Speakers: Aimen Dean & Thomas Small
Aimen: Hello, dear listener, Aimen Dean here, your host and-
Thomas: Aimen. I love it. Alright, the new Conflicted is shaking things up.
Aimen: As usual, I am with my co-host, the great Thomas Small.
Thomas: Hello. I'm still alive.
Aimen: Glad you're still alive. You know what, Thomas, I have a great quote for you from our dear friend, President Erdogan.
Thomas: President Erdogan of Turkey. Go for it. What's the quote?
Aimen: Yeah, he said to a Kuwaiti politician who I met in 2010, who's an Islamist, was asking him, “Prime Minister Erdogan, when will you fully impose Islamic Sharia on the Turkish Republic and finally get rid of Kemalism and its secular legacy?”
He answered by saying, “Secularism and Kemalism had 70 years to corrupt the minds of the Turkish people. Therefore, it'll take 70 years work on our part to cleanse the minds of the Turkish people. Therefore, we must prepare our own generation in order to be worthy of an Islamic state in Turkey.”
Thomas: Well, my goodness, Aimen, you've taught me not to trust what Islamists say. So, who knows if your friend was telling the truth. But if what your friend is saying is true, then it suggests an answer to the question we've been asking in this two-part series on President Erdogan. Is Erdogan an Islamist?
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Aimen: Is the Pope a Catholic?
Thomas: Well, these days some people have their doubts. Let's get right back into it. Dear listener, we left President Erdogan as mayor of Istanbul in the late 90s. And just to get us back into the story, in 1995, the Islamist Welfare Party run by Necmettin Erbakan won a plurality of votes in national elections.
But the Army stepped in cajoling a number of smaller parties to create an anti-Welfare Party coalition. This coalition broke down. There was another election the following year. That time the Welfare Party in coalition with another party won a majority and Erbakan, Erdogan's great idol became the country's first Islamist prime minister.
Aimen: When Necmettin Erbakan became the prime minister, I think power went into his head straight away. I mean, he went to visit Gaddafi. I mean, come on, Gaddafi of all people, I think Gaddafi infected him with Gaddafism or Gaddefitis, I would say, basically the disease of making outlandish suggestions and outlandish statements.
And then suggested some sort of an anti-western alliance. And started to have some sort of an anti-Semitic policies towards the Israelis. I mean, all of this caused within nine months the army to intervene again and to force the government to resign and to ban the party again. And this is when a fallout between the student and the master happened.
Thomas: That's right. Yeah. In ‘97, the military launches another crackdown on Islamists, civil society groups, liberal civil society groups launch rallies against Erbakan and his party. There were big demonstrations, and another coup is threatened.
And at that point, the Welfare Party actually relinquishes power. So, there wasn't a coup in ‘97, it was threatened, but Erbakan said, okay let's step back. He relinquishes his power. He's ousted as prime minister. It was a sort of soft coup, let's say.
But more importantly from the point of view of Erdogan is that the U.S. and the EU both openly supported it. They openly came out and said, well, it's not ideal that the military threatened a coup and it's changed the government, but we're okay with it because they didn't like Islamists.
And from his position as mayor of Istanbul, Erdogan watched all of this unfold, and it taught him if he needed to learn it again, that the Turkish army could not be trusted, but also that the West could not be trusted. And finally, that if you were going to be an Islamist politician in Turkey, you needed to be subtle. You couldn't be overt.
Aimen: I am now going to introduce to the dear listener, a concept that is well known within the Muslim world, but hardly ever known outside of it. We are talking now about a concept that is both religious and political. It's called Taqiyah. Taqiyah is to conceal. Basically, it is concealment.
The first people to practise Taqiyah were the Shia. As a minority religious group, some of their beliefs would be offensive to Sunnis, and therefore they would attempt to hide them and conceal them under the guise of Taqiyah.
But also, the Muslim brotherhood adopted what we call in the 20th and the 21st century, the political Taqiyah, a Taqiyah siyasiyat. And Erdogan and his new circle, Abdullah Gül, Daoud Ahmet Oglu, Binali Yıldırım and many of their advisors and thinkers went into this mode.
The idea that let us conceal our religious aims for now, let us practise Taqiyah siyasiyat, which is political Taqiyah in order to reach what we need to reach, power first, then ideology second.
Thomas: Yeah. Erdogan would never forget the soft coup of 1997. And analysts really believe that much that has transpired in Turkey over the past 20 years is all about Erdogan getting revenge on the forces he blamed for that soft coup. Because he blamed the whole establishment, the military, the judiciary, the civil service, the media, big business, the whole show.
And despite being banned from politics that very year for reading an incendiary poem, which the constitutional court said, attacked Turkey's secular constitution, Erdogan was poised to rise.
So yes, as you say, following the soft coup, Aimen, there was a debate within the Islamists of Turkey between moderation and radicalization. This was a debate that was going on throughout Muslim Brotherhood, affiliated political parties everywhere.
They had watched the Algerian Civil War play out, as we talked about last season, extremely brutal, very bloody, really gave radical Islamist politics a bad name. They had watched the Bosnian jihad and everything that had followed. They had watched the rise of voices like Osama bin Laden’s, antagonising the West and causing blowback.
So, Erdogan joined those voices, which were calling for moderate Islamist tactics. And in August 2001, hardline Erbakan followers founded the Felicity Party. But Erdogan at this point broke with Erbakan and co-founded the AKP, the Justice and Development Party with another moderate Islamist politician, Abdullah Gül.
Erdogan openly described this new party as conservative. He did not use the term Islamist; he did not use the term Islamic. It was officially a centre right party. It positioned itself as pro-democracy, pro-West, pro-free market, pro moderate secularism, even.
If we go back, dear listener to Autumn 2001, we will probably remember that it was not the time to be an openly Islamist party.
Aimen: Indeed, the autumn of 2001. How could anyone forget the events of 9/11?
Thomas: Yeah, 9/11, just the month after this new party was founded the American invasion of Afghanistan, the launch of the global war on terror. It was not a time to be an open Islamist political party.
And that pivot to the centre right, especially given the economic crisis that Turkey was yet again undergoing in the early years of the century, meant that the AKP, this newly founded party had a lot of appeal and immediately became an election winner.
The very next year, the AKP becomes the largest party, and Abdullah Gül becomes prime minister immediately being in a position now to lift the ban on Erdogan practising politics, allowing him to run for parliament, which he duly achieves. And in 2003, Gül steps down from prime minister in order that Erdogan could become prime minister. Gül becomes his deputy.
So, very quickly, in a series of extremely agile moves, Erdogan goes from being a band former mayor of Istanbul to the prime minister of Turkey. Boom. Just like that.
Aimen: Just like that because the Turkish parliament prior to dissolving itself decided that they cannot continue with the insane system that any small party could become member of the parliament, three seats here, four seats there, 10 seats here, he will end up with 21/22 parties represented in the parliament. With eight of them forming a government.
You can't have an unsustainable way of governance. So, they said only parties that would achieve 10% in the proportional representation system in the election will get the proportional seats accordingly.
So, what happened is that only two parties managed to get above the 10%. The old, grand Kemalist party, the CHP won 15%, and the AKP won 34%, which meant that under the proportional representation and the fact that only parties that gain over 10% will enter parliament, that two thirds majority of the parliamentarian seats will go towards the AKP, which means they are the first party in 70 years to form a government alone with a majority enough to change the constitution.
Thomas: And there is Erdogan sitting at the top of it. Amazing. And so, now for the next few minutes, Aimen, I just want to discuss that first few years of Erdogan as prime minister of Turkey.
It's really marked by liberalising reforms, economic reforms to some large degree. And as you once told us in the second series of Conflicted, Erdogan’s stewardship of the Turkish economy, especially in that first 10 years of his time in power, was very adept. And he was very well advised in that regard.
Aimen: Indeed, there is no question that Erdogan's stewardship of the Turkish economy between 2002 and 2012/13 were to some extent good. I mean, he instituted a lot of reforms that enabled really to harness the power of what they would later be known as the Anatolian Tigers.
He industrialised the heartland from just being in a farming into food industry, into the weapons industry, into some extent mid tech industry. And coupled with massive mega infrastructure projects in terms of transportation, in terms of power, in terms of energy.
So, by 2012, 2013, you can say that Turkey has become a regional powerhouse, for sure.
Thomas: Erdogan was committed to a free market economy. I mean, he had benefited from some tough austerity measures that his predecessors in government had introduced earlier in the decade when Turkey was going through a real financial and economic crisis.
But this had caused inflation to come down, which allowed Erdogan to take … I remember this actually quite clearly. He took that powerfully symbolic move you mentioned of slashing six zeros from the Turkish lira.
I remember I visited Turkey for the first time in 2001, and you'd be paying for everything in the millions, and then when I went back in 2006, suddenly you're paying for everything in normal numbers.
It was quite pronounced, but it was powerful symbol that the Turkish economy was no longer a basket case. But the Turkish public really thanked him for this. In 2007, and again, in 2011, the AKP and Erdogan won ever increasing majorities in elections.
The Turks wanted what he had to offer, but interestingly, they were also voting overwhelmingly for pro-EU parties. And this is another part of the story of that first decade of Erdogan in power, the weird dance between Turkey and the EU, over the possibility of EU accession.
The EU at the beginning of this period was, let us say open to the idea, but they were always worried about Turkey's human rights record. They would make a big deal about it. And in response, given that so many of his countrymen wanted to join the EU, Erdogan did launch some human rights reforms.
Aimen: Many of the reforms that took place between 2002 and 2014 were quite astonishing. I mean, one of them in particular, and especially it's a big for Muslim country, is to abolish the death penalty.
The fact that Erdogan's party got rid of the death penalty, despite the fact it is a essential part of Sharia, was a very pragmatic move on their part because they wanted to align their laws with the EU laws, which prohibited the implementation of the death penalty.
Also, there were freedom of speech provisions initially, at least, and there were other reforms in terms of countering corruption, reforms in terms of trade standards and customs. Many things that were done in order to align the Turkish values, both commercially and politically and societally with EU values in these fields.
Thomas: Yeah, the EU accession plans that were drawn up for Turkey explicitly helped Erdogan and the AKP achieve these aims. So, he could always say, well, we have to do this because the EU is telling us to do it if we want to be a member of the EU.
And according to many, many measures, at that time, Turkey was certainly improving in terms of human rights. All the NGOs were saying that there was more freedom of speech, more rule of law, more political pluralism in Turkey.
But Erdogan was soon to clash with the EU over another pillar of the EU’s kind of system, and that was secularisation. So, in the 1980s, the Turkish government, so this was following the coup of 1980, and the discomfort that the government at the time felt with rising Islamism.
So, in the 80s, the Turkish government banned the headscarf, the hijab in Turkish government buildings, in schools, in universities. So, civil servants couldn't wear the headscarf, teachers couldn't wear the headscarf, students couldn't either.
And in 2004, a Turkish woman who felt that her religious freedom was being compromised by the ban on heads scarfs in Turkey, took the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights. And in a way, this is kind of surprising, given the EUs liberal credentials.
But nonetheless, in 2004, the ECHR upheld Turkey's headscarf ban, which gave room in 2005 for Erdogan openly to criticise the European court, claiming that Turkish law on religious matters was up to the Turkish ulama, the Turkish religious scholars, not European judges.
And this was a kind of salvo in a move away from the EU, and from aligning Turkey with the EU’s political liberal values, obviously Erdogan's opponents called his commitment to democracy into question, they were claiming that Erdogan never really intended to align Turkey with the EU’s political liberal values.
He was just using the EU accession plans as an excuse to increase the AKP’s power at the expense of the establishment in Turkey, the secular establishment. And it is sort of true, I think now looking back on it, that the AKP had been aiming at increasing the religious freedoms of pious Muslims for sure, but not of secular liberal Turks, and certainly not of Turkey's ethnic minorities.
So, in the name of liberalisation, the AKP and Erdogan was really just continuing the process towards an Islamist state there. What do you think about that, Aimen.
Aimen: Look, this was considered by Erdogan at that time, and the AKP parties as a whole, the members and the supporters as a slap on the face from the EU because how could the police force in the UK accommodate female Muslim officers by giving them hijab with the same colours of the police uniforms, while at the same time in Turkey, they cannot, which is a Muslim majority country, and yet the EU finds nothing wrong with either.
And this is, I think when Erdogan also felt that this was a attempted deliberate sabotage by European secular elite who wants to conserve the EU as a largely Christian club, and that Muslim Turkey has no place in it.
So, how do you antagonise the Turks? Tell them basically, actually Muslim women can wear hijab everywhere in Europe, except you guys, you can't.
Thomas: This was also the mid noughties. And let's say there was a lot of paranoia in the air about Islam and about Islamism. And Erdogan had kind of run afoul by this point, not only of the EU, but of the United States over the Iraq war.
And it's a kind of a tricky story. Initially, the AKP did move to support the war. Erdogan said, when America came to him and said, “We'll give you $30 billion for our land forces to have access to Turkish territory, we'll give you $30 billion in exchange for that access.”
Erdogan supported it. He sent a bill to parliament to rubber stamp it, but parliament actually rejected it, forcing Erdogan to renegotiate with the Americans. And he, in the end, accepted $9 billion in exchange for giving America access to Turkish Air Force bases and airspace.
Nonetheless, it put a huge strain on U.S.-Turkish relations for the time. And in Washington, some officials were spoken and only really veiled contempt of Turkey in the context of the war on terror. And it didn't help that. At the same time, the AKP’s rhetoric inside Turkey was turning increasingly anti west and anti-U.S.
So, let's say to be generous to Erdogan, he was trying to straddle two worlds. He wanted to maintain Turkey's traditional NATO alliance foreign policy. He also was the head of an Islamist political party, or at least a veiled Islamist political party, increasingly, openly so.
On which side of the balance was Erdogan kind of, let's say, pretending it seems from that rhetoric that he was on the side of the Islamists?
Aimen: No, definitely not. And I will tell you why, because at that time, as you know, I used to work for the UK intelligence services. Turkey was a target of multiple Al-Qaeda led terrorist acts, the bombing of the British Embassy, the bombing of a synagogue, the bombing of the bank that I would later go to work for HSBC in Istanbul, 128 people were wounded, three were killed. The entire building was destroyed, and multiple other acts of terrorism actually took place in Turkey at the hands of Islamists.
So, what happened here is that Erdogan decided, you know what? I have something that the West need more than anything else, and I will help them with that, and they will help me with something else.
Guess what? He decided to go for the absolute Machiavellian pragmatism. He would use his excellent intelligence apparatus, the MIT, the military intelligence in Turkey to gather a lot of intelligence on jihadists.
So, actually Erdogan was clever, absolutely clever. Between 2003 until 2011, he played both sides to some extent. The Turks and Erdogan were getting rid of one enemy, which is the extremist Islamist.
And also at the same time, you appease another enemy, which is the West. So, this way you play both sides here, and you come out of the game winning.
Thomas: Well, that reflects really Erdogan's foreign policy position in general, which was to achieve strategic depth in the region to reclaim Turkey's poll position in Middle Eastern geopolitics. So, Erdogan is prosecuting Turkey's alliance in NATO and helping America and building up its credentials as an Islamist power. Is that fair, Aimen?
Aimen: Indeed. And this would actually become far more prevalent when the Arab Spring comes.
Thomas: Oh, of course, yes. We've talked about Turkey and the Arab Spring on Conflicted before.
Aimen: For me, the Arab Spring exposed Erdogan true foreign policy until then, until 2011, 2012, you wouldn't really guess where Erdogan's political compass pointed towards.
However, his support for the overthrow of Mubarak, his support of the overthrow of Binali in Tunisia, his support of the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, and his enthusiastic support, of course, for the overthrow of Assad in Syria, which never happened of course.
All of these indicated that he was truly supportive of Muslim Brotherhood ideals because some of these uprisings were having the stamp of the Muslim Brotherhood all over them. And suddenly Erdogan the pragmatist became Erdogan the ideologist.
Thomas: Our exploration of Erdogan's life is really focusing more on Turkish domestic politics. It's definitely true that in his geopolitics at the time of the Arab Spring, his Islamist sympathies came to the fore.
It's also true that he hates coups. Remember, it's the thing he hates more than anything else. He's certainly experienced a few of his own and would go on to experience an attempted coup just around the corner.
And that's where we are going to come back after this brief break. We're going to return to the domestic scene where we will stay until the end of this episode, and we will explore the very mysterious and quite exciting story of the attempted coup against Erdogan in 2016. Stay with us. We'll be back.
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We're back. We've been telling the life story of President Erdogan of Turkey. When we last left him, he was unmasked. His Muslim Brotherhood sympathies were there for the whole world to see during the Arab Spring.
But now, in the final half of the second episode of his life, we are going to focus back on the domestic scene and Erdogan's growing paranoia about his worst fear. Remind the listener, Aimen. What is President Erdogan's worst fear?
Aimen: The army, of course, Thomas, the army, he's always afraid of the army because he, in his lifetime, witnessed multiple military coups and military interventions in politics where governments were ousted prime ministers, sometime not only being arrested, but also executed.
So, for him, he saw the army as not only the guardian of the Kemalism that he hates so much, but also as the enemy of the people's choice, especially when it come to political Islam.
Thomas: So, before the Arab Spring, that's where we left him at the end of the last half. But before the Arab spring, by a few years as early as 2007, then Prime Minister Erdogan saw direct evidence that the Turkish army was already looking for some kind of attempt to intervene.
They didn't like the AKP, they didn't like its soft Islamist, increasingly hard Islamist rhetoric. They felt threatened. And in 2007, they tried to intervene. They gave indications that they were ready to do something. This is known as the e-coup because in the end, Erdogan stood up to them and they backed down.
But then the following year, 2008, again, his enemies amongst that Kamal secular establishment in Turkey, they rallied again. And the Turkish constitutional court opened a case against the AKP accusing it of unconstitutional moves in an attempt to shut the party down.
So, Erdogan wasn't just paranoid, there were genuine, powerful enemies that were looking to bring him down. There's no question about that.
Erdogan needed an ally, and he found one. Now, this is where we introduce the very strange character of Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish Sufi born in 1941, so older than Erdogan, born in Erzurum, in the east of Turkey. So, like Erdogan from the hinterlands of Turkey, and from a very young age, he became attracted to a Sufi movement in Turkey that was targeted by the army.
Aimen: If we talk about Fethullah Gülen, I mean, we are talking about someone who resemble an evangelical Christian leader in America, someone like Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson, someone who can call upon the faithful population of the Bible Belt in order to rally them to vote for a particular party or a candidate.
But to which school he belonged to? So, in order to understand Fethullah Gülen, we must understand the founder of his Sufi tariqa, of his Sufi school. So, we're talking about a man who came just before him, someone who was born in the 1870s and died in 1960.
A figure that is so important for the story of the destruction of Kemalism. If we are talking about duan and Gülen as the two edges of a sword that is stabbing Kemalism in the heart, so we need to understand who is the blacksmith who forged that sword?
Thomas: That's a great metaphor, Aimen. My God, you're not a podcaster, you're a poet. Okay.
Aimen: Thank you. So, we have to talk about Bediuzzaman Said Nursi.
Thomas: Bediuzzaman Said Nursi, the founder of the Nursi Sufi tariqa.
Aimen: Absolutely. And this man, of course, he witnessed the fall of the Ottoman Empire the establishment of Kemalism. And he was opposed to it from the beginning. And he dedicated himself completely to the destruction of Kemalism.
Thomas: And Fethullah Gülen was one of his disciples.
Aimen: Absolutely. Fethullah Gülen joined the movement, the moment he died. Fethullah Gülen, a 19-year-old took up the banner and he became one of the greatest leaders of Nursia.
Now, the army wanted to destroy Nursia, Fethullah Gülen and his colleagues, his supporters started a program specifically to target the villages and the towns and the areas and the neighbourhoods where the army send their kids to schools and where they go to some of the mosques.
So, they started infiltrating these areas, spreading in Nursia, and worked on a 20 years plan from the 1980s onward in order to infiltrate the army and to convert as many people within the armed forces, especially in the higher ranks into Nursia.
Thomas: That's right. And so, 20 years into this secret mission to subvert the army from within by converting its sons and daughters to Sufism. It's like a James Bond plot. You wouldn't believe it. The army certainly got wise to this.
And so, in 1999, Gülen fled Turkey to the United States set up shop in Pennsylvania, where he still lives and grew the movement. From there. His global educational and charitable network called Hizmet is now in more than 180 countries.
It's a huge movement, a huge network of people who think of him like their Sufi leader. And initially starting in 2002, Erdogan and Gülen were like best mates. Gülen himself was a huge supporter of Erdogan when Erdogan first became prime minister, his network praised Erdogan praised the AKP.
And knowing very well that Gülen had managed to infiltrate the army to infiltrate to some extent what Erdogan calls and what people call the deep state in Turkey, Erdogan used Gülen’s supporters in the police, in the civil service and the military to go after the elite, to go after the deep state.
Other military people, secularist liberals and Gülen’s network helped Erdogan purge the secular opponents of Erdogan's regime, especially after that 2007 e-coup.
So, the following year, while the Turkish constitutional court is lodging complaints against the AKP, the AKP and Erdogan are using Gulen's network of supporters inside the deep state to round up those alleged members of the e-coup, rounding up military officers. And in general, a McCarthyite mood begins to settle over the country.
Gülenists were expert wire tappers, for example, through the police. They were bugging army officers’ phones, allowing the government, allowing Erdogan to round up more of them, more military officers.
And this was all sort of ironic, it seems to me, Aimen, because in order to fight this deep state, Erdogan was employing a Gülenist deep state that actually existed. It's very weird. Turkish politics from the inside is very strange and murky. It is like a James Bond movie.
Aimen: Indeed, having purged many of his enemies in 2007 and 8, it paved the way for him to win a big majority again in 2011 elections. Post 2011 elections in the two years between 2011 and 2013, he started the program that is so ambitious.
He used his buddies in the financial sector to finance many of the supporters and the key business people that are loyal to the AKP, to buy and acquire many of the media companies in Turkey.
Thomas: He was brilliant. He used legal loopholes to accuse other media owners of tax evasion, forcing them to sell their companies to his allies. He was brilliant. And at the end of it, he's basically in control of the Turkish media.
Aimen: Exactly. So, in reality, his takeover of the media took only about 19, 20 months, and it was all financed by banks that were benefiting from his financial policies. This is why his ability to control the media meant that he will be able to control the narrative. That did not please the liberals of Turkey, the CHP, and their allies, and they started rallying against him.
Thomas: Absolutely. The election itself in 2011 was full of much more openly populist Islamist rhetoric. The AKP became less centre right, more right Islamist. And in line with this, ethnic minorities were being slurred, secularists were being slurred, liberals were being slurred.
And on the ground, the AKP were introducing more explicitly Islamist measures. There was a huge mosque building program. The education curriculum was changed to make Islamic education mandatory, and in some areas more stringent alcohol regulations and even some bans were passed.
So, clearly the program was moving forward, and as you say, Aimen, the liberals were upset. And in 2013, this reached a kind of crisis point over the famous Gezi Park rallies in Istanbul.
We don't have time to go into the details. It was sort of a Turkish occupy Wall Street or a Turkish extinction rebellion, kind of broad-based pro liberal leftist movement of protests that occupied a square near Taksim in the centre of Istanbul, which led to clashes with the police.
There was a certain amount of police brutality rallying more protestors causing the movement to spread. It was a big anti-Erdogan movement. But in the end, thanks to a violent crackdown and many thousands of arrests, the movement was crushed. And in 2014, having gone through all of this, Erdogan becomes president.
Aimen: As I have explained to you before, Thomas, the Turkish electoral rules meant that there are minimum threshold for parties to overcome, to be admitted into parliament.
And this PR voting system meant that the AKP since 2002, all the way until now, would ensure that the party would win parliamentary majorities because of the — even if they don't win the majority of the votes, they still win the bigger share of the seats, and sometimes big enough to reach two thirds majority of the parliamentary seats enough to change the constitution.
Now, changing the constitution is important here, because just prior to 2014, the AKP party changed the constitution in favour of transforming Turkey from a parliamentary governmental system of democracy into a presidential system of democracy.
In the past, the president's role was ceremonial, and the prime minister was really in charge of running the country. He changed the constitution with the aid of his party.
So, Erdogan could be elected as a president, but for the first time, an executive president, just like France, there is an executive president, but also there is a prime minister. So, in 2014, he got his wish, and he became the president of Turkey, the first executive president.
Thomas: Now, you've always told me, Aimen, that you think Erdogan should have stepped away from politics at that point in 2014, that he had achieved a lot, he'd governed Turkey more or less well, but he should have left when he was on top.
Aimen: Yeah, I mean, if he just left the presidential position as a ceremonial one and got himself elected as a president, as a reward for an end of a successful premiership, a retirement gig, let's call it this way, this would have been a fitting end for his achievement. But no.
Thomas: Well, Erdogan did not adopt a merely symbolic presidential role. He became Turkey's first executive president in decades. Ever since that 1960/61 coup, the original coup changed the presidency and made it less executive, obviously, Atatürk had been president and had ruled Turkey with an iron fist.
But in the intervening decades, the presidency had become less executive in power. But Erdogan changed that. He's now standing tall at the summit of Turkish power.
And that brings us to July 2016, which is the month when the now notorious attempted coup against Erdogan was launched. I'd actually been in Turkey the weekend before the attempted coup visiting a friend and I visited the Mediterranean Coast.
Aimen: Excuse me, visiting a friend only or-
Thomas: Planning a coup?
Aimen: Yeah, extremely coincidental. Very interesting. A Greek Orthodox, activist with a dream of retaking Ayasofya, and all of that.
Thomas: Aimen, you're not supposed to tell anyone. Anyway, so a week before the coup, I'd been in Turkey visiting a friend on the Mediterranean Coast. And I was initially struck really by how much change had happened in the 10 years since I'd last been there.
The coast remained extremely liberal, and people were regularly denouncing Erdogan to me. And yet, clearly the country had become much richer. The roads were newly paved and were really, really high quality. There were clear signs that Erdogan's time in power had had its benefits for the country.
And yet he had enemies. And actually, Aimen, as you know, by this point, in fact, his biggest enemy, in a way, had become his former ally, that Fethullah Gülen character, still in Pennsylvania, still in control of a huge network of Sufis, very loyal to him, including inside the army.
Aimen: Do you remember I told you about how Erdogan in 2011 started the takeover of the media financed by the banks and held by his rich cronies? Well, there was another secretive takeover that not many people knew about.
As you know, Gülen established a massive network of schools, of colleges, of charities, mosques. And Erdogan looked at that massive network and thought, “Hmm, I want that because this is power.”
He looked at what Gülen was able to do in 2007, 2008, and he thought, this is power, and it shouldn't be in the hands of someone who lives in America. It shouldn't be in the hand of someone who lives in the shadows. No, no, no, no, no. This should be ours.
And so, he instructed in each city, in each town, in each province, the AKP officials, to start the process of acquiring all of this network, slowly, surely, gradually. And to take control of it.
Gülen in 2013 started to feel that the network is slipping from his hands. He started to feel that if this continues, then Erdogan and his party would actually swallow and completely incorporate Gülenism into the AKP to the point where many, in many cities and many towns and many districts, the lines between the AKP and the Gülenists became so blurred.
And this is when Gülen in 2013 struck back and he decided to ally himself with some of Turkey's liberals and disaffected generals and decided, you know what? We could remove this man from power. He is authoritarian. He is also taking over and grabbing my power base from me.
So, there were some ulterior motives as well as some public good motives. Let's put it this way.
Thomas: Yeah, maybe. I mean, remember, ultimately Gülen's whole movement is built on the back of that Sufi movement that was founded in order to overthrow the Kemalist State and take control of it.
So, Fethullah Gülen is a player, a power player in Turkey. He wants to have the position that Erdogan has, frankly, and Erdogan knew it. So, the two of them were a high tail in it to a conflict. And that conflict came to a head on the 15th of July 2016, when really Erdogan's biggest nightmare unfolded in front of him.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: The army launched a coup against him.
Aimen: Except the amazing thing happened is that when army units loyal to Fethullah Gülen began the coup and detained the head of the army and the head of the Air Force, and they started the process of launching the coup, what they did not anticipate is that the army had been castrated and completely divided and almost leaderless.
Thomas: And the thing is that as a result of this, the coup was very shambolic. The plotters actually had been forced to move their plans forward by five hours when they realised that national intelligence in Turkey had uncovered the plot.
So, they had initially planned to launch at 3:00 AM which is a good time to launch a coup, people would be sleeping. But instead, panicking, they launched at 10:00 PM. I mean, 10:00 PM in the summer in Turkey. Everyone was up. Everyone's awake, out and enjoying themselves on the streets. That's not a time to launch a coup. And it immediately showed they just couldn't really get it off the ground.
Now, Erdogan himself was on vacation. He was vacationing on the Turkish Coast when he was informed about the coup reports are that he did initially freak out. He was very scared. This stands to reason; this was his worst nightmare coming true.
A couple of hours later. I suppose, because by then he'd realised things weren't as bad as he'd first suspected. Erdogan went on CNN, CNN Turk via FaceTime. And in a now famous interview with the newsman, he urged his supporters to take to the streets. And my God, did they ever.
Aimen: Well, hundreds of thousands of Turkish supporters of the AKP of President Erdogan went to the streets and immediately clashed with the military units that were basically trying to control Istanbul, Ankara, and many other cities.
And in fact, the clashes became so legendary in the Turkish folklore that even some of Erdogan's opponents went into the streets to protest against the principle of military coups again.
And the fact that hundreds were killed. And in some of the instances, people were blocking the path of tanks with their own cars, sometime with their own bodies. And what some people would call it, the heroism of so many people showed that Turkey changed. The people are not going to take any BS from the military anymore. Either you go to the ballot and change things there or that's it.
And also, this is when I remember I said based on my tour of Turkey, which was extremely extensive in 2013, I went from east to west, from north to south. I spent months there at the time, and I said, the AKP and Erdogan will always win elections because they have now achieved a electoral base of 40%. That's it.
That level of 40% will always be there. They have managed to position themselves as the only party of faith in Turkey. And that faith brought those people into the streets. And that's why they are always called Shaheed, the martyrs.
Thomas: Well, you said at the beginning of this episode, Aimen, that Erdogan believes it will take 70 years to wash the brains of Turks from the brainwashing of Atatürk. So, from what you're saying, he's done a good job of creating the foundations for that brainwashing plan.
Aimen: Indeed.
Thomas: Following the failed coup in 2016, tens of thousands of civil servants and military personnel were purged from the Turkish state and the Turkish army, only increasing Erdogan's power further, only increasing the hegemony of the AKP.
And in the years since that centralization of power in Erdogan's hands has just continued. I mean, Turkey is still a democracy. Some liberal critics of the country would say that democracy is more or less only a sham now because Erdogan still controls the media by and large. AKP supporters now comprise much of the civil service. The army, as you say, has been castrated as a “protector” of Turkish democracy.
And yet just earlier in the summer there was an election in Turkey and many analysts in the run-up to that election thought that maybe the AKP would get a beating. That did not prove to be the case in the end.
Aimen: Indeed, because of two factors, Thomas. The first one is the 40% electoral base. The old Kemalist guards, the CHP and their liberal and secular allies will always rely on a solid base of 30%.
However, the AKP and their allies will always rely on a 40% religiously inspired political voting bloc. That's it. So, it's always an upheld battle for the secularists from now on to actually achieve that majority.
Thomas: And not only that religious voting bloc, but in recent years, the AKP has entered into alliance with a far right nationalist movement,
Aimen: The MHP. Absolutely.
Thomas: So, sort of morphing the AKP ideology into something like a weird mishmash. It's like an increasingly hard-line Islamist nationalist party. And maybe it's showing you where turkey's going. Erdogan's foreign policy adventures, as we hinted at in the last part of this episode, haven't really gone to plan.
In a way Erdogan is more isolated regionally than he would've liked. He has to sort of stand alone, but he has increased Turkey's overall power. He has leveraged Turkey's, geostrategic and geopolitical position to make Turkey as it's always been throughout history, a very important power broker in the region. We see this now in the Russia/Ukraine situation. We see this in the continuing negotiations over the settlement in Syria and other things.
So, the question I leave you with Aimen really is, is there something that we could call Erdoganism to replace Atatürkism? Is Erdogan now the new Atatürk? And is this strange Islamist nationalist blend in Turkey going to really be the light motif of Turkish politics for the next several decades?
Aimen: Look, in my opinion, Erdoganism in the end will triumph over Kemalism. Kemalism was putting a saddle on a cow. Trying as hard as they did, the communists could not turn the devout polish Catholics into atheist communists. They couldn't.
And try as hard as they could, the Kemalists could not convert the majority of Turks into ardent secularists who oppose the role of religion in life. It was just a project that was destined to fail.
The reality is, and I always have said that secularism in the Western liberal sense will always fail in Muslim societies because the meaning of secularism there need to change. We have to change the definition from separation between state and religion to separation between state and clergy.
And if we achieve that in the Muslim world, then we are safe from the tyranny at least of the religious totalitarianism.
Thomas: Well, Aimen, and that just sort of leaves us where we started this two-part series on Erdogan. We asked at the beginning, is Erdogan a Muslim Brotherhood leader? Is he a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? Does he govern as a member of the Muslim Brotherhood? Does he have Muslim Brotherhood influenced designs, not just on Turkey, but on the Muslim world?
And I feel like it's harder than ever to answer that question. As we've seen, he has got total control over Turkey itself and his political party, the AKP is as much Turkish nationalist these days as it is Islamist, isn't it?
So, is Erdogan furthering the worldwide Muslim Brotherhood movements, aims or not?
Aimen: Well, his foreign policy, his priorities in governing, his alliances and the fact that Turkey, since the so-called Arab Spring in 2011, hosted many of the Muslim Brotherhood leaders who escaped from Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, UAE, all of these figures who sought shelter in Egypt.
In fact, the biggest foreign backer of the Muslim Brotherhood in Yemen is Turkey and the AKP Party. So, Istanbul became known as the new Muslim Brotherhood capital.
This is where if you go to any lobby of any hotel there, you will find a lot of those Muslim Brotherhood people wearing their nice suits, nice clothes or turbans sitting down together and plotting their own coups, their own revolutions, their own ideas of change back in their home countries.
So yes, he did work to further the aims, the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood globally. But does that make him a member of the organisation? Again, I say, if it walks like a turkey and if it quacks like a turkey, then it must be a turkey.
Thomas: Well, Aimen, that's it for President Erdogan for now. We will no doubt return to Erdogan at some point in Conflicted. He's too powerful, he's too important and his life has been too action packed for us to leave him there. But we will leave him there for now.
And in fact, we're going to turn our sights away from Sunni Islamism, which we've been exploring now for 14 episodes, and refocus our attention on the other side of the Islamic confessional divide onto Shia Islamism, starting with, of course, the granddaddy of all Islamic revolutionary regimes, Iran, asking the question, what's up with the Iranian regime now?
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We've heard a lot about the protests that have rocked the regime for well over a year now. We understand at the same time that there have been successful peace negotiations with some of Iran's regional rivals.
So, what's going on with the Iranian regime? What is the likelihood of that regime survival into the future? These are some of the questions we will be exploring in our next episode of Conflicted. Stay tuned.
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production. This episode was produced and edited by Harry Stott. Sandra Ferrari is our executive producer. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley and Tom Biddle.