by Norman Stone
The army could obviously have moved in at this moment, and already had the martial-law powers to do so. However, it had blundered over earlier coups that had proved to be pointless: you took power, your general opined on television at 3 a.m. to the national anthem, professors of political science wrote you a constitution and then, after a short while, you got Demirel back again: burasi Türkiye, i.e. that was Turkey for you. The army therefore bided its time, heeding the Leninist lesson of ‘the worse, the better’. In 1977 already, 230 people had been killed, one fifth of them in Mayday events in Taksim, in Istanbul, when the Left had been shot at. After that, the figures were between 1,200 and 1,500 every year. In Trabzon, on the Black Sea coast, guns were routinely carried, and were frequently used: there was almost a war between town and gown, in the latter case, the Black Sea Technical University. But there were endless cases reported casually every day in the newspapers. A good review of this aspect of things was produced in Ankara (1992) by the National Security Council — 12 September in Turkey and After. It is the country as the generals then saw it — everything divided, with unions of Left and Right for police and teachers, but the Left itself also dividing, and sometimes murderously. The book takes day-by-day excerpts from newspapers. On 5 January 1978 there were fist-fights in parliament, an Ankara café was machine-gunned, a bomb exploded at Istanbul High School, with fifty-one people killed and 444 wounded that month; a car manufacturer was asking for a price rise of 400,000 Turkish lire (over $8,000 at the rate of late 1979, while on 24 January devaluation brought the dollar to 80 lire, from 47). In September 1979 the Islamic party’s leader was ranting against ‘the tyranny applied by Zionism… all Westerners will be eliminated’; a headline runs, ‘Gazi Teachers’ Training School in Ankara was occupied by 800 right-wing students’ — the deputy dean of Political Science at Istanbul university was strafed in his car by four terrorists, including a woman, and there was further shooting even at his funeral. On 2 September 1980 twenty people were killed; on the 3rd twenty-nine, including the three-year-old son of a police sergeant in Bingöl, a largely Kurdish town; on the 4th eighteen; on the 5th a nightwatchman, a village head and his son in Adana, and two more people in cafés in Istanbul and Eskişehir; the Konya prison was raided, and seven people freed; there was a murder in Fatsa on the Black Sea, and, next day, five more in Ordu, along the coast; a raid at Diyarbakır, the chief Kurdish town, got away with 2 billion lire. On 6 September it was the Islamists’ turn, when beards, green flags, Arabic, and Islamic dress appeared, with slogans to the effect that ‘Iran is the only way’, and demands for the introduction of the shariah law. When on 12 September General Kenan Evren took over, face on television to national anthem, tanks in streets, he rightly made the point that two years’ terrorism had cost the country almost as many casualties as had the three-week battle of the Sakarya, in 1921, which had saved Turkey from the Greeks.
The terrorism went on almost to the last moment — a cinema queue machine-gunned in Mersin, a bag-bomb killing six in Kurdish Siirt, and after a great demonstration against NATO it was discovered that the slogans on the posters had been booby-trapped: fifty of them had to be cleared. On the last day, the army leaders were careful. General Evren saw the acting president for tea and gave nothing away (for which he later apologized, as he did to the defence minister Ihsan Sabri Çağlayangil, who had not been told, although that, given his political instincts, may have been by choice). Lights went out gradually in the military buildings. Abroad, people did guess, and Nuri Çolakoğlu, for the BBC in London, certainly knew. However, the senior American general was only told five minutes beforehand, even if the chief American expert, Paul Hentze, seems to have been in the know (he was able to tell Carter, at Fiddler on the Roof). Then, in the evening, the directors of television and the post office were invited to headquarters and politely detained. Under escort, they went off to block the telephone connections of the deputies and links with the outside world (incidentally, somewhat more professionally than happened in Poland, where soldiers, in December 1981, smashed the telephone wires with heavy axes). The politicians lived in their own compound, and it was easy enough to proceed there. The general behaved humanely. He knew that Turkish politicians, some of them given to heavy overeating, might have heart attacks if faced by soldiers at 3 a.m. He therefore arranged for their best friends to accompany the arresting parties, and to be first visible when the door opened. The arrests went ahead smoothly enough, and the various men met in the VIP lounge at Esenboğa airport, on their way to internment at Gallipoli. One thing the military had learned: not to make martyrs. There was to be no hanging. The politicians were personally banned from entering politics again, and the parties themselves were also banned. But the imprisonment was in easy circumstances, and did not last for more than a few months in most cases. The military had also learned from previous coups, and, perhaps at American behest, from the experience of Chile, although this cannot be demonstrated one way or the other. The deputy chief of staff, Haydar Saltık, planned the operation (‘Flag’) and in a fifteen-page typescript outlined certain essentials: for instance, the need to suppress the small parties. There was a certain fear that in the gecekondu districts the army would not be able to appear, but things went quite smoothly — the army had timed the coup very well, and it was greeted with great relief in nearly all quarters, from Joseph Luns at NATO headquarters (who embraced the Turkish ambassador, Osman Olçay) to ordinary Turks in Anatolian small towns. The only hitch was that the central television aerial could not, for some time, be made to work — the signal to the units to move. The general made his broadcast, on lines by now somewhat traditional, but this time the generals had learned: they did indeed promise a return of democracy, but not at once. Parties were banned. But Turgut Özal went ahead with the IMF programme of 24 January. As was already happening with Pinochet, this was ‘the Washington consensus’ in action, and it was to work remarkably well.
24. The Eighties
The 1980s have entered history, in much the same way as the twenties or the sixties or for that matter, before them, the fin-de-siècle nineties have done. Pinning down such things is not possible: pedantic historians can even claim that such decade moments do not exist. They do. Perhaps this is just a matter of technology: bikes, typewriters, telephones; the motor car; the Pill. The eighties were marked by the computer, or perhaps just money. However it is to be explained, there was a Wirtschaftswunder in the Atlantic world; though there was no tangible symbol, as had happened for the German original with the Volkswagen, because much of what happened, happened in cyberspace. The money translated into conspicuous consumption, often of a repulsive sort, at all levels, but all in all the 1980s deserve the name The Seven Fat Years, title of a famous book on the subject by Robert Bartley of the Wall Street Journal.
The decade began with lamentation, talk of a crisis in capitalism and of a Second (or Third) Cold War, but quite quickly, by 1982-3, things improved. The ‘Anglo-Saxons’, including Australia, were to see money in a way not experienced except maybe in the USA of the 1920s. In 1990, even taking inflation into account, the American GNP was nearly a third larger than in 1982 — equivalent to the entire German economy. Overall, the standard of living rose by close to a fifth and 18 million new jobs were filled. The output per hour of American labour — productivity — grew by 10 per cent, manufacturing grew by nearly half, and exports almost doubled. So did tax revenues. There was a British counterpart, although the ‘mix’ was very different, as manufacturing fell by roughly one quarter, and ‘services’ took its place: southern England boomed. In 1984 Ronald Reagan was re-elected, the first President since Eisenhower to have two full terms, on the basis of a ‘morning again’ campaign that took advantage of the boom, and the extraordinary confidence that came with it. He had more electoral votes than Roosevelt, and his opponent, Fritz Mondale, who stood on an old-fashioned platform of tax increases for ‘the rich’, was sunk without trace. Margaret Thatcher was similarly triumphant — three electoral v
ictories in a row, and even, though in absentia , four. The performance was extraordinary, comparable to de Gaulle’s. It showed the British capacity for tissue regeneration, in defiance of all the self-imposed odds, and, though this may turn out to be the country’s last moment as world leader, the Thatcher government produced prototypes that were widely followed. But it was uphill work, to start with, the stage being cluttered with toxic historical furniture, with the last gunboat, and the last gasp of the industrial ‘triple alliance’ that had produced the strange death of liberal England seventy years before.
In 1982 Margaret Thatcher was under heavy attack from all sides: one of her best allies, Norman Tebbit, had it right when he said that he bore the scars of many wounds, mainly in his back. Then came an extraordinary episode, bringing modern themes together, including that of military dictatorship in Latin America. There was one such, a junta, in Argentina, the modern history of which had been one of squandered opportunities. Far from copying Pinochet, the military in Buenos Aires regarded him as a poor cousin, and cast about for ways to gain cheap popularity. A national cause of sorts existed, in a remaining British colony, the Falkland Islands, a few hundred miles from their coast. Take it over by force; the British would simply be grateful that some forlorn colonial outpost, which cost the taxpayer money, would be taken off the expense list. Relations between Argentinians and British were good; casual conversations showed that no-one in London cared about the Falklands one way or the other. Besides, British defence policy was a mess. In the later 1970s naval pay was so low that sailors had to moonlight. In 1980 there was a moratorium on defence contracts; there was absolute resistance to aircraft carriers and no-one would pay for the Falklands. On the other hand, Argentinian regimes were generally so awful that the Falklands lobbyists did not have any trouble in convincing the Left of their cause. However, the Argentinians misunderstood. They assumed that they would have American support or at least understanding. After all, the USA had become heavily involved in Central America, where Argentina’s support was needed: there was semi-clandestine military co-operation, the Americans supplying training and weaponry. In this atmosphere, taking the Falklands seemed to make sense. The American ambassadress at the United Nations, Jeane Kirkpatrick, was assumed to be influential, and she had written what was thought to be an important article — saying that the USA should tolerate lesser, banana republic authoritarian regimes.
In December 1981 a General Leopoldo Galtieri seized the dominant role in the Buenos Aires military junta, and he appeared as the ultimate in comic, circus-uniformed rulers, an ‘El Supremo’ out of Hornblower. In March 1982 he tested the waters: his troops landed on South Georgia, a remote, frozen place from which the British had conducted surveys of the Antarctic. Then, on 2 April, he invaded the Falklands. In London there was disbelief: a senior Foreign Office man caught the mood when he gasped, they cannot treat a major power in this way. Parliament was specially recalled, and was in boiling mood, a mood that even affected the left-wing Labour leader, Michael Foot. The navy was full of fight, and of course anxious to show that surface ships were still needed. Sir Henry Leach, First Sea Lord, had the qualities to persuade Margaret Thatcher that a naval force could and should be sent; he called the reductions in naval spending ‘the greatest con-trick of the century’. He also much admired Margaret Thatcher’s decisiveness and remarked, accurately, that if nothing had been done ‘we would have woken up in a different country’. She herself liked military men, whereas she tended to dismiss diplomats; she now took a great gamble. She would fight, guessing that she would have American support where needed. This was correct, and state-of-the-art Sidewinder missiles forced the Argentinian aircraft to fly low, such that many of their bombs did not explode, because the fuses had been mistimed. A British expeditionary force was put together with speed and efficiency, and embarked for a campaign, 8,000 miles away.
The fact was that British opinion had now divided, with, on the whole, educated people questioning the whole venture and, on the whole, uneducated people cheering on what the popular press called ‘our boys’. On the face of things, this was, as a German book’s title ran, ‘the absurd war’ — the last of the Royal Navy, embarking on a voyage of 8,000 miles for a nearly valueless set of islands, the inhabitants of which could, with a fraction of the cost, and greatly to their advantage, be resettled on one of the not dissimilar Scottish Hebrides. However, the Argentinian junta behaved with grotesque obstinacy, refusing American mediation, and waving aside even Latin American efforts. A proposal was made for the British ships to stop a thousand miles from the Falklands, and that was ignored (it was, in any event, unreal). An elderly battleship, the Belgrano, was first directed towards the islands, and then away from them; it was sunk on 2 May; 368 sailors drowned. Later, a great fuss was made, to the effect that it had been sunk so that Margaret Thatcher could simply ignore further attempts at mediation. Not many people believed these assertions at the time, and no-one does now. It is clear that the junta were in no mood to offer any concessions, even to common sense. War was war, and developed its own momentum, beyond the helicopter accidents hitherto seen. Two days later Sheffield was struck by an Exocet, twenty-one lives being lost. It was an old ship, with too much aluminium, and chaff, to distract the missile, was not used because the ship was broadcasting, and there were other near disasters, but, with both patience and determination, the Prime Minister was showing the generals and admirals, says Hugo Young, ‘every quality they least expected in a politician’. She also needed luck: there were large and vulnerable ships at stake, including, with some symbolism, the Queen Elizabeth II, which had been constructed in a conscious recall of the great days of Atlantic shipping. But morale was high, and the operation was professionally conducted.
On 25 April the British retook South Georgia, along with a particularly vicious Argentinian officer. The Chileans gave considerable help as well, in radar intelligence and efforts to divert Argentinian strength. The Argentinians’ chief weapon, the French-made Exocets, proved to be less deadly and accurate than expected — on three occasions they did not explode, and the Argentinian pilots were operating at the extreme end of their fuel range, so that they could not manoeuvre easily. In any case the French gave covert help to the British. On 21 May came the landings, and the shivering Argentinian conscripts were no match for professional soldiers; after three weeks, on 14 June, they surrendered, as a celebrated British journalist, Max Hastings, spear-headed the advance into Port Stanley by marching into the local pub and ordering a beer. Margaret Thatcher’s gamble had succeeded, and as her biographer writes, ‘it was an event of stunning political impact all over the world’. Quite accurately, she said, ‘we have ceased to be a nation in retreat’. The junta in Buenos Aires fell, its victims liberated in great numbers. After Margaret Thatcher’s loss of office, there was a gathering of representatives of peoples in whose liberation she had had a hand — central Europeans, Slavs, for the greater part, who each sang a national song. She was very touched and grateful when a representative also came from Argentina. She herself of course shot up in popularity at all measure: why was ‘that woman’ getting away with successes that had escaped her supposed betters? In Scotland the Secretary of State thought that it was all like a ‘Nuremberg rally’ of vulgar triumphant nationalism, and a particularly lugubrious Foreign Secretary remarked that instead of having a cavalry officer, they had ‘a corporal’. Visits by Pope John Paul II and Reagan, within weeks, became part of the picture. As she told an interviewer, rightly, ‘there was a feeling of colossal pride, of relief that we could still do the things for which we were renowned’. But in some ways it marked the high point of the Thatcher period: a courageous budget was associated with economic recovery, and the Falklands campaign with a great sea-change in international affairs.
The ‘high eighties’ were under way. At the time, only a few people sensed the breakthrough to come. Arthur Seldon of the IEA did, but academe was almost solidly refractory, and the dead hand of Edward
Heath still lay upon much of the Conservative Party itself — so much so that the creative thinkers of the first Thatcherite hour tended to despair, as, returning to Downing Street from a good lunch on strategy, they were confronted by committees and devil-in-detail agendas. The election of 1983 was an easy win: as with the Democrats in the United States, the main opposition party had talked itself into a corner, had split, and anyway offered nothing more than a rerun of the later 1970s. Considerably less than half of the working classes voted Labour, which became almost a regional party, as a north-south gap opened up. There was only one Conservative seat left in Scotland — aptly, at Bearsden outside Glasgow, the northernmost outpost, once upon a time, of the Roman Empire, which was commemorated by a piece of wall and the first recorded Scottish utterance, to the effect that Rome created devastation and called it peace. That sentiment was expressed, less pithily, by its author’s descendants, as the impetus came from southern England, in the accents of which the Prime Minister spoke. And southern England boomed. This should have given prosperity to the north as well, but there were formidable difficulties, especially to do with a system of ‘social’ housing that stopped labour mobility.