Erdogan Rising
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Everyone has heard of Erdogan: Turkey’s bullish, mercurial president is the original postmodern populist. Around the world, other strongmen are now following the path that he has blazed. For the first time, ERDOGAN RISING tells the inside story of how a democracy on the fringe of Europe has succumbed to dictatorship. Hannah Lucinda Smith, Turkey correspondent with The Times of London, has witnessed all that has befallen Turkey and the wider region since the onset of the Arab Spring. From the frontlines of the wars in Syria and eastern Turkey, through the refugee crisis and the attempted coup against Erdogan, she traces how chaos in the Middle East has blown back on a country that was once heralded as the model of Islamic democracy. With access to key insiders, she also paints a vivid portrait of Erdogan’s descent from flawed democrat to staunch authoritarian.ERDOGAN RISING is a story rooted in Smith’s first-hand experiences of a country divided, told through the eyes of a rich cast of characters. She journeys into the Turkey where Erdogan commands a following so devoted they compose songs in his honour, adorn their houses with his picture, and lay down their lives to keep him in power. But on the other side – sometimes just a few hundred metres down the road – she also meets the Turks who are mourning the loss of the country they once knew.ERDOGAN RISING serves as a chilling warning of democracy’s fragility – and reveals how much people can change.
ERDOĞAN RISING
The Battle for the Soul of Turkey
Hannah Lucinda Smith
Copyright (#ulink_18d5260e-b0c6-55ec-91ed-289d403bc1db)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Hannah Lucinda Smith 2019
Cover image © Getty Images/Bloomberg/Contributor
Hannah Lucinda Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
Maps by Martin Brown
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Source ISBN: 9780008308841
Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008308865
Version: 2019-08-26
Dedication (#u707da21c-7862-5bb4-965a-8c8498fbf5b1)
For my dad, who planted so many seeds
Epigraph (#ulink_fef9ac80-28c2-5e9d-8505-1be4a7229e3a)
Yet the school of Turkish politics was so ignoble that not even the best could graduate from it unaffected.
T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom
Contents
Cover (#u43f9da31-5fac-5ea9-be8f-ec69aa318b4f)
Title Page (#u3460cdbc-8042-5fd3-a5ab-69240409d4dd)
Copyright (#ucc6ae4ae-4d3c-54db-8baf-ed70bc98a32f)
Dedication
Epigraph (#ubf605a37-2e16-5e9a-8f1c-4ec16f01696f)
Maps (#ucef7d24f-63d0-5cd3-aaac-3b97a16dfd90)
Cast of Characters (#u9ac5fbd4-102a-5197-8e9f-a1f55e18145a)
Acronyms (#u6fe90fcb-8142-56e1-915a-ddf37021bed3)
Timeline (#u14051206-3a22-5325-bc38-43553db00774)
Introduction (#u3fa52145-3157-5af4-a8b0-8aeaa69746fe)
1 Two Turkeys, Two Tribes (#u2df00b5f-e992-5292-8f77-1015baf606af)
2 Syria: The Backstory (#ue6693044-1851-5713-b562-02e629443993)
3 Building Brand Erdoğan (#u1fa676d2-add5-5317-978c-2c3f90ecea4f)
4 Erdoğan and Friends (#u2fc104dd-82db-58fd-9253-79b777b60d3d)
5 Syria: The War Next Door (#litres_trial_promo)
6 The Exodus (#litres_trial_promo)
7 The Kurds (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Peace, Interrupted (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Coup (#litres_trial_promo)
10 Atatürk’s Children (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Erdoğan’s New Turkey (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Spin (#litres_trial_promo)
13 The Misfits (#litres_trial_promo)
14 The War Leaders (#litres_trial_promo)
15 Erdoğan’s Endgame (#litres_trial_promo)
List of Illustrations (#litres_trial_promo)
Picture Section
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
MAPS (#ulink_2b6042e4-a4ea-5e54-9ee2-2b513b40df10)
Turkey (#u11b8d032-093f-56e7-b056-f227d1f8cc7a)
Syria and Turkish border region (#udc1acf60-fd99-5d37-8de9-8c021f1257a5)
Refugee smuggling routes from Turkey to Europe (#litres_trial_promo)
Kurdish region of Turkey, Iraq and Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
Istanbul (#litres_trial_promo)
Areas where Turkish army is fighting in northern Syria (#litres_trial_promo)
CAST OF CHARACTERS (#ulink_b58fb3af-8acb-5096-8c93-210ebf0bbe4f)
ACRONYMS (#ulink_feb07a4d-c0d7-53c0-9452-b713786beecb)
TIMELINE (#ulink_61bec080-009c-523b-84fc-9be61b3ac0fd)
INTRODUCTION (#ulink_a86fede9-202c-5d46-99fb-42201d149f09)
July 2016
It is less than forty-eight hours since rogue soldiers tried to kill him and here Erdoğan is, back on stage. The sun is setting and the call to prayer is sounding, and the president is wiping a tear from his eye.
‘Erol was an old friend of mine,’ he starts, then breaks. ‘I cannot speak any more. God is great.’
Erol Olçok: Erdoğan’s ad man, his trusted spin doctor, his loyal friend. One of the first to race to the Bosphorus bridge last night, his corpse now before us in a coffin.
Nothing will be as it was before, for Olçok’s family, for Erdoğan, or for Turkey. Two nights ago, as Istanbul’s glitterati sat drinking on the banks of the Bosphorus, tanks filled the bridge and war planes split the skies. The army was revolting against Erdoğan – but soon Erdoğan’s own infantry was on the streets, with Erol Olçok at the first line. Bare-chested young men stood side by side with headscarved women in front of machine-gun fire on this midsummer night; others lay down on tarmac in front of rolling tanks. And as fortunes turned against the putschist generals, Erdoğan’s angry, shirtless, sweaty men removed their belts to whip the coup’s surrendering foot soldiers. Their twisted faces were lit with the perfect aura of an early summer’s morning in Istanbul: a glorious backdrop of dawn over the city that spans two continents. The images flew around social media within minutes. They were beautiful, and they were horrifying.
The coup has been crushed but the toll is huge. Two hundred and sixty-five people have died over the bloody span of this night, more than half of them civilians who came out to resist in Erdoğan’s name. Erol Olçok was shot dead alongside his sixteen-year-old son, Abdullah, as soldiers fired into the protesters on the bridge. Thousands more have been injured. There are still sporadic bursts of fighting as suspected plotters resist arrest; Istanbul’s airspace reverberates with the roar of patrolling F-16 fighter jets. The streets have been hauntingly quiet all weekend, as Turks stay inside, watch the news and pray.
Among the dead: a local mayor shot point blank in the stomach as he tried to speak with the soldiers; the older brother of one of Erdoğan’s aides; a famous columnist with the pro-government newspaper Yeni şafak. A crack team of special forces soldiers had burst into the Mediterranean resort where Erdoğan was holidaying, ready to kill him if necessary and missing him only by minutes.
Erdoğan has already bounced back, his close brush with death seemingly leaving no dent. He has returned to Istanbul, banished the soldiers back to their barracks, and called the coup attempt a ‘gift from God’ that will allow him to finally cleanse the state of those trying to destroy it. Six thousand people have been detained by the time he addresses the thousands-strong crowd at Erol Olçok’s funeral, at a mosque on the Asian side of Istanbul. The imam implores God as he leads the prayers for the slain man and his son: ‘Protect us from the wickedness of the educated!’
A weight is descending on Turkey. Each night Taksim Square fills with huge crowds of Erdoğan’s supporters, turning out to make sure his enemies don’t come back. Within days a state of emergency is declared, and every day thousands more suspected collaborators are arrested. The alleged ringleaders are paraded on state television with black eyes and bandages around their heads.
Privately, friends tell me they are worried. Goodbye to the Republic, writes one by text message. Goodbye to democracy.
The heart of my Istanbul neighbourhood, which usually bustles at all hours with street sellers, taxi drivers and prostitutes, is near-silent the morning after the coup; the pavements empty, the traffic thinned down to a few lonely cars. The only people I bump into as I walk around the deserted streets are the women who always stand on the main thoroughfare on a Saturday, selling black-and-white postcards to the shoppers. Usually they ask for five liras for this low-resolution print of Atatürk, father to the Turkish nation. Today, a middle-aged woman with blonde perm presses one silently into my hand.
‘Man, this is nothing but a country of cults,’ says my friend Yusuf a few days later, dazed and still trying to make sense of what is unfolding. ‘It’s Jerusalem in the Year Zero.’
In the years that have passed since July 2016, as I have filled newspaper column inches with stories of Erdoğan’s swelling crackdown on his opponents, his skewed election wins and questionable wars, I have been asked the same question time and again: ‘Why doesn’t the West just cut Erdoğan off? Make him a pariah, and leave him and Turkey to go their own way?’
The morality is complex but the answer is simple: we can’t turn our backs on Turkey because Turkey and Erdoğan matter. Forget old clichés about East-meets-West – it is far more important than that. Here is a country that buffers Europe on one side, the Middle East on another, and the old Soviet Union on a third – and which absorbs the impacts of chaos and upheaval in each of those regions. During the Soviet era, it took in refugees from the eastern bloc looking to escape the despotism of communism. When that empire collapsed, it became a place where the poor ex-Soviets went for work, and the rich showed up to party. Now, with the Middle East sinking into ever-greater turmoil, it is the world’s biggest refugee-hosting nation, with five million from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and others.
Turkey is a member of the G20, and is recognised as one of the world’s largest economies. It has the second biggest army in NATO, the Western military alliance which, with the rising expansionist ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, is finding itself sucked into a new Cold War. More than six million Turks live abroad, the street ambassadors of a country that trades and negotiates with almost every other nation on earth. This is not a far-off hermit-state, isolated from the rest of the world. It is a major player, vital to global security and prosperity.
For millennia, the ground on which modern Turkey stands has been coveted and fought over because it stands at the nexus of trade routes and civilisations. To see it for yourself, spend an hour people-watching under the soaring ceiling of the new Istanbul airport, the biggest of Erdoğan’s increasingly outlandish vanity construction projects. It was opened in April 2019, and the Turkish government says that more than 200 million people will pass through its halls by the year 2022, making it the biggest and busiest in the world – twice as many passengers as Atlanta Airport, two and a half times as many as Heathrow. Cruise through its duty-free shopping area and you will spot Gulf Arab women wrapped in black fabric with only their eyes showing alongside sunburnt and flustered Brits in ill-advised tank-tops and shorts. There will be dreadlocked backpackers, preened Russian princesses, and, if you time it right, Islamic pilgrims swathed in white sheets making their way to Mecca. There will be people with wide Asiatic faces, and statuesque African women swathed in fabulous prints. Turkey sits at the centre of all of this.
It sits, too, at the centre of the journeys that the people on the wrong side of globalisation are making – the illicit trafficking routes that stretch from the Middle East and Africa, through Turkey and the Aegean Sea to Europe. In Istanbul’s backstreet tea shops another kind of travel market is flourishing, no less buoyant than that in the ticket halls of the new Istanbul airport. Here, shady men in leather jackets cut deadly deals with desperate people. Survival does not come guaranteed with a smuggler’s ticket to Europe, but it will cost you more than a budget flight from the shiny new airport.
So let’s think about what might happen if Erdoğan were to turn Turkey’s back on the West entirely, or if the country were to descend into full-on chaos. That surge of people in 2015, travelling from Turkey’s shores to Greece in search of a new life in Europe? That was nothing. There are millions more in the developing world still desperate to make that journey, and a collapsed Turkey could be their back door. What if, even worse, there were to be a major conflict or economic collapse in Turkey itself? Not only would thousands, perhaps millions, of Turks join the flow to Europe, but shrewd leaders like Russia’s Vladimir Putin would be quick to capitalise on the chaos to expand his territories and influence, just as he has done in Syria.
Erdoğan is no fool. He knows how important he is and he plays on it, often seeming to push his Western allies’ buttons just to see what will happen. He may sometimes look like a man deranged, but he is also a smart political operator who was refining his brand of populism a decade and a half before Donald Trump cottoned on. If Western countries want to contain and control Erdoğan – as they will have to if they are to keep Turkey stable and engaged in the world – then first they need to understand him. More than that, they need to understand why so many Turks adore him.
What is there to adore? On the face of it, not very much. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan lives in a thousand-room palace complex, Aksaray (White Palace), that he built almost immediately on becoming president. He and his followers have a taste for outlandish historical dressing-up. In a photo call with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, he posed on the staircase of Aksaray with soldiers decked out in costumes from the various eras of the Ottoman Empire. Despite his constant harping on about his working-class roots, and his apparent championing of the underdog against the elites, his wife and daughters dress in haute couture from the famous fashion houses of Europe.
The party Erdoğan leads, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, or AKP), is the most successful in Turkey’s democratic history, even though it has never won more than 50 per cent of the vote. Erdoğan himself has stood at the helm of Turkish politics longer than any other leader in the country’s history. Since first becoming prime minister in 2003 he has quashed the power of the military, rewritten the country’s constitution, remoulded its foreign relations and mastered divide-and-rule politics better than any other current world leader.
Erdoğan’s grip on power might often appear shaky – he only just clinches victory each time he takes his country to the ballot box. But it is this constant sense of threat, this dread that he could be ousted and everything go back to the way it was before he came, that galvanises his supporters. He is not an Assad or a Putin, who use their faked and overwhelming electoral victories to cling on in their palaces. Erdoğan’s continuing dominance over Turkey rests as heavily on those who despise him as it does on those who idolise him. In order to be loved more, he must show his fanbase that there are those who are ready to overthrow him – and could feasibly do so. So, too, must they sense the constant threat in order to feel the wave of overwhelming ecstasy when he comes out on top after yet another crisis – and there have been many of those.
Turkey is still officially a candidate for EU membership, yet in my time covering this country as a newspaper correspondent I have been detained by the police twice, tear-gassed more times than I can remember, and had a Turkish tank turn its turret on me as I tried to speak with Syrians fleeing an onslaught of violence behind the closed border. From my front door I have watched the country I call home nosedive down the rankings for democracy, press freedom and human rights. Like every other journalist in Turkey I am constantly reconfiguring the limits of what I can say. Can I laugh? Criticise? Question? The threat of imprisonment or deportation always lingers in the air for the country’s international press corps, but for Turkish journalists it is real. Some sixty-eight are currently behind bars, the highest number of any country in the world. Add to them the tens of thousands of academics, opposition activists, serving politicians and alleged coup plotters who are also languishing in jail, waiting for trials that are likely to take years to come to court, and you start to get a sense of the kind of country Turkey has become – although a tourist searching for a cheap holiday might still look at the weak lira and the turquoise seas and happily bring their family here for a fortnight. While the package-deal masses race to the all-inclusive resorts and adventurous weekenders explore Istanbul’s atmospheric backstreets, Turks are watching their savings crumble, food prices soar and their children frantically search for any way out of the country.
To write – and to live – under Erdoğan’s tightening authoritarianism is to cohabit with a voice in your head that asks Are you sure you want to say that? every time you press send on an article or crack a joke with a stranger. It is to see your tendency for social smoking soar into a daily, furtive habit that you indulge by the window late at night, and then to look in the mirror in the morning and realise that the faint worry line between your eyebrows is setting into a deep crevice. Dictatorship screws with your sex life; it makes you go through an internal checklist on every person you meet – what are they wearing? Where are they from? Who do they work for and how far can I trust them? I hear my neighbours rowing more often these days, witness more fights breaking out on Istanbul’s streets. The Turks who love the way things are going like to rub it in everyone else’s face. The Turks who hate it usually spill everything to the Westerners they meet – some of the few safe sounding boards they have left. Conversations that start with ‘How long have you lived in Turkey?’ usually come round to ‘Why on earth do you still stay?’ The stress of wondering if your phone is tapped and your flat being watched slows down your brain, becomes a tiring distraction, while at some point, you realise that all your conversations with friends come back to politics, and that although there is plenty of material for cynical, satirical humour none of it makes you feel much better once you’re done laughing. To live in this system is to watch people you know be seduced by power and money, and happily throw away their moral compass as they pursue them. It is to suck up to people you despise because in order to survive you have to – and then to start despising yourself.
All of this creeps up on you, and by the time you realise what you are looking at it is already too late. It was only after the coup attempt that I saw clearly what had been happening all along – the descent of Turkey’s shaking democracy into one-man rule, the dawn of the state of Erdoğan. While I was focusing on the minutiae of daily news, on the war in Syria and the refugee crisis in Europe, his dominance had grown so entrenched that he had become inseparable from the state, and the state indivisible from the nation. Now, the answer to the eternal question posed by every journalist in Turkey is that it is fine to laugh and question and criticise – so long as you leave Erdoğan out of it. But in a country so monopolised, that leaves very little room for any discussion at all.
I have seen Turkey and Erdoğan through seven elections, dozens of terror attacks, a coup attempt, a civil war, foreign misadventures, slanging matches with Europe, mass street protests, a refugee influx and a massive purge of the public sector. And each time, when I have thought, this must be it, this will finish him, he has come out on top even stronger.
I have to give it to him – Turkey’s president has handed me some great material. Often, I have wished I could hand it back.
Erdoğan is the original postmodern populist. In power for seventeen years, his latest election win in June 2018 means he will stay until at least 2023. Already there is a generation of Turks who can remember little or nothing before the Erdoğan era, and his detractors have much to worry about. They fret over his creeping Islamisation of Turkey, once the staunchest of secular states. They point to his fierce crackdown on Kurdish rebels in the east of his country, where hundreds of thousands have been killed or displaced, and his cosiness with armed rebel groups of questionable ideology in Syria. Europe, which once saw Erdoğan as its darling, now deals with him increasingly as if he were an obnoxious teenager. The inhabitants of the Greek islands within spitting distance of the Turkish coast hold their collective breath and brace each time he threatens to open his borders to allow hundreds of thousands of migrants to flow across the Aegean in cheap plastic boats.
I have spent six years watching Erdoğan, speaking to his followers, and sniffing the winds. I think about him every day and write about him on most days, even though we have never met. But I never set out to be an Erdoğan-watcher, or even to be a Turkey correspondent.
In early 2013 I moved from London to Antakya, a tiny town on Turkey’s southern border with Syria, to pursue a career as a freelance war correspondent. The war next door had turned Antakya into a busy hive of spooks, arms dealers, refugees and journalists. The Syrian rebels had captured two nearby border crossings from President Bashar al-Assad’s forces, and I spent a year crossing back and forth through them into Syria to report on the spiralling slaughter. But as Syria turned darker and colleagues started to go missing at the hands of criminal gangs and Islamist militias, the journalists dropped away from Antakya. Along with most of the Syria reporter crowd I moved north, to Istanbul, where not so much was happening.
The huge Gezi Park protests, which in the spring of 2013 had briefly morphed from small environmentalist demonstrations into the most serious street opposition Erdoğan had ever faced, had now petered out into leftist forums scattered across Istanbul’s upmarket districts. They were happy protests – anyone could stand on a soapbox and, instead of clapping (too bawdy and overwhelming), the audience would wiggle their raised hands in appreciation. I doubt they caused Erdoğan too much anguish. For a year or so after Gezi, small-scale street demonstrations became the city’s number one participation sport – with protagonists boiled down to a hard core who just seemed to enjoy getting tear-gassed. One student ringleader I interviewed talked about upcoming protests as ‘clashes with the cops’, as if that were the main point of the event. The demonstrations became so common and predictable they were more of a nuisance than news. Several times over the course of that year, tear gas seeped into my bedroom as I tried to sleep.
I was bored and sad. I had left Syria, a story I had moved countries for and invested so much energy in. I yearned for the day I could go back and start reporting from there again. I was still dating a Syrian man down in Antakya, and I spent half of my time there with him. Strange as it feels to remember it now, there just wasn’t much of a story up in Istanbul.
But one day I fell in love. Travelling back from Antakya to Istanbul on the cheap late-night flight, I looked out of the window as the plane came in to land in a huge swoop across the city. On either side of the black scar of the Bosphorus, millions of pinprick lights marked out the shape of the shoreline, the traffic-clogged roads, the bridges and the palaces. From above, this scruffy city glistens, and I was glad to be back: it’s a feeling I still get every time the seatbelt sign comes on over Istanbul. It had taken me six months to realise that my banishment from Syria had landed me in the most beautiful, melancholy, fascinating city in the world. Gradually I stopped going down to Antakya, and my relationship with the Syrian fell away.
So, by chance rather than by my own good judgement, I was one of the few reporters based in Turkey full time when the news started flowing – the bombings, the diplomatic spats with Europe, and the overwhelming interest in Erdoğan. As the months progressed, I realised that even the most parochial, insignificant Turkish story could make a headline if Erdoğan were somehow involved. One I particularly remember is a story about his wife, Emine, and a speech she had made suggesting that the Ottoman sultans’ harem, the place where scores of potential sexual partners were kept, could be considered a bastion of feminism. The Western press went nuts – even though there is a serious line of academic debate that would concur with Emine. The interest in Erdoğan, as well as the growing chaos in Turkey, soon landed me regular work filing reports for The Times.
I found myself fascinated by him, too. The first time I saw Erdoğan in the flesh was not for a story – it was just because I happened to be in the area and was interested. In May 2013, while I was still living in Antakya, a double car-bombing hit Reyhanlı, another small Turkish border town hosting thousands of Syrian refugees. The attack was the first spill-over from the Syrian conflict, and the toll was horrific: fifty-two people killed and the heart of the town ripped out. Pieces of seared flesh were later found in the town’s sewers, so intense was the force of the blasts. Some Syrians headed back across the border into the war zone, fearing they might soon feel the brunt of the locals’ anger if they stayed. A week later, Erdoğan went to Reyhanlı to speak to the people. As it was only half an hour down the road from Antakya, I decided to go.
Compared to what I would see in later years, the crowd then was small and calm and Erdoğan’s speech was measured. But that day I noticed certain things I would go on to see again and again: how hundreds of people appeared to have been bussed in from every corner of the country, how party volunteers were handing out flags and baseball caps which, when televised, gave the appearance of a sea of red, and how the people who had showed up seemed to care far more about being close to Erdoğan than about what had happened in Reyhanlı.
How different that low-key event was to the time I saw him four years later, on a chilly May Sunday in 2017. It was a month after he had snatched narrow victory in a constitutional referendum to switch legislative power from the parliament to the president, and the AKP was holding its party congress in Ankara’s main basketball arena. By the time I took my seat at 8 a.m., the entire place was packed and rowdy with young men chanting for their hero. Erdoğan was due to take the stage around noon, to reclaim his place at the head of the party. He had nominally stepped down when he resigned as prime minister and was elected president three years earlier – the head of state was supposed to be politically unaffiliated according to the old, now-discarded constitution. In reality he had never loosened his grip over the party. He continued to campaign for the AKP in parliamentary elections, and had publicly ousted a prime minister who had dared to stray too far from his line.
As a political spectacle, the congress was incredible. There were men in the crowd who had arrived dressed as Ottoman sultans, sitting alongside Kurdish women holding banners proclaiming they were from şırnak, an eastern town that had recently been decimated by fighting between Turkish security forces and Kurdish militants. ‘Everything for the homeland!’ they whooped, ululating as Middle Easterners do at weddings – a bizarre celebration of their home town having been smashed to rubble. Music boomed non-stop from the speakers – a limited repeat playlist of Ottoman marching music, and the referendum campaign song titled ‘Yes, of course’. The one that got the loudest singalong was the dombra, a paean to Erdoğan and an unashamedly cringing anthem. ‘He is the voice of the oppressed, he is the lush voice of a silent world. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan!’ the lyrics begin, continuing on a similar theme through four verses.
Erdoğan entered the building as scheduled, accompanied by his wife and son-in-law, the then-energy minister Berat Albayrak, who most believe he is priming as heir. Tubs of red carnations had been strategically placed around the edges of the stands and Erdoğan threw them out to his adoring crowd as he did a victory lap. The grey men on the stage must have felt rather outshone as they reeled through their dry lists of candidates for various posts within the party. For top job Erdoğan was standing uncontested, and that was the only item on the agenda that really mattered.
Turkey is different from the other countries falling under the sway of strongmen. It boasts not one, but two – perhaps even three or four – coexisting personality cults.
There is Erdoğan’s, a cult in the ascendant I have seen evolve before my eyes. There is the cult of Abdullah Öcalan, the grandfatherly-cum-psychopathic leader of the PKK (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistanê, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – the Kurdish militia fighting against the state in eastern Turkey), who has been banged up in an island prison since 1999, yet still commands a huge following among the Kurds and their diaspora. As well as the Turkish PKK there are affiliated militias fighting in his name in Syria, Iraq and Iran. His appeal stretches to Western leftists who are so enchanted by his ideas on women’s equality and government without the state that they are willing to overlook the atrocities that his gunmen and women commit. As the latest peace process broke down in the summer of 2015, I went to interview Öcalan’s brother in the south-eastern mountains of Turkey, having been told I would find him an intelligent, sensible kind of guy who would give me an honest account of his notorious sibling. Mehmet Öcalan’s home-grown figs were delicious, but the interview quickly veered into the bizarre. He tried to convince me that his brother knew, and by extension controlled, exactly what was going on in the Middle East day by day from his solitary prison cell, thanks to his psychic powers. Throughout, he referred to him as ‘Serok’ (Kurdish for ‘leader’) – never Abdullah or ‘my brother’.
There was, and perhaps still is, the cult of Fethullah Gülen, a wizened Islamic cleric who has been commanding a network of secretive followers since the 1960s. He has been living in exile on a secluded and heavily guarded ranch in Pennsylvania, USA since the 1990s, but until recently his devotees occupied high ranks within the Turkish bureaucracy, police and judiciary. They used their positions to bully and punish anyone who opposed them, most notably secularists who were uneasy with the idea of a secret Islamic cult wielding so much power in their country. Erdoğan and Gülen were allies, of sorts, until they fell out spectacularly in 2013 and began a personal war played out through the state. Erdoğan accuses Gülen of organising the attempted coup of 2016. At present, a Turk’s life can be ruined by the mere suggestion that they have at any time and in any way been affiliated with the movement.
And then there is the cult of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish republic and possibly the only man capable of raising a serious challenge to Erdoğan despite the fact that he has been dead for eighty-one years. Atatürk – or at least the Atatürk who is still very much alive in the imagination of today’s Turks – stood for almost everything Erdoğan despises, and vice versa. He was an unbending advocate for secularism, non-aggression in dealings with other states, and a Turkey that is allied to Europe and the West.
Atatürk has always been a Turkish hero, but increasingly he is also the figure Erdoğan’s opponents rally around. During the 2017 constitutional referendum campaign the streets of my Istanbul neighbourhood – a secular bastion that voted 81 per cent against Erdoğan’s plans to gather power in his own hands – turned into an open-air gallery of Atatürk-inspired artwork. The ‘İzmir March’, an anthem to militarism and Mustafa Kemal, was the unofficial theme tune of the ‘No’ campaign. It is common, both inside Turkey and without, to hear Erdoğan’s detractors bemoan how he is unravelling Atatürk’s legacy.
Maybe it said more about the state of the opposition than it ever did about the enduring strength of Atatürk. There is no question that this cult continues, but its cracks are beginning to show. Over the course of Erdoğan’s reign, those who have in the past quietly loathed Atatürk and all he stands for have found they can finally speak out. They are primarily the religious poor, dispossessed by Atatürk’s unbending secularism, though they also include liberals who wince at the thought of unbridled adoration in any direction. But those same liberals who once supported the downgrading of Atatürk’s legacy are now recoiling at Erdoğan’s transformation from man to deity by his followers. And so, Turkey has become a fascinating Petri dish – a perfect place to observe one cult of personality in the ascendant, alongside another in slow decline.
Over six years I have travelled to every corner of this huge, diverse, often baffling and always fascinating country, and have also reported on the chaos it borders in Iraq, Syria and south-eastern Europe. Along the way I have spoken to politicians, criminals, policemen, taxi drivers, warlords, flag-sellers, refugees … My notebooks are so stuffed with characters that the material could keep me writing for years. In Erdoğan, I have found the most compelling protagonist a writer could wish for.
But it wasn’t the coup attempt that spurred me to write this book, despite all its Hollywood drama and the front pages it garnered. That night in July 2016 was just the prologue, the scene-setter for the real tragedy that then unfolded. I started writing this book a year on, after the grandiose celebrations held on the first anniversary of the coup attempt revealed fully the depth of the personality cult that Erdoğan had assembled. By the time I had finished the first manuscript eleven months later, he had sealed power through the presidential elections that will keep him in his palace until 2023 – two decades at the top of Turkey.
This story is bookended by those two events, but at its core is the entire period in which I have taken a front-row seat at Turkey’s descent. When I arrived here in early 2013, thinking that I would stay for a few weeks to report on Syria before going back to my life in London, Erdoğan was just tipping over from being a flawed but largely tolerated democrat to a relentless autocratic populist. Within two years he had turned into a hate figure that the whole world had heard of – and then he led his country into its most turbulent era in decades. In the space of eighteen months in 2015 and 2016, Turkey suffered a refugee crisis, a wave of terror attacks, a fresh eruption of violence in its Kurdish region, and a coup attempt. Since then, even with some kind of daily stability and normality restored for most Turks, Erdoğan has consolidated his position further and stamped down harder on his opposition.
Spotting the narrative’s threads has not been easy: his path has not always been steady or clear. Multiple plot lines unfold simultaneously, linears converge and loop back on themselves. Events outside Turkey wash over its borders, feeding forces that are brewing inside the country while Erdoğan holds up his own skewed version of the world to his people like a fun-fair mirror. I worked forwards and backwards through shelves of my notebooks from Turkey and Syria as I wrote, trying to work out what I’d witnessed. I reread old diaries and rang up old friends, trawled through newspaper cuttings from the past twenty-five years and plundered the historical archives at The Times. I spoke to historians and political scientists and drew up huge lists of diplomats, Erdoğan’s insiders, lobbyists, advisers and opponents and contacted them all, asking them to speak either on the record or privately. Most of them ignored me, some of them refused. The ones that agreed usually did so on condition of anonymity, and each has shaded their own part of this portrait of Erdoğan and Turkey. Some names have been changed, usually in order to protect people who are still inside Syria or who have families there. In other cases I have referred to interviewees by first names only, or by the position they held. It is a mark of the current state of the country that I cannot thank or acknowledge by name most of the people who have helped me write this book; in the future, in better times, I hope I will be able to do so.
There is a vague chronology to this story, but Turkey never makes sense on a single timeline. To understand the present you need to link it to the past, and to unravel Erdoğan and his followers you must also acquaint yourself with all the other bit-part players who share his stage. Remembering recent history has become an act of rebellion in Erdoğan’s Turkey; memories are being erased and events rewritten as he fashions the country to his liking. By 2023, when the next elections are scheduled, the memories of the old parliamentary system will have faded and no one much under forty will have ever voted in an election in which he or his party did not, somehow, claim victory.
So this book is my attempt to document what I have seen, before it is erased from Turkey’s official story in the way that history’s winners always rub out the bits they do not like. It starts a year on from the coup attempt, in a country that has started to believe its own lies and the middle of a crowd high on the rush of its leader’s ascent.
1 (#ulink_4f0ab9b7-2ed8-595b-a9df-3b270213c419)
TWO TURKEYS, TWO TRIBES (#ulink_4f0ab9b7-2ed8-595b-a9df-3b270213c419)
July 2017 Coup anniversary
Stout old grandmas, svelte young women, mustachioed uncles and thick-set hard men: they are all moving together like a single being, and all waving Turkish flags high above their heads. I’m in the middle of a river of red. When I break away and climb up onto the footbridge over the highway they look like microdots in a pixellated image. I squint, and their fluttering crimson flags merge into one pulsating mass.
Serkan watches them stream past with a humorous, anticipatory eye.
‘BUYURUUUUUUUN!’ he shouts – the call of the Turkish hawker, which imperfectly translates to: ‘Please buy from me!’
A family stops to eye his wares, which he has spread on the pavement – a rough stall laden with cheaply made T-shirts, caps and bandanas on which are printed the serious face of a man with a heavy brow and a clipped moustache, usually depicted beneath an array of sycophantic headings:
OUR COMMANDER IN CHIEF!
OUR PRESIDENT!
TURKEY STANDS UPRIGHT WITH YOU!
Serkan – his own mannequin – dons the full set, a cap above his round and ruddy-cheeked face, one of his T-shirts stretched over his middle-age paunch, and his accessories of armbands and a scarf. He wears it all with aplomb, his friendly grin at odds with the stern printed image of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on display.
‘It’s just business,’ he confides once his customers have moved on. ‘I’ll sell at any political rally, but right now the Erdoğan merchandise sells the best.’
A few metres further down the pavement the next seller, Savaş, expands.
‘Maybe it’s because the people who buy the Erdoğan stuff are younger,’ he ventures. ‘But I sell about six or seven times more at the Erdoğan rallies than I do at the others.’
He is right. Turkey’s youth, its largest and most frustrated demographic, is over-represented in the crowd packing through an unremarkable Istanbul neighbourhood this July evening. There are families here too, and ballsy young women in headscarves hustling along in tight groups. One of them waves a printed placard: WE HAVE ERDOĞAN, THEY DON’T! But the more I keep moving with the mass of people, the more I might fool myself that I’m on my way to a football match.
Tonight these streets are theirs – the Erdoğan fanatics – celebrating the first anniversary of the failed coup, which, in the year since the guns fell silent, has opened the way for Erdoğan to grab even more power. For this crowd, that is a reason to party. We are heading for one of the icons of Istanbul, the graceful bridge arching over the Bosphorus Strait that, when the sun sets, sparkles with thousands of colour-shifting fairy lights. One of my favourite indulgences is to cross this bridge in a speeding public minibus late at night, boozy and sentimental. Look to the right as you cross from Europe to Asia and you see the southern end of the strait open out suddenly into the Sea of Marmara, backlit by the silhouettes of Istanbul’s Ottoman centre in the distance. To your left you see a decadent spread of rococo palaces along the river banks, alongside the turrets of the Kuleli military high school, alma mater of generations of ambitious young officers, and the minarets of the monumental, neo-Ottoman Çamlıca Mosque, Erdoğan’s flagship vanity project. However rowdy the bus is in the early hours, it always falls silent on the approach to this mesmerising vista.
Within weeks of the coup attempt the bridge was renamed and rebranded – now it is the 15th July Martyrs’ Bridge, a monument to Erdoğan’s finest hour. The road signs have been rewritten, and new announcements recorded for the bus routes. On this anniversary night it is the epicentre of the commemorations; the roads leading onto it have been lined with loudspeakers blasting out patriotic music to spur on the thousands of people milling around.
Erdoğan is the star of this show. First, he unveils a memorial to the martyrs. Stuck up on a grassy hill at the east side of the bridge, it resembles a space-age luminescent moon: huge, bright white and incongruous. Inscribed inside it are the names of the civilians who died. The Islamic funeral prayer is broadcast from here loudly, twenty-four hours a day, though, as one of my cynical friends points out, it is impossible to hear it over the roar of the traffic.
Next come the speeches from the stage set up at the apex of the bridge. The immediate audience is VIP only, but big screens have been arranged in the area just outside the eastern entrance for the tens of thousands who are here in order to be in close proximity to their leader. The event is also being streamed live on every Turkish TV channel. As Erdoğan takes his seat, a range of dignitaries take turns to pay homage.
‘Thank you to our martyrs, and thank you to our commander in chief!’ shrieks the announcer. ‘Recep. Tayyip. ERDOĞAAAAAAAAAN!’
Devout men in skullcaps spread flattened cardboard boxes on the road and kneel in the direction of Mecca. Everyone else falls silent as the announcer rolls through the names of the dead. Then Tayyip himself takes to the podium to deliver a speech full of invective against the traitors and the meddling foreign powers, packed with promises to chop off the heads of those responsible. He is then chauffeured to his private jet, which will fly him and his retinue to the capital, Ankara, where they will do it all over again.
Those who do not belong to Erdoğan’s fan club escape to Turkey’s liberal coastal towns, avoid the TV and newspapers, and drink cocktails on the shores of the Mediterranean until it is over. Yet their president finds them. Shortly before midnight, anyone using a mobile phone gets Erdoğan’s recorded message on the other end of the line: ‘As your president, I congratulate your July fifteenth democracy and national unity day. I wish God’s mercy on our martyrs and health for our veterans,’ he says in his distinctive, drawn-out tones. I get six calls within an hour from friends who just want to test it out, not quite believing that even Tayyip would pull such a stunt.
Events like the coup anniversary have become Turkey’s rock concerts – especially since the actual concerts dried up. I had tickets to see Skunk Anansie, a band I was obsessed with as a teenager, with an old school friend in Istanbul a few days after the coup. But the band cancelled the gig soon after the news broke of the 15 July massacres. Attendance at football matches – a working-class passion in Turkey – has also fallen since the Passolig, an electronic ticketing system designed to stamp out hooliganism, was introduced in 2014. Turkish politicians, though, always seem to find reasons to get on stage to bellow to their flag wavers.
At least the street sellers still have events where they can hawk their merchandise.
‘I used to sell at the football matches,’ says Mehmet, a small, gnarled old man with a thick grey moustache and a clear disdain for this evening’s show. ‘You know – fake team shirts, scarves, that kind of thing. Then they started cracking down on us. The Zabıta’ – a unique Turkish cross-breed of trading-standards-officer-meets-traffic-warden – ‘started issuing fines, and now the teams’ lawyers walk around and check out our stalls. If they see you selling anything with logos, they sue you.’
‘When did the crackdown begin?’ I ask.
‘When Erdoğan came to power!’ he laughs as he replies.
Even here, at Erdoğan’s own event, Mehmet is being screwed: official event marshals are riding around in pick-up trucks laden with Turkish flags and baseball caps bearing the official coup commemoration logo, cheap mementoes they are handing out for free. I pick some up to add to my burgeoning collection of Turkish political tat, and continue on towards the bridge.
Just before the arch takes flight the crowds grow so thick I lose the will to keep pushing through. Instead I stop, look around, and take in the febrile buzz. A friend and fellow journalist has texted me, warning that the riled-up crowd has been chanting abuse at the CNN news crew. I thought that, with my notebook firmly in my rucksack, I would blend in. I was wrong.
‘Excuse me, are you a journalist?’ asks a slight young woman in black abaya and headscarf who emerges from nowhere, catching me by my elbow, and off guard.
Yes, I reply, I am.
‘Which channel?’
Her eyes are hard and suspicious, not friendly as those of nosy Turks usually are. I tell her I work for a newspaper, not for TV, but she doesn’t believe me.
‘Really?’
My companion for the evening was caught in a mob attack during the coup in Egypt four years ago, and is alert to the warning signs. Other people are beginning to look around, so I shake the woman off and we push deeper into the crowd. When I stop again, I notice a young man with terrible teeth, dark brown and shunted into his mouth at weird angles, gazing up at the screen and grinning.
‘Tayyip!’ he yells as live pictures of his hero, just a few hundred metres down the road, flash up. ‘TAYYIIIIIIIIIIP!’
He is so enraptured he doesn’t notice me staring.
The Justice March
One week earlier: it’s the other tribe’s turn. On a humid Sunday afternoon scores of Turks in white T-shirts descend onto a corniche on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus. There is no Erdoğan merchandise on sale here.
Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the leader of the opposition, has just walked here from Ankara – a 280-mile, three-week trek in the blistering heat, accompanied by hundreds of police officers. Along the way he has gathered thousands of supporters shouting ‘HAK! HUKUK! ADALET!’ (Rights! Law! Justice!) as they weave through Istanbul’s poor outer suburbs. One side of the highway leading into the city has been shut down for the marchers. Vans travelling up the other side beep their horns in solidarity. From the balconies of crumbling concrete apartment blocks, women swathed in black burkas shake their fists and scream in fury. Others hold up their hands in a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under – the sign of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, adopted by Erdoğan’s fan club.
Kılıçdaroğlu walks the final mile alone – a small, defiant figure surrounded by rings of black-clad cops. No one thought he would get this far. When he began walking, spurred by the arrest of one of his party members, he was mocked. Now he is about to step on stage in front of hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of people who support him, and who despise Erdoğan.
But Kılıçdaroğlu’s face wouldn’t look quite right on a T-shirt. He is grey, diminutive, pushing seventy. A career bureaucrat. A man who has spent his seven years at the head of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), Turkey’s secularist party, eclipsed by six-foot ex-footballer Erdoğan. So instead of Kılıçdaroğlu’s face the street sellers’ wares bear the face of a blue-eyed blond with sharp cheekbones and a debonair dash: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who not only founded Kılıçdaroğlu’s party, but also the Turkish republic. He was a polymath, a womaniser and a thirsty drinker, a war hero, a visionary and a statesman. And he is a hero – to this half of the country. He has been dead for eighty-one years, and he is still Erdoğan’s biggest rival.
Here is the Atatürk legend. He was born simple Mustafa, son of a former army officer and a housewife, in 1881 in Thessaloniki, now in modern Greece but at that time one of the richest and most diverse cities in the Ottoman Empire. He followed the familiar path for a bright boy from a modest background. First, he attended military school, where he studied Western philosophy alongside the bedrocks of literacy and numeracy, and was bestowed with the second name Kemal, meaning perfection, by a maths teacher. After finishing school he became an army officer.
He was serving an empire in decline. The Ottomans had once ruled a great stretch of the globe spanning Europe, Asia and Africa, but by the beginning of the twentieth century the peripheries were breaking away. The army Kemal joined was growing increasingly disloyal to the sultan, and by the onset of the First World War had all but overthrown him. Kemal was a lower-level player in the revolt, and a passionate advocate of reform. His experiences serving on fronts in the Balkans, North Africa and the Levant convinced him that such a huge, unwieldy, multi-ethnic empire could no longer survive and that it must be trimmed back to a Turkish nation state.
The Great War was the Ottoman Empire’s inglorious finale. By then it was being run de facto by the Young Turks, a cadre of military officers including Kemal. Meanwhile the sultan, Mehmet V, sat sulking in his palace in Istanbul, fully aware that almost all his power had drained away, even though by name he was still head of an empire.
Kemal was dismayed when his fellow officers decided to enter the war on the side of the Germans, but he fought with distinction. He secured his reputation as a war hero at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915, when troops from Britain, France, Australia and New Zealand launched a huge naval attack on the Dardanelles, the last maritime bottleneck before Istanbul. Against all odds, the Turks led by Kemal beat them back in a final show of force – and then the empire crumpled entirely.
The Ottomans’ decision to ally with the Germans proved terminal. On 13 November 1918, just two days after the end of the war, British, French, Greek and Italian forces moved into Istanbul. Soon after, the Greeks seized a large swath of the Aegean coast and Thrace, the funnel of land leading from Istanbul into Europe. Meanwhile, the French had moved into the cities of the south-east, close to the current border with Syria, as well as the coal-rich regions of the north.
A new sultan, Mehmet VI, did little to prevent the unpicking of his empire. In 1920 he signed the Treaty of Sèvres, which recognised the various foreign mandates in his own lands. The fight appeared to have gone out of the Ottomans – but it had not gone out of Mustafa Kemal. Almost as soon as the armistice was signed he began hatching plans to reverse the damage. Slipping Istanbul, he headed for Samsun, a city on the Black Sea coast in northern Turkey, and began building a national resistance movement. Despite opposition from the sultan, who ordered him to cease his activities, by early 1920 Mustafa Kemal had built a massive following and established an alternative parliament in Ankara, a small city on the Anatolian plain. From there, he launched the Turkish war of independence, seizing back the Anatolian territories, the coast and then, finally, Istanbul. The last British warship departed the old imperial capital on 17 November 1922. Aboard was Mehmet, the last sultan, expelled in disgrace by the new parliament set up by Mustafa Kemal. Mehmet returned six years later, in a coffin, having lived out his remaining years on the Italian Riviera.
Five days after Mehmet was discharged, the sultanate was dissolved. His cousin, Abdulmecid, was appointed caliph – head of the world’s Muslims – but his tenure was similarly short. Less than two years later, the caliphate was also abolished. The 600-year-old Ottoman Empire was over.
Mustafa Kemal had led a movement that saved Turkish pride and reclaimed great swaths of its territories. From the ruins of the Ottoman Empire he established a modern republic: in 1923 the Treaty of Lausanne was signed, recognising Turkey as a sovereign state. For most men, this might have been enough. But it was here that Mustafa Kemal’s most remarkable work began. As the first president of the republic, from its founding in 1923 to his death in 1938, he set himself an enormous task: to pick up his people, shake out their old habits and mindsets, and reshape them as citizens for the twentieth century. Among his more famous reforms was to scrap the Ottoman alphabet, written in the same script as Arabic, and replace this with Latin letters. He introduced secularism into the constitution and banished God to the private sphere, and had everyone choose a surname in the Western tradition, leading to a plethora of colourful monikers in present-day Turkey. It is not unusual to meet a Mr ‘Oztürk’ (‘pure Turk’), ‘Yıldırıım’ (‘lightning’) or ‘Imamoğlu’ (‘son of an imam’). Mustafa Kemal’s own choice, ‘Atatürk’, means ‘Father of the Turks’. And he advocated passionately for the equal rights of women.
For the people who wave his flag, Atatürk is the man who saved Turkey from the fate of some of its unfortunate neighbours. ‘If it wasn’t for Atatürk, we would be like the Arabs!’ is a common refrain. If that sounds bigoted to a Westerner’s ears, then some time spent in the Middle East might bring you round. Travelling and working as a woman in the Arab world can be infuriating at best, scary at worst. I have been heckled, grabbed, groped, patronised and scorned during my time working in Arab countries – simply because I am a woman –though I would like to pay tribute here to my scores of male colleagues and friends in that part of the world who do not fit the stereotype, and who have often saved me from those situations. In Turkey, women seem simply to sigh inwardly at embarrassingly clichéd chat-up lines, and learn how to deal with machismo displays of jealousy and the constantly hungry stares from men. What they don’t sigh at but have to bear is the appallingly high, and apparently rising, rate of domestic violence and killings of women at the hands of their male relatives. Yet in the secular neighbourhoods of Turkey’s western cities at least, women can live almost as freely as they do in the West. I can go running, Lycra-clad, in the morning, and hit bars and clubs wearing mini-dresses at night in Istanbul. Atatürk’s admirers would credit that to him – whether that is true or not.
Atatürk’s fan club is secular (at least politically if not always privately), relatively wealthy, educated, well-coiffed and decidedly less spiky to deal with. In short, they are almost the mirror image of the Turks who turn out for Erdoğan. During Kılıçdaroğlu’s long walk, a joke goes around that his supporters who can’t be bothered to walk alongside him are sending their drivers instead. The people who turn out to what has become known as ‘the justice rally’ look like professors, writers and engineers. There are large groups of middle-aged women who arrive on chartered coaches from faraway cities, cackling between themselves at crude jokes as they walk to the parade ground. I watch sweet old retired couples in matching JUSTICE T-shirts walking hand in hand along the corniche. These people belong to the same Turkey as the old ladies with fur coats and small dogs who live in my 1960s apartment block, clinging to their crystal tumblers of whisky, their cigarettes and all the former glamour from those heady days. There is no horror-show dental work on display here.
‘Aaaaaah, we’re among the beautiful people!’ says Yusuf, a Turkish photographer who is firmly of this world, even though it pains him to admit it. When I really want to needle him I call him a ‘White Turk’, the lazy label for this half of the country. It refers to the elites, the secularists, ‘those people who sit by the Bosphorus sipping on their whiskies’, as one of Erdoğan’s staunchest allies once put it, with a visceral sneer of disgust. The president is proud to represent the other half of Turkey – the poor, the religious, the marginalised. ‘Your brother Tayyip is a Black Turk!’ he once roared in a speech to his faithful. Whenever I call Yusuf a White Turk, he rolls his eyes and huffs a little. But he never denies it.
The walk down the corniche to the Maltepe parade ground, where Kılıçdaroğlu will take the stage, has the air of a genteel Sunday stroll. The white-clad masses lick ice creams and pause for tea in the kitsch waterside cafés. There is a happy, easy hum of conversation – I pick up snippets of holiday stories, and of updates on how the children are doing at university. There is less venom here than at Erdoğan’s rallies – but also less sense of drive and direction. These people lost control of Turkey fifteen years ago, but they still wear the easy nonchalance of power. Meanwhile Erdoğan’s supporters are still full of the scrappy aggression of the underdog. Old habits are hard to give up.
Kılıçdaroğlu, the bureaucratic grey man, has always made an easy target for ridicule. During his rallies Erdoğan plays videos showing the state of Turkey’s hospitals in the 1990s, when Kılıçdaroğlu was head of the state health department. Admittedly they were terrible back then, full of filthy wards and mind-numbingly long queues. The crowd boos whenever Kılıçdaroğlu’s face pops up on the screen. And as Kılıçdaroğlu begins his walk, Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım – a Erdoğan loyalist to the bone – mocks him.
‘Why don’t you use our high-speed trains?’ he baits, highlighting the sleek new rail link, one of the government’s vote-winning projects.
But by the time Kılıçdaroğlu nears Istanbul Erdoğan is spooked. As thousands of Justice March supporters file past the neo-Soviet-style billboards for the upcoming coup commemorations it becomes embarrassing for Erdoğan: this inadequate rival, stealing his thunder? And so he starts accusing him of tacitly supporting both Gülen, the alleged ringleader of the coup attempt, and the PKK – a known terrorist organisation – through this endeavour.
‘Politics in the parliament has become impossible, so I’m taking it onto the streets. They can’t cope with my free spirit,’ a suntanned and fit-looking Kılıçdaroğlu tells me, back in his Ankara office five days after he has finished the march. With so few trusting the ballot box, these rally turnouts have become the new battleground.
Each time the politicians call their legions to the streets, fierce debate breaks out over the numbers. The CHP claims two million attended Kılıçdaroğlu’s Justice Rally; the office of the Istanbul governor (a government appointee) counters, saying the real figure was 175,000.
Meanwhile, the government’s claims for its own rallies – generally held in the purpose-built Yenikapı parade ground on the European side of Istanbul – always stretch into the millions. At the post-coup ‘Unity Rally’, they claim five million. At a pre-referendum campaign meeting, despite the large gaps in the crowd, they say one million. When I write in my report for The Times that the figure appears to have been inflated, pro-government journalists howl in protest. One accuses me of being a Zionist trying to destroy Erdoğan. The headline in the rabidly loyal newspaper Sabah screams that ‘millions’ turned out on the bridge for the coup anniversary. But even the Sabah journalist loses faith by the first paragraph, revising the figures down to ‘hundreds of thousands’.
For perhaps the first time ever, Istanbul’s Office of the Chamber of Topographical Engineers finds itself in the position of political referee. It weighs in with a statement on the justice-rally numbers, couched in rather different language to the usual Turkish rhetoric:
The rally area of Maltepe is approximately 275,000 square meters. Participants were also located in an area that was closed to traffic, which is around 100,000 square meters. So citizens took part in the rally over a space covering 375,000 square meters … In estimating the participant number, it is usually accepted technically that three to six people are located per meter square, so it can be stated that at least 1.5 million joined the ‘Justice Rally’. Experts say that considering the fullness of the rally area, this number could even be as high as 2 million.
My own back-of-a-fag-packet calculations concur: the areas of the Maltepe and Yenikapı parade grounds are roughly similar, while the part of the bridge where Erdoğan’s coup commemoration was held is not large enough to hold more than 200,000.
‘They don’t inflate the numbers, they just make them up!’ Yusuf says, our calculations hieroglyphing pages of my notebook.
Mehmet the street hawker doesn’t need mathematics.
‘I spend my life in crowds and I know the size when I look at them!’ he says. ‘There were at least three million at the Justice Rally. They were lying when they said a hundred and seventy-five thousand.’
So, yes, Kılıçdaroğlu has boosted his image beyond anyone’s expectations. Yet over his shoulder looms the man who really called out the party faithful: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
The rivals
If you have ever read Daphne du Maurier you might recognise Erdoğan’s relationship with the blue-eyed blond. Just as the unnamed narrator of Rebecca obsesses over her husband’s dead first wife, it is easy to imagine how the thin-skinned Erdoğan, desperate to establish his own place in history, spends hours fretting over the continuing popularity of his biggest rival.
You could forget that Atatürk is no longer with us. He is so present in Turkey that you might expect him to pop up at a rally, or be interviewed on TV. Like the Queen, his face is so familiar it becomes difficult to see it objectively. Right now, he is the only person who might wield more power than Erdoğan. He is definitely the only one whose picture you will see more often as you travel around Turkey. Erdoğan’s face, always twenty years younger in photos than in real life, looms large from the banners strung between apartment blocks in conservative neighbourhoods. But it is Atatürk who hogs Turkey’s limelight.
It helps that he was photogenic – a natty dresser who instinctively understood the power of the camera at the exact moment the camera was becoming ubiquitous. Each stage of Atatürk’s career – officer, rebel, war hero, visionary – together with his transformation from conventional Ottoman gentleman to twentieth-century statesman and style icon, is represented in a series of classic images.
Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara, can probably be classed as his fanbase HQ, but you will find miniature shrines around every corner and underneath almost every shop awning. In his earliest portraits and photographs he looks like any other stiff-backed Ottoman officer. But in later images Atatürk swims, dances and flirts with the lens, dressed in finely tailored clothes and smoking monogrammed cigarettes. There is the famous silhouette of him stalking the front lines at the Battle of Gallipoli, deep in thought with a finger on his chin and a fez on his head. There is another of him in black tie and tails dancing with his adopted daughter, sleek in her sleeveless evening gown. There is the one where he stares directly into the lens, his cigarette in one hand and the other in his pocket, a Mona Lisa smile on his lips. There he is in a nerdish knitted tank top, teaching the newly introduced Latin alphabet to a group of enthralled children. The list goes on …
I like to try to guess the character of any individual Turk through the picture they display. Whenever I see a military Atatürk pinned up behind a counter I imagine the owner to be a patriot who looks back on his own military service with pride and warmth. If they have opted for a besuited and coiffed Kemal, I wager them to be pro-Western intellectuals. If, as in one meyhane (a traditional rakı-and-fish restaurant) close to my flat, the walls are plastered with various portraits from the start of his varied career to its end, I guess them to be full-blooded Atatürk fanatics.
My own favourite is the picture pulsing with such life and humour that the first time I saw it, hung behind the cash register of an Istanbul bakery, I yelped in delight. It is a colour photo of Atatürk on a child’s swing, aboard a pleasure steamer on a trip to Antalya. It was taken three years before his death, and he is not a well man. His sunken bright eyes and his receding blond hair, his pallor and stout middle betray his love of drink; he would die from cirrhosis of the liver aged fifty-seven. Yet he is grinning so widely you can almost imagine him whooping as he flies. A second, less famous frame taken minutes before or after this one shows him standing on the swing with a young child peeping between his legs. This, I thought, is a personality cult I could get with – and a personality cult is what it is. Insulting Atatürk or defiling his image can still land you with a prison sentence, or at the very least the probability of a beating from the nearest Atatürk devotee. Back in 2007, under Erdoğan’s government, a court decided that all of YouTube should be blocked because it carried a few videos deemed insulting to Atatürk. The ban stayed in place for two and a half years.
Internet censorship is still widespread, although these days insulting Erdoğan is far more likely to bring down a court order. Meanwhile, though, Atatürk’s genuine appeal burns strong. It is not unusual to see young Turks use an image of Atatürk as their Facebook profile picture, or tattoo his signature down their arm. You can buy T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and keyrings emblazoned with his face. My own collection boasts a wine carafe, an egg timer and a compact mirror. In almost every town you can find small museums dedicated to him in some way, staffed by volunteers and visited by Turks who earnestly take selfies with the Atatürk waxworks. During Gezi, the 2013 summer of riots sparked by plans to concrete over the eponymous park in Istanbul, the young protesters quickly realised that if they added an Atatürk image to the anti-Erdoğan slogans they spray-painted on the walls, the authorities would not paint them over. The council workers charged with this unenviable task decided to walk the tightrope between the two camps by painting out the slogans while fastidiously leaving the Atatürks. Though Erdoğan might dislike it, Atatürk’s cult endures. And so, Erdoğan has nurtured his own.
Shortly before the parliamentary elections of November 2015 – a contest in which Erdoğan, by that time president, was not even running – I visited his home district of Kasımpaşa, a port neighbourhood in central Istanbul. In a backstreet shoe shop, I found Fatma Özçelik, a lively 59-year-old who had known Tayyip from childhood.
‘Ooooh, he was so handsome!’ she told me. ‘So tall. So handsome! Yes, he’s a bit aggressive on screen. But what can you do?’
I asked who she would be voting for.
‘Tayyip!’ she replied.
But Erdoğan isn’t on the ballot, I said. Did she mean she would be voting for the AKP?
‘Nope!’ she insisted. ‘Don’t like any of them! I’m telling you, the guys ruling the AKP now are terrible. They’re blaming Tayyip for all their shit.’
I pressed on. But would she be giving her vote to Ahmet Davutoğlu, the prime minister (later purged by his boss for being too independent of spirit), knowing that it would actually be an endorsement of Erdoğan?
‘Nope! I don’t like that Davutoğlu, I don’t trust him. I don’t like any of them – only Tayyip! They can’t replace him. It can’t be the AKP without him.’
She would not countenance any other option, and I never did get to the bottom of whether she would be voting or not.
Around the corner I dropped in on Ahmet Güler, perhaps the most famous barber in Istanbul, with the country’s most famous customer. A small TV screen in a corner of his shop played live footage of Erdoğan speaking at a rally in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Both Ahmet and the cloaked and shaving-foamed customer in his chair had the same clipped moustaches as their hero.
‘We should all be proud of Erdoğan, he’s a son of Kasımpaşa!’ he told me. ‘He’s still one of us. I know him well and I don’t feel he’s changed at all.’
He paused, thought a little, and then added a brutally honest and very Turkish appendix:
‘Well, OK – he’s tired and old, so he’s getting bags under his eyes. But otherwise, I have only positive things to say!’
How does he do it, this grumpy old man in an ill-fitting suit? It is a question I have often asked myself as I travel around Turkey talking to his faithful. Usually I get the sense of a demographic who feel their time, and their man, has come. For decades Turkey’s poor, conservative voters found they could participate in democracy, as long as they did not threaten the order. When the politicians they elected looked as though they might actually change things in the way their supporters had been yearning for, the army – self-appointed guardians of Atatürk’s secularity – stepped in to overrule them.
Yet that is only half the story. Alongside the women banned from universities and the public sector because they wear the headscarf, and the men who long yearned for a politician who prays and abstains from booze just as they do, there are others who you would never expect to support Erdoğan – yet they do. Over lunch on a waterside terrace one afternoon, a blonde, wine-drinking academic who grew up in the UK spoke openly about the things that irk her about Erdoğan. Single, secular and childless, she said she felt personally offended when the president had described women like her as incomplete, his latest in a series of bullish statements alienating anyone less pious than he is. Ultimately, though, she – like his other supporters – let him off the hook. When I asked her why the most powerful man in Turkey appeared so sensitive, so petulant and so undiplomatic, she threw back her glamorous coiffed head and laughed: ‘Because he’s a Pisces.’
What is the root of his appeal in these unexpected quarters? One secular, Western-educated journalist told me that she has two great political heroes – Erdoğan and Margaret Thatcher. She sees the same traits in both of them – a tireless work ethic, and a single-minded belief that their way of doing things is the right way, and screw all the haters. She also admires the way that both were self-made, people who had started from modest backgrounds and clawed their way to the top. Others, even if they do not admire him, can appreciate the way Erdoğan has broken the grip that the Kemalists, the devotees of Atatürk, kept on the country for decades.
It is easy, now that they are the underdogs, to romanticise Turkey’s secularists, and to imagine that all would be right with the country if only they could seize back power. But those who remember the secular glory days know they could be as despotic as any religious regime. The dogmatic banning of headscarved women from higher education and from working in the public sector after the coup of 1980 confined millions to a life of child raising and housework – ironic, given Atatürk’s outspoken feminism. Atatürk pushed his own bizarre law banning the fez, the iconic, tasselled, brimless red felt hat ubiquitous in the later Ottoman Empire. This decision sparked a ‘Hat Revolution’ on the part of stubborn fez-wearers in the conservative eastern city of Erzurum that was crushed by Atatürk’s military, thirteen of the ringleaders being executed.
Though Atatürk may not have wished for it, the self-appointed keepers of his legacy – who for decades dominated the courts, the universities and, most notably, the army – stamped down on anyone who stood in the way of their mission. And if you find yourself in eastern Turkey and talk to the Kurds, you’re unlikely to find many Atatürk fans – for it was he who ordered their cities bombed when they revolted against his Turkish national project. Even today, in the Kurdish regions, the Atatürk statues seem a little bigger, a little more brash: visual slaps to the descendants of those who died at the hands of their own government. The plaques engraved with one of his most famous sayings – ‘How happy is the one who says, I am a Turk’ – seem to be there simply to mock the Kurds. The first Turkish president to apologise for what happened in the 1930s? Erdoğan. It’s odd, now that Erdoğan is waging his own war against Kurdish radicalism.
‘You see the look the Erdoğan people have in their eyes now? That conviction that they know the ultimate truth? Well, that is exactly the same look as the Kemalists used to have,’ said one Turk who remembered very well. Half of his family, a bunch of outspoken leftist intellectuals, were imprisoned following the 1980 coup.
Here is another way of looking at Erdoğan’s success: lucky timing. Erdoğan is not the first politician with ambitions to take Turkey in a new direction, he is just the latest in a line of leaders who have professed their piety, and their opposition to the old order. The support base has always been there. Atatürk never fully, or even mostly, achieved his ambition of making Turkey a truly secular country. And Erdoğan’s demographic is growing more rapidly than Atatürk’s – put crudely, the poor and the religious tend to have more children. Meanwhile, the opposition screams foul at Erdoğan’s plans to grant citizenship to around one in ten of the three million Syrians who have settled in Turkey after fleeing their own country’s civil war. They are convinced he is only doing so to reap their votes in the future.
But what differentiates Erdoğan from his ideological predecessors is how he managed to gather support from those outside his base – social liberals, supporters of globalisation and free trade, opponents of military tutelage – before going on to crush those very same people. The irony was not lost on Amnesty International, who – as Erdoğan intensified his post-coup jailing of opposition journalists in 2016 – wrote an open letter reminding him that they had once stepped in on his behalf when, in 1999, he was imprisoned for reading a religious poem at a rally.
Since Atatürk died in 1938, Turkey has been like a round-bottomed toy that rocks precariously to one side or the other but always returns upright. The opposing pull of the country’s two major forces have always brought it back to a central position – though Erdoğan’s charisma, political skill and good timing might now have upset the balance.
Even amid a purge that has stripped tens of thousands of their freedom and livelihoods, those who are not charmed by Erdoğan can still fall prey to his powers of persuasion. Once, as I was chatting to a man who was telling me how his company had recalled 200,000 T-shirts because they feared the design might offend the president, we came on to the subject of Europe – Erdoğan’s pet hate at the time.
‘But Europe lies!’ said the man, certainly no Erdoğan fan. ‘We have three million Syrian refugees and Europe gives us nothing!’
This was one of Erdoğan’s claims – that almost none of the money promised to Turkey by the European Union under a deal to stop asylum seekers surging across the Aegean had materialised. But it was rubbish. Over a period of eighteen months the EU had signed off on projects worth almost three billion euros, exactly what it had promised, with another three billion ready to hand over. European money was pouring into the Turkish health and education systems, refugee camps, asylum detention centres – and that was just one branch of funding. Billions were also being handed over in accession grants, the money given to countries that might one day be EU members to help them bring their standards up to European level. But Erdoğan had managed to convince his people that Turkey was being screwed by Brussels. Erdoğan’s lies are not a web, they are a paste that he slathers on so thick that nothing of the truth underneath is left showing. His motivations for doing so are clear.
‘Look,’ he is telling his fellow Turks. ‘You may not like me, but I am saving our honour against those who would seek to destroy it.’
It is a well-tested method. Part of Atatürk’s appeal, after all, lies in the fact that he rescued Turkey from nefarious foreign powers almost a century ago. Maybe these two cults share more similarities than either would care to admit.
‘He is Dictator in order that it may be impossible ever again that there should be in Turkey a Dictator,’ wrote H.C. Armstrong, a British officer and contemporary biographer of Atatürk in 1932, as the founder’s reforms moved ahead in top gear. Today it is Erdoğan’s turn to change his country, and to overpower anyone who stands in his way, so that it may never go back to the old order. And that is just the way his tribe likes it.
2 (#ulink_121fb686-b780-53b7-a5db-0ea23a09fc45)
SYRIA: THE BACKSTORY (#ulink_121fb686-b780-53b7-a5db-0ea23a09fc45)
April 2011 Damascus, Syria
I wandered into my first personality cult on my first trip to the Middle East. I was twenty-seven and had never been to the region but it fascinated me – especially the Lebanese capital, Beirut, with its evocative connotations of glamour and war. At the time I was a television producer in London, working mostly in the current affairs departments of Channel 4 and the BBC on big investigations, including stories about rampant heroin use in prisons and fire safety flaws in refurbished tower blocks, a full seven years before Grenfell. But I yearned to be a foreign correspondent, writing dispatches from turbulent places for a daily newspaper. Soon I discovered that British journalism is a series of closed shops; the editors hiring for any foreign jobs I applied for weren’t interested in my experience. So, in lieu, I travelled to off-beat places for holidays, and sold an occasional article where I could.
The Arab Spring hadn’t yet kicked off when I bought my plane tickets but the biggest popular protests in decades were flowing back and forth across the Middle East by the time I flew to the Jordanian capital, Amman, with a vague plan to travel by land into Syria and then on into Lebanon. In Tunisia and Egypt, the old dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had already been bundled from their palaces by popular grassroots movements. In Libya, the armed rebellion against Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was soon to win the backing of NATO airstrikes.
In Syria, small demonstrations in the southern provincial city of Deraa, close to the Jordanian border, had been swelling for a fortnight by the time I entered the country. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, initially seemed immune to the unrest spreading elsewhere in his region, partly because he kept his own country so closed. To get a fourteen-day Syrian tourist visa I had enlisted a friend at a small company to fake a letter of employment for me, claiming that I was his secretary. Had I written on my visa application that I was a journalist, there was no way I would have been allowed in by the time I arrived at the border – an American traveller I met in my hostel in Amman had just been turned back at the frontier. By now, a fragmented opposition movement was rising against Assad, and there was a growing security crackdown in response. It was happening mostly in places like Deraa, and the poor outer suburbs of the cities where scores of rural migrants had arrived over recent years, forced from their farms by drought. But young educated activists in Syria’s urban centres – Damascus, Aleppo and Homs – were picking up on the chance to finally challenge the dictator they hated. Via Facebook, they organised ‘Days of Rage’ after each week’s Friday prayers.
All I could see of this from my shared taxi – a Chevrolet so old it was retro that boomeranged along the 125-mile road between Amman and Damascus – was Syrian army tanks blocking the exit to Deraa. The driver looked ahead and said nothing, while the two old couples travelling with me fell into silent contemplation. The TV in my room at the once-glamorous Orient Hotel, a faded grandma located in what had become a red light district in central Damascus, broadcast the official version of events on Syrian state television. From the huge and sagging bed I watched protests in front of the presidential palace a kilometre away, as the area filled with supporters shouting how much they loved Bashar. Sensing my chance to hit on a story, I set about trying to contact opposition activists.
In the meantime, I wandered the old heart of Damascus, a maze of narrow alleyways between thick stone walls, laced with sweet whiffs of jasmine and shisha smoke. Here I found trinket shops dedicated to souvenirs decorated with Bashar al-Assad’s image – lighters, coffee mugs, car bumper stickers. Bunting bearing his face, identical on each little fluttering flag, criss-crossed the rafters of the souk. One morning I walked through the main drag with a new friend, a sweet Syrian girl in a tight white headscarf who had approached me minutes earlier as I stared awestruck at the nearby Umayyad Mosque. She grasped my arm and pointed to him.
‘Beheb Bashar – I love Bashar,’ she said, with the earnest gaze of a recent cult convert. ‘Do you love Bashar, too?’
What could I say? The president is weak-chinned, long-necked and speaks with a lisp. And, already, he was a murderer. As she and I walked through that souk on a fresh April day, Assad’s thugs were opening fire on demonstrators in Deraa, eighty miles down the road, picking them off from the rooftops with the indifference of schoolboys playing video games. I hummed a non-committal murmur, which seemed enough to satisfy her.
After a series of protracted emails, phone calls that came from a different number each time, missed meetings and finally some good luck, I eventually found an opposition activist called Roua. She was one of the young Damascenes – there were so few of them at the time it’s incredible they managed to find each other – who was trying to organise the Day of Rage that Friday. So far, the activists hadn’t scored much success – mere handfuls of people were showing up to their protests, and most were immediately arrested. Their ranks, such as they were, had been fully infiltrated by Syrian intelligence.
When Roua came to meet me, on a sultry Tuesday night in a bustling restaurant in the Christian quarter of the old city, she was wearing a paper dental mask over her nose and mouth, and didn’t take it off in the whole time we spent together. She claimed she was hiding some work done recently on her teeth.
‘We are speaking to each other using Skype,’ she told me in perfect English. With her hennaed hair and hippyish clothes she wouldn’t have looked out of place at Glastonbury. ‘We use false names, and actually we wouldn’t even know each other if we passed on the street.’
Her parting sentence confirmed my suspicions: she was terrified that if she showed her face, someone might notice that she had been meeting with a foreigner and start putting two and two together.
‘The walls have ears,’ she said, tapping her knuckles on the age-worn stone of the restaurant’s wall as she rose. I never managed to meet her or speak to her again; her phone numbers rang out, my emails to her went unanswered.
All that fear and paranoia had birthed a society of sycophants. Everywhere I went in Damascus in that month when the uprising was just sprouting I found pictures of Bashar al-Assad. Bashar in military uniform, pasted onto a kebab shop’s heated glass cabinet. Bashar administering eye drops to a baby, pinned up on the door of a stationery shop. Bashar in dark glasses, superimposed onto the rear window of a sleek black Mercedes.
Syrians who wished to go one step further put up posters of the Shia troika – Bashar with Hassan Nasrallah, the pugnacious leader of the Lebanese Shia militia Hizbollah, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the president of Iran at that time. For real favour-winning bonus points, they would also stick up a picture of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and first president of the dynasty – over a decade dead, but never too far away. Some young Syrians I met, befriended and went drinking with warned me to be careful on Fridays.
‘Stay in your hotel,’ said Faris, a plump and cheerful guy from an upper-class Sunni family. ‘Don’t go to the mosques or the old city. Wait until Friday prayers are fully over.’
One of the others, a gay man called Ahmed, said he was sick of Bashar, but deeply apprehensive about the opposition. ‘We don’t know who they are,’ he warned me. ‘They might be Islamists, anybody.’
I left Damascus and its small sparks of revolution in the spring of 2011 and returned to London to pitch the story. I got a couple of commissions from marginal magazines, but nothing more: the uprising in Libya was revving up and would dominate the news from the region until Gaddafi’s bloody end at the hands of a mob in October of that year.
Meanwhile, the protests were growing in the Syrian cities. Homs, a multicultural university town close to the Lebanese border, was one of the epicentres, with thousands of people turning out around the old clocktower in the centre of the city chanting: ‘The people want the fall of the regime!’ With no international media able to operate freely in Syria the news of the demonstrations leaked out through shaky mobile phone footage. And as the protests spiralled out of the government’s control, the security forces started posting snipers on the rooftops to fire into the crowds. The increasingly emboldened activists were rounded up by the score and thrown into the regime’s feared prisons.
Then, in the autumn of 2011, videos started appearing on YouTube showing groups of armed men in mismatched camouflage waving a three-starred flag – similar to but distinct from Syria’s official two-starred flag. The three stars quickly became the symbol of the opposition and the rebels announced themselves as the Free Syrian Army (FSA). Soon after, scores of Syrian military officers started defecting to join the FSA and the protests turned into full-blown conflict. Assad’s army placed the centre of Homs under siege, and the death toll began to soar. Suddenly Syria was the story.
I had witnessed the opening acts and was desperate to go back and report there again. So over the next two years I saved up, made some more contacts in the newspaper industry and bought a flak jacket, and in February 2013 travelled to the Turkish borderlands with a few phone numbers and a plan to cross the frontier and go into rebel-held Aleppo. Thousands of Syrians were flooding into Turkey every day to escape the fighting between the FSA and Assad’s forces in the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo. Going the other way and entering the war zone was as easy as showing your passport to a Turkish border guard.
February 2013 Free Syria
The Syrian rebels had captured two main border crossings with Turkey, Bab al-Salaam (the Peace Door) and Bab al-Hawa (the Windy Door), and the Turkish government kept them open allowing rebels, refugees and journalists to cross in and out of rebel-held Syria. What had once been sleepy frontier outposts frequented by intrepid backpackers and cross-border traders were now funnels for weapons, aid and desperate people. My Syrian fixer, who had picked me up the night before and run through the basic logistics of the route into the war zone, left me at the first Turkish checkpoint at Bab al-Salaam, telling me that he would pick me up on the other side. With no passport, he had to travel into Syria via one of the smuggling routes a few hundred metres along the border. It was discombobulating enough to be left alone among the crowds of grimy kids tugging at my leg to sell me water, amid lines of cars, packed in every spare space with blankets, nappies and clothes. But that was nothing next to what I found on the other side of the frontier, past the scrums of shouting Syrians waving their documents at exasperated Turkish bureaucrats, the looted duty-free store, and finally the huge scrappy flags of the FSA that had been hastily sewn together and hoisted over their captured frontier. WELCOME TO FREE SYRIA, read the sign.
Free Syria looked like a set from Mad Max. Armed men, many with their faces covered, roamed through city streets pancaked by Assad’s airstrikes. Mortars had slammed into the top floors of the housing blocks, leaving masonry dangling like melted cheese, but families still lived on the lower floors and on the street traders sold trinkets, children’s jewellery, scarves and wristbands decorated with the FSA’s three-starred flag. Hawkers at the side of the road sold the only fuel available, an illegal brew that they dispensed from plastic jerry-cans, and which screwed up car engines in months.
In the rebel-held suburbs of Aleppo city in February 2013 I found the kind of idealistic young activists I had tracked down in Damascus – but they had been overwhelmed by the men with guns. Now, the so-called ‘liberated areas’ were battlegrounds for warlords who wanted to extract their share of bounty from the chaos. A thousand new little fiefdoms had sprouted in the space Assad left behind, each with an egocentric man drunk on hubris at the top and a score of lackeys beneath him. Former merchants, construction workers and imams had become self-styled leaders, their men either looting with abandon or, increasingly, imposing their own draconian ideas about Islam on the suffering population.
At night, the city went dark – at least, the rebel-held part did. The electricity was cut off there and most people relied on generators powered by the moonshine fuel from the roadsides. The tarry smoke caught in my nostrils as I sat inside a scruffy makeshift media centre, once a family home and still dotted with keepsakes on the cracked and dusty shelves. Outside, young rebels took over the streets at night to fire mortar rounds into government territory, just a couple of kilometres away and still fully lit and functioning. That inevitably drew return fire, and curses from everyone desperate for a full night’s sleep.
Stark daylight revealed huge piles of rubbish moulded into hillocks at the side of the Aleppo streets. Leishmaniasis, a flesh-eating disease spread by the sand flies living in the garbage, was tearing through the population, especially children. At a clinic set up by a local charity I watched distraught toddlers receive daily injections into their gaping sores. As we approached the city’s checkpoints, run by armed groups of increasingly hazy affiliation, my drivers and fixers would switch the music on their stereos to nasheed, a cappella chants about violence and loss beloved by the jihadis. On the road back to the Turkish frontier we passed through whole villages that had been recently flattened and abandoned.
The revolutionary promise of two years before had sunk beneath a malodorous tide of tragedy; front lines were crystallising across Aleppo city, and hundreds of thousands of people had fled their homes as the regime’s air force launched relentless raids on rebel territory. The death toll was in the tens of thousands, and the war’s descent into extremism had started. Syria was already well on the way to giving the world a grim litany of new cultural reference points – barrel bombing, chemical attacks, heart-eating rebels, and Isis.
Crossing back over the border into Turkey at the end of any assignment in Syria was like stepping from a sepia film into full colour. Kilis, the first Turkish town after the Syrian frontier, is only forty miles from Aleppo as the crow flies. It is the beigest of any Turkish city, its tiny Ottoman heart smothered by rings and rings of new tower blocks housing masses of rural peasants. It would not feature in any Turkish guidebook, but compared to Aleppo it was paradise. Each time I came back I ripped off the black shawl I had used to cover my clothes, and drank in the colours hitting my eyes. After the privations of Aleppo, hot water, privacy, electricity and undisturbed sleep in a Turkish fleapit felt like a night at the Savoy.
Summer 2013 Rebel-held Aleppo
The most powerful rebel faction in Aleppo city in the summer of 2013 was the Liwa al-Tawhid, an Islamist militia led by Abdulkader al-Saleh, a diminutive former spice importer. He had assumed the nom de guerre of Hajji Marea, Hajji being the title bestowed on Muslims who have completed the pilgrimage to Mecca, and Marea being the spit-and-sawdust town north of the city he came from. The urbane and wealthy population of Aleppo had been none too pleased to find Hajji Marea and his brigade of bumpkins entering the city the previous summer and quickly carving it up, with the Tawhid and other rebel brigades controlling the poor, conservative districts to the east and the regime clinging to the wealthy west. There, the residents might have known their president was a tyrant, but many of them preferred to stick with the devil they knew rather than take their chances on the unknown, ragtag rebels.
The Tawhid had built a slick PR operation, which I encountered within minutes of arriving in Aleppo on my first morning as a war reporter. We had driven directly to Ard al-Hamra, one of the chaotic neighbourhoods that made up almost all of eastern Aleppo. A Scud missile fired by Assad’s forces had hit it in the inky hours before sunrise, and the street in front of me – a little parade of honey-coloured houses – had been flattened. Children were running about on top of the rubble looking for salvageable and saleable remnants. The survivors had already been extracted, and so too had the identifiable bits of the dead. Severed body parts and smashed furnishings were all that was left under the dust. It was all so familiar from the news reports I had been watching over the past two years – crumbled houses, crying women, scowling men with guns slung over their shoulders – only now it was here in front of me in full HD. I was so transfixed that it took me a few seconds to realise that the hysterical children across the street were shouting at me, beckoning furiously and pointing at the space above my head. When I looked up, I saw that a huge chunk of stone, the corner of a dainty Juliet balcony, had cracked away from the building above me and was about to topple onto my head. I moved away and gave them a weak smile and a wave of thanks.
Seconds later a lorry with its rear shutters rolled up backed screaming around the corner, and the people who had been milling about crowded around it. Here was the humanitarian face of the Tawhid rebels, who ruled by the gun but wanted the world’s media to show a different face. In front of my camera and that of a young media activist called Farouk, they started throwing out blankets and food packages to the waiting gaggle who surged forward to scrap over the goodies. Over the following months I would watch all the other armed rebel groups do the same, in a series of increasingly odd charity stunts that their media relations officers would then try to sell to foreign journalists and our fixers as worthy international news stories. Al-Qaeda set up a subsidised bus service. Others opened bakeries with money from unnamed Saudi or Kuwaiti donors, handing out bread to the poor but refusing to allow the male volunteers to serve women. Even Isis got in on the act, in the first months after it sprouted like a poisonous weed amid the misery and before it got down to ruling through fear alone. In August 2013 it organised a children’s fun day in Aleppo, where armed men in balaclavas watched over a group of six-year-olds embroiled in an ice cream-eating competition. As the day’s finale, a group of Isis fighters competed in a tug-of-war against a team from Al-Qaeda, treating their enthralled audience to the darkly comic spectacle of overweight and bearded men in thobes and sandals sweating as they grappled with the rope. Isis won – a nice metaphor for what happened a few months later. The two extremist groups – identical sartorially and ideologically – turned their guns on each other.
The fixer I travelled into Aleppo with on that first assignment was a fat and slightly stupid guy called Mohammed who, like many others at that time, was making a wedge of cash off foreign reporters while doing little more than airing the Tawhid’s propaganda. Although Syrian by origin he had a distinct Iraqi accent, and had grown up in Baghdad. His father, a devout man from the conservative northern Syrian town of Jisr al-Shugur, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood – a network of pious believers who preferred to live in the shadows until the onset of the Arab Spring beckoned them into the open.
The Brotherhood is feared and loathed by the Middle East’s old authoritarian regimes because it provides a vision for an alternative system of government that appeals directly to the oppressed, using the world’s most powerful religious ideology as its glue. Distrusted but tolerated in the West, the Brotherhood was public enemy number one in the Arab world’s secular regimes, like Mubarak’s Egypt and Ben Ali’s Tunisia. In Syria, it was so hated that schoolchildren had to spew vitriol against it each morning as part of their ritual oath-giving to Assad’s Ba’athist state. In 1980, membership of the organisation was made punishable by death, and the Brothers retaliated with a series of increasingly violent protests and guerrilla attacks. Finally, in February 1982, President Hafez al-Assad sent his army to the city of Hama, epicentre of the Brotherhood’s uprising, where, over twenty-seven days, it besieged and bombarded the entire population. Up to 25,000 people were killed, but with media access restricted and no way for people inside the city to communicate with the outside world, it went virtually unreported. Everyone inside Syria heard about what happened, but their fear of what the regime might still do brought down a self-imposed omertà. Back then there was no independent media operating inside Syria and no internet to help the news leak out. The insurgency was crushed, whole city centres were destroyed. The remaining Brotherhood members were imprisoned or fled, and in Syria no one spoke of it again.
In the aftermath of Hama, many of Syria’s surviving Brotherhood members fell into the arms of a willing patron, the one Middle Eastern strongman who saw that there might be a use for them – Saddam Hussein.
The Iraqi president, though also a Sunni Muslim and a sectarian ruler, did not build an alliance with the Syrian Brotherhood out of religious conviction – later he would carry out his own crackdown on the Iraqi wing of the movement. But in the 1970s and early 1980s, Saddam’s main enemy was the Shia goliath Iran, to which Assad’s Syria was allied. By cuddling up to the Syrian Brotherhood, Saddam could undermine Damascus, his neighbour to the west, and in turn also Tehran, his neighbour to the east.
Saddam had funded and trained the Syrian Brotherhood prior to 1982, and then opened his country to those who fled after the group’s revolt against Assad failed. Syrian Brotherhood families were given homes in Baghdad and lavished with generous benefits, just as the rest of Iraq was slipping into a gruelling poverty inflicted on them by their leader’s increasingly erratic behaviour. The war with Iran, which began in 1980, was to drag on for eight years. Two years after it ended, Saddam invaded Kuwait and brought international sanctions hammering down on the heads of his people. By some estimates, half a million Iraqi children died in the 1990s through the direct or indirect impacts of the sanctions, which placed an almost total trade embargo on the country.
My fixer Mohammed recalled that time quite differently. ‘Baghdad was amazing, so many parties,’ he said dreamily. The good times for the Brotherhood families only came to an end in 2003, when the US-led ‘Coalition of the Willing’ invaded Iraq and toppled Saddam. Ten years on, Mohammed still sneered in disgust when he thought about the capture, trial and execution of a man who, whatever the errors of the West in toppling him, was one of the most brutal dictators in modern history.
Whenever Mohammed spoke of Saddam, it was with a finality that implied there was no other reasonable point of view. ‘Saddam was a very great man,’ he would say – and there was no way of persuading him how ironic it was that he was now embroiled in an uprising that was, purportedly, all about freedom from another dictator. Quite how or why he and his brother had come back to Syria from Iraq in 2011 would always remain a fuzzy enigma. Looking back, I’m sure that those old family ties were the reason why Mohammed was in Aleppo, a city with which he had few links, and why he was so keen to take me straight to the headquarters of the Tawhid Brigade, the Brotherhood’s armed proxy in the city. Three decades had passed since Assad the father had crushed and banished the Syrian Brothers. Now, in the Syrian revolution, they saw their chance to take revenge on the son.
The Tawhid was described by its apologists as a moderate Islamist group, which, in comparison to Al-Qaeda and Isis, it was. But moderate is a relative term. The more time I spent around the Tawhid, the more irritated I became at the strict code of Islamic behaviour they forced on me, a foreign atheist journalist who had come to tell their story. On the streets of Aleppo, a multi-faith city in a multi-faith country, they commanded that I wear the headscarf. They said it was to ‘show respect for the people’. It wasn’t; instead, it was all about respect for the Tawhid. Usually, when I entered ordinary people’s homes in Aleppo, the first thing they did was tell me I could remove the headscarf if I wanted to.
One day in May, as I was waiting inside the Tawhid’s base in a baking hot car with an agonising migraine for an interview that never materialised, and growing gradually more furious at being ordered to wear an uncomfortable symbol of someone else’s faith, I ripped the headscarf from my head. ‘Fuck this,’ I muttered to myself.
I will never forget the looks I got from the surly fighters hanging around the base. Several times I heard them whisper between themselves ‘sahafiya’ – ‘journalist’. To their credit, no one approached me and told me to put the headscarf back on, but I could feel the intense hostility.
Even more troubling was Hajji Marea’s willingness to accept the presence of Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda’s Syrian franchise, in Aleppo and to fight alongside them on the front lines against Assad. Nusra’s base was next door to the Tawhid’s, and they had kept their hostages – including foreign journalists and aid workers – in the basement of a building the two shared. James Foley, the American reporter later passed on to Isis and murdered on camera, is believed to have been held in that basement while he was in Nusra’s hands – and while Hajji Marea was receiving the rest of us for interviews in a room just metres away. We never did find out if Hajji Marea knew the extent of what Nusra was doing – he was killed in a regime airstrike in November 2013. Most of the Syrians I knew changed their Facebook profile to a picture of him on news of his death.
In August 2013 I visited the Tawhid’s base for the last time, and found the road outside had been freshly tarmacked and a promenade of elegant white flagpoles erected, leading up to the heavily guarded entrance.
‘We call it the UN,’ laughed Mahmoud, the suave, funny and far more intelligent fixer I had found after firing Mohammed. Mahmoud was no fan of the Tawhid.
I was disgusted at the arrogance too – this tacky show, this waste of desperately needed funds, just metres from water mains burst by artillery and schools and homes obliterated in the fighting.
But in Syria I also saw what happens to the trimmings of a personality cult when it crumbles. Across the rebel-held north in 2013 I came across the same banners depicting Bashar al-Assad that I had seen in that Damascus souk two years earlier, only now with his eyes scratched out and obscenities scrawled across his face. I found what was left of a bust of his father, Hafez, the architect of this terrifying regime, in the lobby of a hydroelectric dam that had been taken over by Jabhat al-Nusra. Somehow, they had managed to almost completely incinerate it. Another statue of Hafez in a nearby town had a leather sandal rammed into its mouth – the ultimate Arab insult.
And when I returned to Aleppo in the spring of 2014, after a bleak winter in which Isis overran the rebels in the east of the city and Assad’s forces started dropping barrels filled with explosives from helicopters, I found the Tawhid had been bombed out of their base. The old eye hospital, already tattered when they occupied it, was now just ruined columns jutting out of rubble. Those flagpoles were a row of twisted stalks, and with Hajji Marea dead his undisciplined mob had forgotten their once-eternal fealty to their leader and had been absorbed by rival factions. It’s what happens to them all, in the end.
Turkey’s cults
Maybe it was because I wasn’t looking for them, but I didn’t pick up on the first hints of Turkey’s personality cults until I had been there for several months. Although I was living in Antakya I was barely connected to Turkey at first. I worked inside Syria, hung out with Syrian refugees in Turkey during my downtime, and devoted most of my attention to the war over the border. Turkey was the place I came back to at the end of assignments in the war zone, to drink beers and wear sleeveless tops and enjoy the unlimited electricity and hot water on tap. I sat in shisha cafés in the Turkish border towns as I wrote my articles about what was happening on the other side of the frontier and whatever was going on politically in Turkey was just background noise – unless it overlapped with what was happening in Syria.
I knew of Atatürk, of course. Every Turkish guidebook mentions him, and warns tourists not to speak ill of him in public. I also remembered a passage in a book I had read as a teenager, written in the 1930s by a Turkish woman who had been so proud when her leader travelled to Europe wearing a suit and trilby hat like every other modern leader. Apart from anything else there is no way to avoid Atatürk in Antakya; a crude rendering of his face is cast in lights on the dramatic mountains that loom behind the town, visible from every street and rooftop terrace. The first time I saw the stylised line drawing of his face that is rendered in paint or metal signage in every public office in Turkey, I was struck by how much he bears a likeness to the British pop star Sting.
Erdoğan and the AKP I knew of mainly because they rose to power when I was in my first year of university in Manchester. One of my classes focused on contemporary European politics – a hopeful, expansive subject at that time. The theme de jour was the endless possibilities for EU enlargement, and the imminent accession of the central European states that had once been Soviet satellites. In my seminar that day we had discussed the Turkish elections and their implications for Europe. Amid all the doom of that year – the slow cranking up to the war in Iraq, the worsening quagmire in Afghanistan – it seemed to be a glint of hope. The Turkish secularists who were howling at the rise of these seemingly benign Islamists were the ones who looked like fundamentalists.
The Gezi Park protests, which started when I had been living in Turkey for three months, were the first major news story I took note of. They made small waves down in Antakya, where the local population of Turkish Alawites – members of the same sect of Shia Islam as Bashar al-Assad – held thinly attended protests in the main square. Maybe my views on Gezi at that time were coloured by the Syrians surrounding me: they mostly viewed Erdoğan as their champion – no other world leader was opposing Assad and welcoming refugees so consistently – and they distrusted the Turkish Alawites for their kinship with Assad’s hated regime in Syria. The tear gas used by the Turkish police to put down the demonstrations in Taksim seemed minor compared to the live rounds fired by Syrian security forces on protesters there.
But, after Gezi, I started noticing how Erdoğan was becoming much more than a prime minister. When new football stadiums opened, he would play in the inaugural matches – and always, without fail, score a goal. He appeared on an evening chat show and sang a lilting Turkish song in a tuneless voice, to enthusiastic applause. Barely a day went by when a television channel did not broadcast one of his speeches or visits. After he gave up the job of prime minister and won the presidential elections in 2014, his picture started appearing everywhere. And when the AKP won in parliamentary elections a year later, my Syrian boyfriend’s father phoned from Saudi Arabia, where he was living. He had never even visited Turkey.
‘Erdoğan! Erdoğan! Erdoğan!’ he sang in delight.
That was where my fascination with Erdoğan and the people who idolise him started – the moment when I became obsessed with untangling the appeal of the Turkish president.
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BUILDING BRAND ERDOĞAN (#ulink_42a4b531-3036-5547-9d45-406b18be307d)
The president likes to wear sunglasses. It is part of a look that, over the years, he has honed to a crossover between Islamist and mafia don.
There is the clipped moustache that has been there from the start – an essential element of any pious man’s image. Back in the 1990s it was a glossy chestnut brown, set off by his bouffant hair. Over the years, as both have got shorter and greyer on their original wearer, the moustache has spread through Erdoğan’s inner circle like a catwalk trend. As the 2017 referendum approached, a Daily Mail journalist totted up that twenty-seven of the thirty cabinet members were sporting the badem biyik – or ‘almond moustache’. Of the three with no moustache, one was a woman.
There are the oversized suit jackets, cross-hatched and most often in a dark powder blue. They originally made an appearance around the time of the presidential elections in August 2014 – when Erdoğan first won the post – and have since become so iconic that when a friend decided to dress up as the president for a raucous post-referendum dinner party all he had to do was don one of these suits and grow a week’s worth of moustache. In 2015, as the fashion spread in Erdoğan’s circle, one of Turkey’s leading designers bestowed it with a name: the ‘prestogal’ jacket.
‘President Erdoğan is the man who brought the checkered fashion to Turkey. Nobody influences our president; he does not follow the world, but rather he creates his own fashion,’ Levon Kordonciyan, the designer, told the state news agency, Anadolu.
And then there are those shades, aviator-style with thin gold rims. Erdoğan dons them at rallies and walkabouts, the lenses so dark that his eyes are inscrutable. When he walks en masse with his entourage, all of them dressed in black and wearing shades to match him, you get the sense that the mob boss has arrived. It’s the same with the screaming convoys the high-level politicians move about in – first police on motorcycles, then the swarm of blacked-out cars travelling in packs half a kilometre long down the highways. They have grown more common everywhere since Erdoğan became president – and his own entourage is by far the biggest – but you see them most often in Ankara. Whole intersections must be slickly closed and reopened to allow the government motorcades to pass through, jamming another stick in the spokes of the capital’s dreadful traffic.
It is impossible to guess to what level such privileges go down. Erdoğan travels like that, for sure, as do the high-ranking members of his cabinet. In August 2016, a month after the coup attempt, prime minister Binali Yıldırım’s press team called me and a couple of dozen other foreign journalists to an Ottoman palace on the Asian bank of the Bosphorus. A jolly Yıldırım ordered us to tuck into the opulent Turkish breakfast, served in the gardens – young cheeses with succulent figs, delicate tea and hot, crunchy pastries – while burly men in black T-shirts, olive-grey combat trousers, shades and earpieces scanned the scene in every direction with assault rifles ready. After a two-hour discussion and a sincere vow from the diminutive, grandfatherly Yıldırım that we should do this more often, we watched as he was whisked away in a helicopter in a flourish of political showmanship.
Other ministers travel in more low-key style. But in September 2016, down in Diyarbakır, de facto capital of the Kurdish south-east, I happened to be in the city’s premier breakfast spot as the city governor, newly appointed from Ankara, came in. The Hasanpaşa Han is an Ottoman-era caravanserai, a two-level eating and shopping centre around an open central courtyard that was built in the sixteenth century. Back then the traders traversing the Silk Route would spend the night inside its black basalt walls, resting their horses in the straw-strewn central space and dining and sleeping in the warren of surrounding rooms.
Today, there are stalls at ground level selling trinkets, colourful silk scarves and rugs printed with images of Kurdish heroes. For a time you might have found PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan’s face among them. Now the rug sellers stick to uncontroversial figures, mostly Kurdish singers and poets; none go so far as to sell any bearing pictures of Erdoğan, as I have seen in other parts of the country. Through tiny arched doorways steep stone steps lead up through the blackness of the han’s thick outer walls like secret warrens in a medieval castle, before they spill out to the mezzanine of the second level. Here, breakfast is served – Diyarbakır style. Endless small plates of cheeses, olive oil, jams, spicy pastes, sliced tomatoes and cucumber, honey, kaymak (a kind of Turkish clotted cream), tahini, fried eggs, spicy sausage sizzling in butter are heaped onto tables along with endless bread and tea, refilled as soon as it is finished.
I was there with my translator and her friend, who had run a café in the grounds of Surp Giragos, the largest Armenian church in Anatolia, until fighting between local PKK militants and the Turkish security forces enveloped it. He closed up and left his café in December 2015 and had not been back in the ten months since, but a colleague who had been able to get into the curfew zone to check on the church had taken photos for him. It was not so much the loss of his business that made his hand tremble with grief and rage, but what had been done to Surp Giragos. He held up his phone to show me photos of the camp kitchen that the soldiers had set up under the soaring gothic arches of the nave and the Atatürk portrait they pinned up in place of the icons.
It was at that moment that a gaggle of close protection guards, the same guys in olive and black who had accompanied Yıldırım, filed in and fanned out on both levels of the han. The bubbling conversation hushed as if someone had turned down the dial, then the governor walked in and took his place at a breakfast table. Slowly the chatter returned, but we stopped talking about the church and the war that had ravaged the districts just behind these thick old walls and stuck to banal small talk for the rest of the morning.
But the portraits in the public corridors of Aksaray, Erdoğan’s thousand-room palace, show the other side of the man at the top of the clique that rules Turkey. He is still in suits and dark glasses but now in the world’s misery spots rather than the halls of power, kissing the hands of old women in headscarves or surrounded by adoring African children.
The president’s loyal insiders – and often even his opponents – insist that such personal warmth is genuine. One lower-level bureaucrat working in the presidency tells me that in meetings, Erdoğan makes sure everyone has a glass of tea in front of them before he starts. An adviser insists that he berates Turks to have at least three children only because he cares about them as he would his own family. The head of the foreign investment board, who was personally appointed by Erdoğan, says people see the president as their father.
Turks who have met Erdoğan in person say time and again: he is funny. But his instinct to bring an iron fist down on those who oppose him politically is a bona fide part of his personality, too.
‘What I know from his life and his family is that he is not concerned on a macro level,’ a former aide told me. ‘He may cry and help a person but if you tell him that there are thousands of people gathered there, he sends somebody to bust them. A thousand people is something political. The other is something humane.’
Foreign diplomats paint a similar picture. For sure Erdoğan can be charming, and they agree his personal warmth is real. But they also say he can be obstructive and caustic, especially when he feels he is not getting his way or being treated with respect.
‘I don’t find him particularly funny, but he definitely has a presence,’ said one. ‘He was quite warm. He was always patting me on the back. To be this successful you must have something and he absolutely does. He has a very magnetic personality, which does not really come out. He always seems very angry and harsh in his public speaking. But he does not seem like that in private.’
Another, who had personally felt the force of the president’s fury several times during his posting, said there are two Erdoğans: ‘the diplomatic, polished guy who wants to make friends and is trying to act to his capabilities in order to influence others. This is the nice Erdoğan. Then there is the tough, awful Erdoğan. And you never know which one is going to show up.’
Outside the country, Erdoğan’s mercurial and often bullish personality wins him more detractors than fans. But inside Turkey – which is, at its heart, an Eastern country even if it often assumes the veneer of the West – it is seen as his biggest attribute.
‘One of his strongest points is that he is genuine in both doing right and wrong,’ a former adviser tells me. ‘He is very transparent, and that’s a good thing in Turkey. He does not conceal anything. He speaks his mind, and this is why he makes so many mistakes. He sometimes says absurd things. But he is not a European politician in that sense. He is more like a guide figure, like a politician of the Ottoman times.’
The speechwriter
The photo Hüseyin Besli has chosen for the wall of his Istanbul office is a classic of the genre. Erdoğan is smiling, shaded and waving, dressed in a black greatcoat and surrounded by his entourage. It is the new Tayyip in the new Turkey – a place where he is firmly in charge. But with his Marlboro reds, diamond-patterned sweater and tired and sagging grey face, Besli himself looks like a relic of the old – more like an ageing shopkeeper or a minor bureaucrat than the architect of a revolution. His shoulders hunch forward and his smile is resigned. The way he sucks his cigarettes through his own moustache – a little longer than Erdoğan’s and just as grey – suggests a deep sadness. Maybe he is just lost in his thoughts.
We meet in his writing room, a neat, wood-panelled attic in an old Balkan-style house, nestled in the heart of a bubbling district in Asian Istanbul. The streets of Çengelköy are narrow and cobbled, lined with family-run grocers. The district sits on the banks of the Bosphorus, at a point where the land juts out to gift it a panoramic view of the first of the three suspension bridges with the outlines of the mosques of Istanbul’s Ottoman centre in the hazy blue background. The din of a Monday evening rush hour leaks in through the huge window by Besli’s desk as I settle into one of his comfy leather chairs. Revving motorcycles and shouting shopkeepers blend with the wail of the sundown call to prayer. His floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed with books on religion and politics. There is a sticker of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rabia hand, a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under, pasted onto the window, and that Erdoğan portrait is the first thing you’re confronted with as you walk in the door.
Besli chain smokes and occasionally apologises as he breaks off to answer his phone. He says he is sure that I won’t represent his words properly, because the foreign journalists never do.
‘Then why did you agree to speak with me?’ I ask.
‘Because I am polite,’ he laughs.
But I suspect he also craves some recognition for the years he spent moulding the image of the most powerful man in Turkey.
It was in 1974, when Besli was in his mid-twenties, that a tall and striking young man walked into one of his meetings. The National Salvation Party (Milli Selâmet Partisi or MSP) was one of the few overtly Islamist organisations in Turkey at that time, and Besli was head of its youth branch. The country had just undergone its second military coup, and a mushrooming street war between leftist and nationalist youth gangs had sent the murder rate soaring. The rival factions were shooting and stabbing each other to death on the streets and in the university campuses. The MSP stayed outside the violence and the factionalism, meeting to pray, plan and organise. It was a tactic that bore fruit. Throughout the 1970s, the MSP won places in two coalition governments despite never winning more than 12 per cent of the vote, largely thanks to the hopeless fracturing of the non-Islamist parties.
In 1974 Erdoğan, aged twenty-one, was leader of the MSP’s local branch in Beyoğlu, his home borough in inner Istanbul. Besli, a couple of years older, remembers him as a charismatic guy who could already work a room. ‘I don’t remember where I first heard Erdoğan speak, but I remember that he was great, even back then,’ he says. ‘He could make himself heard. When he spoke, people felt sympathy with him.’
Within two years, Besli’s term in office had ended and Erdoğan was elected his successor. They were the young bloods in a party led by the middle-aged and nerdish professor Necmettin Erbakan, who was pursuing an agenda beloved of Islamists since the late Ottoman era. Erbakan insisted that Turkey’s ills could be blamed on foreign meddling and Western influence, and that the cure was to turn it back towards Islam and build relations with the Muslim world. The nefarious secular elites who ruled the republic had done her a disservice by taking her into NATO and cosying up to Europe; what was needed was a revival of strong Islamic morals, population growth and rapid industrialisation to bring Turkey’s living standards up to those of the West.
The establishment was rattled. The army stepped in, launching the third coup of the republic in 1980.
The MSP, like all the other parties, was shut down by the generals. But young Erdoğan’s rise continued. In 1985 he became Istanbul chair of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP – which replaced the MSP), and then stood unsuccessfully as their candidate for the mayorship of Beyoğlu in 1989. In 1991 he ran for parliament for the first time – and although he won, had to hand his seat to another parliamentary candidate due to the party’s preferential voting system. None of these setbacks discouraged him. That same year Besli began working as Erdoğan’s speechwriter, assembling the strategy that finally propelled him to the Istanbul mayor’s office in 1994. Erdoğan has never conceded victory at the ballot box since.
‘Our struggle was not so much about power, it was about a cause,’ Besli says, when I ask him what drove them to continue even when so much was stacked against them. ‘When you have a cause, you don’t give up just because you’re not in power. And when you’re a man of fate, you tell yourself that you have to struggle and the result will not be defined by you. You do what is necessary and leave the rest to Allah.’
We are twenty minutes into our conversation, yet it is the first time God has been mentioned. I can’t tell whether it is deliberate; however, when I later ask Besli what their biggest hurdle has been, he admits it was the fear and scepticism of Turkey’s secularist voters. He refers to them as the generation raised by the republic, brainwashed into rejecting their faith and their Eastern traditions in favour of a false affinity with the West. But he also says that a key part of his strategy with Erdoğan was to keep religion away from their image, so that they could broaden their appeal beyond the narrow, pious support base the MSP had commanded. When Erdoğan entered the mayor’s office, he signed a paper promising that no one would lose their jobs because of their political affiliations or be forced to adhere to Islamic rules. On the job, he won respect for his party’s technocratic efficiency.
Erdoğan’s early conciliations in the mayor’s office quickly gave way to a more combative tone. During a rally in the eastern town of Siirt in 1997 he read out a poem that blended nakedly Islamist metaphors with militaristic nationalism: ‘The mosques are our barracks, / The minarets our bayonets, / And the faithful our soldiers.’ The judicial system – dominated by Kemalists – seized the opportunity to take Erdoğan back down to where they believed he belonged. The mayor of Istanbul was sentenced to ten months in prison for inciting religious hatred. And he had already left the Refah Party, which was closed down anyway only eleven months later. But jail time proved the best image boost Erdoğan could have dreamed of.
Jail time
In 1999 the future Turkish president joined Johnny Cash and Tupac Shakur, and released an album from prison.
Bu şarkı burada bitmez (This Song Does Not End Here) – is a 35-minute compilation of Erdoğan reading poetry over a soundtrack of lilting Turkish melodies. Produced by Ulus Music, a label specialising in ‘introducing to the world the richness, colour and variety of Turkish music and same time making sure that the whole world can take advantage of our cultural preciousness’, the album remains widely available on CD and cassette on Turkish second-hand trading websites.
By the time the glamorous 43-year-old mayor of Istanbul broke with Refah and was sent to jail, he had already started an aggressive spin campaign to reinvent himself as Turkey’s number one Islamist. In the eleven months between his conviction and the start of his jail term, Erdoğan called his first major press conference. As mayor of Istanbul Erdoğan had almost always refused to speak with foreign journalists. Now, he needed the media to reboot his image for the world stage. So he invited a group of correspondents based in the city for a slap-up lunch at an upmarket restaurant serving hearty Ottoman-style food.
‘Why are you meeting with us now?’ asked one of the more cynical correspondents.
Erdoğan turned in surprise to his assistant, a pleasant young man who had always relayed his boss’s rejection of interview requests with an apologetic air. ‘Why didn’t you tell me these journalists have been wanting to meet with me?’ he berated the unfortunate bureaucrat.
It was, says one of the correspondents who was at the lunch, a transparent attempt to save face. ‘A charm offensive,’ was how another described it.
As the court case against Erdoğan dragged on, Istanbul city council turned its website into a protest page featuring messages of support and a link to the full text of his defence statement. By the time his appeal failed and he was finally sent to prison in March 1999, he had built a reputation as a free-speech crusader with a legion of loyal personal supporters. Before he was jailed he was allowed to attend Friday prayers at the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul for a final time. Huge crowds came to pray alongside him, and formed a convoy to escort him to Pınarhisar jail, north-west of Istanbul. When he was released in July 1999, having served only 119 days of his ten-month sentence, thousands turned out again to greet him.
The ad man
Erdoğan was not the only Islamist mayor to have been imprisoned in Turkey at that time. In 1996 şükrü Karatepe, the mayor of Kayseri in central Anatolia and also from the Refah Party, had told a rally that his ‘heart was bleeding’ because he had been obliged to attend a ceremony honouring Atatürk. Convicted of insulting the eternal leader in April 1998, a week after Erdoğan’s conviction for inciting religious hatred, he had a one-year sentence slapped on him and was sent straight to prison with no time for appeal. But Karatepe did not have a marketing genius behind him – and he was forgotten as soon as his cell door slammed shut.
Erdoğan, meanwhile, was working with the best in the business.
‘Even when Erdoğan was forbidden from engaging in politics we were engaged in communication campaigns. There was a political ban on him but we were trying to do as much as the law allowed,’ says Cevat Olçok, the bearded and sharp-suited director of Arter, Turkey’s first political marketing agency. I am sitting across from him at a huge desk in the agency’s minimalist-industrial-style Istanbul offices in April 2018. The clean lines of the shelves behind him are ruined by Ottoman-style knick-knacks, books and framed pictures of Erdoğan. Pride of place, though, goes to the photos of his brother, Erol, and nephew, Abdullah, both killed on the Bosphorus bridge by coup soldiers on 15 July.
Erol Olçok, who founded Arter with Cevat, first worked with Erdoğan as a spin doctor in the Istanbul mayoral election campaign of 1994. He was raised in a poor and religious family in the Anatolian town of Çorum and, like Erdoğan, had graduated from religious high school. But instead of entering the clergy like most of his peers he went to art college – the first from his village to take advantage of higher education.
‘I will never forget the day I first passed the Bosphorus,’ Erol later said of his first day in the city in 1982.
In 1986 he graduated with a degree in art history and started working in advertising. It was a relatively new and rapidly expanding sector; prime minister Turgut Özal, the first elected leader after the 1980 military coup, was opening up Turkey’s economy and Turks were becoming consumers in the Western style. After working with a number of commercial agencies Erol started Arter in 1993, and a year later was contracted by Erdoğan. Such was the bond that developed between them that, having won the Istanbul mayoral elections, Erdoğan appointed Erol Olçok his press adviser.
‘Erdoğan never stopped marketing himself,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘We were making greetings cards from him for religious holidays and important dates for the country. When he had the political ban, his motto was “this song does not finish here”. We designed the poster for everybody in Turkey. There was a huge demand for it. It was in every city in Turkey.’
Arter’s iconic poster was the namesake of the later album of poetry: a picture of Erdoğan in profile, speaking from behind a podium with a Turkish flag in the background. At the top, his name. At the bottom, that slogan – a statement. And other than that, nothing else: no party logo, no symbol and no explanation. None was needed. Erdoğan had become a brand.
The rebels
As Erdoğan was serving his jail term, a separate group of young renegades was calling for change from within the Refah Party. These rebels, like Erdoğan, had grown frustrated with Necmettin Erbakan’s way of doing politics. From cosmopolitan, professional backgrounds, they included Bülent Arınç, a suave lawyer of Cretan heritage, and Abdullah Gül, a former economist at the Islamic Development Bank. Gül stood as candidate for the leadership of Refah in 1997, hoping to reform the party from within. He was narrowly beaten – but a few months later the party was closed down anyway.
‘We had many successes with Refah. But later on, the political landscape changed and we started to make mistakes,’ Gül tells me in the huge drawing room of his Istanbul palace. ‘There was a convention and I became the candidate. I was talking about democracy, I was talking about fundamental rights, about human rights and saying that if the rhetoric is not good in politics we have to adopt the correct policies. The party was very authoritarian at the time. There was no chance for me yet I was about to win. It was a shock. The party was then closed by the constitutional court without justification … I was trying to save the party.’
As had happened so many times over the decades, Refah reformed under a new name, the Saadet Partisi (Felicity Party). But the new guard led by Gül did not join them – instead they split and formed a new grouping. They started their public relations drive with a rally in Kayseri, Gül’s home city, and followed it up with a tour of Turkey. And they had attracted a star – Erdoğan, recently released from prison and with a soaring reputation. Gül had lobbied the European Parliament to oppose Erdoğan’s jail sentence and personally approached him to join his new party once he was released. The soft-spoken technocrat says he had no issue with handing over the top position in the party he had founded to the most charismatic Islamist Turkey had ever produced. The demand for him to do so came, he says, from within the ranks.
‘We all decided to make Erdoğan chairman. His popularity was higher,’ Gül says.
The Arter team came as part of the Erdoğan package – and so they got to work on the new party’s branding.
‘We worked on the name, the logo and corporate identity,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘Erol was the leader in all these things. We made additions to the party’s manifesto, and we worked on the name. There were many ideas for that: one of them was the Genç Partisi [Young Party]. They did not like it. Then there was Beyaz Partisi [White Party] and from that it became Ak [meaning pure]. It became AK Partisi because Turkey needed a clean page. All the political establishments were tired, and the society was not getting what it wanted. But the people in this party were clean and wise – this is why we proposed AK Partisi.’
As Arter revved up the spin, speechwriter Hüseyin Besli was working out who the Turkish people actually were – and how the newly hatched AK Party might win their votes. Such polls are unremarkable in most developed democracies, but in Turkey the entrenched system had ensured that power always lay in the hands of the secular elite. They would vote one way and the religious masses would vote another and, ultimately, the army and other facets of state would decide how the country should be run. There had seemed little point in any political party trying to effect change. But that’s what Erdoğan’s team did and continues to do – obsessively.
‘We did comparative studies of the Turkish people, and of the dynamics of the previous coups and the reasons why they had happened,’ Besli says. ‘We found out what people’s reactions to the coups were, and then we considered all the information we had gathered. We wanted to avoid anything that might lead to such events in the future. Today, Erdoğan says we are not the ones who founded the AKP – it was the people. Our main motto was to be the voice of the voiceless. We really understood what people wanted.’
Abdullah Gül credits the expanding television coverage of parliament and political debates in the mid-1990s for Refah’s, and then the AKP’s, growing success.
‘Before politics happened in meetings. Politicians were talking with people and then coming here’ – to Istanbul and Ankara – ‘and living and doing things differently,’ Gül says. ‘When TVs started to show parliament, people started to monitor their representatives. In the village they were supporting someone, and then seeing what they were doing in parliament. We were addressing their feelings. We were being live broadcasted. The first live broadcast started in the 1990s. It was one of the contributions to Turkish democracy. Before, political allegiance was just a tradition that was passed on. Now it is more transparent. Refah got rooted in the country in the 1990s. People listened on TV. They saw that we were addressing their feelings. This is how everything was restructured.’
Turkey’s economy was also creaking by the time the AKP launched in 2001; the currency was slipping into hyper-inflation and unemployment rocketing towards 10 per cent. All the existing parties were tarnished with corruption, incompetence or both. The logo Erdoğan and his team eventually plumped for to represent their new party was the light bulb – a symbol of hope in dark times. And to fit with the letters A, K and P, they came up with a full and generic name – the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party).
Soon, the AKP was the most talked-about party in Turkey. A secularist newspaper columnist said it should be pronounced as its letters – A-K-P – rather than as ‘Ak Party’, as the marketers had intended. It is still a point of contention today – and a great way of determining a Turk’s feelings about the party. Every time I say ‘A-K-P’, Cevat Olçok pulls me up.
‘Ak Partisi!’ he snaps, without irony.
‘When it started, the goal was to make AK Partisi … a brand in Turkey and the world,’ he continues. ‘This was said at the foundation. AK Partisi: a world party. Seventeen years have passed. You will see AK Parti everywhere in Turkey, and always with a corporate identity.’
In November 2002, only fifteen months after it was officially launched, the AKP won an outright majority of seats in the parliament. The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), one of the major international election monitors, was glowing in its opening assessment of the poll. It wrote in its final report:
The 3 November elections for the Turkish Grand National Assembly (TGNA) demonstrated the vibrancy of Turkey’s democracy. A large number of parties campaigned actively throughout the country, offering the electorate a broad and varied choice. The sweeping victory of opposition parties showed the power of the Turkish electorate to institute governmental change.
But the OSCE also noted some serious flaws in the system. The AKP had won just 34 per cent of the vote but taken almost two-thirds of the seats in parliament. The only other party to take up seats was the CHP – a result of Turkey’s arcane election rules, which state that only parties that tally more than 10 per cent of the vote can enter parliament. The votes of those that fall below the threshold are distributed between those who have reached it.
Erdoğan, though chairman of the victorious party, could not take up one of its seats – his criminal conviction barred him from taking public office. Abdullah Gül became prime minister, but the AKP immediately began gathering cross-party support for the law barring Erdoğan to be changed. Gül served for just five months before stepping aside for Erdoğan in March 2003. Some within the party were unimpressed.
‘No one was expecting me to resign, even Tayyip Bey [a Turkish honorific, roughly Mr Tayyip],’ says Gül. ‘Everything was going very well. There was a lot of pressure, but I did not think it would be ethical for me to stay. [Erdoğan] was chairman of the party. It was an ethical matter. I thought it would be better for me to leave [the prime minister’s position].’
By April 2018, when I meet Cevat Olçok, Arter has stuck with the AKP and vice versa for seventeen years, through ten election campaigns and countless other publicity drives – and now the loss of their founder and visionary, Erol Olçok. Under him, they took their AKP formula international, working on political campaigns in northern Cyprus, Iraq, Georgia, Egypt, Malaysia, Albania, Macedonia, Libya, Tunisia and Ukraine. They also take on other work in the commercial sector.
But for Erdoğan, their number one client, Arter has always gone above and beyond the role of spin agency: Erol Olçok even stage-managed the grandiose society weddings of the president’s children. It was he who commissioned the song about Erdoğan for the 2014 presidential elections – and convinced his boss of its merit.
‘The mathematics of our campaign was like this. Our hero was Erdoğan,’ Erol Olçok later said. ‘Then Mr Erdoğan called me to his side. He said, “Is it too late to say this song is very personal and it would not be right to use it?” I said to him: “Mr Prime Minister, this song has nothing to do with you. This song is for the people who wish to express their love for you. This is their statement.”’
Set to the rhythm and tune of the dombra, a pounding Turkic-style war song, the lyrics still echo around the Erdoğan rallies I go to five years on: He is the voice of the oppressed, the lush voice of a silent world! Recep Tayyip Erdoğan …
‘Erdoğan is a genius in regards to political communications and so was Erol,’ says Cevat Olçok. ‘They knew … how to touch people and understand their feelings. They were a match.
‘Erdoğan and his party came to get rid of the old order. They widened Turkey’s perspectives and horizons. He gave us self-confidence. Now we have much bigger dreams. We will build our own electric car. We are building our own fighter jets and tactical helicopters. We are the seventeenth biggest economy in the world. We were the most expanding country in this year’s G20. Erdoğan is realising Turkey’s dreams. This is why he is a great brand.’
4 (#ulink_e338fb60-58d1-5986-9c1b-be23e0d819aa)
ERDOĞAN AND FRIENDS (#ulink_e338fb60-58d1-5986-9c1b-be23e0d819aa)
The diaspora
Ufuk Seçgin is a Turk without Turkish citizenship and, at heart, a liberal. In Germany, where he was born, grew up and went to university, he supports the left-leaning Social Democrat Party. In Britain, where he has a second citizenship and runs his business, he is a Remainer. But in Turkey – in his DNA – he is a solid supporter of Erdoğan and the AKP. It is about more than just clever marketing.
‘You should have been in Turkey in the 1990s. Compare that with now, it’s day and night!’ Seçgin tells me in his crisp German-accented English. ‘Going to hospital was high risk, basically. I can remember how we were buying medicine from pharmacies in Germany and sending them because either they were not available in Turkey or they were so expensive they couldn’t buy them. And food banks, water cuts – there was no clean drinking water. Like fuel stations you would have water stations in the city. People would go with their empty containers and fill them, every day. Electricity just a few hours a day. You see that and then you see this, what’s going on now. And you say, well, this was definitely a success of the Ak Party.’
As a child born to Turkish migrant parents in Hamburg in the 1970s, Seçgin could at first only claim Turkish citizenship. His German identity documents listed him as a ‘son of a Gastarbeiter’, the name for the Turks who flocked to Germany as economic migrants in the post-war boom. They were not allowed to become German nationals. Then, in the election campaign of 1998, the Social Democrat Party pledged to lift the rule that meant only people born of German parents could claim citizenship. Seçgin, a business student with big plans, saw a new spread of opportunities open up with the promise of EU citizenship. But though the SDP won the election they were shunted back on their promise by pressure from the right wing. The amendment to the citizenship law that was eventually passed allowed the children of Turkish migrants to become German citizens – but only if they renounced their Turkish nationality. Migrants from anywhere else were allowed to keep both.
‘That was because they wanted to avoid people running on both cars,’ says Seçgin. ‘It’s black or white. You’re German or you’re Turkish. Where are your priorities, that type of thing.
‘I still remember, I went into one of my local meetings with what was then the head of the foreign commission in the German parliament, a so-called veteran of politics. He had been forty years an MP in our region. I asked him why are you doing it this way, and gave him a list of citizenship rules from other countries. He started to give me stupid answers and I pushed further, and further. And the answer he gave me was: “What if Turkey enters a war against Germany? Who would you fight for?”’
Seçgin took German citizenship, and renounced his Turkish, in 2004. The Turkish government provides German-Turks in the same position as he is with a blue card, which allows them to live and work in Turkey as if they were citizens but without the right to vote. Nonetheless, they are invested. Seçgin was studying for an MBA at Cardiff University when the AKP was first elected in 2002. He was already a keen supporter. His flatmate – another German-Turk who, unlike Seçgin, weaved a booze-filled, Casanova-like path through British university life – joined the party online as he saw the votes coming in.
‘I said: “Anything Erdoğan or the Ak Party says is completely the opposite of what you believe. So why on earth are you joining?” And he said: “I’m going to be a businessman, and the earlier I join AKP the better for me in the future.”’
Both Turkey and Germany have since yanked at Ufuk Seçgin, trying to make him decide whom he loves more, but really all he wants is to be a successful Muslim businessman in a globalised world. Like many Turks he feels fed up with the EU and the endless merry-go-round of Turkey’s attempts to join it. He once supported Turkey’s membership bid, but now feels it would be better outside it. At the same time, in the UK he is facing the impacts of a Brexit he didn’t vote for, and which doesn’t appeal to him. He will no longer be able to hire talent from the continent with the same ease as he hires British workers, or to work across borders so easily.
Now, in the AKP and Erdoğan, Seçgin sees a party and a leader with some problems. He says there are few signs of a succession plan, no new generation of leaders being nurtured, and he feels the arrests of journalists in the wake of the coup attempt have gone too far. He worries that the Turkish economy, once so buoyant, may soon start to shrivel. But in uncertain times across the span of his world, Erdoğan is one of the few certainties Seçgin can cling to. The president has brought wealth, stability and honour to Turks like him – and to those looking in from the outside, Erdoğan’s flamboyance masks many of his flaws.
‘I don’t see, who has got that charisma? Someone like Erdoğan doesn’t come along every ten years. He comes along every thirty years or whatever,’ Seçgin says. ‘Even his opponents say he is really charismatic, knows his stuff. He has put Turkey back on the map.’
The new Muslim middle class
Seçgin is part of a wave of pious businessmen who have made it big in Erdoğan’s Turkey. Halalbooking.com, the business he co-founded in 2009, is an online holiday booking service aimed at observant Muslims. It is a fast-growing market; Halalbooking.com is currently valued at $60–70 million.
In May 2017 – the start of his most successful season to date – I accompany Seçgin on a tour of the halal resorts of Antalya alongside two dozen businessmen and women, all of them European Muslims. Thirty-six-year-old Songül, a stylish German-Turk from the city of Bremen, donned the Islamic headscarf and started practising her religion by the book six years ago after the birth of her two daughters. It was only then that she realised the dearth of lifestyle brands aimed at middle-class Muslims – and so she became one of the pioneers. Songül started her online bookings business in 2016, and still had only one competitor in the online halal tourism sector in Germany a year on.
‘It was a boutique industry before, all very expensive,’ says Songül. ‘You would either hire a private villa or go to exclusive resorts where it costs around four thousand euros for a family holiday for one week.’
Over four days, Seçgin leads us on a tour of the new wave in pious holidaymaking – the mass-market halal hotels. The Bera, the first to be awarded halal status in Turkey, is our first stop. The sweet smell of hookah smoke wafts through the cavernous lobby, and a wide panorama of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge with a mosque in the foreground hangs behind reception. The Bera is owned by a conglomerate with ties to Erdoğan: when he was mayor of Istanbul, the municipality sold it a piece of prime real estate in the heart of the city for a fraction of its true value. The television screens are showing ATV, a pro-Erdoğan channel, and Yeni şafak and Sabah, its newspaper equivalents, are propped up in a rack by the door. On leaving, I am handed a gift: an encyclopaedia of Ottoman history.
Otherwise, The Bera is just like any other package resort: filled with hyped-up small children and parents who look as if they’ve been craving this holiday since they flew home from the last. I ask a couple from Preston who are slumped in the lobby’s comfy chairs as their two tiny girls scoot around whether they thought twice about a holiday in Turkey after the coup attempt and terrorist attacks.
‘We’ve not really heard about those,’ the mother tells me, clearly wishing I would move on so she can relax. ‘We just came here last year and we liked it, so we decided to come again.’
The food at the buffet is halal – but otherwise no different to any other resort. In my comfortable, clean room I find not a Gideon Bible and a minibar stocked with beer and wine but a Quran and a Qibla, an arrow stuck to the ceiling to show the direction of Mecca. At reception in the women’s spa and beach area I am frisked by a (female) security guard and stripped of my phone and camera before being gestured through smoked-glass doors. Through the changing rooms and treatment suites, the path leads out onto a fifty-metre stretch of beach surrounded by billowing curtains of fabric hung between flagpoles thirty metres high. You cannot see out to the sea – the view is blocked by the sails, although the water can still lap in underneath. The women wear reasonably conservative bikinis on this boxed-off beach, even after being freed of the male gaze. I ask one if it bothers her that she cannot contemplate the horizon as she sunbathes.
‘But if it was open, the men could look at us as they come past on boats and jet-skis,’ she replies.
In the lobby that evening, as we relax with tea and flavoured tobacco, I ask Seçgin how the drop in visitor numbers to Turkey since last year’s coup attempt has affected his business. He looks at me as if I were crazy.
‘Drop?’ he replies. ‘Last year we doubled our business, and this year we doubled again!’
By 2017, Turkey has risen to become the world’s third most popular destination for halal travellers, a four-place rise on the year before (only Malaysia and the UAE score higher). In a global halal tourism market now worth $151 billion annually, Turkey dominates the beach-holiday sector. The country accounts for a disproportionate amount of the hotels listed on Halalbooking.com, not out of a conscious effort on Seçgin’s part but simply because Turkey is the place with the best-developed concept of what an all-inclusive halal holiday means. This, after all, is an evolution of the model the Turks have been fine-tuning on booze-soaked European tourists since the 1980s.
‘Turkey is the centre of package resorts,’ Seçgin continues. ‘At the lower end there are the mass-market resorts. And at the high end in the halal market there’s the Angels Resort, where the rooms start at three hundred and fifty euros a night. I have one customer from Ukraine this year – he booked six weeks there and spent thirty-one thousand euros!’
But this is Turkey. And here, the sacred always comes with a side serving of the profane.
The original pioneer of the country’s now-booming Islamic leisure sector is the unlikely Fadıl Akgündüz, who goes by the nickname ‘Jet’ and is a conman of such confidence that every time he is released from prison he starts plotting his next swindle. Most recently, he served fifteen months for a libel conviction after he claimed that the governor of an Aegean province had tried to assassinate him in a car crash. Before that, he defrauded hundreds with dodgy timeshare deals, and back in the late 1990s he collected millions of pounds from investors, many of them Turks in the European diaspora, for a construction project in Ankara that never materialised. Before that, though, he launched his first and only successful project: Turkey’s first halal holiday resort.
The Caprice Hotel in the Aegean seaside town of Didim is a monstrosity of glass and plastic façades that looks, at a distance, like the stern of a sinking cruise ship. Inside, it is pure neo-Baroque. The domed ceiling of its lobby is painted with tulip motifs in the style of the old mosques of Istanbul. Its floor is inlaid with gold mosaics. Like any other hotel catering to the mass tourism market, it has an all-you-can-eat buffet every mealtime, a huge swimming complex and spas, and a path leading straight to the beach. There are also à la carte restaurants serving Chinese and Italian food, and a designer boutique offering some of Turkey’s top brands. Turkish stars perform in the hotel’s entertainment centre every week. The well-heeled tourists who stay here would have no reason to leave its gaudy confines, apart from acute claustrophobia. And if they are devout Muslims – as almost all of them are – they can relax safe in the knowledge that they will never miss prayer time.
Jet Fadıl Akgündüz opened the resort in 1996 with the strapline: ‘A modern vacation complex, where the call to prayer is heard five times a day.’ The idea of a hotel catering to the Islamic market was unheard of in Turkey at that time. It was the era when the Refah Party’s Necmettin Erbakan was prime minister and Erdoğan the mayor of Istanbul – but Erdoğan’s jailing and the toppling of Erbakan’s government in the ‘postmodern’ military coup of 1997 would remind everyone that the Kemalists were still in charge. Local residents in this largely secular part of Turkey were dismayed when Akgündüz bought what had once been a resort for debauched European tourists and turned it into a haven for the devout – but his business boomed. Muslims with money to spend had previously had to share their hotels with customers who followed totally different lifestyles: drinking alcohol, sunbathing in bikinis in mixed-gender areas, and disregarding the patterns of the Islamic day. Now, they could spend their leisure time in an environment just like that of their homes. In halal hotels, the swimming pool and spa areas are segregated by gender, there is no trace of alcohol anywhere, and prayer rooms are provided so that guests can slip straight from the poolside to the prayer mat.
Slowly, other Turkish businessmen caught on to the potential and by the time the AKP took power in 2002 there were five halal hotels in Turkey. By 2014 the sector had mushroomed to 152 halal resorts, spas and boutique hotels across the country, including a halal ski resort and a cruise ship. Part of that growth can be explained by the overall rise in wealth in Turkey over the same period, which lifted the poorest – and generally most pious – section of the society from a subsistence-level existence to a level affording them disposable income. The average annual income in Turkey in 1998, two years after the Caprice opened, was $8,567 and the average rent costs in the gecekondu – literally, ‘built in the night’ – districts ate up half of a family’s income. By 2014 the average wage was $19,610 and rent or mortgage repayments now only took up a quarter of their pay. A new middle class has risen, buoyed by a growing class of businessmen from the conservative cities of central Anatolia. And they want in on all the things the elites have been enjoying for decades.
There is also the Erdoğan factor.
‘There is more Islamic political influence now,’ says Seçgin. ‘Muslim people are standing up and saying: “Hang on, I also work hard, I have more money, I want to take part in all these great things that everyone else is doing, the upper ten to fifteen per cent of the society.” The industry was starting to develop before Erdoğan, and until recently there hadn’t been a single policy by the tourism ministry in support of this industry. Nothing. So, you might argue that without Erdoğan the industry would probably have developed anyway. But my fear is that for political and ideological reasons, some people in Turkey may have tried to prevent this sector from thriving. By Erdoğan and the AK Party being in power, their passiveness, they have helped the industry to thrive. They didn’t support us at all, but they also didn’t do anything to prevent or hinder us. And that’s already a good thing, because under different governments, I can imagine some would have tried to stop this industry from going further.’
The Turkish Standards Institute started providing halal hotel certification in June 2014. Until then Turkey had lagged behind in the sector compared to other Islamic countries such as Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates; even the UK’s tourism board, Visit Britain, held halal tourism conferences before Turkey. But without much official help, the sector has taken root and flowered amid the fleshpots of the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines. Some of the halal resorts are spanking new and purpose-built. Others are older hotels that were once stuffed with hard-drinking Russians and Europeans but which have now been converted – stripped of their bars, fitted with prayer rooms, their swimming pools and beaches divided into men’s and women’s sections.
As the halal tourism market evolved, so too did the business plan of its original entrepreneur, Jet Fadıl Akgündüz. As more mass-market resorts opened, he upgraded the Caprice to a five-star luxury resort and changed the ‘Hotel’ in its name to ‘Palace’.
‘Thank you, Caprice Palace, for providing so much for the ladies!’ gushes the dubbed star of the hotel’s tacky and stilted promotion video, as an unseen male narrator guides her through the seemingly endless facilities. ‘My god! What beauty is this? What spaciousness? What tranquillity? Caprice Palace … I wouldn’t have believed that a palace like this existed in the world!’
Akgündüz was also working on other projects: a second Capricein Istanbul, a residential complex in Ankara, a football club packed with celebrity players and a plan to manufacture Turkey’s first indigenous cars in the impoverished eastern province of Siirt, his birthplace. None of them came to fruition, and scores of investors were left empty-handed and furious. Akgündüz fled the country in 1998 to avoid criminal charges, but only four years later, after the 2002 elections (in which the AKP took power for the first time), he returned to Turkey after standing for and winning a seat in Siirt as an independent candidate. His political career was short-lived; the high election council immediately cancelled his parliamentary membership, meaning that he was also stripped of the immunity from prosecution that he had briefly enjoyed as an elected deputy. He was sent to the Istanbul courthouse and then to the prison in his private limousine with the number plate 34 JET 25.
A year later Akgündüz was freed, and spent the next decade skipping town before serving another jail term and then hatching another plan. In 2014 he announced that he had bought an island in the Maldives, which he would turn into ‘an island for the Muslims’. He began to dress in robes and turban in the style of an Ottoman dignitary, and claimed to be investing $170 million in his new project. Some of Turkey’s most prominent pious Muslims gave it their backing by issuing a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) stating that such a project was permissible in the eyes of Allah. When investors in this latest scheme discovered that it was a swindle, too, one of the preachers who had given it his stamp of approval was confronted by a journalist. ‘I didn’t say buy a place. I just said it’s permissible under the fatwa,’ he insisted. ‘If you didn’t listen and did a stupid thing, so did I. I lost my apartments, too.’
In 2015 a court order was issued for the original Capriceto be confiscated in order to help pay the compensation claims levied against Akgündüz’s still-unfinished Istanbul project. The local police raided the Caprice Palace Didim and began loading the furniture, minibar fridges and computers onto trucks in front of 600 startled guests. At the last minute the hotel’s lawyers managed to cut a deal, and the fittings were returned – but three months later Akgündüz was arrested on embezzlement charges. He served sixteen months, and then immediately began talking about his next project.
‘The east will come to life, Turkey will be developed!’ he proclaimed to journalists waiting at the prison gate on the day of his release in March 2017.
The Gülenists
Akgündüz remains a free man – for now. The original owner of the similarly high-end halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, Turkish businessman and newspaper owner Akın İpek, has not been so lucky.
İpek shot into the stratosphere of the Turkish business elite during the first decade of the millennium – the early AKP era. It was a time when certain connections promised considerable bounty, both political and economic. İpek, like many others, was an open supporter of Fethullah Gülen – the cleric turned cult leader who built his small Turkish congregation into a worldwide movement. Born in 1941 in the eastern province of Erzurum, Gülen trained as an imam and joined the Diyanet, the state’s religious agency, which was set up under the republic’s first constitution in 1924. The Diyanet employs all of Turkey’s clerics and posts them to mosques around the country. Gülen graduated in 1958 and was dispatched to coastal İzmir, where he quickly began working to extend his reach outside the mosque. According to the movement’s biography, he began speaking in tea houses and at town meetings. ‘The subject matter of his speeches, whether formal or informal, was not restricted explicitly to religious questions; he also talked about education, science, Darwinism, about the economy and social justice,’ the biography claims.
Having built his local following, Gülen retired from the Diyanet in 1981 and started preaching freelance both in Turkey and abroad. He also began opening schools and charitable foundations.
In the conservative city of Kayseri, one businessman remembered how a charismatic imam came to town in 1986 and started delivering lectures to huge crowds. ‘His speeches were so good, all the women in Kayseri’s high society soon started wearing the headscarf. We all liked his speeches and meetings so much that we started collecting money for the movement. I gave one cheque to them. There was a doctor, he wasn’t interested in religion but the hoca [teacher] even converted him. After a while I began to see that they are conmen, but lots of people didn’t care. All the state contracts were given to Gülenist businesses when the AKP came to power. One of my friends said to me, “I got rich because of them, they are buying everything from me.” People wanted to believe in what the Gülenists were saying because there was so much state pressure on religion. And here was a Muslim organisation that was working in every area except the political space.’
In February 1997, the Turkish army launched what became known as its postmodern coup. Tanks rolled through Ankara and Istanbul, setting off a series of events that would eventually force Fethullah Gülen into exile. The generals had been stirred into action after Necmettin Erbakan, leader of Erdoğan’s Refah Party, became prime minister in 1996 – Turkey’s first full-blooded Islamist premier. After the generals issued a memo from their boardroom, and Erbakan’s governing coalition partners rounded on him, he stepped down. For the next years political Islam was again forced into the shadows in Turkey; Refah was shut down, Erbakan’s political career was finished, and the AKP’s shoots started growing in the dark.
Gülen moved to the United States in 1999 and has remained there ever since, now living in a vast secluded ranch in Pennsylvania and rarely venturing out. But he has never stopped preaching. Gülen’s videos draw millions of views and both adulation and hilarity on YouTube (one has been superimposed with cartoon watermelons to make it look as though the imam is chopping them with his flailing hands as he rants).
Although he was little known outside Turkey, Gülen’s following had grown so huge by 2013 that he was propelled to the number one spot in Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential People in the World list. His devotees, loyal, worldly and highly organised, had voted en masse to get him there. The magazine’s blurb betrays the bemusement the editors must have felt at finding the votes flooding in for this unknown man. But there is also a prescient hint of what was to come:
Fethullah Gülen is among the world’s most intriguing religious leaders. From a secluded retreat in Pennsylvania, he preaches a message of tolerance that has won him admirers around the world. Schools founded by Gülen’s followers thrive in an estimated 140 countries. Doctors who respond to his wishes work without pay in disaster-afflicted countries.
Gülen, however, is also a man of mystery. His influence in his native Turkey is immense, exercised by graduates of his schools who have reached key posts in the government, judiciary and police. This makes him seem like a shadowy puppeteer, and he is scorned by almost as many Turks as love him.
The political rise and fall of the Gülenists is the murkiest and most controversial part of the Erdoğan story. But the first thing to say is that the core of Erdoğan’s allegations against the group are true – that as bizarre and conspiratorial as it sounds, Gülen’s followers really did become a shadowy cabal who spent decades inching their way up through the Turkish state.
Here is a taste of how the Gülenists operated. In September 2015, as the relationship between Erdoğan and Gülen was imploding, an email dropped into my inbox from Hawthorn Advisors, a London public relations and ‘reputation management’ agency, publicising a study written by a group of British barristers. It was titled A report on the rule of law and respect for human rights in Turkey since December 2013, and had been commissioned by the Journalists’ and Writers’ Foundation – a well-known Gülenist front group. Established in 1994, the JWF operated from an office in Istanbul’s pious Üsküdar district and was, according to Joshua Hendrick, a US academic who immersed himself among the Gülenists in the 2000s, ‘the primary public face of the movement’.
‘They have a very strategic and long history, in Turkey and the world, of peddling favour from influential people, including elected officials, journalists and other leaders,’ Hendrick told me.
They had certainly picked the report’s authors well. Two of the four were serving British politicians, Sir Edward Garnier in the House of Commons and Lord Woolf in the House of Lords. Garnier’s Register of Interests entry for the work reveals that the JWF paid him £115,994 for his 100 hours spent on the project. Six months after the report was published, Garnier stood up in the Commons during a debate on the EU–Turkey migrant deal to raise the ‘serial and appalling human rights and rule of law abuses by the Turkish government’.
‘While these abuses continue,’ he said, ‘there should be no question of opening any chapters [on Turkey’s EU membership] at all, even though we need Turkey as a member of NATO and its agreement to help with the migration problem.’
Although he mentioned in his statement to the House that he had worked on the report, he did not reveal who had commissioned it. In his response to me in August 2016, when I reported the story in The Times, Garnier insisted that he and the other authors ‘are not supporters or adherents of [the Gülen movement] but wrote the report as independent English lawyers based on the evidence we had reviewed’.
There is no doubt that he knew who he was working for, though – the original press release sent to me by the Hawthorn PR agency had included a blurb about the Gülen movement at the end: ‘The Gülen movement is a civil society network of individuals and religious, humanitarian, and educational institutions that subscribe to Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s advocacy of interfaith dialogue, community service, and universal education.’
It is easy to see how a British politician might be sucked in. Outside Turkey the Gülenists sell themselves as purveyors of modern, pluralist Islam, a pitch that is directly and deliberately tuned to Western ears. Using that narrative they have built up a large following within the Turkish émigré community and organised endless outreach programmes and round tables in the West. In the UK, where much Gülenist capital has fled since Erdoğan’s crackdown started, they still run a lobby group, The Dialogue Society, which has hosted Cherie Blair and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabati among its guest speakers, as well as an educational trust that offers free weekend tuition to pupils in the state school system. You have to dig fairly deep into their websites before you see that these organisations are linked to the Gülen movement.
Inside Turkey, the Gülenists were best known for running high-achieving private schools for the children of rich families and subsidised university dormitories for those of the poor. ‘Everyone was aware of Gülenists but they were not seen as particularly threatening,’ said one Western diplomat based in Turkey in the early AKP era. ‘They were seen as a kind of irrelevance, a rather eccentric secret society that raised money, did good things and ran schools in Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world. It felt like a normal part of the Turkish society. We did not, as diplomats, focus on things that we probably should have done more. It did have the civic elements, particularly in Anatolia. It felt almost like Germany or old UK, like the Rotary Clubs. It almost fell into that bracket rather than a serious political thing.’
Overseas the Gülenists ran Turkish language and cultural institutes. Their members, having come up through the elite Gülenist schools or been handpicked in the university dorms, were the brightest, the best educated and the most fluent foreign-language speakers – the perfect cultural ambassadors for Turkey abroad. While some members were directed by the higher ranks of the movement to take jobs in the Turkish state and security services (and often handed stolen test papers in advance to ensure they would get the plum positions), others went abroad and opened more schools overseas. Poorer, developing nations – particularly the Muslim parts of Africa, the Balkans and central Asia – were delighted to have such polished and pious people coming to provide education. An opaque group called ‘Citizens Against Special Interest Lobbying in Public Schools’ has released a document online titled ‘Every continent but Antarctica’, listing 101 countries where Gülenist schools were allegedly operating, from Afghanistan to Zambia.
‘I remember that after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, there were hopes from Turkish nationalists and even centre-right parties to bring in their brothers through Central Asia under the Turkish umbrella, sort of a near abroad for Turkey,’ says a US lobbyist who has previously worked for the AKP government. ‘They were going to go as far east as the Chinese border. Those hopes were quickly dashed because seventy years of communism takes its toll – their plans did not work out. But there was still a soft power idea more modestly expressed. The Gülenists were seen as a useful tool. And the Gülenists wanted to do it. It was a win-win situation, and it only became a liability later. It’s funny because for years it was a Turkish foreign policy priority to get these schools up and running. Now the priority is to close them down.’
In those early AKP years Erdoğan was happy to piggyback on the Gülenists’ established networks. His party was electorally strong but institutionally weak, and facing a hostile state and military dominated by the Kemalists. There were few AKP people working within the bureaucracy – this was, after all, the party that had risen from the fringes, and was only now making its way to the centre. The army wanted to bring Erdoğan down. Much of the judiciary wanted to bring him down. The only way he – and his party – could survive was to build alliances.
‘After the AKP came to power in 2002, I, like many others, was hearing informal reporting that the Gülenists were being recruited more and more in some government departments, especially in the police and the judiciary,’ says one former parliamentary deputy. ‘I tried to collect some information on such informal reporting, but I couldn’t get much reliable results. In one case I talked to an ex-Minister of Interior who had recently left that position, asking if it were true that large numbers of Gülenists were being recruited to the police. He said yes, to some extent it was true, but rhetorically asked “what could I do when those people performed much better than others in the entrance tests and examinations?”’
The liberals
Erdoğan’s alliance with the Gülenists was only one among many. The AKP was also reaching out to liberal, anti-army activist groups, and to members of the secular opposition who had grown tired of their stale old parties. Many joined up with the AKP right at the start in 2001. Süleyman Sarıbaş, a lawyer who had been a deputy in Turgut Özal’s Anavatan Party (Motherland Party, or ANAP) since 1983, signed up shortly before the elections of November 2002. Erdoğan personally approached him to join the party. Sarıbaş agreed, despite some misgivings about Erdoğan’s character.
‘I regarded Erdoğan as a civilian, but he never completely retained Western values,’ Sarıbaş says. ‘He was emotional and easily scared. Timid. His lifestyle was something between an urban lifestyle and the provincial rural lifestyle. He was very much in the middle. I will give you one example. He would pull out his Swiss army knife from his pocket and clean his teeth with it. He is a villager in that sense. But he has been raised in Istanbul and he is very urban at the same time. In the period I met him, he was being judged. He had court cases against him. He was afraid about being arrested. After he became the chairperson of the AKP there was a court case against him about his property. He seemed to have too much property and it was not clear how he had managed to own it all. He said that it was the gold belonging to his children that he had exchanged. At about five p.m. we went to see the prosecutor and he wanted to put him under arrest. They were about to close the court. The judge arrived a little bit late on that day. We waited for half an hour for the judge to arrive. Erdoğan was white at the fear of being arrested.’
Sarıbaş joined the AKP because it seemed, in 2002, to offer a reformist agenda. Within three years he had left it again, part of the party’s first mass wave of resignations. He was one of thirteen deputies who quit between February and April 2005, throwing the AKP into its first real crisis. Erdoğan was already showing himself to be ‘fretful and ill-tempered’, according to an AFP report on the mass exit of members. On resigning, Sarıbaş said that the party was not truly committed to EU-focused reform, and that its inner workings were corrupt and authoritarian. Musa Kart, a cartoonist at Cumhuriyet, a secularist newspaper, depicted the prime minister as a cat tangled in a ball of yarn as the crisis in his party grew. Erdoğan sued him for $3,500. He also called the defectors ‘the rotten apples in the bag’.
The mass of remaining deputies seemed willing to overlook any growing disquiet about Erdoğan’s character. The AKP survived its 2005 crisis, and two years later scored a huge victory over its old enemy, the army – and over the CHP, the largest opposition bloc in parliament. In May that year, the generals threatened a coup over the nomination of AKP founder Abdullah Gül as president. The constitutional court took up the thread and started a case to close down the AKP. Gül is a moderate Islamist and a pro-European. The army’s problem with having him as president? His wife wears the Islamic headscarf.
Erdoğan called their bluff and called a snap election. The AKP won overwhelmingly, affirming the people’s support for the democratically elected government over the self-appointed secularist saviours. Tens of CHP deputies and hundreds of rank-and-file members left their party and joined the AKP.
‘The AKP between 2002 and 2007 seemed to be following a reformist political line,’ says Haluk Özdalga, a CHP deputy who was among those who crossed the floor. ‘We had extensive consultations with party people, and a majority supported the idea of going over to the AKP. In Ankara, which is my political district, a couple of hundred CHP members followed with us, and they gradually got various elected positions within the AKP organisations. This flow of members from the CHP to the AKP continued until approximately 2011. I consider myself as a social democrat, and at that time the AKP stood ideologically closer to me than the CHP. That may sound a little unusual for those not knowing the CHP and the AKP of that time. Many social democratic politicians in Europe at that time felt the same way. The AKP appeared to be structurally a more democratic party, not dominated by a single person.’
Another of the nine who joined in 2007 was Ertuğrul Günay, a CHP veteran who had left the party in 2004 and was in parliament as an independent. Günay believed he saw in the AKP the promise of a new type of Turkish politics. Erdoğan appointed him minister of culture.
‘It was directly from Erdoğan that I received a proposal to join the AKP,’ Günay says. ‘After a few meetings, and after consulting my friends, I accepted. During its first term in government the party was promising on the issues of democracy, social welfare and pluralism. CHP as the only opposition party in the parliament followed a much more conservative line about the issues of EU and pluralism – I know many “leftists” from the CHP who thought that the EU would divide Turkey. I had hoped that with the AKP, a new social movement in Turkey would form itself, leading to the rise of a progressive politics that would be at peace with the values of the people.’
Erdoğan at that time was a man willing to take criticism, to listen to others, and to learn: ‘well-intentioned and sincere about democracy’, according to Günay. One diplomat said that in his early years as prime minister Erdoğan would arrive at meetings with a stack of notecards on the issues to be discussed. Another said that he was ‘one amongst many important people in the system … more equal than anybody else but there were other players who argued with him, whether Abdullah Gül, Abdüllatif şener [another AKP founder, who left the party in 2007], or Ali Babacan [economy minister]. These other voices were from smart individuals, who had come into government with a lot more experience on a world stage than Erdoğan. He relied on them. He trusted them and respected their advice and judgement.’
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