On September 13, 2009, The Sunday New York Times carried a short editorial (“A Clear Assault on the Press”) about recent events in Turkey. It managed to scold the Erdogan government:
Now Turkey has provided a particularly chilling example of another way to shut down independent voices — a fine of $2.5 billion that appears to be designed to put a major media company out of business….The media group, Dogan Yayin, is a widely respected conglomerate of newspapers and television stations including the Turkish-language version of CNN. Dogan journalists have not shied away from stories that the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s iron-willed prime minister, does not like.
Is that the adjective that best fits? “Iron-willed”? Other adjectives come to mind: “despotic” or “cunning” or “ruthless” or “calculating,” or such adjectival phrases as “sinister in his single-minded determination to free Islam from the restraints placed on it by Ataturk.”
The Times continues:
Aydin Dogan, an owner of the media group’s parent company, is one of Mr. Erdogan’s most vocal critics. That makes it all the more suspicious that the Erdogan government levied a tax penalty on the Dogan group that is almost much as the value of the entire company.
So far so preachily on-the-side-of-the-angels good.
But then the editorial ends with this paragraph:
Turkey has made important strides in the last decade, amending its Constitution, outlawing the death penalty and bringing Turkish law more in line with European standards. Steps like this undermine that progress.
That last paragraph — about all the “progress” Turkey has made by changing its laws over the past decade, when Erdogan and the AKP have been in power — should be held up for inspection. For aside from ending the death penalty, most of the “reforms” that the editorial staff of the Times applauds are in fact designed not by civil libertarians who are desirous of emulating the freedoms of the West, but by Erdogan’s schemers, who are using the claimed need to comply with the E.U. to put in “reforms” that, as all the threatened secularists in Turkey understand, are really designed to weaken the power of the Turkish army and the power of the Turkish judiciary to uphold the secular order and the Kemalist restraints on Islam.
The E.U. bureaucrats are members of the
same political class that all over Europe has shown itself willfully
ignorant of Islam, and thus ignorant of the internecine war being waged
within Turkey between the secularists and Erdogan and his followers.
The latter know exactly how to use claimed pressure from the E.U. to
change the laws. What seems to editorial writers in New York to be real
“reforms” are in fact attempts only to weaken the secularists. Any
seeming expansion of civil liberties has been the result of the desire
by the most relentless enemies of the individual rights guaranteed by
the advanced Western democracies to pretend to uphold those rights, and
then to consolidate power and destroy the power of the centers of
secularism – the university rectors, professors, judges, journalists,
and above all the military.
Ataturk faced great opposition with the forces of black Islamic
reaction in his attempt to push Turkey westward. But he had been a
successful general, even a war hero during World War I, and he used his
prestige, and every other weapon he could find, to transform Turkey as
much as he could. He was also ruthless. He understood the power of
Islam and the power of those who, in his view, wanted to keep Turkey
mired in an Islam that, Ataturk understood, had been the cause of
Turkey’s backwardness and near-ruination. He was not a civil
libertarian. And the secularists in Turkey today understand that, but
have trouble spelling this out for people from outside, who have never
had to deal with the threat of a resurgent Islam.
About ten years ago I went to a dinner party in Istanbul. The
Turkish hosts and other guests were all assuredly secular. Some sent
their children to school in the U.S. When at
one point I asked why the Turkish government did not return Hagia
Sophia to being a working church, since it was the first place so many
Christian tourists went, and what would be the harm, my Turkish
companions looked at me with surprise and pity, their expressions
showing they had not realized how naïve I was, for, they all told me:
“If we did that, we would have a revolution.” They then explained that
to allow the Hagia Sophia to again be a church (it had been used as a
mosque until Ataturk turned it into a museum) would so enrage Muslims
— the “real Muslims” — that it could never be contemplated. Until
then, I had not understood how difficult was their situation, and how,
even after 80 years of Kemalism, how great was the danger of
backsliding. And the backsliding came, as the AKP won
its election, and as the bonds that bound up Islam as a political and
social force were undone, almost as systematically as they had once
been put in place.
I doubt that the Editorial Board of the New York Times would
understand the plight of the secularists, who understand, as we in the
West do not, that the kind of solicitude for civil liberties that we in
the advanced non-Muslim world take for granted would be
counterproductive in the Turkish context, the context of Erdogan and
the assault, using every conceivable weapon, on the secularists of
Turkey by those pushing for Islam to come back in every sphere of life.
Those on the Editorial Board of the Times do not think of Turkey as a
place with a history, and a problem, and an attempt (by Ataturk) to
ameliorate if not to solve that problem. Instead, they think of it
merely as one more nation-state that should pull up its socks. Pulling
up its socks means to adopt the kind of guarantees of rights, and
limits on power, that can be found in the countries — all of them
non-Muslim — of the E.U.
Turkish secularists have a problem. They cannot adequately convey
the threat of Erdogan and of the primitives who follow and support him.
They cannot explain, at least to the satisfaction of the bureaucrats of
the E.U. or the editorialists of the Times,
why certain freedoms cannot be immediately granted — why the army, for
example, or the judiciary, should be allowed to retain their power, a
power required by the threat of Islam and those wishing to bring it
back by undoing what Ataturk achieved.
But somehow they have to do this. Otherwise, one can imagine, in ten
years, or twenty, a very different Istanbul in a very different Turkey.
Imagine the cafes and bustling bookstores of Istiqlal Caddesi
shuttered. The shuttered bookstores would include those that sell books
by Bernard Lewis, and the antiquarian bookshops, the ones that always
seem to be selling off the impressive collection of Turkica or
Ottomanica that had been collected by some heir-less German Jewish
refugee who ended up in Istanbul just before or during the war. The
hijab, and all that it implies, would be back, and then bits and pieces
of the Shari’a, as Turkey regressed, and became more like an Arab
state, or like the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If you wish Turkey and the people who live in Turkey well, how could
you wish the secularist, the hope of Turkey, to have to endure all that?