The Atlantic and Its Enemies

Enlightenments eat their parents. The medical improvements, considerable in their own way — in Ankara, malaria had been a mass killer until the Republic, with its Cubuk reservoir and its devoted doctors — also resulted in a demographic explosion. This was worst in the partly Kurdish east, where polygamy, starting for a boy in his mid- teens, with a girl even younger who was soon ditched, was standard, though not legal. Then again, as France had discovered post-Napoleon, education creates an unappeasable intelligentsia; a Russian reactionary, Konstantin Leontiev, sagely said that, in Russia, ‘the tavern does less damage than the school’. The best products of the educational system, as with developing countries from the Third Republic or united Italy onwards, went into technical services and were very good indeed, but there were others, hanging discontentedly around the media or the educational institutions, and thinking that they knew it all. This was to be an enormous problem in the Turkish seventies, more or less as happened in Chile; and such men and women tended to look on the peasantry, trooping into the towns, as isomorphic magnitudes like a sack of potatoes. Migrant peasants occupied huge areas on the outskirts of the main cities, especially Istanbul. By law, they could not be evicted if they managed to put up a house during one night’s work. These ‘night constructions’ (gecekondu) formed rings round historic Istanbul and Ankara, a terrible affront to modernizing Turkey. Ankara had been planned by central European architects and their Turkish associates in the 1930s, and they had aimed higher than this.

Migrant rurals even besieged the old part of Ankara, where Ataturk had established the modernizing State. You could leave the official entertainment palace of the foreign ministry, where, once, Ataturk had danced the waltz with Western ambassadresses, and perhaps discussed the principles of Bauhaus architecture with Bruno Taut, luminary of Weimar, Moscow and Tokyo. (Taut, out of gratitude, said that he would design Ataturk’s catafalque gratis. He then designed something resembling a huge gilded eggbox. The Turks did not know how to respond. Taut let them off the hook by himself dying, and being buried in it, at Edirne.) Then you would smell kebabs, and have to avoid large, religious-clad women driving their brood along the pavement towards a multifarious bazaar. Istanbul’s population grew from 2 million to 10 million (and by some accounts, even 15 million). There had been 12 million Turks in 1922. By 1950 there were 20 million, by 1975 35 million and by 1980 45 million. The infrastructure could hardly respond to this. Schools were too few, the electricity network was overburdened, and even the sewage system suffered. It was a variant of what western Europe had undergone in the later nineteenth century, but on a much greater scale, and in a much shorter time. In the 1970s order was breaking down.

All enlightened, reforming states encountered a political problem: how far could liberty be sacrificed for the sake of progress? This problem was well-known in Russia or Spain, two countries with which Turkey had a great deal in common. Pushkin had said that ‘the State is the only European in Russia’, and in such countries the army had a role in public affairs that it did not have in more advanced places. It took in ambitious boys from the provinces, sometimes even the peasantry, gave them discipline and education, and so caused them to rise in society (e.g. the chief of staff in 1960 came from a tobacco-farming family, and a later military saviour, Kenan Evren, was the son of a bank clerk in the Balkans). Military schools taught medicine and engineering, and the Turkish officer corps had had a role in the modernization of the country ever since the early nineteenth century. Under Ataturk — himself, in Salonica, a one-time cadet, refugee from a religious school — this went on: the army was at the centre of the State. On the other hand, there was much pressure for political change, in the direction of greater freedom. In the later 1940s there was a split in the ruling single party, the Republicans, partly because of foreign pressure, and partly because the two wings grew further apart. The Republicans, under Ismet Inonu, represented bullying Westernizing virtue, and Inonu had a statue of himself, bigger than the National Monument itself, designed for Taksim Square, where once had been an Ottoman barracks. But there were rivals, interested in prising open the State and, in some grubby cases, using primitive nationalism to expropriate the property of the minorities, especially the quarter-million Greeks in Istanbul. They were also prepared to open up to the peasantry, especially as regards the legalization of religious practices that the Republicans had regarded as ridiculous. The Republicans were by this stage unpopular, as they were associated with a police state.

In 1950, under American pressure, Inonu allowed free elections, and the free-market, liberalizing element, established as the Democratic Party, won an enormous victory. The old Republicans survived in any number only because local prefects had done deals with Kurdish chieftains in the east, whose tribes voted en bloc as instructed. The Democrats were in power for ten years, and started well: American aid flowed in, some of the state restrictions were lifted, a large concrete mosque was put up in the middle of Ankara (with a supermarket underneath) and the Democrats’ leader, Adnan Menderes, won respect abroad because of his NATO connections (he said, ‘Whatever America does is right by us’). Then came the worst mistake of modern Turkish history. The Greeks of Istanbul occupied much of the best real estate and ran the best shops; they were half of the stock exchange. Some were even deputies of the Democratic Party. On 5-6 September 1955 there was a riot in the European part of Istanbul, and the great avenue running through it, once called Grand’ rue de Pera, was filled with broken glass and goods flung out of shop windows, while the police stood by. This was ostensibly done because the Greeks on Cyprus were behaving intolerably against the Turkish minority, but the main factor was simply greed, and stupid greed at that, on the part of Democrat associates. The Greeks (and many Armenians) left Istanbul, except for a tiny remnant, even then — in the Fener district — overshadowed by true-believing Moslems at their truest- believing noisiest, and having to be protected by the army and the police. The Greek district was then taken over by rural migrants, and took two generations to recover. So did the country. Menderes was later executed because of this, though, oddly enough, the Greek Patriarch appeared as a witness on his behalf. The Democrats made whoopee with the budget, lost control of finance, split, had to attempt a fiddling of elections, then tried to govern in authoritarian style. They encouraged religion, whereas Ataturk had determinedly kept it out of public life. Secular Turkey hated all of this, and there was a military coup, on 27 May 1960. A general, Cemal Gursel, now became head of state, and tried, in close co-operation with Inonu, to produce an updated version of Ataturkism. Professors of law produced a revised constitution, in the extraordinary belief that the decreeing of things on paper would mean their realization in practice. The Americans offered almost immediate recognition and $400m credit; more professors — Dutch — arrived with a Plan.

But the outcome was Menderes’s revenge. In the first place, the demographic boom went ahead — by 1980 two thirds of the urban population was under thirty-five, and the villages moved to the towns (and also moved to German towns, in hundreds of thousands). The Democratic Party had been banned, but it carried on in another form, as the Justice Party (Turkish parties sometimes have names with an almost untranslatable religious reference, to the seven deadly virtues — chastity, sobriety, thrift, etc.). The Americans had a soft spot for it, and its leader, the wily Suleyman Demirel, had worked with them, in a company that built the Bosphorus Bridge and the Middle Eastern Technical University. The Republicans, by contrast, were turning increasingly towards the Left, and old Inonu was eventually forced out by a man who had the makings of a Turkish Allende, Bulent Ecevit: very cultivated, a Sanskrit scholar, a considerable poet and quite hopeless in politics. He had to deal with a very divided party. Part of it was rigidly secularist, regarding Islam as a disease. Another part came from a very heretical element of Islam, the Alevis, who treated women as equals, drank wine in the Christian manner, and regarded the holy month of Ramazan, when nothing was supposed to pass the mouth during daylight hours, as ridiculous. Then there were Kurds, also a rough fifth of the population, whose chiefs tended towards deadly rivalry, and were generally willing to change party allegiance according to favours. Already in the early 1960s an uncomfortable pattern was setting in. Roughly 40 per cent of the vote would go to parties with some form of religious programme; another 40 per cent would go to their opposites, some of them veering towards the Left. Then there would be small parties, set up to champion a leader’s ambition. But the large parties themselves only held together if there was a leader with all of the strings in his hands, prepared to behave dictatorially and even corruptly. Coalitions succeeded each other, and the army waited in the wings. A counterpoint of bullying and irresponsibility then went ahead. The trick in politics was to establish personal influence, whether to do favours for your electors at home or for your friends in the capital. There was an element among the educated youth that wandered off into terrorism — much as had happened with ‘Land and Liberty’ in Tsarist Russia, where students had imagined that the masses could only become seriously revolutionary if the police made their lives hellish, by mistake. They provoked trouble, and brought another military coup in 1971, a pointless one. As happened in Chile, the Turkish Left had a great deal more responsibility for its fate than it ever, generally speaking, admitted to.

In the seventies, Ecevit with his rough 40 per cent matched Demirel, with his rough 40. In the hothouse atmosphere of the other 20 per cent, there were strange growths. Certain parts of Turkey had a strongly Islamic tradition, especially Konya, south-east of Ankara, and the Erzurum region, far to the east. Here, in secular eyes, were brainwashed peasants with a vengeance, but the real point was hatred of the corruption that came from Istanbul and Ankara. The leader was a professor of water engineering, Necmettin Erbakan, who had taught in