Countdown to crisis in Turkey

July 8, 2008 | Mark Weston | More on Middle East, News | 

I have just spent two weeks holed up in a sleepy Turkish fishing village in the far eastern corner of the Mediterranean. Even there, one cannot escape the storms raging in the west of the country.

The culture wars are hotting up: the industrialist Rahmi Koc, one of Turkey’s richest men, has banned his companies from employing anyone with a mustache or beard. As well as ruling out pretty much any man over the age of about 45, this can only inflame radical and also many moderate Muslims, who are already smarting over the reaffirmation of the ban on headscarves in universities. Koc’s move was criticised by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, who is the subject of a new book which accuses him and his wife of being “Moses’s Children” (in other words, Jews). The book has become a bestseller and the topic of heated and righteous conversation among the same desperate secularists who a few minutes later, straightfaced, will tell you Erdoğan wants to turn their country into a new Iran (which wants to exterminate the Jewish race). Confused? Me too.

Further arrests of retired generals in the Ergenekon case have raised the stakes in the battle between secular fundamentalists and the moderately Islamic governing AK Party. The army and media are now arguing that the case is a revenge attack by the government in response to the imminent ban on its activities - a suggestion undermined by the fact that the first Ergenekon arrests came months before the case against the government was launched. If enough newspapers peddle this story, however, Turks start believing it - few ask whether in fact the prosecution of the government may be an attempt to protect the generals.

Meanwhile, on an overnight coach journey to Istanbul, we are stopped at a checkpoint. It is 3am. A young gendermarie officer marches through the bus collecting ID cards. He strikes lucky. A few minutes later, he comes back onto the bus and calls out a name. A young male passenger stands up, and is led off into a waiting car. After half an hour, he is brought back on to collect his bags, and then spirited away, face full of fear, into the vast Anatolian night. Speculation among the remaining passengers is rife that he may have been linked to the Kurdish-separatist PKK group (we began our journey near the Syrian border), but the coach driver later tells me that the man had dodged military service; the army’s grip on the country, as Daniel noted last week, remains vicelike.

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