The arrest of Aydin Engin, Turkish journalist, playwright, writer, politician, in the raid of 12 leading staff of Cumhuriyet. November 1, 2016.“Is Brussels
asleep, or just ignorant?, asked the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister
of Sweden Carl Bildt in an
op-ed in Politico, lambasting European
leaders’ “tepid response” to the failed July 15 coup in Turkey. “It took some
time for the EU to condemn the events”, wrote
Bildt; instead, “Europe’s leaders immediately began to question measures
taken by the Turkish authorities to cleanse from power any elements thought to
be associated with the Gülen movement”.
For him, there was
“no question that Turkey has the right to, and indeed must, take measures to
safeguard itself against forces trying to topple its constitutional order.” Of
course, “there is a severe risk these measures will go too far”, but the
Council of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights could assess this when
things calm down. In any case, “it is hard to know at this stage if the
government is casting the net too wide or not wide enough, but erring in either
direction will only create new problems”.
This is also the main
thrust of a report published by the European Council on Foreign Relations
(ECFR) Carl Bildt co-chairs. Penned by the Senior Policy Fellow Aslı
Aydıntaşbaş and dubbed “by far the best you can find on the Gülenist movement
and its dangerous role in Turkey” by Bildt, the report takes the official
narrative for granted and claims that the coup was indeed the Gülenist
officers’ doing – turning a blind eye to the many inconsistencies, indeed
contradictions, in the statements of the captured putschists and the factual loopholes
in the narrative which have led many observers to argue that what transpired on
this fateful night was much more complicated than the AKP government would have
us believe.
To be fair, the
report does mention the post-coup “crackdown” in its concluding pages, yet
blames it on “over-zealous investigators”, worrying more about the threat this
poses to Turkey’s “image at home and abroad” than its actual victims.
A passion for democracy or Erdoğanophilia?
How can we make
sense of this sudden and, to the best of our knowledge, unsolicited Erdoğanophilia (Bildt’s above-mentioned
article is entitled “Europe, Stand up for Erdoğan”, not for Turkey or for
democracy)?
Is it simply a
show of solidarity on the part of a fellow conservative politician whose career
is (equally?) embroiled in controversy – a diplomat who, when he was the EU’s
special envoy to the former Yugoslavia, “blocked airstrikes that could have
prevented the massacre of 6000 men in Srebrenica” according to declassified
documents published by the Clinton Presidential Library; a foreign minister who
was questioned by Riksdag’s Constitutional Committee for his membership of the
board of Vostok Nafta, an investment company with holdings in the Russian
company Gazprom (Bildt left the company two months after he became foreign
minister); a foreign minister who was also a board member of Lundin Petroleum,
an oil company which was accused in a 2010 report by
the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan, in addition to several NGOs and human
rights organizations, of being complicit in war crimes and crimes against
humanity?
Or is he an
old-school Eurocrat, perhaps a romantic maverick, who is seeking to defend the
“political ideal and democratic values” of Europe which he claims were not
reflected in EU’s response to the failed coup in Turkey? Does he really believe
that a stronger engagement with Turkey could improve the prospects of democracy
in Turkey?
A “democracy” like no others
If it were a genuine concern or passion for democracy, why has our maverick
been watching Turkey’s rapid transformation into a fully-fledged dictatorship in
the three and a half months that followed the botched coup silently? Does he
think that the measures taken by the Turkish government have still not gone too
far? Is the net still cast not wide enough to be worthy of one single critical
tweet?*
Or perhaps he is too busy trotting the globe to keep up with the dizzying
pace of political change in Turkey. Well, then, let us do him a small favour
and provide a quick roundup of the events of the last few days, for a fuller
account of the post-coup crackdown would require no less than a novella:
- – With
two new emergency decrees issued on 29 October, 10,158 civil servants have lost
their jobs overnight, in addition to the 100,000 who had already
been sacked or suspended for being part of or sympathetic to the Gülenist network, the PKK and various
leftist organizations. A further 37,000 have been arrested on similar
charges since July 15.
- – 1267 academics have been dismissed from
their universities by the same decrees, bringing the total number to over 2000
(the exact number remains unknown!). This also includes several members of the
“Academics for Peace” who have signed a petition asking for the
cessation of hostilities in Southeast Turkey. According to the New York
based charity Scholar Rescue Fund, there has been an “unprecedented” increase
in the number of requests for help from Turkey – 65 applications for funding
since July 15. The decree of 29 October also abolished rectorship elections,
giving President Erdoğan the
right to directly appoint rectors.
- – 15 media outlets have been shut down by
the same decrees, including Jinha, a news agency staffed solely by women.
Overall, 168 media outlets have been shut down and around 100 journalists
arrested since July 15, bringing the total number of journalists in jail to 133,
more than Russia, China and Iran combined as P24, Platform for Independent
Journalism, and several others commentators have noted. According to www.engelliweb.com, access to 114.264 sites
is blocked at the time of writing. Turkey also dominates Twitter censorship
charts. Only in the first half of 2015, hence before the coup attempt, 72% of
1003 requests for content removal by courts and government agencies came from
Turkey, followed by Russia which filed a mere 7% of the requests.
- – The emergency decrees of 29 October
ordered the recording of conversations between lawyers and the detainees, with
the additional proviso that they be made available to the prosecutors. Earlier decrees
had extended the maximum length of police detention without judicial review
from four to thirty days. Detainees can be denied access to a lawyer for up to
five days. The decrees also allow the authorities to cancel or confiscate the
passports of those under investigation and their spouses or partners.
- – A report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), published
on 24 October, documented 13 cases of alleged abuse, including sleep
deprivation, severe beatings, sexual abuse and rape threats since the coup
attempt, revealing the extent to which the state of emergency conditions
negatively affect the rights and conditions of the post-coup detainees. This
led the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to issue a joint
statement which accuses HRW of being “under the influence of people associated
with the Gülenist terror
organization, FETÖ”.
- – Mayors and local councils in 27
municipalities, most of them in the overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast, have been
removed from office and replaced by government-chosen trustees. The last
casualties of this “measure” were Gültan Kışanak and Fırat Anlı, the mayors of Diyarbakır (the largest
Kurdish city in Turkey), who were arrested on 31 October.
- – The crackdown, or the “net cast by the
government” to use Bildt’s terms, has extended to mainstream opposition
newspapers with the recent raid on the daily Cumhuriyet and the detention of 13 of its writers, including its
editor-in-chief, for “committing crimes” on behalf of the Gülen movement and the PKK.
“It's real, but it ain't
exactly there … democracy is coming…”
As anyone following the news in Turkey would readily notice, this list is
only the tip of a massive iceberg – yet apparently not large enough to be
noticed by Carl Bildt and his colleagues at ECFR who prefer to stick to “the
view from Ankara” as the title of an
article by İbrahim Kalın, advisor to President Erdoğan and a close friend of
Bildt, published on ECFR website, indicates. Would they have issued a comment had
they noticed it? I doubt it. Certainly not Bildt, notorious for his arrogance
(“Reviewing Carl Bildt is not for beginners” he said to reporters
from Aftonbladet on one occasion),
and his ability to always “get off the hook” (as he did in the Riksdag
investigation into his private dealings). “I have strong opinions. I stand out.
I am demonized. But I never read it”, he famously told magazine
Café in 2014.
And it does not
matter. Carl Bildt is chosen as a conversation partner here as he was the first
political figure of some repute to come to Erdoğan’s rescue in the aftermath of
the failed coup, and the first to use the trope of “evil Gülenists” (the very people the ECFR cooperated with
back in 2011) versus “good, democracy-loving people”. Alas, Turkey was not a
democracy either on July 14 or 16, and the fact that there has been a bloody
coup attempt in between – the details of which still remain shrouded in mystery
– does not alter this simple fact. Turkey was not a
democracy either on July 14 or 16, and the fact that there has been a bloody
coup attempt in between – the details of which still remain shrouded in mystery
– does not alter this simple fact.
On the other hand,
the argument that closer links between the EU and Turkey, perpetrated by Bildt
and his colleagues is plain wrong since i. the EU has already been engaging
with Turkey for the last two years when it suits its interests, e.g. to bring
the refugee flow to a halt, without any scruples about the increasingly
authoritarian character of the regime; ii. the EU is no longer in a position to
speak from a moral high ground given its own ongoing slide into the dark side;
and iii. Erdoğan has proven time and again that he is not someone to yield to
external pressure, which he normally uses to his own advantage to stoke the
nationalist fire.
Too pessimistic?
Indeed. Could there be a crack in the wall through which democracy can come to
Turkey – to paraphrase the lyrics of Leonard Cohen’s famous song? Perhaps, but
not in the near future.
Oh, and Bildt? He
will probably repeat the remarks he made when the majority of the world’s
democratic leaders condemned
Gaddafi when he attacked demonstrators with fighter jets in 2011: “It has
nothing to do with supporting one or the other, it has to do with obtaining
stability and reasonable development.” Then he will hop on a plane and set out
for his next destination.
* While this
article was being written, Carl Bildt has finally descended from his pedestal
and posted his first “critical” tweet in three and half months, expressing his
worry about the raiding of Cumhuriyet.