building’s exquisite eccentricity. When Soho House took over the lease they ripped away the façades to reveal a forest of faded frescos, vine flowers tangling around each other as they climb the ten-metre-high walls and ceilings. The floors and staircases are solid marble. The trimmings in the bathroom are antique brass, polished to a blinding gleam.

  In the restaurant, Selin piles plates and plates of delicious mezzes towards me: a spicy, nutty paste of blood-clot red, a tabbouleh, halloumi. For the main course, we eat freshly caught sea bass that the waiters fillet in front of us. Selin’s daughter and her friend, feisty and smart young women in their early twenties, join us. We talk for hours over fish and green tea about Proudhon’s theory of anarchism, the erratic Turkish currency, and God.

  After dinner, we go up onto the roof – the highest point of the highest hill in this part of Istanbul. From here, you can raise a glass of champagne as you soak in the outdoor swimming pool and look out over Istanbul’s endless rolling suburbs to where frivolous Pera ends and Kasımpaşa – Erdoğan’s steadfast loyalist home neighbourhood – begins.

  Erdoğan’s Istanbul

  Kasımpaşa is a Black Sea town slapped down in the middle of the metropolis. Most of its residents are migrants from the region along Turkey’s northern edge, who moved to Istanbul to make a better life. They brought their religiosity and straight-talking tough-man reputations with them. Today Kasımpaşa is packed with canteens serving Black Sea delicacies such as fried anchovies and a breakfast dish of gooey cheese, although Istanbul’s modernisation has smoothed its grittiest edges.

  Erdoğan’s father, Ahmet, was one of those migrants. After moving the family to Istanbul from the Black Sea region of Rize he worked as a sea captain in the Bosphorus. At home he was a strict master, enforcing harsh discipline and instilling piety in his children. The legend goes that Ahmet’s sternness could tip over into cruelty, and that young Erdoğan sold simit, sesame-encrusted bread rings, on the streets of Kasımpaşa to help hi
s family survive. He appears to have been known as a moralistic yet tough child – at least if that film biography, Reis, is anything to go by. One scene of the film shows young Tayyip, having just performed another good deed on the streets of Kasımpaşa, drawing glowing admiration from the grown-ups but the envy of his peers. ‘Why does everyone love Tayyip?’ says one, clearly wishing that he could be more like the future president.

  Erdoğan grew into a strapping young man, six foot tall. Away from politics, he became a semi-professional footballer, another tick on the Turkish macho credentials checklist. His nickname today is ‘Uzun Adam’ (Tall Guy); his rhetoric is pure bully-boy, filled with snide jokes at the expense of his opponents and solemn vows to crush perceived enemies.

  It’s a style his fanbase loves, because in an honour-based culture face-saving is everything. Turks, both those who support Erdoğan and others who do not, believe they have been humiliated by Europe with its hot-and-cold games. Meanwhile, the religious also feel humiliated by secularists, who thought they could keep their pious brothers and sisters out of politics simply by ignoring them.

  Tayyip, their glamorous saviour, has turned their lot around and made Turkey a place where people from places like Dumankaya or Kasımpaşa can say that the guy in The Chair is one of them. Their fanaticism is partly due to religion. The doors of universities and the public sector have been opened to women who wear headscarves, and they have gratefully flocked through them. The religious high schools, known as İmam Hatips, are being expanded. New mosques are flying up everywhere.

  But more than that, people of Dumankaya, Kasımpaşa, and other places like them love Erdoğan because he saved their honour.

  ‘I am especially proud when he raises his voice against the world,’ a sweetly smiling pensioner says at one of Erdoğan’s huge rallies on the Yenikapı parade ground, before telling me how racist Europeans are and then in the next breath inviting me to his home for dinner. ‘In the old days we used to watch our presidents bend to England and America. Now it is very different.’

  The suburbs

  Rain slashes the grey plaza. I bundle some cash at the minibus driver, jump out, and race across it with my handbag over my head. The wide expanse of concrete I’m pacing over doesn’t bring any feeling of space or light to this neighbourhood; on every side the traffic streams non-stop down polluted streets in a churning din. The apartment buildings and office blocks are dull, identikit, flaky concrete in pastel shades turned grubby in the places where car fumes cling. There is hardly anyone else on the pavement. I dodge huge dirty puddles as I sprint.

  Çekmeköy is about as far from the postcard Istanbul as you can imagine. It’s only taken me half an hour to get here from my picturesque waterside neighbourhood thanks to the minibus driver, an expert at weaving and butting through gummed-up traffic. We are still, geographically speaking, in the bowels of the metropolis; it would take us another couple of hours’ drive to get through the rest of the suburbs. But the tourists never come here; even I, a committed Istanbul wanderer, have never visited Çekmeköy.

  There is a glow from the centre of the square coming from a steamed-up box of glass and corrugated steel. The Evet Kafe (‘Yes Café’) has sprung from nowhere in the past few days, settling like a spaceship in the middle of this concrete desert. Inside the door I shake drops of rain from my hair and shrug off my jacket, which is far too light for the season. Perişah Uslu tuts and smiles when she sees my weather-inappropriate attire. I learn, to my astonishment, that she is forty-one – only eight years older than me. From her prim headscarf, her tabard and her motherly manner, I had put us in different generations.

  Perişah hands me a small, tulip-shaped glass filled with strong steaming tea, and passes others to the old men gathered around the low tables. Without too much prompting she starts talking about the unpaid work she is doing for the man she adores.

  ‘I am doing this for the future of our children,’ she begins.

  Perişah is a foot soldier in Erdoğan’s army, one of tens of thousands of party volunteers who have flooded onto the streets ahead of Turkey’s constitutional referendum. When we meet in March 2017 – three weeks before voting day – the polls put it neck and neck. Erdoğan’s base and some followers of the nationalist MHP are rooting for the Evet, or Yes, vote, which would do away with the parliamentary system and hand executive powers to the president. Almost everyone who is voting Hayır, or No, to the changes is doing so because they fear Turkey will be taken another rung up Erdoğan’s authoritarian ladder. The opposition are fielding a noisy grassroots campaign – but Erdoğan’s guys have the resources. Posters for Evet have been hung on Istanbul’s ancient city walls in blatant disregard for the rules banning parties from using state property for canvassing. The television channels friendly to (or frightened of) the government – and that is most of them – are running ads only for the Evet campaign.

  In one of the most bizarre pre-referendum news pieces, TRT World, the Turkish state’s English-language news channel, runs a vox pop with an apparent Erdoğan-loving cross-dresser in Taksim Square. The glamorous drag queens I’ve met would be appalled – the interviewee looks like a cameraman in a wig.

  ‘I am gay, and I love Erdoğan!’ he says, hammily and entirely unconvincingly.

  But this is an exception, for otherwise Erdoğan’s campaign team is smart. With sixteen years of experience they know how, and when, to press the buttons. The Evet Café is modelled on the traditional Turkish tea houses, where old men gather to gossip and speculate. Here, the political marketeers have created a perfect space for the faithful to reflect on everything their president has done for them.

  ‘Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is the only hope for Europe to save itself from destruction. There is war in the Middle East, refugees, these are the most reported topics. We trust only him to stop the bleeding,’ says İsmail Kaya, only thirty-five years old but a father of four and looking tired for it. ‘Those people who don’t like Erdoğan also don’t want Turkey to develop itself. They have the same mentality as the people who don’t want refugees.’

  Perişah, a party volunteer for the past ten years, is firmly in charge here. As she brews the specially branded Evet tea (a blend of leaves grown in Rize, Erdoğan’s home region), she tells me how she goes fishing every day at Eminönü, a central port district next to the Golden Horn. It is a man’s world at the water’s edge, where rows of weatherbeaten old guys line up with their fishing rods and their water-filled buckets ready for the little sardines they catch. It is an unusual place for a woman to spend her time. But Perişah tolerates no nonsense.

  ‘Once someone cursed me, so I punched him,’ she says. ‘Then he twisted my finger and other people stepped in to separate us. He got the trouble for it! I have immunity as a lady in Turkey.’

  Not every Turkish woman can be as free. Perhaps it is her no-bullshit personality, likely also the fact that she has brought up two children, one of whom is now serving as a soldier down in the restive Kurdish east. She has been faultlessly dutiful as a Muslim woman and gets to take her place alongside the men. She also believes Erdoğan to be the ultimate feminist champion, and insists that the AKP is the party of women’s rights.

  ‘He placed us over his head – may God be with him!’ she smiles. ‘Now headscarved ladies like me can go to school, be members of parties and organisations. These No campaigners, with their rucksacks and their leaflets like street sellers – they are the ones who are trying to oppress women!’

  Truck driver İsmail Kaya, hardly looking like a poster boy for feminism, agrees. ‘The most important thing that has changed under Erdoğan is that, before, women were invisible,’ he says. ‘Now, they’ve become our brains.’

  Perişah and the men gather for a photograph and make the sign of the Rabia, the four-fingered salute of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Since Erdoğan was photographed with a startling Monty Python-esque statute of a Rabia hand on his desk, his supporters have adopted it, too. Perişah and the men have the demeanou
r of a group of liberal students – all entirely comfortable in this mixed-gender gathering and no one questioning that it is a woman who does most of the talking. It is not, I think, how Erdoğan’s opponents like to portray his supporters.

  Perişah offers me a final thought as she pours a fresh round of tea.

  ‘We had really hard times – for so long – but now we have healthcare, and medicines and comfort,’ she says. ‘The old Turkey is gone; we are progressing.’

  Çekmeköy and districts like it are Erdoğan’s Istanbul – his heartlands on the periphery of the city. Huge banners bearing his image sway limpidly between tower blocks, his face ten storeys high and his moustache stretching ten metres across. Visit Istanbul as a tourist and you will come away thinking it is a liberal, secular place where, outside the mosque-heavy historic quarter, people drink freely and transvestites mix with Syrian buskers in Pera. But those bohemian neighbourhoods are islands marooned in a sea of conservative suburbs; Çekmeköy is the real Istanbul.

  The original Istanbul was very different. Until the 1950s it was a city of just under one million. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire sieved out some of its minorities, and purges of the Greek community in the 1960s and 1970s would homogenise it further. By the first decades of the republic it was a Turkish Muslim city rather than an imperial multicultural one, but its remaining residents were still cosmopolitan urbanites. The waterside districts they lived in had changed little in their layout for hundreds of years, even though they had been destroyed by earthquakes and fire and rebuilt countless times over. Istanbul lost its status as a capital when Atatürk founded the republic – but not its high opinion of itself.

  ‘Istanbul is devious; its streets are dark, narrow and labyrinthine; its intrigues are still Byzantine; it is clogged by pessimism, eternally sponging itself in the fetid bath of its magnificent past,’ wrote David Hotham, The Times’s correspondent, in 1962. ‘No longer the capital, [it] tends politically to be a nest of cynicism, pessimism and opposition. It can also devote itself more wholly to the pursuit of pleasure.’