Erdogan Rising

by Hannah Lucinda Smith

  The families of all three men ended up in Uzbekistan. The Ahiska Turks were not allowed to live in the cities of the regions they were exiled to, and under Stalin’s harsh communist system no one was allowed to practise religion. But their parents and grandparents kept up the rituals of Islam in the secrecy of their homes, and continued to speak Turkish between themselves. ‘After the exile it was forbidden for us to even travel from one village to the next, so relatives didn’t see each other for decades,’ says Vahid. ‘Once Stalin died the laws started relaxing and we began getting together again. Then in 1989 there was the second exile.’

  As communism collapsed, many of the Soviet Union’s ethnic groups began turning on each other. For decades they had been told they were all socialist brothers, but the heavy hand of the system had simply been holding a lid on bubbling tensions. A scrappy civil conflict between the ethnic Uzbeks and the Ahiska Turks, who had lived alongside each other for forty-five years, began with a random street fight in which an Uzbek was killed. Some believe it was started by the agitation of the KGB, although that has never been proven. Huge violent riots broke out, leaving up to 1,500 people dead and the houses of thousands of Ahiska Turks torched.

  The Soviet army moved all the Ahiska Turks to a military base, where they held them for seventeen days before evacuating them to western Russia. Most had nothing apart from the clothes they were wearing. Everything they had accumulated over two generations in Uzbekistan – their houses, their cars and their land – was lost. Over the course of the following year, the whole population of ninety thousand Ahiska Turks fled the country. Some moved on to Azerbaijan – and some went to eastern Ukraine.

  For almost three decades, life was good there. The Ahiska Turk elders sent their representatives to the Ukrainian towns first to check if they would be welcoming, and found the Ukrainians open to anyone who had suffered under Soviet Russia. The Ukrainians, too, had been appallingly treated by Stalin, both deported and starved in the early years of his reign and forbidden from speaking their own language. Vahid Aliriza, who was twenty-three when he arrived in Donetsk with his parents, attended the police academy and joined the Ukrainian force. If it had not been for the outbreak of the conflict in 2014, he would have been happy to stay there for the rest of his life.

  ‘I wouldn’t have wanted to move from anywhere,’ he says. ‘Even though Donetsk was not our motherland, we treated it as if it was. We are so thankful to the Ukrainians. They have never treated us badly.’

  But the new war with Putin was the last push they needed to return to the place they had always thought of as home. In the weeks before their journey to Turkey, Ankara sent bureaucrats to Donetsk to take full notes on all the families who would be coming. When they arrived in Üzümlü they were taken to houses fully furnished and with the heating already turned on – a literal warm welcome awaited them. Inside, workers from the local council handed over the keys to their new homes. To date, more than three thousand Ahiska Turks have taken up Erdoğan’s offer of resettlement in Turkey, with all of them guaranteed fast-track citizenship. Plans are underway to extend the right to all the quarter of a million Ahiska Turks scattered around the world.

  Vahid takes me to his home, a doll’s house-style villa in the middle of a sprawling new estate. All the others in this neighbourhood are exactly the same: four steps leading up to a small front porch, dun-coloured walls and white trim around the large windows, red pitched roofs at a gentle gradient. The village mayor tells me they were built by TOKİ, the Turkish state housing company, in early 2015 but had lain empty since then; no one had been interested in buying them, even at the bargain price of 125,000 lira (around $40,000) spread out in fixed instalments over twenty years. Üzümlü’s geographical isolation probably has much to do with it. Though it is beautiful, there is little to do here. Most young people eventually leave for the big cities.

  Now, New Üzümlü is being filled with newcomers. A sign at the entrance to the estate points the way to the Ahiska Market, set up as a franchise by the canny owner of the general store in the village centre. Boxy Ukrainian-plated Ladas dot the edges of the near-silent boulevards. Vahid and Nesibe have made a few changes to their house in the nearly two years they have been here; in addition to the plants, they have repainted, and bought a small television and some knick-knacks. On the walls they have hung framed pictures of the men they thank for their new life – Erdoğan and his old prime minister, Binali Yıldırım.

  There was little to adjust to here, they tell me – they had even clung to the Turkish cuisine during their years in exile. But the creamy homemade pasta with chicken and sweetcorn that Nesibe serves for lunch is different to anything I have tasted in Turkey before. Vahid admits that he still prefers Ukrainian vodka to Turkish rakı.

  For Nesibe, a true believer, the biggest thrill of being in Turkey was hearing the Islamic call to prayer for the first time in her life on the day she touched down in Erzincan. Although they had been able to practise freely all the time they lived in Ukraine, there were no mosques in Donetsk and they prayed in each other’s houses. At Ramadan, the Alirizas hosted all their friends and neighbours. Now, for the first time in their lives, they have their own neighbourhood mosque. ‘We arrived here on a Friday and we all went to the mosque together and prayed,’ Nesibe says. ‘Even the children were really curious. It was overwhelming for me – that is when I thought, This is real!’

  Although she had prayed five times a day in Ukraine and studied the Qur’an to the level where she could recite it by heart, Nesibe had never felt she could show the full trappings of her faith in Ukraine. She kept her head uncovered there and wore knee-length skirts. ‘There was no law against covering, but people would look at you in a funny way,’ she explains.

  On the flight to Turkey, she covered her head with a hijab for the first time. She has never left the house without it since she arrived, she adds – though I can tell by the few strands of hair peeking out from the Lycra headband underneath that she is not fully used to wearing it. When I meet her she is wearing a soft lilac headscarf with a sleek fitted black dress embroidered with flowers around the sleeves. It covers her fully to the ankles and the wrists and is both more conservative and more delicate than the usual Turkish pious style. The Turkish government has laid on free Qur’an courses for the Ahiska Turks, she tells me – but she needs no educating about her faith.

  Religion aside, Vahid says they are doing all they can to fit in. It is what the Ahiska Turks have been doing for the past eight decades, after all – their way of self-preservation in each new and uncertain resting place. But this time, they feel they have come home for good.

  Vahid sips his tea and offers plates full of delicious cakes as his cute grandchildren, fluent in Ukrainian and picking up Turkish at a rate I both admire and envy, play around his feet. One day they, like the other young Turks of Erzincan, will head for Istanbul, sucked into the metropolis where all the politics and intrigue and money is made. And if their loyalty to the man who has given them this new life is sealed, he can rely on their votes in the future. Here, there and everywhere, Erdoğan is picking up new voters. Three hundred thousand Syrian refugees have been promised Turkish citizenship, while the requirement to learn the Turkish language has been dropped. Since 2014, Turkish citizens living abroad, the majority of them AKP voters, have been allowed to cast their votes in Turkish embassies in their adopted countries. As his margins, always ultra-fine, slip further towards the centre line, such numbers could be enough to nudge elections.

  This new Turkish family is content to simply stroll the mountain paths and settle in to the country that has embraced them. ‘There is a blessing in everything that happens, and this is our blessing,’ Vahid says. ‘We are trying to set a good example here so the gate will be open for all the others.’

  14

  THE WAR LEADERS

  Atatürk’s end

  At five past nine in the morning, every 10 November, cannons fire and air-raid sirens sound across Turkey
. Public offices blast out the national anthem and a mournful drone of foghorns strikes up from the ships on the Bosphorus. Almost everyone stops what they are doing and stands to attention.

  It’s an eerie sight, none more so in the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul where the drivers, who would generally run over their own grandmas to get somewhere a little quicker, stop dead and sound their horns. But it is nothing compared to what happened on 10 November 1938, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the great Republican reformist, breathed his last in an upstairs bedroom in the annexe of the Dolmabahçe Palace. You can still visit the room today, left exactly as it was the day he died with a Turkish flag draped over the bed. Strikingly small and cold compared to the cavernous gold-trimmed halls of the palace proper, Atatürk lay dying here for weeks. Nightly bulletins from the palace detailed the exact statistics of his condition – temperature, pulse, breathing rate. A team of eight doctors attended him, and on some days he seemed to be improving. But the liver failure nurtured by his years of copious consumption finally overwhelmed him.

  ‘A great soldier, statesman and leader has passed away,’ ran The Times’s editorial on Atatürk’s death:

  Of the leaders whom the new Europe has seen emerge from the confusions of war and revolution, none has accomplished more, none faced greater difficulties. He leaves his people in mourning. It may at least console them to know that in this country [Great Britain] their old opponents, now turned friends, who admired him as a redoubtable enemy, deeply regret the loss that Turkey and Europe have sustained in the death of so great a man.

  Six days after Atatürk died, the Dolmabahçe Palace was opened to the public to allow Turkey to pay its respects. Within three days, an estimated 400,000 had filed past his body. Twelve people were killed and thirty injured as the huge crowd waiting outside the palace surged in panic on the evening of 17 November. Inside, the mood was different. His ebony coffin, surrounded by torches, was draped in the Turkish flag and garlanded by wreaths placed by İsmet İnönü, his prime minister and now the new president, representatives of the army and of the Kamutay, the national assembly.

  ‘The dimly lit room is most simple and impressive,’ wrote Jack Kernick, The Times’s correspondent, who joined the throng. ‘Army officers, officials, students and long queues of men and woman of all classes and ages, filing past, bow silently, deeply moved and whispering prayers for the dead leader. The former King Amanullah of Afghanistan arrived this morning and passed incognito among the people, praying before the coffin.’

  Ten days after his death, the body of Atatürk was transported to Ankara, the village he had turned into his capital. His coffin was loaded onto the Turkish battleship Yavuz and carried to the port of İzmit, escorted by HMS Malaya and ships from the French, Russian, German, Greek and Romanian fleets. In İzmit his coffin was transferred to a train. At Ankara station a team of soldiers placed the coffin on a howitzer carriage drawn by six black horses and escorted by six generals with drawn swords on either side. In contrast to the maelstrom that had engulfed Istanbul, the streets of Ankara were deserted; residents had been cleared from the whole route to the Kamutay, where a fifty-foot platform had been constructed and painted red. There Atatürk’s body lay overnight, as still more mourners filed past to pay their respects. ‘Orderly and generally mute,’ Kernick reported, ‘but there is obviously much stifled emotion.’

  Atatürk’s funeral was held the next morning under a steady late autumn drizzle. Soldiers wept as they saluted the passing cortege. Detachments of foreign armies marched in procession behind the Turks, with the British turning out the largest, of 266 troops including 60 Royal Marines. Fifteen generals flanked Atatürk’s coffin, while another walked behind carrying a cushion pinned with the leader’s medals from the war of independence.

  At midday the procession reached the Ethnography Museum, where Atatürk’s coffin would lie as it awaited its final home. Chopin’s funeral march – a symbolically European choice – accompanied this final ritual. It would be played by the military band at the funerals of all Turkish soldiers and statesmen for the next seventy-nine years.

  Erdoğan: from civilian to commander in chief

  Erdoğan – the born orator, masterful politician and genius populist – has never made a natural commander in chief. Photos from his military service in the early 1980s show a gawky, startled-looking young man cradling his rifle awkwardly. From time to time since he first became prime minister the pictures have been printed in the Turkish press, but he is always careful not to over-egg it. After all, he is the scourge of the military, the man who ascended the ladder of Turkish politics promising to quell the might of the generals. His power lies in his image as a civilian, not as a man in uniform.

  But post-coup Erdoğan is wearing his commander-in-chief role with aplomb. When the state of emergency was brought in, allowing the government to rule by decree, it was the security services Erdoğan turned to first. He brought the gendarmerie and the coastguard under the control of the interior ministry, alongside the police, and announced that he would be closing down the military high schools – the training grounds of the officers since the Ottoman era. The military was brought under the command of the ministry of defence, and its ministers now – for the first time – sit alongside generals on the appointments council.

  Two days after the revolt almost three thousand soldiers were dismissed. The government insists that only 1 per cent of the military took part in the coup. But the raw numbers hide the real story: the sackings and arrests soon hit the top brass hardest. Within four days, 110 generals and admirals were purged from postings all over the country, many of them places the coup did not even touch. And, as Erdoğan’s military clearout continues, even those who were not in the country on the night of 15 July find themselves in his sights.

  In November 2016 I was approached through an intermediary by a group of Turkish officers who were on NATO postings in Europe as the coup played out. They had all been recalled to Turkey following the putsch, told they would be reassigned. But when those who heeded were arrested within days of their arrival, the others decided to stay in Europe and claim asylum. Overall, 650 of the 900 Turkish officers in NATO had been purged by the time the officers contacted me. Stripped of their positions and denounced as traitors, they decided to break their silence.

  ‘I and my colleagues were informed that our tours were terminated unexpectedly and called back immediately to our country with no further explanation,’ said one officer, who had been based in the UK and used the pseudonym ‘Kemal’. ‘I learned that criminal investigations were made in my former residence address in Turkey. They cancelled my diplomatic passport. I requested many times with phone calls and written official letters that the Turkish armed forces inform me about the bizarre order and charges against me. However, Ankara was earless to my appeals and gave no response. I contacted many lawyers in Turkey but none of them undertook defending me before the courts. Under these circumstances I refused to go back to Turkey as I feared I would be imprisoned with no fair trial, since this is exactly what has happened to all the other members of Turkish military who went back. I know at least thirty-two of them personally.

  ‘A few weeks after I was called back to Turkey, I learned from the Turkish official gazette on the internet that I, along with 15,653 other people, no longer had a career, any income or any benefits. I was dismissed disgracefully. I was declared guilty of terrorism and punished without any evidence, accusation, legal process or opportunity to defend myself. They destroyed my honour and reputation by a smear campaign, which accused me of being a supporter of a terrorist organisation.’

  As Erdoğan’s purge of NATO officers continued, General Mehmet Yalinalp, a former Turkish brigadier general and NATO’s former Deputy Chief of Plans of Allied Air Command, sent an email outlining his concerns to General Curtis Michael Scaparrotti, the current Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations:

  As the historical purge of thousands of military personnel tak
es a faster speed, I and my Turkish colleagues observe a considerable rise of ultra-nationalist, anti-western sentiments within our military and throughout our state departments. It is very worrying to witness that some of the newcomers from Turkey to NATO have a radical mindset, some question the values of NATO and even hate western organisations while holding pro-Russia/China/Iran sentiments. For example, during an address to tens of Turkish NATO officers, a Turkish SNR from a NATO Headquarters located in Southern Europe, stated that there are currently two types of Turkish officers within our military; those who are loyal to NATO and those who are loyal to their nation, and the cleansing is carried out to replace the former ones.

  Erdoğan’s post-coup new guard are a mix of loyalists at the start of their careers, and ultra-nationalist officers purged under the trials spearheaded by Gülenist judges and prosecutors back in the 2000s, who have now been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile, as the military is decimated, the president is building up an alternative security force, the Polis Özel Harekat (PÖH, or special operations police). Founded in 1982, while Turkey was still ruled by General Kenan Evren, leader of the 1980 coup, the unit’s broad remit is anti-terror operations. It recruits from the regular police force, sucking in the fittest, the bravest and the most dedicated, and trains them in purpose-built facilities in Ankara and the Aegean province of Balıkesir. In the mid-1990s, the head of the unit was entangled in a scandal that blew open the links between the police, the government and the right-wing mafia. In 2010 Erdoğan instructed the interior ministry, which oversees the PÖH, to restructure it and pour more resources in. At that time, the number of PÖH officers stood at around 11,000, armed with machine guns, assault rifles and pistols.