Hugh Pope on Turkish Politics

It’s a critical moment in Turkish politics right now, with a lot of military leaders on trial, accused of planning a coup in the so-called Sledgehammer plot. I interviewed Harvard economist Dani Rodrik in December; he is Turkish, and his father-in-law, Cetin Dogan, is one of those on trial. He’s absolutely outraged at what is going on, and has written a number of articles about the alleged fabrication of evidence. Some Turkish newspapers, on the other hand, are depicting it as a big step forward for civilian versus military rule. So I asked a friend who knows a lot about Turkey what he thought, and he agreed with Rodrik that it was outrageous: people have been put in prison without trial, etc. But he added that people ‘disagree strongly on the matter’ and that ‘Turkey is incredibly complicated’. Is that how you see it as well?

Yes. And Cetin Dogan is an interesting case. He was a senior officer during military interventions in politics, in an army that routinely used medieval methods against those it saw as enemies of the state. At the same time he is a gentlemanly person. He was one of the generals that everyone – including me – tried to talk to in the mid-1990s to find out how things were going in Ankara. The army at that time was half in charge of the country. Most of us here assume that some people in the army have been plotting against the government in a serial manner. Cetin Dogan was very senior in 1997 when generals boasted about having challenged the elected government of Turkey by running tanks through the street, which is not exactly your typical democratic behaviour. But did he plot a full coup? Because of the murkiness that is endemic to countries like Turkey – where no one, neither the military nor the courts, quite wants full accountability for their actions – you can never be quite sure what has happened or who exactly is responsible. It’s very slippery. People don’t trust the system. It’s the reason Turkey is in the second division of countries of the world. It’s a bit like Turkish football. Turkish clubs compete in European tournaments, and sometimes, by a miracle, they win. But it’s almost accidental when they do. The system is not strong enough yet. For a big country, they should be doing much better in international football – but their football leagues are plagued with the same sloppiness and lack of good systems that the judicial system and probably the army itself are.

That’s why we hoped for so much from the EU convergence process – because the standards it set would push the boundaries of Turkey’s systems to a new level.

So when Rodrik argues that these documents are fabricated, that could well be the case?

There are definitely some real documents that they’ve found. I suppose that some of them may have been fabricated. When you look at the indictments, you can see there’s a kind of conspiracy theory mentality that is motivating the prosecutors. They’ve taken the assumption of a problem and then logically gone back to the evidence – instead of taking the evidence and moving it forward to a conclusion. That’s very common in this part of the world. For so long, people have felt weak and powerless over their own fates, that great powers are manipulating them. So you line up the evidence to suit what you’re thinking, instead of approaching it by considering, ‘Well, maybe this is all a bit confusing, maybe no one really knew what they were doing and maybe it’s actually a series of coincidences that have led to this.’ That’s never considered possible.

But in answer to your question, is he guilty or isn’t he, I don’t know. People have told me vicious things about Cetin Dogan. And sometimes Cetin Dogan was fighting vicious people. It’s no reflection on Dani Rodrik – it’s just the way things are.

I also know that the Turkish military created Turkey out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire in the 1920s, and to some people in Turkey they remain a great safeguard that has managed to keep Turkey on track for all these years – and out of international wars since 1923. It’s one of the reasons Turkey is making some progress, whereas the rest of the region has remained a hopeless mess. Should the Turkish army and people like Cetin Dogan be thanked for doing this? A fair number of people in Turkey would say, ‘Yes. The army deserves to be supported for what it has done.’ But the trouble is, when you allow an army to do that, it takes on a political role. In the period that these indictments came up, the army was losing power. It has very much lost political power now. And, as it was losing power, it’s clear that some people in the military were scrambling to try to retain their influence, their economic leverage, all their privileges. It’s a country where there have been many attempts at military coups. Would they suddenly have miraculously stopped, just when they began to lose power? I don’t know.

Historically, the army has intervened a number of times to re-establish democracy. Do they see intervention as part of their role?

Yes. They think the internal regulation law which governs their activities allows them to be the ‘safety valve’ – according to their own judgment of what democracy should be.