restored. On previous occasions the generals, taking power, had tended to scratch their heads and drift, but now, in 1980, they had a strategy in mind: the political confusions must be stopped, and that meant coherent behaviour. There was one very significant difference with Chile: it was not a general who took power, the senior one, Kenan Evren, contenting himself with the mainly ceremonial presidency, and spending his time painting (at which he was good).
The overall idea seems to have been to collect moderates of the Demirel and Republican sides perhaps under the leadership of one of the generals’ trusted Republicans, such as the veteran Turhan Feyzioglu. Oddly enough, the old politicians, even in internment, held to illusions, perhaps precisely because their internment was so mild; they never imagined that the National Security Council could do without them, and Demirel, especially, was constantly being telephoned by senior civil servants and politicians whom the generals consulted. One man was essential — Turgut Ozal, the international money-man. He was not particularly keen to have any sort of state-oriented political team in charge. The generals, for their part, despised the politicians, and when they found they could not easily re- form a civilian government, on 18 September they simply handed full powers to the commanders of the martial law districts and nominated an admiral as prime minister. Ozal was happy enough with this solution, for he could push through the economic reforms that he and his business friends wanted to see. Authority tended therefore to settle lower down in the pyramid, and Ozal found it coming his way, as under-secretary of the plan.
Ozal did not believe in plans — he used to laugh, as to how, coming back through the customs at Istanbul airport, he waddled, because he had worn layers of smuggled tights for his wife in thick layers, to avoid paying duty. He had worked at the World Bank and been an irrigation engineer. Turks older than him would also have been engineers or economists, but they would have been from the urban middle (or higher) classes, and secular. Ozal was the product of the Turkey that they had created, in so far as education and mobility had reached far into the depths of Anatolia, and had affected places such as Malatya, where he came from. He was part Kurdish, and in religion belonged to one of the stricter orders (
The reforms announced on 24 January 1980 had followed lines that the IMF and Washington had been recommending with increasing insistence since they had proved to be successful in Pinochet’s Chile. Price controls were at least relaxed, and the state enterprises lost less — $62m as against $290m earlier. Quota lists for imports were cut to six months, as against the earlier twelve, and the trade deficit continued, but the IMF gave a standby credit of $1.25bn — the greatest ever given to date. An essential was to stop the inflation, which meant initial pain, as it did in Chile or for that matter England. There would be serious devaluation — in effect, almost by half — and there would be reliance on an export-led recovery. This would mean freeing foreign exchange from controls — and in Turkey these had been very onerous indeed. You even paid a tax if you left the country. Taxes in general were heavy, and if you bought anything at all, you were required by law to keep the sales record. There was very widespread evasion, the black economy accounting for a good half of sales, and at some stage the system would have to be overhauled, but the budget must first of all be brought nearer to balance. Of course these things were difficult to achieve, and the civil service was deeply unsympathetic; the generals were very irritable, and the large private concerns would much have preferred to co-operate with Demirel, whom they knew (not least as a Mason) from old. Ozal, in the eyes of the establishment a rough peasant, though nominated deputy prime minister, was quite isolated, and when the generals sensed his ambition, they drove him out. But he came back, for an odd reason.
The January measures of 1980 could only really be pushed through if, initially, wage levels were held back. This was difficult. Half of the economy was controlled by the State, with monopolies of this and that, and the trade unions were powerful. There were subsidies for (some) agriculture, and there was elaborate protection for the Koc industrial dynasty, the head of which, old Vehbi, was very astute indeed. (He owed his origins to Ankara. As a small boy he had seen Armenians and Greeks going around on horses, whereas he had his donkey; he wondered how you got a horse. As he grew up, he got the franchise to sell refrigerators in the main square of the town, which had meanwhile become the capital. An oak forest was to grow from this acorn.) The Karabuk works on the Black Sea, started with Soviet help and finished with British, produced indifferent steel with coal, from nearby Zonguldak, of atrocious quality, but everything was interlocking, and the system resisted liberalization on 24 January lines. Telling the workers not to have index-linked wages at a time of high inflation was very difficult indeed. Stopping strikes for a time was easy enough, as in Chile, but for how long? Initially all that happened was that the banks were freed from the restrictions hitherto prevailing. Gold was freed altogether; banks now kept four fifths of their hard-currency earnings instead of handing them to the State. It became legal to hold dollars (or Marks), and the Turkish currency was devalued, from 47 to 80 lire against the dollar; there were fourteen further devaluations up to May 1981, as the government did not bother with the exchange rate. This meant, for the banks, very easy money indeed, as you just shifted in and out of Turkish money as and when, making a huge profit if you happened to have warning that a devaluation was forthcoming. Interest rates were unnaturally high, in Turkish money, and inflation or Turkish paper-money creation tended to rise faster than the dollar. Given the world recession that continued until the turn of 1982-3, the liberalization in Turkey was not an easy matter, and the money that it generated, given the odd combination of liberalization and restriction, produced profiteers and Ponzi (pyramid) schemes. There was, in Turgut Ozal, too much of the grasping provincial, and his (second) wife loved flashy jewellery; her sons were very badly spoilt. This was a Turkish (and Russian) peculiarity. In western Europe, money took four generations to move
Ozal’s own fingers were burnt, and he dropped out of politics for a while. Then, in time for the election of 1983, he returned (from a weight cure in the USA, where he fell to 13 stone, but no doubt also took time off to talk in Washington). Of all oddities he, standing with a permitted opposition party, ANAP or ‘Motherland’, now gained in popularity precisely because the generals, with their dummy parties, had had to bear the brunt of the blame for the liberalizing policies that Ozal himself had introduced. Besides, the Americans regarded him as extremely useful. Their own interest was straightforward, the big base at Incirlik, on the edges of Iran, Iraq and Syria, with a network of listening posts and small garrisons stretching from Sinop on the Black Sea through Diyarbak?r on the Tigris. When the Russians went into Afghanistan, the Americans found themselves in alliance with Islam, and, in Turkey, Ozal had his links in that quarter (as indeed had Menderes before him, also, for much of the time, the Americans’ man). In 1983 there was an election, and ANAP swept in. Boom ensued. The gamble on exports was a success, as they doubled (to $6bn) between 1980 and 1986; for the first time, Turkey became a part of the world economy, selling manufactures rather than just raw materials. Money poured into Istanbul, especially, and the growth rate also doubled (to 7 per cent in industry).
But there was at the heart of it all a great problem. Ozal’s regime was based mainly on relatively upstart Istanbul (or Izmir) money, and provincial Anatolia was also coming into the picture (places such as his own Malatya, and more especially Antep). The men who emerged in such places were generally pious, though in a rather lazy and not consistent way, and under the generals of 1980 Islam made much progress. It was helpful against Marxism, or at any rate might counter the role of so many Alevis, heretical and easily secularized, on the Left. In the seventies, the observation of Ramazan, the fasting month, when nothing — not a cigarette, not a drop even of water — had been supposed to pass the lips, sunrise to sunset, had not been much observed: how, in a hot month, in a proper job in a city, could that fail to turn people into murderous vegetables? Now, its observance grew. In the two decades after the 1980 coup Turkey became in some degree desecularized, and even in the very centre of Istanbul, the
