Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  ‘That they will all be voting yes in the referendum,’ I reply dutifully, hating myself even though it’s the truth.

  ‘Of course they will!’ says the policeman happily. ‘We all love Mister President.’

  I ask where they are taking my friend, and why. They pretend not to understand.

  ‘Gel’ – Come – says the short one with the scar, and bustles me to a separate car. Now I am panicking. I take out my phone and send a short message to another friend. I am in the back of the car and there is a policeman on either side of me, as if they think I might try to escape. The short one is looking over my shoulder as I send the message. I douse it in British slang so that if he does speak any English, he won’t have a clue what I’m writing.

  Being taken by the rozzers, I write. Call paper if I don’t msg in an hour.

  Oh, shit, my friend replies.

  I reply with a pin of my current location.

  The thing I’m terrified of is being taken over the bridge to the other side of the city, and to the Vatan – Istanbul’s central security building. This is where the serious interrogations go down, and where the ordeals of foreign journalists who have been arrested and kicked out of the country over the past few months have generally started. It is also where those of the dozens of Turkish journalists who are now slammed in prison began. The charges are always the same, revolving around support and propaganda for terrorist groups. But everyone knows what their crimes really are – writing stories that displease Erdoğan. The state of emergency after the coup attempt has still not been lifted, endowing the police with powers to detain suspects for up to thirty days without charge, and without access to a lawyer for the first five.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’ I ask.

  ‘Somewhere warm,’ the short one replies. If this is meant to be comforting, it is not. They have already ticked me off for asking questions so close to the president’s house, even though I weakly protest that it is a public area. I wonder what roused their attention. Did I get too close to Sümeyye’s foundation when I went to take a look at the brass plate on its door? Did the estate agent have a quiet word in the cops’ ears as he made his way to midday prayers? Was it enough just to be a strange blonde and a beanpole wandering around this insular, conservative neighbourhood?

  Whatever has happened, my credentials and explanation have not been enough for them. But I feel my stomach settle a little as the car swings into a local police station after a mere ten-minute drive. Although I don’t know it, my friend has been brought here, too, and is watching me being escorted through the entrance hall. He will spend the next few hours fielding a litany of ridiculous questions about me.

  ‘What are her politics?’

  ‘Have you been to her house?’

  ‘Why don’t you marry her?’

  I am led into a small ground-floor office cluttered with file boxes, and which boasts a sweeping view of the Bosphorus. The short cop has been charged with watching me. He spends most of his time smoking out of the window, fiddling with his pistol, which is strapped into a leather holster that crosses his chest, and asking about my social and love life in Istanbul. What might have been the end of my career as a Turkey correspondent and the start of several days in a prison cell has thankfully descended into farce. By hour three, I am smoking the policeman’s cigarettes and commiserating with him on his failure to find a decent woman to marry. Boredom replaces fear. I look at the seagulls skirting the water’s surface and think how lucky they are to be there, rather than sitting in a cramped, smoky office making small talk.

  After five hours, the policeman tells me I can go. The presidential guard – Erdoğan’s elite protection – have been called, but when they arrive they say they don’t need to speak with me. As I leave I catch the eye of one of them, a tall, grey-haired guy wearing a black trench coat. Then I turn back to the short cop, and take one final stab at finding out what started this whole rigmarole. Though he has become friendly, he won’t give anything away.

  Maybe he barely knows himself. ‘Because,’ he says sheepishly, ‘Mister President.’

  16 April 2017

  Referendum day

  The referendum results are in: a victory for Evet. A last-minute rule change has shifted an ultra-fine balance: two hours before polling booths close, the electoral board announces that ballot papers without the official stamp that officials use to mark those that have been filled and validated will be included in the count, rather than disqualified. No reason is given for the decision, and four days later the head of the union of Turkish bar associations tells Reuters that there is no way of knowing how many unstamped ballots were added. No records were taken, although bar associations across the country fielded thousands of calls on voting day from observers telling them box-stuffing was happening. The provisional result shows 51.4 per cent for Evet, a victory margin of 1.4 million votes, and Erdoğan calls it as a win. Unsurprisingly the opposition cries foul. So too do international election monitors. Erdoğan accuses them all of bias.

  My Turkish friends watch with a sad resignation. ‘I told you they would never let the No vote win,’ says one.

  I watch the count live on state television in a tea shop in Kasımpaşa, Erdoğan’s home district. The burly men playing backgammon around me seem mostly uninterested in the presenters’ breathless commentary, but when the result is called, young men start speeding around the neighbourhood in their cars, blaring their horns and waving Erdoğan flags out of their windows.

  Once I’ve filed my first story for the morning’s paper, balancing my laptop on my knees as the waiters refill my tea cup, I make my way down to the AKP’s Istanbul headquarters. The crowds are flocking down the dual carriageway along the bank of the Golden Horn, some on foot, others on motorbikes with flags flying, a few brave ones waving lighted flares from the windows of their cars. The trinket sellers are out already, having predicted this result. Their roadside stalls are heavy with Ottoman banners and Erdoğan scarves.

  A light drizzle begins to crack the glow from the floodlights into crystalline beams of light in the forecourt of the headquarters. The party’s local representatives are here already, addressing the crowd from the top of a bus. Now the economy will be bigger, they promise, the development faster, the fight against enemies both internal and external stronger. The crowd is dancing, cheering, swaying – ecstatic and, for once, happy to speak to a foreign journalist.

  ‘Erdoğan is the most powerful leader in the world! Now no one can bring him down,’ says Hüseyin Apolu, a middle-aged man wearing an Evet baseball cap.

  At a quarter past ten, the hysteria reaches fever pitch: Erdoğan appears on the big screens from Ankara to address his people in victory.

  ‘Today, Turkey gave a historic decision on its governance system, which has been an immemorial matter of debate for two hundred years,’ he says. ‘April sixteenth is the victory for all Turkey, with everyone who both voted yes and no.’

  When I finally make it back through the snarled-up traffic to my neighbourhood, liberal Kadıköy on the city’s Asian shore, I find another set of gathering crowds. For weeks I have watched the streets outside my door turn into a gallery of opposition artwork. Stencilled images of Atatürk have been spray-painted onto pavements and walls, and posters tacked up.

  Istanbul hayır diyor! – Istanbul says no! – reads one, above the logo of the Turkish communist party.

  Tek adam rejim! – A one-man regime! – says another.

  Just as they did during the Gezi protests four years ago, old ladies are hanging out of their windows and banging their pots and pans in a dignified and domestic show of protest. On the streets below, the secular youth are gathering in their hundreds for a slow, funereal march. It is past midnight and the weather is miserable, but the throng swells by the minute.

  Maybe Erdoğan, even if he knew what was happening in Kadıköy, wouldn’t care too much. This neighbourhood, this bastion of Kemalism, has hated him from the get-go. It is a stronghold of the op
position party, the CHP, where the bars are full of rakı-drunk Turks every night and the mosques always empty on a Friday. It has voted 81 per cent for No – of course it has. It is filled with tattoo shops and hipster cafés and dog owners, not to mention those glamorous old ladies and their husbands, with their tired old ideas about what Turkey is and should be. Why should Erdoğan care what Kadıköy thinks?

  But news is creeping through of bigger losses behind his victory. The No vote has won in the three biggest cities – Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir. The first will deliver a particular sting. Erdoğan’s home city, his power base, the place where his political career began – Istanbul has turned its back on him for the first time. And while the biggest opposition turnout has come from these predictable secular neighbourhoods, others have also handed him shock defeats. Fatih, the ultra-Islamic district that includes the historic Ottoman heart of the city, has voted No. So too has Üsküdar, where the upscale neighbourhood of Kısıklı and Erdoğan’s villa lie. Earlier in the day, as the votes were being cast, Erdoğan’s supporters told me they were expecting an 80 per cent win for the Yes vote. AKP insiders had said privately that they would be disappointed at anything less than a 60 per cent victory. Behind the smiles and the bombast, they must all be stinging now.

  ‘Liar, thief Erdoğan!’ the crowd chants as it weaves through the narrow streets. ‘Kadıköy will be your graveyard, Erdoğan!’

  12

  SPIN

  From the deck of a pleasure boat cruising down the Bosphorus, the white house looks like any of the old Istanbul mansions on the water. Intricate wooden trellis-work frames its windows and gables, and its terrace doubles as a private jetty. Peer through its windows and you might catch a glimpse of serious twenty-somethings hammering at their computers, or suited men and headscarved women locked in animated discussion around the conference table. Visitors enter through a small doorway on the other side of the building, next to a busy main road. There is little to suggest what is housed here, other than the security camera looming over the doorbell.

  Erdoğan’s daughter is a regular visitor to the white house. So too are several of his closest party allies, and although the president himself wouldn’t be so indiscreet as to be seen here in person, his name and spirit is ever-present in its high-ceilinged rooms. Because this mansion on the water, built as a summer retreat for an elite Ottoman family before Istanbul swelled up and swallowed it, is the nerve centre of a huge propaganda operation. From within these walls a prime minister has been toppled, British politicians have been courted, and a clique of ambitious young men and women have secured their positions as the most powerful political influencers in Turkey.

  The spin operation

  The Bosphorus Centre for Global Affairs, the organisation that rents out the white house, markets itself as a think tank, its mission to ‘bring different groups of society together to address national and international political, social, cultural and economic issues and come up with sustainable solutions’. It hosts foreign journalists and politicians at roundtables together with Turkish government figures, and runs a plethora of ‘fact-checking’ websites and social media accounts in Turkish and English which, it says, aim to push back the morass of fake and biased news about Turkey – and Erdoğan – in the international press. There was plenty for the centre to sink its teeth into when it opened in late 2015.

  ‘I had started catching lies on social media and fact-checking during Gezi,’ said Fırat Erez, who was headhunted for a job at the Bosphorus Centre. Erez’s background might suggest that he would have taken the side of the protesters during that spring of demonstrations against Erdoğan’s government in 2013: he is an artist, a self-described atheist, and an old communist who has mellowed into liberalism in middle age. The living room-cum-studio of his house in a ramshackle old Roma neighbourhood of Istanbul is packed with flea market artefacts, and a sketch of a female nude is pinned to the fridge. But it was the conservative, Islamist Erdoğan who Erez ended up siding with during Gezi.

  ‘At that time I saw that Erdoğan’s government was opening up Turkey to the West, ending torture, enlarging our freedoms,’ he said. ‘They had improved transparency, started a peace process with the PKK. And meanwhile they were also under attack from all the rotten old ideologies – Kemalism, socialism. I supported Gezi when it was about saving the trees in the park. But then it turned into a kind of attack on the government, a coup or an uprising.’

  As Erdoğan sent the riot police into Taksim, the Gezi protesters turned to social media to spread their message to the world. Turkey’s television channels shut them out; even the independent CNN Türk broadcast a documentary about penguins as Gezi Park erupted in a swirl of tear gas. But falsehoods quickly crept into the ungoverned internet space. Some Gezi protesters claimed that the government had deployed Agent Orange in the heart of Istanbul. Others said that the cops were deliberately shooting to kill protesters. Erez started using his Twitter feed to argue back.

  ‘And the leftists crucified me,’ he said. ‘All politics in Turkey is so tribal. I became estranged from my own friends, and after Gezi I started to feel that I am pro-AKP.’

  After Gezi, Erez approached local AKP officials with the idea of setting up a fact-checking project. He landed gigs writing columns for Karar, an Islamist-leaning newspaper, and often appeared on state television as an analyst. When the Kurdish peace process collapsed, Erez turned to deconstructing the disinformation coming from the PKK’s social media propagandists. His first score came when he revealed that an apparent police special forces officer, who the guerrillas claimed they had captured and paraded on camera, was actually a homeless man from the eastern city of Elazığ, known locally as Crazy Ersin. Kurds on Twitter rounded on Erez and accused him of carrying out psy-ops for Turkish intelligence. Then, in September 2015, he received a phone call from Hilâl Kaplan, a columnist at Sabah, a rabidly pro-Erdoğan newspaper.

  The mouthpiece

  Sabah has the look of a downmarket tabloid and a reported circulation of more than 300,000 – the biggest on the newsstands. Its sensationalist headlines are filled with outrage at whomever it has decided are Turkey’s enemies of the today. Meanwhile, Daily Sabah – its English-language counterpart – models itself on a dry US broadsheet with a sensible typeface and lots of text. It boasts a circulation of just 7,000, but presidential advisers and AKP politicians flock to pen opinion pieces in its pages. The articles here may be more erudite than their Turkish-language cousins, but they pursue the same themes – foreign meddling, domestic plots, and praise for the man who is battling both.

  Hilâl Kaplan is Sabah’s star writer, a headscarved woman from the conservative fringes who made it to Istanbul’s prestigious Bilgi and Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) universities. In 2004, when she started her first degree, the headscarf was still banned in the halls of learning. So too was the Islamic beard, as sported by Soheyb Öğüt – her fellow student and the man she would later marry. Kaplan had grown up in Fatih, Istanbul’s ultra-conservative inner district where women roam in black shawls with only their eyes and noses peeping through. But when she walked the smart streets around her colleges, people would stare at her colourful headscarf, teamed with a modest fitted coat – the outfit that felt so modern in Fatih – and whisper. In class she covered her headscarf with a hat. Once, in the street, a drunk tried to pull the scarf off her head. It was an attitude she had lived with all her life; when she was five or six years old, she heard a Turkish man telling her covered mother to ‘Go back to Iran.’

  At university Kaplan joined the Genç Siviller (Young Civilians), a small activist group that pulled social liberals together with conservative Muslims in an alliance against the Kemalists. They wanted Turkey to democratise by breaking free of its secularist dogma and military custodianship, and the headscarf was high on their agenda. Kaplan turned it into a feminist issue, telling an online news outlet in 2010:

  I believe it’s wrong to associate taking off your headscarf with freedom. It’s said th
at taking off your headscarf is liberating for a woman. However, there is a lot of media related propaganda against women who are not covered. There are moulds that are hard to fill, such as the weight and height women should be. Sadly these are set from a man’s point of view and are commodifying women. This situation is increasing the amount of women suffering from conditions such as anorexia and bulimia. There are also millions of women who are having plastic surgery in order to free themselves from societies, which is ruled from a male point of view, comments etc … Whether she is covered or not, every woman tries to be free.

  Kaplan struck an eye-catching note on the issues: personally pious, socially liberal. Religious classes in schools should be available but optional, she argued. She said her biggest inspiration was Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist murdered in 2007, most believe for his outspoken work on the massacres and deportations of Anatolian Christians by Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in 1915.

  In 2008, in power for six years and having defeated the Kemalists over the nomination of Gül as president, the AKP started moving to lift the headscarf ban in the universities. In his speech to a party congress that year, Erdoğan hit the same note as Kaplan: ‘What do they say – only citizens without headscarves can be secular? They are making a mistake falling into such segregation. This is a society of those, with and without headscarves, who support a democratic, secular social law state.’

  Liberals and the religious bloc applauded. But although the law was changed to allow covered women through the doors of the universities, most rectors – largely CHP sympathisers – refused to recognise it. The CHP started a case at the constitutional court, seeking for the law to be blocked. Amid the furore, Kaplan and another Genç Siviller member drafted a communiqué stating that they would not be happy going into the universities with their heads covered until Turkey also addressed its problems with discrimination against Kurds and religious minorities. It was a genius move. Now, the issue was about all of Turkey’s democratic flaws, not just its attitude to the pious. The court ruled that the headscarf ban should stay, but Kaplan had become a revolutionary figure. Already making a name as a newspaper columnist, her rise began.