Two months after a failed coup the Turkish government continues to exploit vague threats of further plots to jail its critics and deepen its hold on the country’s institutions. To date, the purges include the forced retirement of 584 military officers, the Supreme Council of Judges and Prosecutors’ summary dismissal of 2,847 of its members, and even the detention of a former ambassador to Canada. Thousands of academics and journalists also face similar repercussions. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch report credible accounts that detainees have been subjected to beatings and torture, including rape.
Turkey’s response to the latest plot is complicated by its long history of military coups ‒ there have been four since the 1980s. But although even Erdoğan’s fiercest critics resisted the most recent attempt at a military takeover, they share well-founded fears that the government will use McCarthyesque witch hunts to silence all of its remaining critics. Even before his controversial re-election, Prime Minister Erdoğan had arrested seven hundred people, including senior military officials and members of parliament, journalists, media owners, academics and the directors of charitable organizations. At one point fifteen per cent of the country’s active admirals and generals faced prosecution for their involvement in alleged conspiracies.
Like its counterparts in Russia and India the Erdoğan administration, an authoritarian regime dressed in the garb of democracy, has learned how to use the threat of coups and conspiracies to muzzle critics and strengthen an already formidable national security apparatus. Part of its strategy is to lose no opportunity to underscore the gravity and omnipresence of the threat. In July, for example, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned the US Congress that “terrorism remains the biggest threat” to the world. He then repeated the word “terror” no fewer than ten times, relegating “poverty” which affects the daily lives of tens of millions of Indians far more directly, to a single mention. Erdoğan has pursued a similar strategy, pointing to shadowy conspiracies whenever there is the slightest criticism of his government, secure in the knowledge that he is too valuable an ally for Western governments to raise more than token resistance to his crackdown.
Through a mixture of shrewd diplomacy and economic success, Turkey has made itself extremely important to America and the EU — as a broker with Syria, Iran and Palestine; as a buffer in the refugee crisis; as an ally against IS, and as a longstanding suitor for EU membership. This makes it far too important for either the US or the EU to endanger their tentative friendships with Turkey over human rights abuses, however widespread and however credible these may be.
Fully aware of this leverage, the Erdoğan government has continued to consolidate its power, and prosecute intensive military campaigns against the Kurds, without fear of restraint. Should it succeed in overwhelming its domestic critics, and crushing the Kurdish resistance, the Erdoğan administration may well retain control of the country for another decade — further entrenching a wave of Islamization that has made increasing gains on the secular ideals enshrined in Turkey’s Constitution.
These developments ought to be of much greater concern to the West, but its governments have largely preferred to celebrate the success of the Turkish economy — whose GDP has doubled since 2002 — rather than focus on the erosion of Turkey’s secular institutions and civil society.
In the wake of the failed July coup, the historian James Palmer wrote that Erdoğan’s “populist authoritarianism threatens a frightening change in Turkey — a dictatorship with the barest veneer of democracy laid over it as cover, fueled by resentment and religious conviction, and drawing in elements from jihadists to intelligence officers to organized crime to shield itself and assault its enemies.” As this veneer of democracy reaches a vanishing point, the international community remains unconscionably silent about Erdoğan’s crackdown, partly from a mixture of apathy and narrow self-interest and partly from an indifference to the struggle of millions of Turkish citizens who have fought to uphold the country’s democratic ideals against the military and religious forces which continue to threaten them.
