Two months ago in Istanbul, nine thousand policemen fanned out across the city’s streets, snipers took positions on rooftops, up above military helicopters circled the skies, down below a submarine lurked in the straits of the Bosporus, as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan celebrated the 15th Century Ottoman conquest of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II.
“We will witness the birth of a totally different Turkey. So what do we say for this?” Erdogan asked a rapturous flag-waving crowd dressed in Ottoman-era garments, “We say new constitution, new Turkey and a new system of government.”
Last night, shots rang out across Istanbul, a state television office was seized, tanks mowed down civilians, as a faction of the military rose up to depose Erdogan. The details of the violence are still trickling in – at least 161 people have died thus far – but it appears that Erdogan has survived the coup which aimed to overrun Istanbul afresh.
“Erdogan has clearly emerged stronger,” said Candar Yildiz, an Istanbul-based journalist in a phone interview this morning, adding that a purge of the once powerful military had begun.
President Erdogan is now free to pursue his grandest project yet – transforming Turkey from a parliamentary democracy to a Presidential one, a move likely to give him ever greater powers.
“Anyone who opposes Erdogan, even within his own party, is out of the game,” said Garo Paylan, an elected representative of the opposition HDP in an interview in May, claiming that switching to a presidential system would pave the way for an Erdogan-led presidential dictatorship.
For the government, the failed coup proves that the President’s fear – that his critics were plotting his downfall – were far from unfounded.
Yet well before yesterday’s coup, Erdogan’s critics say, the President had hijacked the Parliament, subverted the judiciary, muzzled the free press, and used the country’s broad libel and anti-terror legislation to jail lawyers, journalists, academics and politicians opposed to his government. To date, the government has filed cases against more than 1,800 people for “insulting the president”. The failed coup, which all Opposition parties opposed, is likely to give the government greater leverage to target its critics.
“The definition of terrorism is so large in Turkey that if you criticise the government, you are a terrorist,” Paylan said, adding that he was physically assaulted in Parliament for raising the issue of the Armenian genocide of 1915-17.
“Erdogan calls people directly to intimidate them,” said a journalist who lost her job for reporting on Turkey’s oppressive military presence in Kurdistan. In 2014, the media was abuzz with Turkey’s own version of the Radia tapes where a male voice – purportedly of the President – was heard instructing his son to move 30 million euros from a family safe to an undisclosed location. Also in the cache of recordings was one of the same voice calling Erdogan Demiroren, the 75-year-old owner of the daily Milliyet newspaper, and shouting until Demiroren was reduced to tears.
One of the journalists fired by Milliyet under pressure from the government, was an editor called Can Dundar who moved to the Cumhuriyet, an Opposition daily. In May 2015, the Cumhuriyet published video footage they claimed illustrated that Turkey was secretly supplying weapons and ammunition to rebel groups fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
President Erdogan accused the journalists of espionage. “Whoever wrote this story will pay a heavy price for this. I will not let him go unpunished,” he said on live television.
In May this year, Dundar and his deputy, Erdem Gul, appeared before the judiciary to be sentenced, when an armed man chanting nationalist slogans burst into the court premises and opened fire. No one was hurt, but the judges were un-moved by the assassination attempt on the journalists. Gul got 5 years in prison, while Dundar was sentenced to 5 years and 10 months.
“In the space of two hours we have experienced two assassination attempts: one was done with a gun, the other was judicial,” said Dundar, as he addressed the press after the verdict was announced.
“It isn’t just journalists, even lawyers have been arrested and charged with supporting terrorism for simply visiting their clients in jail,” said Raziye Ozturk, one of 12 lawyers accused of working for the banned Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Ozturk, who is Kurdish, is accused of allegedly ferrying messages between suspected terrorists during jail visits to meet her clients.
“I told the courts I have been visiting prison since 1992, when I was four years old,” she said, explaining that she decided to become a lawyer when her uncle was arrested for working for the PKK when she was still a child. “If they arrest me, I thought its okay, my uncle has been in prison for 24 years, I’ll spend some time with him.” Ozturk is yet to be arrested, but the charges against her still stand.
In 1453, Sultan Mehmed II stormed the walls of Constantinople, bringing the city now known as Istanbul under Ottoman rule after over 1,000 years of Byzantine rule. Popular legend, recorded in Jason Goodwin’s Lords of the Horizon, has it that on the first day of the conquest, he rode through the now deserted palace of the emperors, murmuring the lines of an ancient Persian poem, “An owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiab/ The spider spins his web in the palace of the Caesars.”
On television this morning, President Erdogan appeared invulnerable once more as he vowed to bring the plotters to justice, but the deeper tensions between his authoritarian government and sections of Turkish society remain.
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