http://www.ft.com/cms/s/3/48c8afd8-4af7-11e6-8d68-72e9211e86ab.htmlTurkey slips into the chaos of the Middle East
David Gardner
The plot against Erdogan risks impairing the Nato ally’s fight against Isis, writes David Gardner
©Reuters
The bridge linking Europe and Asia across the Bosphorus in Istanbul was lit up in France’s national colours to mark Turkey’s solidarity after the horrendous Bastille Day truck attack on a festive crowd in Nice. Then, all of a sudden, troops took it over in an attempted coup, ostensibly aimed at restoring the secular order of the republic built on Jacobin lines in the last century by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — slowly bent into neo-Islamist shape by Recep Tayyip Erdogan during this century.
Soldiers and tanks took over TV stations, airports and bridges. The state broadcaster, TRT, went off the air. Jets screamed overhead. Mr Erdogan, a three-time prime minister and now president who has made a habit of closing down dissident newspapers and broadcasters, jailing journalists and shuttering social media, was obliged to address the nation via mobile phone, through the FaceTime video app, held up by a CNN Turk newsreader for public perusal.
This shambolic melange of retro and digital could serve as a metaphor for the way in which Mr Erdogan has simultaneously modernised Turkey and taken it back towards a sort of neo-Ottoman authoritarianism with himself as the contemporary sultan.
Tyrannical in temperament, and bent on untrammelled rule as an executive president under a new French-style constitution he seeks, Mr Erdogan has nevertheless won 10 elections in a row since 2002. He has a preternatural rapport with half the Turkish people and many of his supporters last night answered his call to take to the streets. He and they are making a fight of it. The soldiers who have set the tanks rolling once more had better be sure they have a lot of support — and not just in the army.
One reason for Mr Erdogan’s spectacular political success is that liberals and leftists repudiated a political culture that saw a coup each decade, and lent their support to his moderately Islamist Justice and Development party (AKP) when it stood up to Turkey’s overmighty generals. The army tried to ban the AKP after its second general election victory in 2007, but retreated in the face of a massive government purge, which put one in 10 generals behind bars and defanged the general staff.
To do this, Mr Erdogan relied on a strike force of police, prosecutors and spies loyal to Fethullah Gulen, a secretive Islamic imam resident in the US. As the military trials got ever more baroque with embellished evidence, the AKP came to blows with the Gulenists, who launched corruption probes in 2013 into Mr Erdogan’s inner circle. The ferocity of this intra-Islamist civil war has buckled Turkey’s institutions, and brought the army back towards the circle of power. But in the government’s conspiratorial view, it is the Gulenist “parallel state” — the erstwhile hammer of the generals — that is behind this attempted coup.
There is disaffection in the army, not just because of its loss of influence but with Turkey’s Syria policy. The government until recently permitted a jihadi pipeline of volunteers and arms into Syria, which has enabled Isis to build a network of cells inside the country. Last year, Isis bombed targets linked to the reignited Kurdish insurgency Ankara has fought for three decades. This year it is targeting the Turkish state, not least with its lethal attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk international airport last month. The response to Isis of Mr Erdogan, preoccupied with the Kurdish question, the Gulenists, and cementing his one-man rule, has been tepid.
If, as appeared likely early today, this military plot collapses, Turkey will face a new purge of its security capacity. The AKP battles with the army and then the Gulenists weakened military and police intelligence. However this episode turns out it will further impair the immune system of a Nato country that has been slipping away from Europe into the chaos of the Middle East.
