Armenian, Assyrian and Hellenic Genocide News

Turkey's Dream of Democracy - Part 1
by Eric Rouleau
Posted: Wednesday, November 01, 2000 08:23 pm CST

ERIC ROULEAU is a writer and was France's ambassador to Turkey from 1988 to 1992.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

TURKEY TODAY stands at a crossroads. Few other moments in the 77-year history of the Turkish republic have been so decisive. In the coming weeks, its parliament will begin to consider the "accession partnership document" recently presented to it by the European Union. The document is a road map for the far-reaching economic and political reforms Turkey must enact if it is to join the EU. Actual membership negotiations between Ankara and Brussels cannot begin until these reforms are implemented, which both parties hope will happen before 2004. But if Turkey expects to meet that deadline, it will need to start acting fast.

Less than a year ago in Helsinki, Finland, the EU finally decided to accept Turkey's candidacy for membership. The Turks were over-joyed. Since 1987, all of their previous applications to join the EU had been rejected. For 12 years, Turkey had complained that as a Muslim nation, it was being discriminated against by an exclusively Christian club. The Europeans had countered that democratic and economic deficiencies in Turkey's institutions and practices disqualified it from membership. If Ankara really wanted to join, Brussels instructed, it should start taking steps to meet the union's many requirements.

Then, at the December 1999 Helsinki meeting, the EU softened its stance and dropped its preconditions. The reasons for this about-face were several. Thanks to a thaw in bilateral relations, Greece had finally lifted its veto. And Turkey was too important a player on the international chessboard to be ignored. Bordering the oil fields of the Middle East, at the edge of the ex-Soviet Turkey republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia (some of which are also rich in oil), and linked through its Ottoman past to the
Balkans, Turkey has huge potential to play a stabilizing role in a turbulent region. Moreover, in the economic domain, Turkey had intensified its lucrative commercial and financial ties with Europe and had come to be considered one of the world's ten most promising emerging markets by the U.S. government.

The Helsinki decision called on Turkey, like all other EU membership candidates, to comply with the so-called Copenhagen rules. These guidelines, established in 1993, require EU hopefuls to build Western-style democratic institutions guaranteeing the rule of law, individual rights, and the protection of minorities. Indeed, the EU's eastern and central European candidates adopted most of the Copenhagen norms on their own, before even knocking at the doors of the union.

In contrast, in the ten months since the historic Helsinki decision, Ankara has made no moves to reform its institutions. It is true that, after abstaining for 34 years, Turkey recently signed (but has not ratified) two U.N. conventions on political rights. And some observers were encouraged by parliament's election in May of Ahmed Necdet Sezer, the country's highest-ranking judge and a known liberal, as president of the republic -- although Sezer was seen as a nonpolitical compromise candidate and has limited power. Overall, however, the authoritarian nature of the regime appears to have hardened.

This August -- to cite but one example -- Ankara, acting at the instigation of the army high command, took advantage of a parliamentary recess to issue a decree authorizing it to dismiss, without charges or legal judgments, civil servants suspected of Islamist or pro-Kurdish sympathies. This decree, which could possibly affect tens of thousands of individuals, was denounced as unconstitutional and arbitrary by almost all of Turkey's unions and professional associations and by numerous politicians, jurists,
and columnists. In an event unparalleled in the history of the republic, President Sezer vetoed the decree on the grounds that only parliament could pass such a measure. If parliament rejects the draft law when it reconvenes this fall, the military may well interpret the vote as an intolerable challenge to its authority. A major national crisis could result.

This incident gives some idea of the enormous difficulties Ankara will face in adopting the Copenhagen rules. These measures represent more than simple reforms; they mean the virtual dismantling of Turkey's entire state system. This system, which places the armed forces at the very heart of political life, is deeply rooted in a centuries-old culture and in practices that have been ingrained for decades. Whether Turkey will choose to change them -- and whether the army will let it -- remains uncertain. Even EU membership, the ultimate incentive, may not be enough to convince the Turkish military to relinquish its hold on the jugular of the modern Turkish state.

PASHA POLITICS

THE ARMED FORCES have always occupied a privileged place on Turkey's political landscape, under the republic no less than in Ottoman times. The imperial troops, especially the elite Janissaries (until they were disbanded in the nineteenth century), enthroned or overthrew sultans at will. General Mustafa Kemal, who came to be known as Ataturk ("Father of the Turks"), would not have been able to drive out the foreign forces that occupied his country in the wake of World War I or to found the republic on the ashes of empire without the military's active assistance.

Of the ten men to become president since the republic was established in 1923, six have been high-ranking officers. Since 1960, moreover, Turkey has experienced a number of attempted putsches and four successful coups d'etat. The latest, in February 1997, has come to be known in Turkey as the "virtual" or "postmodern" coup, because the troops never actually left their barracks: a thinly veiled ultimatum from the army high command sufficed to bring down the coalition government headed by the so-called Islamist Necmettin Erbakan. Those in the mainstream media who welcomed the military intervention soon began honoring the higher officers with the deferential title "pasha," the imperial term for a general.

The republican pashas, whether left- or right-wing, invariably erupt onto the political scene waving the banner of "Kemalism." The term has become ubiquitous in the successive constitutions that the military has sponsored after overthrowing various civilian governments since 1960. Kemalism is likewise invoked in most of the laws based on those constitutions, as well as in the oaths of allegiance sworn on taking office by Turkey's presidents, parliamentarians, and high officials. To succeed or survive in modern Turkey, all opinions, initiatives, and behavior must conform to the ideas or intentions -- real or imagined -- of Kemal Ataturk.

Modern Kemalism is a faith simple in formulation and broadly positive in content. It has two major elements: the indivisibility of the nation and its territory and the secularism of the republic. The rigid conformity with which these basic principles are upheld is paradoxical, however, and ill conforms to the true spirit of Mustafa Kemal. For although Kemalism has been transformed into a strict ideology since his death, Ataturk himself was no ideologue. He pragmatically borrowed from sources as varied as the French Revolution and the totalitarian regimes of his time in order to forge a nation-state bent on modernization and economic development. Just as paradoxical is the fact that the same people who have championed so-called Kemalist orthodoxy have never hesitated to go against its very essence whenever Ataturk's policies got in the way or were found anachronistic. Ataturk's single party has been replaced with a multiparty system and his statist economy has been gradually abandoned in favor of a market-driven one. Whereas Ataturk laid down the strict principle that under no circumstances should Turkey involve itself in the internal affairs of foreign countries, his successors in the military have defended not only Turkish-speaking minorities in other countries (Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and elsewhere) but also -- surprisingly for a militantly secularist state -- Muslim minorities in foreign lands (such as Bosnia, Kosovo, and Chechnya).

Perhaps the most poignant irony of Kemalism today is the fact that the "Father of the Turks" unalterably opposed any intervention by the armed forces in the affairs of state -- a principle that his admirers have consistently violated for the last 40 years. Such departures from the founder's principles have not prevented the military from virtually deifying Ataturk, however, or elevating Kemalism to the rank of sacrosanct dogma, while arrogating to its officers a monopoly on interpretation and the right to punish suspected dissidents.

The military's principal tool in this pursuit has been the officer corps, an elite caste par excellence. As described by veteran journalist Mehmet Ali Birand in his investigative work, Shirts of Steel, the officer system has been remarkably effective at reproducing itself generation after generation. Candidates for military careers, selected according to strict social, political, intellectual, and physical criteria, are taken completely in hand by the state from the age of 13 or 14. Cadets undergo intensive training in special schools that are beyond the jurisdiction of the ministry of national education. In addition to military training, they follow university-level courses in history, sociology, political science, and economics. The officer is meant to become a top civilian official in uniform; as the chief of staff noted in January 1998, "A general should be able to act as a diplomat, whereas a diplomat should be familiar with military questions; both should be well versed in economics."

Nonetheless, officers enjoy greater privileges than civil servants at the same level: their pay is sometimes twice as high, they shop in subsidized military stores, they obtain low-interest housing loans, and they have access to exclusive holiday resorts, hotels, and clubs. Endowed with a sacred mission, they naturally occupy the pinnacle of the state, and their prestige is unequaled in Turkish society.

CONSTITUTIONAL CONUNDRUMS

A RIGID, NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY and a powerful, activist officer corps: this is what the EU is up against in trying to persuade Turkey to totally revamp a constitution that institutionalizes the army's dominant power and blocks any move toward democratization. Unveiled in 1982 by the generals who had seized power two years before, Turkey's current constitution is the source of laws and practices that frequently undermine basic freedoms and human rights. This summer, in an unprecedentedly frank statement for someone of his rank, Sami Selcuk, the chief justice of Turkey's highest court of appeal, declared that 90 articles of the constitution should be canceled or amended in order to comply with EU rules and promote democratization -- so
many that it might be better to "rewrite it completely from scratch." This, in blunt terms, is what the EU has been implicitly suggesting in a series of reports and notes it has sent to Ankara for more than a decade.

One of Brussels' main targets has been Article 118, which establishes the National Security Council (NSC), a kind of shadow government through which the pashas can impose their will on parliament and the government. The NSC is made up of six high-ranking military officers and five civilians. Once a month, decked out in full dress uniform, the chief of staff and the heads
of the army, navy, air force, and national police, along with a sixth general acting as the council's general secretary, meet with Turkey's president, prime minister, and the ministers of defense, foreign affairs, and the interior. The council is empowered to examine all the affairs of state, whether relating to domestic or to foreign policy. Its deliberations are never made public, and even when decisions are announced, they are presented as "recommendations" to the government.

Civilians ignore these recommendations at their peril. Although the NSC acquiesced when its recent order to purge suspect civil servants was vetoed by President Sezer and sent to parliament for approval, the council was far less indulgent in the case of Prime Minister Erbakan. When Erbakan had the temerity to send the NSC's 20 "recommendations" aimed at "eradicating
Islamist reaction" to parliament in February 1997, the military had him ousted. Erbakan signed his government's death warrant by pretending not to understand that the recommendations constituted an ultimatum.

The EU has not suggested that the NSC be abolished, but only that it be transformed into an informal and extraconstitutional consultative body with a civilian majority. Unsurprisingly, this idea was well received in Turkey's liberal circles. But the chief of staff hastened to dispel any illusions about the reform. Reminding Turks that the NSC's decisions are taken not by majority vote but by consensus, he declared that the council could include "even one hundred civilians, if that's what they want." As the editor in chief of the Turkish Daily News, Ilnur Cevik, explained, the chief of staff's apparent equanimity stemmed from the fact that the military's "qualitative superiority" on the council assured that the "consensus" it favored would be maintained -- whoever joined the body. As Cevik wrote, "The military present their views and want them to be taken into consideration; no government dares challenge their views and 'advice.'" To ensure compliance, special offices set up within the general staff monitor the activities of most ministries.

The military's "qualitative superiority," as Cevik called it, is guaranteed by a number of articles of the constitution. For example, the constitution gives the chief of staff more power than the defense minister and all other members of government. Although the chief of staff comes after the prime minister in the order of protocol, in fact he has more authority in the most sensitive areas of the state. The head of the military is, in effect, responsible for the country's internal and external security, including the intelligence agencies. It is he who decides on nominations and promotions within the armed forces and who formulates defense policy.

The armed forces enjoy a similar autonomy in the judicial domain, having their own laws, courts, and judges to deal with matters concerning military personnel -- including cases where civilians are involved. Any public criticism of the military (in the press, for example) found to be "insulting" can result in prison sentences of up to six years. Crimes of opinion are tried in state security courts, until recently presided over by high-ranking officers. These tribunals enforce "emergency laws" in Turkey's nine Kurdish provinces, where an official state of emergency has been in force since the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) launched its guerrilla war in 1984. The EU has demanded the abolition of these special courts on the grounds that they are "incompatible with a democratic system and contrary to the principles of the European Convention on Human Rights." But for the time being, at least, they remain in place.

Equally unacceptable to the Europeans is the very concept of freedom as enunciated in the Turkish constitution, the preamble to which reads, in part,

No protection will be extended to thoughts or opinions contrary to Turkish national interests, the principle of the indivisibility of Turkey . . . [or] to Turkish historical and moral values . . . [or] to the nationalism, principles, reforms, and modernity of Ataturk.

Not only does the vagueness of the terms open the door to abuses, but the provision makes "thoughts" and "opinions" as punishable as acts.

Similarly, Article 130 of the constitution stipulates that "scientific research and publications" not in keeping with the above-mentioned values are to be banned by the rectors of the universities, without prejudice to additional sanctions. The Turkish Council of Higher Education (known by the Turkish acronym YOK), created under the 1982 constitution, has the power to fire any professor suspected of ideological dissidence (who can also be tried in the courts if considered dangerous to the public order). The penal code, a number of articles of which were borrowed from Mussolini's, facilitates the judges' task in this regard. Thus Ismail Besikci, an ethnic Turk and well-known sociologist, was sentenced under various laws to more than 200 years in prison for having expressed allegedly pro-Kurdish "separatist" views in his scholarly works.

According to a study commissioned by the Turkish Press Council, Turkish law today restricts freedom of opinion through no less than 152 legal texts -- not counting the articles of the constitution. Article 312 of the penal code, for example, the abrogation of which the EU has repeatedly sought, penalizes views judged contrary to ethnic and religious harmony. This was the article used in 1998 to strip the 75-year-old Erbakan, a veteran of the political scene for more than three decades, of his civic rights for five years. The same article was applied again this year to sentence him to one year in prison for a campaign speech he gave in 1995, a year before he was appointed prime minister. Similarly, an arrest warrant was issued in August against Fethullah Gulen, a distinguished Muslim cleric who preaches tolerance and human rights. Though the warrant was subsequently dismissed, another prosecutor indicated him again for "planning to establish a theocratic dictatorship." Gulen, who is living in the United States while undergoing medical treatment, is the spiritual leader of an Islamic brotherhood that operates a network of hundreds of schools in Turkey and abroad that have won praise even from the ardently secularist Bulent Ecevit, Turkey's current prime minister. As Cevik editorialized in the Turkish Daily News, "Gulen and his people have done nothing but serve this country, yet we still want to harm them by sending Gulen to prison. Isn't this odd?"

Not if one shares the view of the pashas, who tend to be suspicious of any Muslim activist who is not under state control. As General Hilmi Ozkok, speaking in August at his inauguration as chief of the army, declared, any "concession to radical Islamic factions will bring this country back to the darkness of the Middle Ages."

Finally, in addition to the constitution and penal code, the EU has also objected to a number of other laws. These restrict basic rights in various ways: by restricting and outlawing the formation of political parties, professional associations, and unions; by constraining the status of civil servants; by mandating dress codes; and so on.

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