What’s worse: a coup or a post-failed-coup Erdogan?
Civil and human rights in Turkey were already being chipped away. Now things could get worse.
I spent last night glued to the Conflict News Twitter feed. The footage from Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, was breathtaking. Glowing ammunition darted to earth like sci-fi laser beams. A chamber of Turkish Parliament rumbled violently as it absorbed a tank round. Civilians, in the streets at the exhortation of their president, couldn’t move fast enough to dodge a speeding tank, which left a scene of gore in its wake.
All of this streamed across the internet in real time, too fast for the coup makers to contain it. By the time soldiers shut down Turkish CNN, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had already addressed the nation from his iPhone, confirming the government was still standing and urging citizens to resist treason. To Erdogan’s supporters and even to his detractors, appalled by the violence perpetrated in their cities, his appeal to law, order and democracy was a rallying cry.
For anyone in the United States or Europe wondering what a bloody coup would look like in their country, it’s not so difficult to imagine anymore. Here was a democracy, an advanced economy, a modern military, all cast into confusion as a faction of the army endeavored to seize power by force. The other recent example, Thailand in 2014, was significantly more subdued: The commander of the army gathered government and opposition leadership in one room for mediations. When the talk broke down, he said, “Sorry, I must seize power,” and arrested everyone. That the Turkish coup leaders failed to detain Erdogan before he pulled out his phone was probably their biggest mistake.
Today the government is sussing out who was involved, and, in addition to thousands of ground troops, prominent figures have already been arrested. Governments in the West, including the United States and Germany, have expressed their support for Erdogan. The U.S. State Department has even promised to help investigate a dissident leader exiled in Pennsylvania if Turkey can provide compelling evidence he was involved (he swears he wasn’t).
But while Turks are saddened by the chaos and military meddling, not everyone sees Erdogan as the “defender of democracy” he now claims to be. One of those taking a nuanced view is Can Dündar, editor of Cumhuriyet, a newspaper that has pursued independent coverage of the government despite Erdogan’s withering campaign against free speech. In January 2014, Cumhuriyet published photos of Turkish spy trucks moving weapons into Syria, allegedly bound for Islamist rebels. Dündar was charged with treason for the report and arrested. In May, while Dündar was waiting to hear that he’d been convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, a man with a pistol tried to shoot him outside the courthouse, shouting “traitor.”
Two months later, we’re still waiting for an investigation to determine what moved the gunman to murder, but Dündar blamed a climate of fear and division stoked by Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party.
Yesterday, Dündar tweeted a list of “coups that worked,” including Erdogan’s election as president:
Western governments tend to gloss over the fact that Erdogan’s regime increasingly resembles a dictatorship because they see Turkey as a strategic ally against Islamic extremists and against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. They also depend on Turkey as a protective barrier against migrants and refugees seeking safety in Europe. The European Union has an explicit agreement with Turkey to pay €6 billion in exchange for accepting asylum seekers Europe doesn’t want. Although Turkey has accepted a colossal number of Syrian refugees (2.7 million), its record of mistreating them has led human rights groups and a court in Greece to deem the arrangement illegal.
In the predominantly Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey, insurgents have waged a separatist war against the government. Peace negotiations failed last year, and Erdogan responded with a campaign of brute force. The military put entire cities under curfew, razed whole apartment blocks and killed civilians. The following link shows the scale of the destruction:
But the true toll is unknown because Erdogan has prevented journalists and human rights groups from investigating. According to Human Rights Watch:
“The Turkish government’s effective blockade of areas of the southeast fuels concerns of a major cover-up,” said Emma Sinclair-Webb, senior Turkey researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Turkish government should give the U.N. and nongovernmental groups immediate access to the area to document what’s going on there.”
Since last night’s coup attempt, there’s a growing movement to reinstate the death penalty in Turkey. For a coup that killed nearly 300 people and many, many civilians, it’s hard to blame them. But they’re giving Erdogan a new mandate to exercise even stronger executive power. Whatever credibility he lost for failing to prevent the Istanbul airport attack, he regained it last night. Those who support the president now support him more than ever.
We watched a coup in real time. Now watch democracy, free speech, and civil and human rights erode in real time.
