{"id":87018,"date":"2013-12-31T03:36:14","date_gmt":"2013-12-31T01:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/?p=87018"},"modified":"2023-04-27T14:09:18","modified_gmt":"2023-04-27T11:09:18","slug":"will-turkeys-erdogan-cause-his-own-downfall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/2013\/12\/31\/will-turkeys-erdogan-cause-his-own-downfall\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Turkey\u2019s Erdo\u011fan Cause His Own Downfall?"},"content":{"rendered":"
December 27, 2013<\/div>\n

<\/h1>\n
Posted by Dexter Filkins<\/cite><\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
\n
\n

The revolution always eats its children: in France, in the Soviet Union, in China, and, now, in Turkey.<\/p>\n

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, one of the most remarkable figures in the modern Middle East, is fast discovering that the authoritarian measures he has increasingly relied on to govern Turkey, and the cult of personality he has built around himself, are conspiring to bring about his political demise. Early this week, three members of Erdo\u011fan\u2019s cabinet, their sons implicated in a far-reaching corruption investigation, resigned, and one of them called on Erdo\u011fan himself to quit. Yesterday, Erdo\u011fan, in a blatant attempt to thwart the investigation, dismissed the lead prosecutor<\/span> after he announced that he was investigating Erdo\u011fan\u2019s son. The drama is just beginning.<\/p>\n

\n

In nearly eleven years in power, Erdo\u011fan, as the head of the Justice and Development Party, has transformed the Turkish state and society, and helped send the economy on a decade-long run of rapid growth. With a mix of populist bluster and political savvy, Erdo\u011fan gave voice to the long-suppressed yearnings of Turkey\u2019s pious majority and, at least in the beginning, seemed to give proof to the idea that Islam and democracy could thrive together. Through all of that, Erdo\u011fan broke the power of the Turkish military, a reactionary institution that has stifled Turkey\u2019s democratic yearnings since its founding.<\/p>\n

But in recent years, intoxicated by his own ascent, Erdo\u011fan began to act like a leader who believed that Turkey\u2019s success and his own could not be separated. And the very mechanisms that enabled his rise began to turn on him.<\/p>\n

From the beginning, Erdo\u011fan\u2019s success was made possible by, among other things, an alliance with the followers of Fethullah G\u00fclen, the leader of a far-flung Islamic order whose members pride themselves not just on their piety but also on their business acumen. As I wrote last year in the magazine, the G\u00fclenists, as they\u2019re known, come across in person as amalgams of Dale Carnegie and a Christian missionary: smiling, clean cut, and relentlessly cheerful. G\u00fclen himself lives in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania, having fled Turkey in 1999, when it appeared as though the Turkish military was preparing to arrest him on charges of conspiring to overthrow the country\u2019s secular order. (G\u00fclen was acquitted in 2008, but he has not returned.)<\/p>\n

For much of Turkey\u2019s history, civilian governments, together with the military, enforced a rigid and often mindless secularism, where even the most nominal displays of piety were suppressed. For this reason, the G\u00fclenists, as members of an Islamic order, operated in secret, rarely advertising their affiliation, even though their brand of Islam is ostensibly moderate.<\/p>\n

When Erdo\u011fan came to power, in 2003, the G\u00fclenists, whether by agreement or by design, began to infiltrate Turkey\u2019s police departments and judiciary. This enabled Erdo\u011fan to begin an epic crackdown on the military and on what Turks call \u201cthe deep state,\u201d a shadowy network of \u00e9lites that, since Turkey\u2019s founding in 1923, has helped enforce the secular order. The crackdown, beginning in 2007, targeted something called \u201cErgenekon,\u201d which prosecutors and police claimed was the name given to the deep state itself. Over the past six years, hundreds of Turks have been arrested and jailed, not just military officers but university leaders, newspapers editors, owners of television stations, and opposition politicians, as well.<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t much doubt that something called \u201cthe deep state\u201d actually existed in Turkey, and that it used violence and intimidation to enforce the secular state enshrined by Turkey\u2019s founder, Mustafa Kemal, or Atat\u00fcrk. But the Ergenekon investigation, along with its sister case, called Sledgehammer, rapidly evolved into something much more pernicious: a campaign to crush Erdo\u011fan\u2019s political opposition. The Ergenekon and Sledgehammer prosecutions were built on mostly fabricated evidence.<\/p>\n

In case that didn\u2019t work, Erdo\u011fan embarked on an aggressive campaign to silence anyone who might criticize him, most notably the press. Just last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists reported that Turkey had forty reporters behind bars, more than any other country in the world.<\/p>\n

All this worked for a while, in no small part because Erdo\u011fan faced almost no criticism from the West. The Obama Administration, grateful for an ally in an otherwise unfriendly part of the world, largely gave the Prime Minister a pass. Erdo\u011fan, who is planning to run for President in 2014, seemed destined to stay in power for years to come.<\/p>\n

But then it all unravelled. It\u2019s not clear why Erdo\u011fan and G\u00fclen are splitting now, but, according to some reports, the roots may lie in disagreements over foreign policy and how to deal with the country’s Kurdish minority. Among other things, the G\u00fclenists oppose Erdo\u011fan\u2019s arming of rebels in Syria and the cooling of the Turkish government\u2019s long-standing friendship with Israel. The Erdo\u011fan-G\u00fclen break also follows Erdo\u011fan\u2019s brutal suppression of anti-government protests that swept the country ealier this year. Those began when the police forcibly evicted a group of peaceful demonstrators in Gezi Park in Istanbul, where they had gathered to protest Erdo\u011fan\u2019s drift toward authoritarianism. The resulting crackdown injured some eight thousand people and killed five. For Erdo\u011fan and Turkey, if not for G\u00fclen, Gezi Park was a turning point.<\/p>\n

What happens now? The AK Party, as it is known, has been in power for eleven years, and the smell of corruption is everywhere. Erdo\u011fan has denied any wrongdoing, and said this week that anyone who tried to implicate him would be left \u201cempty-handed.\u201d But if prosecutors are inclined to follow their leads, and if the imam in Pennsylvania is behind them, there is no telling how far they will go, or when stability will finally return to Turkey.<\/p>\n

Photograph: Umit Bektas\/Reuters<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 27, 2013 Posted by Dexter Filkins The revolution always eats its children: in France, in the Soviet Union, in China, and, now, in Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan, one of the most remarkable figures in the modern Middle East, is fast discovering that the authoritarian measures he has increasingly relied on to govern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":775194,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[1018],"class_list":["post-87018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-turkey","tag-recep-tayyip-erdogan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/775194"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}