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Coup
Attempt in Turkey: A Feast of Pretexts
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Turkey's
NTV TV shows soldiers involved in the coup attempt surrendering on
Istanbul's Bosphorus bridge, July 15, 2016.
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Everything looked surreal in Turkey; soldiers inviting the head of the
police anti-terror squad for a "meeting" only to shoot him in
the head; top brass, including the chief of the military general staff,
air force commander, land forces commander and gendarmerie commander,
being taken hostage by their own aide-de-camps; then people taking to the
streets in their thousands to resist the coup d'état, taking over tanks,
getting killed, soldiers opening fire at the civilians, and finally the
victorious pro-Erdogan people lynching coup-staging soldiers wherever they could
grab them.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused his formerly staunchest
political ally, a Muslim cleric in exile in the United States, Fethullah
Gulen, and his loyalists within the military. Appearing before a crowd of
party fans, Erdogan pleaded to Washington for "the
terrorist" Gulen's extradition.
Erdogan's intelligence and loyal police force immediately arrested
nearly 6,000 military officers and members of the judiciary, claiming
that they belong to the "Gulenist terror organization." Justice
Minister Bekir Bozdag said that more arrests were in the offing,
signaling a witch hunt across the country. Immediately after that move
the Interior Ministry suspended 8,777 officials, including governors,
suspected of being "Gulenists," and arrested thousands in the judiciary. Many liberals believe the
government will use the coup attempt as a pretext to intimidate its opponents, whether or not with any
links to Gulen.
Erdogan's Turkey will now be an
even more difficult place to live for dissidents.
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"He [Erdogan] comes out of this tremendously strengthened," says Howard Eissenstat, associate professor of Middle
East history at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York. "This
has remobilized a base that was getting sort of tired of him. It gave him
at least a moment in which he unified all elements of society against a
clear threat."
Turkey now will be an even more difficult place to live in for
dissidents. Erdogan is already talking about the reintroduction of death penalty. "Our government
will discuss [the death penalty] with the opposition," he said when
he spoke to a crowd of party fans who interrupted his speech with the
slogan "we want the death penalty." Then he said he would endorse the reintroduction of the death
penalty if parliament approved it.
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The
1933 Reichstag fire provided a critical pretext for the Nazi seizure of
absolute power in Germany.
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Meanwhile, the Security General Department (which runs the police
force) issued a statement calling on citizens to inform them about
any social media material that supports terrorists or the Gulen
organization, or that contains anti-government propaganda material.
All this Turkish upheaval reminds one of the Reichstag fire, an arson attack on the German
parliament building in Berlin on Feb. 27, 1933. A young unemployed Dutch
communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, was arrested for the crime. He had only
recently arrived in Germany; he pled guilty and was sentenced to death.
The Reichstag fire was used as a pretext by the Nazi Party to tell its
public that communists were plotting against the German government -- a
pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
We may never know if the failed coup of July 15 was a Turkish version
of the Reichstag fire. But we do know that it will be used as a pretext
to claim that a multitude of enemies, inside and outside Turkey, are
plotting against the government.
Burak Bekdil is an Ankara-based
columnist for the Turkish newspaper Hürriyet Daily News and a fellow at the
Middle East Forum.
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