Historical Origins of the Current Government

The current ruling party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), has its origins in Necmettin Erbakan’s movement. The movement was the continuation of Ottomanist and Islamist political traditions. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire witnessed not only the development of modern ideologies following the European model, but also the formation of Ottomanism and Islamism, as the products of traditional reactions and solutions to the dissolution of the old system. The former tried to keep together different ethnic and religious components of the empire under Ottoman citizenship, while the latter, especially when the former turned into an impossibility, tried to keep Muslim regions. However, the last decades of the Empire saw not only Christian and non-Turkish regions but also Muslim Arabs separating from the empire. Hence, the new Turkish state was based on nationalism by excluding Ottomanism and Islamism. The Republic of Turkey as a nascent modern nation-state adopted different ideologies and principles such as secularism, republicanism, populism and statism.

Ottomanism and Islamism began to disappear or were indirectly forced to transform and evolve into extreme right parties along ideological lines. They sometimes combined with, or melted into, modern ideologies. The early republican period under the single-party regime of the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), which had been established by Mustafa Kemal in 1923 and consolidated by İsmet İnönü during the 1930s and 1940s, adopted relatively radical secularist policies and abolished the Sultanate and Caliphacy, officially liquidated the civil religious organisations, and again officially began to control religion through its Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı, DİB). All civil and unofficial Islam either moved underground or survived in the countryside.Reference Bulut¹ After the Second World War, as Turkey aligned with the Western capitalist camp and adopted a multi-party system in 1946, religion became politicised. One of the new parties, the Democrat Party (Demokrat Parti, DP), rose as the main opponent of the CHP and won the 1950 elections with a great majority. Nearly all opposition, including religious circles, supported the new party and its government.

The DP survived only ten years until the military coup of 27 May 1960 put end to it.² The 27 May coup was a democratic revolution and removed many legal obstacles for the left. The rightists not only lost their government with DP, they also confronted the challenge of the ever-rising leftist movement and organisations. In the place of the DP, a new right bloc was organized under the leadership of the Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP). Süleyman Demirel’s AP was also supported by a coalition of religious circles such as Nakshis and Nurcus (in which Fethullah Gülen’s group was a circle) and extreme nationalists that were allied against leftists and communists (Ref. 1, p. 194).

The extreme rightist National Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) of Alparslan Türkeş, who was one of the right-wing military officers of the 27 May revolution, emerged as the first counter-measure against the leftist rise. Türkeş’s party adopted the ideology of a Turk-Islam synthesis towards the end of 1960s. Another development in this period was a new party that appeared in 1970, a year before the military warning to the government. It was the National Order Party (Millî Nizam Partisi, MNP) of Necmettin Erbakan. Thus, the extreme right then also had an anti-secular political party in addition to the extreme-nationalist MHP of Türkeş. The MNP was predominantly Islamic, had a ‘nationalist’ discourse and expressed its main political line as a ‘National View’. However, its ‘nationalism’ was a new form of Ottoman ‘nationalism’ affiliated with Islam. In addition, the ‘National View’ propagated a statist economic development model probably due to the leftist atmosphere of the period following the 1960s. The MNP would be shut down within years for its anti-secular stance. In March 1971, the army warned the civilian government and forced it to resign. By applying police measures and martial law, the military warning succeeded in suspending the left mobilisation, but only for three years. In 1972, Erbakan’s new party, the National Salvation Party (Millî Selamet Partisi, MSP) replaced MNP, and in the second half of the 1970s it entered a coalition government³ with Demirel’s AP and Türkeş’s MHP.

In the second half of the 1970s, the socialist left gained more popular support and increased its militancy against the rising fascist mobilisation. On 12 September 1980, a military coup brutally stopped and destroyed the left. All parties, including Atatürk’s CHP, were closed. The MSP was also closed for its anti-secularism.⁴ Nevertheless, the military intervention of 12 September and the new order it established would create suitable political, ideological and economic conditions for its re-establishment and impressive rise in the next decade. Hence, it was not surprising that after the first election held in 1983, the civil government was formed by the Motherland Party (Anavatan Partisi, ANAP) of Turgut Özal, who was a parliamentary candidate for Erbakan’s MSP in the 1977 national elections and was known as a member of the Nakshi religious circles (tarikats). New Prime Minister Özal had a religious past, was also a designer of neo-liberal economic policies and, free from a radical and organised opposition,⁵ created a new state, economy and society. His party government encompassed ‘the four tendencies’ involving some of the supporters of AP, MHP, MSP and CHP, in ideological terms, and contained nationalists, conservatives, liberals and some social democrats.

Erbakan is Back

Erbakan was the founder of the first party representing political Islam in Turkey and the one who officially differentiated political Islam from the general lot of centre-right parties. Although all of his parties were closed, his movement was neither excluded nor marginalised from state administration and party politics. His MSP, as stated above, formed coalition governments with Ecevit’s CHP and Demirel’s AP before 1980. The problem his movement faced was related only to its ‘anti-secularism’. However, the movement also converted this problem into an opportunity.Reference Yalçın⁶

After 1989, as all other political parties gained votes at the expense of the ruling ANAP, the renewed MSP, called the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP), also gained votes. With the 1991 national elections, Erbakan returned to Parliament as part of an electoral coalition with Türkeş’s Nationalist Task Party (Milliyetçi Çalışma Partisi, MÇP) and the Reformist Democracy Party (Islahatçı Demokrasi Partisi, IDP). The fact that the coalition was required to reach a 10% nationwide voting threshold shows that, in 1989, the extreme right as a whole was far from gaining a ruling status. The RP gained about 40 seats and became the fourth largest party after Demirel’s True Path Party (Doğru Yol Partisi, DYP), Erdal İnönü’s Social Democratic Populist Party (Sosyaldemokrat Halkçı Parti, SHP) and ANAP, which was then headed by Mesut Yılmaz.

The RP continuously increased its nationwide share of the vote in the 1994 local and the 1995 national elections. Today, the 1994 local election can be considered a turning point. Ankara, the capital of the Republic of Turkey, and Istanbul, the largest and wealthiest city of the country, together with hundreds of municipalities and other local administrative units, fell under RP’s authority. In addition, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was elected the mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi), and his election would be the second turning point.

The third turning point for recent Turkish history would appear when, in 1995, Erbakan’s party gained the majority in Parliament.

The Success of Erbakan’s Movement

The reasons for the success of Erbakan and his RP are manifold: like Özal’s ANAP in 1983, Erbakan filled a huge power vacuum. When Özal died in 1993, Demirel, the leader of the strongest central right party (DYP) was elected President, leaving his party and government to Tansu Çiller. Özal’s ANAP suffered from the consequences of ten years of neo-liberal economic policies, such as inflation, debt and corruption. The SHP, in power in Istanbul municipality until 1994, lost respect nationwide due to corruption. However, the most important cause was the Kurdish armed revolt that continuously intensified since it had first started in 1984. The Kurdish question and the Kurdish revolt of the preceding decade were such serious and troubling problems for Turkey that corruption, public debt, ever-increasing authoritarianism of the state, and the emergence of illegal relations among politicians, the Mafia, Kurdish property owners and the police, were all somehow connected to them. Turkey adopted a variety of authoritarian methods to solve or at least ease the problems without investing their historical roots. For Erbakan and his RP, the solution lay in the establishment of a religious brotherhood between Kurds and Turks and a sort of Kurdish-Islam synthesis, an alternative to the previous Turk-Islam synthesis that sought an ‘assimilation’ of the Kurds into a ‘higher’ Turkish identity. All of Erbakan’s previous parties, and the RP, adopted a religious position and had a powerful social base in the Kurdish rural regions of South-Eastern Anatolia owing to their religious connections and authority, in addition to their political power in the conservative central Anatolian provinces, and they were in competition with the extreme rightist MHP of Türkeş.

Their success also had an international and regional context. The former was first seen through comments made by American and European policymakers, reporters and think-tankers after the early 1990s, who suggested that Turkey should adopt a more religious stance, a kind of ‘moderate Islam’ ideology instead of its official secular, Kemalist, nationalist, republican ideology (Ref. 1, pp. 186–190; Ref. 6, pp. 265–284). These suggestions were consistent with the ‘new world order’, as the US labelled the framework of the post-Cold War global political system. ‘The new world order’ meant the integration of all ‘nation-states’ into the global capitalist system under the hegemony of the US. The specific practical implications for each state were surely different. For Turkey, it was neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism, and ‘moderate Islam’ and hence, further liquidation of the secular, nationalist Kemalist republic, or whatever was left of it. The latter could be seen in Turkey’s relations with the Middle East and its position in the region. Turkey exported some consumer goods to the region and, in return, imported oil. More importantly, real estate capital realised many important projects in Arab countries such as Iraq and Libya after the second half of the 1970s. These trade and investment relations increased further after the 1980s, when interest in Muslim Arab countries was rekindled. In the case of Erbakan and his religious movement, such relations also had specific ideological and international undertones. From its beginnings, his movement was ideologically close both to the Muslim Brotherhood and to Saudi Wahhabism. In addition, Iran’s Islamic ‘revolution’ in 1979 has affected many in his movement as well as in other religious circles.

International religious contexts can also be seen in the framework of the old American ‘green belt’ project, which was a part of an anti-communist strategy that had been designed at the end of the 1970s to ‘contain’ the Soviet Union (SU) with a religious front from its southern territories, and in which Turkey, being a neighbour of the SU, was attributed a key role.

Military Memorandum of 28 February 1997

The events that occurred about one year into the coalition government of Erbakan’s RP form the basis on which the currently ruling AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been acting.

Erbakan’s coalition government with Çiller’s DYP was fraught with problems. Anti-secular mobilisation increased, Kurdish armed revolt intensified, corruption and illegal connections among police, intelligence and security officers and the Mafia destroyed the legitimacy of the political-bureaucratic power of the state. The Susurluk Event was the culmination point of all those relations and connections.⁷ Public protests spread all over the country in the form of ‘One Minute Darkness for Permanent Light’. Nearly all of Turkey turned lamps on and off at 9 o’clock every night.

Despite all protests, Çiller excused illegal actions in the name of national unity and security by saying that ‘all those who die or kill for the country are heroes.’ On the other side, Prime Minister Erbakan and his justice minister Şevket Kazan only mocked the protests.⁸ However, the real, sometimes symbolic, mistakes made by Erbakan and his supporters, as well as by other religious circles, were again related to religion, secularism, the personality of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, official republican days and commemorations. Even high party echelons propagated ‘sharia law’, openly rejected the secular republic, mocked Atatürk and his mausoleum, and demanded the religious transformation of the pro-Western secular republican regime. The ultimate serious mistakes were made when Erbakan invited and hosted the leaders of the religious tarikats in the prime minister’s mansion and when the mayor of the Sincan district in Ankara organised an Al Quds Night with guests from the Iranian embassy, engaging in highly religious and anti-secular discourse.

The official end of Erbakan’s coalition government would come from the National Security Council (Milli Güvenlik Kurulu, MGK) that met on 28 February 1997. The MGK’s decisions were seen by many political, media and academic circles in Turkey as a ‘postmodern coup’. The decisions mandated that the government should take all measures for the protection of the secular, social and democratic republic as stated in the Constitution, that it should implement the Kemalist revolutionary laws and that it should extend the duration of compulsory primary education from five to eight years. This last decision aimed to abolish the intermediate three years between the Imam Hatip Lices (Religious High Schools) and primary schools. Another decision strictly demanded the abolishment of illegal Qur’an courses, which had become the civil education centres of religious opposition and anti-secularism.

Prime Minister Erbakan remained in office until June 1997, when he resigned with the hope that his coalition government would continue under the new Prime Minister Çiller, leader of the DYP. The last dramatic phase of the declining power of Erbakan and his coalition occurred when President Demirel decided to call on Mesut Yılmaz, leader of ANAP, to form the new government instead of Çiller. Demirel actually put an end to Erbakan and Çiller’s coalition government completely. This was the political death of Erbakan and the end of his five decades of political struggle.

Between 1997 and 2012, Turkish elections gave rise to serious developments. Abdullah Öcalan, leader of the illegal Kurdish guerrilla party, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partie Kerkeran Kurdistan, PKK), was surrendered to Turkey after a secret operation by the US. Then Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit’s Democratic Left Party (Demokratik Sol Parti, DSP) won a majority in the 1999 parliamentary election in the context of such nationalist sentiment. Ecevit’s surprising success was also related to his uncorrupted and honest image, which the other centre-right parties had lost over the last two decades. The extreme rightist and nationalist MHP was another winner of the elections.

Yılmaz and Ecevit’s coalition governments, which involved Devlet Bahçeli’s MHP, partially implemented the MGK decisions taken during the 28 February meeting. Eight years of compulsory primary education were introduced, and thus the first three years at the religious Imam Hatip Lices were closed. Within the state’s administration and in the army in particular, new units were formed to monitor, record and remove anti-secular civil servants.

The government suffered, first, from the destructive earthquake that happened in the Marmara Region, the most developed region of the country, second, from corruption and, most importantly, from the destructive economic crisis that erupted in 1999. Ecevit’s coalition government with ANAP and MHP lasted until the 2002 national elections, in which the AKP won the electoral majority with 34.28%, yielding 363 seats out of 550.

The Rise of Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an and the AKP

Before the AKP’s electoral victory, Erbakan’s RP had been put under constitutional review for its anti-secularism by the chief prosecutor of the Republic. The Virtue Party (Fazilet Partisi, FP) was formed to replace the RP. The FP, however, suffered from the division between its reformists and traditional wings. The mayor of the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç led the former group. Erdoğan was imprisoned due to a speech at a party gathering in which he advocated religion as a tool of political struggle. He was the actual leader of the FP but was suspended from official politics for five years. Gül was one of Erbakan’s princes and the foreign minister of his coalition government from 1996–1997. Arınç also was a minister in the coalition government and had been one of the leading figures of Erbakan’s movement. He was tried many times for his anti-secular statements and his preoccupation with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s personal status since the 1970s. The reformists criticised the old cadres faithful to Erbakan’s movement and his ‘national view’ and called for a far more ‘moderate’ version of Islamism and its far more ‘liberal’ implementation than Erbakan had already embraced from the early years of 1990 onwards under the name of the ‘Just Order’ programme. The party was divided into nearly equal parts at its first congress, where the traditionalists won the leadership with a slight majority. The reformist wing left the party to establish the AKP (Ref. 6, pp. 235–238).

Indeed, those days were rather favourable for a new party that was politically and ideologically well-organised and reformist. It had to be led by young, dynamic, opportunist and practical cadres. It had to address all of the right, centre and extreme, to form a new right power block. Also, the old centre-left parties were weak and the old centre-right parties had dissolved into small minority parties. It was the time for the AKP of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç to fill the vacuum.

Once the AKP won a majority in Parliament in the 2002 elections, Erdoğan’s close friend Abdullah Gül would chair the party and his single-party government. The second and only other winner of the election was the CHP, led by Deniz Baykal. All other parties were left outside of the assembly with the exception of a few independently elected members. Actually, the AKP destroyed all political parties except the CHP, which was a semi-social democratic, centre-left, version of the old Kemalist political tradition.

After a brief time with Gül as Prime Minister, Erdoğan was freed from a constitutional restriction banning him from politics thanks to a constitutional amendment realised with the support of the CHP. Afterwards, one AKP member’s seat in the assembly (for the Siirt constituency) was dropped and re-election for the same place was held. From Siirt, Erdoğan would be elected, he entered Parliament and became the Prime Minister. It was very strange that he had already visited the US and been hosted by George Bush, as if he was Prime Minister even before the elections. He was already recognised as the new leader of Turkey even when he did not have any legal right to engage in politics. It was clear that not only had Ecevit’s DSP and Erbakan’s last party, FP, but also Turkish politics had been redesigned. Ecevit’s DSP, Yılmaz’s ANAP, Bahçeli’s MHP and Erbakan’s FP disappeared. It seemed that a special political environment had been prepared for the AKP to take off.

The Pragmatism of AKP’s Survival Strategy

In the post-28-February period, Erbakan’s movement saw itself and made itself be seen as being victimised by the ‘Kemalist’ army, judiciary, bureaucracy, Istanbul’s secular business circles and the media. The secular Kemalist regime did not do justice to it, and new ways of struggle had to be created.

The lessons of Erbakan’s 50-year struggle were rather clear for the reformist wing of the Virtue Party, whose main figures were the founders and leaders of the AKP. They revised Erbakan’s ‘National View’ and ‘Just Order’ programmes in favour of a sort of neo-liberal and conservative programme in which political Islam was reduced to a secondary, discursive role. They did not want to immediately confront and clash with the secularist strongholds of the republic, the army, higher judiciary and the Council of Higher Education (Yükseköğretim Kurulu, YÖK) among others. However, it would be seen, as time passed, that both sides had certain tolerance limits and reservations against each other.

As a survival strategy, the AKP first adopted Turkey’s historical pro-Western policy and the decades-old accession programme to the European Union. It seemed to aim at gaining the support of monopoly capitalists and İstanbul’s business circles in particular. The EU, in Turkey, also always meant contemporary civilisation, democracy, rule of law, liberties, transparency and economic welfare for many.⁹ However, for the AKP, it was predominantly an instrument to present itself as being compatible with the values of the pro-European and pro-Western elite. It was a hypocrisy that would reveal itself when the AKP attacked basic European liberal values, such as rule of law, separation of powers, freedom of the press, expression and association, sooner rather than later.

As for the USA, the new party leaders had already had close contacts with and support from the US since the 1990s. For example, in 1996, newspapers revealed that the mayor of Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality, Erdoğan, was seen as the future leader by the US Under-Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. Furthermore, when Erdoğan became prime minister, he would declare in many public meetings that he was one of the co-presidents of ‘the Greater Middle East Project’.¹⁰ The project envisioned a new pro-American Middle East (with adjacent regions from Morocco to Afghanistan), new regimes with new borders and boundaries in terms of ethnic and religious divisions. However, it was dangerous as it also might result in the separation of Turkey’s Kurdistan and its union with adjacent Kurdish regions being separated from its two neighbours, Iraq and Syria. In Iraq, the project had been put into practice after 1991, and there had been an already semi-independent Kurdish regional authority, which was widely called a ‘puppet state’, as a result of the first American war on Iraq.

The international economy of the period was also suitable for the AKP government. Coming to power, it benefited from global credit expansion and financial capital flows into domestic markets.¹¹ The economy began to revive. Business circles had great hopes and expectations from Erdogan’s party government and the ‘political stability’ it promised. For domestic politics, as briefly presented above, its rivals had been removed from the scene with the exception of the CHP.

Erbakan’s Fate ReappearsReference Özdil ¹²

However, despite all those favourable conditions and opportunities for the AKP to benefit, then and later, the chief prosecutor of the Republic had initiated a procedure to close the AKP – claiming that it had acted against the law governing political parties – just ten days before the national elections of 3 November 2002 and AKP’s electoral victory. He submitted his detailed report to the Constitutional Court in January 2003 and called for a ban of the AKP and for preventing Erdogan from using his presidential authority in the party. Another chief prosecutor would open a similar file in 2008. It was clear that the AKP had to follow a survival strategy from its first days onwards.

Another problem came to the forefront when the government adopted the pro-EU policy of previous governments and the EU accession process restarted in 2005. The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) released its decision on a case concerning the ban of religious headscarves in Turkish universities. The ECHR stated that the ban did not contradict human rights. Prime Minister Erdoğan condemned the court’s decision and stated that only religious leaders and circles (ulema) could take such a decision. This reaction of the government would be the summary of all events that occurred next. The first response by the government was the arrest of Professor Yücel Aşkın, known as a secular rector. In retaliation, nearly all university rectors and the head of YÖK, Professor Erdoğan Teziç, declared their support to Aşkın. As a response, the Turkish ECHR judge who rejected the case was replaced by a new one by the government. The pro-European and pro-American, monopoly capitalists’ Association of Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen (Türk Sanayicileri ve İş İnsanları Derneği, TÜSİAD) also declared support to the rectors. In the following days, the Council of State (Danıştay) decided that wearing a religious headscarf was illegal for public servants. Erdoğan immediately reacted in the same way by saying that such a decision could be taken only by the state’s religious authority, that is, DİB. The AKP saw the judiciary and the army as a secular block against itself. Tensions between the secular state and the government escalated as the public was increasingly divided into secular and religious camps.¹³

Turning point: The Raid on the Council of State and the Invention of the ‘Ergenekon Terrorist Organization’

In such a tense political environment, on 17 May 2006, an armed Islamist named Alparslan Aslan attacked a meeting of the Council of State and shot dead a judge. Murderer Aslan stated that he punished the Danıştay regarding its decision on banning the religious headscarf. Before the attack, the judges of the court had been named as targets by an extreme Islamist newspaper, Vakit, on its front page. At the funeral, the attendants shouted slogans and condemned the AKP government as ‘murderers’. Some of the day’s newspapers claimed that behind the attack on the court was a terrorist organization called ‘Ergenekon’ This so-called Ergenekon organization¹⁴ would be the pretext for the liquidation of nearly all opposition against the AKP government over the next period. The high echelons of the army, many journalists, writers, intellectuals, police officers, businesspeople, and members of some civil organisations were arrested, detained and, ultimately, imprisoned.¹⁵

A new problem in the history of the AKP government and recent Turkish politics emerged in the context of the 2007 presidential election. President of the Republic Ahmet Necdet Sezer’s seat was expected to be replaced by Prime Minister Erdoğan, or else by his Foreign Minister, Abdullah Gül. Before leaving the position, Sezer addressed the War Academy, stating that the secular republic and the army were under the threat of ‘moderate Islam’. One day before, the chief of staff General Yaşar Büyükanıt said that they (the army) hoped that a ‘real’ republican person would be elected as President of the Republic. The secular republic was under attack by religious circles and its own government. People were ready for nationwide protests.

The nationwide public protests against the AKP government, which were called ‘Republican Meetings’, were first organised in Tandoğan Square in Ankara, on 14 April 2007 and reported in the national and global media. The meeting clearly was not only directed against the government, but also against a possible election of Erdoğan as President. As a consequence of these public protests, Erdoğan could not nominate himself for the position.¹⁶ Instead, Abdullah Gül was nominated and, in the Parliament’s general meeting, Gül was elected President of the Republic. However, the opposition CHP applied to the Constitutional Court claiming that the election had not followed proper procedure. That night, the chief of staff circulated an e-Warning, declaring that the army was ‘the determined defender of secularism’. The government immediately took the opportunity to display itself as a ‘victim’ by issuing a counter-declaration. Meanwhile, the public protests continued. On 29 April, İstanbul organized a Republican Meeting in the Çağlayan neighbourhood. People shouted ‘The Paths to Çankaya¹⁷ are closed to Sharia; neither sharia nor military coup!’

The Constitutional Court rejected the election of Abdullah Gül. The AKP then decided to have the President elected by popular vote for a 5 year-period. Another Republican Meeting was organized in İzmir, in Gündoğdu Square. According to Özdil, the Ankara meeting was the largest in Ankara’s history and the İstanbul and İzmir meetings were attended by 2 million people¹⁸ (Ref. 12, pp. 106–111).

In the 22 July 2007 national elections, the AKP won the majority once again, raising its vote share to 47%.¹⁹ In addition, the new assembly elected Abdullah Gül as Turkey’s 11th President. The AKP’s new electoral victory and Gül’s election to the highest state office sparked a debate on the ‘conservativisation’ of Turkey and religious pressure on secular citizens.²⁰

In 2008, the debate on the religious headscarf resumed. Erdoğan clearly stated that the headscarf could be used as a symbol for political purposes. In Turkey, however, religion and its symbols could not be used as political instruments. Erdoğan, as Prime Minister, clearly rejected this secular principle. The chief prosecutor of the republic started scrutinizing the AKP. In response, another 33 people, including retired Brigadier-General Veli Küçük, were arrested by special prosecutor Zekeriya Öz²¹ within the context of the so-called ‘Ergenekon Terrorist Organisation’. Afterwards, the government drafted a law to allow the religious headscarf in universities. In total, 120 rectors of 198 universities met and declared their objection to the draft. However, the law was passed by 411 out of 550 votes, with the support of the MHP. However, the ban of religious headscarves was a Constitutional Court decision since 1997. For this reason, despite the law adopted by the national assembly, many universities refused to allow the headscarf. The new head of the Council of Higher Education decreed the approval of the headscarf.

A series of mutual reactions followed. As stated above, the chief prosecutor of the Republic filed proceedings before the Constitutional Court, calling for a political ban of 71 politicians, including then Prime Minister Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, based on the claim that the AKP used democracy as an instrument to introduce sharia law while hiding its real purpose. The prosecutor likened the AKP to Mussolini’s fascist party and Hitler’s Nazi party. Erdoğan attacked the judiciary, and pro-government media labelled the prosecutor as ‘being without religion’. It was not surprising that the following week witnessed a new wave of arrests within the context of the Ergenekon cases.²² It seemed, as a reaction to the chief prosecutor’s move, two retired generals, a businessperson and a journalist were detained.²³

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court declared that the AKP was the focal point of anti-secular acts. However, the party was not closed, thanks to one dissenting opinion by Haşim Kılıç, the pro-government president of the court.

Fethullah Gülen’s Movement

While the public debated the Deniz Feneri affair, a fresh wave of arrests in the Ergenekon case began to involve the highest positions in the army and showed one of the last signs of the Fethullah Gülen’s power in Turkish politics.²⁴ The chief of staff of the Turkish Army, General İlker Başbuğ, delivered a speech in the War Academy, declaring that some religious communities (cemaats) saw the army as the main obstacle preventing them from attaining their goals and thus they attacked it. What he meant by religious communities was nothing but Fethullah Gülen’s movement. Even in those days, the public knew well that the Ergenekon case and the related police operations were planned, coordinated and carried out by members of this religious community with the AKP’s involvement. Gülseren Yaşer, president of the Foundation of Contemporary Education, whose arrest had also been called for, stated that this decision was caused by the foundation’s nine-year struggle against Fethullah Gülen’s movement (Ref. 12, p. 178).

The movement of Fethullah Gülen was the dominant circle within the Nurcu Islamist groups, which originated from the teachings of Said-i Nursi who created a divergent religious tradition within the centuries-old Nakshi tarikat (the most influential religious line within Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey). Fethullah Gülen’s group, which called itself ‘Hizmet Hareketi’ (Service Movement), was one of the most influential religious networks in Turkey after the 1990s. This network included thousands of pre-university education organisations, several universities, and private companies within and outside of Turkey, a powerful media group composed of several televisions and radio stations, and many newspapers and journals. The group was highly opportunist and pragmatist and did not support a single party continuously. It supported Erbakan’s movement, Demirel’s AP before the 1980 military coup, Özal’s government during and after the 1983 elections, and again Erbakan’s RP from the late 1980s to the 1990s. After 28 February and the fall of Erbakan’s RP and the FP, it supported and allied with the AKP. Fethullah Gülen’s group equipped the AKP government with its cadres and bureaucratic staff and provided it with international connections. In return for its ‘services’, it gained a better base for its further development and extension. However, as we will show, after 2012, Gülen’s group began to criticise and conflict with the AKP for a variety of reasons, and by the end of 2013, it would fight openly against it.²⁵

The Taraf newspaper, which was one of the pillars of pro-government media, circulated the headline ‘A Plan to Destroy the AKP and the Movement’. It claimed that the plan was prepared by Colonel Dursun Çiçek under the direction of the Chief of Staff’s Department of Action.²⁶ The Chief of Staff, General İlker Başbuğ, stated in a press conference that the document leaked by the newspaper was ‘just a piece of paper’ despite having been declared as authentic by Taraf, and, more importantly, Başbuğ argued that the army faced an asymmetrical war arranged by the media. Erdoğan, upon this development, stated that ‘the police ensured the security of the regime’. On the same day, Parliament issued a law that allowed the trial of military personnel in civil courts.

Many times, the proceedings of the judiciary were hampered by interruptions and interventions by the government. The judge of the Ergenekon case resigned, stating that he faced media and institutional pressure. The judge had released a general who had been arrested in the case and subsequently been attacked by the pro-government media (Ref. 12, p. 184).

In the Ergenekon case, so many military officers were arrested that there were not enough cells in Hasdal Prison for them and new places in Hadimkoy and Maltepe prisons were arranged (Ref. 12, p. 272).

The courts that heard the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases were Specially Authorized Courts, which in the context of the EU accession process replaced State Security Courts. The latter had been established during the 1970s to prosecute socialists, in particular, and became one of the main legal instruments, after the 12 September 1980 coup, especially against the radical left and Kurdish militancy in addition to extreme-right militants. In fact, only the name of the State Security Courts had changed in 2004. The Specially Authorized Courts would be closed in 2012, but meanwhile dealt with the Ergenekon, Balyoz and interrelated cases.Reference Özdil and Özdil²⁷

The Ergenekon case featured countless interesting aspects. The most remarkable was the fact that its file comprised 120 million pages, with appendices, including evidence, proof, suspects, dates and witness statements of many unrelated and unconnected cases. For this case, as well as for the Balyoz and other similar cases, Turkey introduced famous ‘secret witnesses’, some of whom, in these cases, were criminals and terrorists. ‘Digital’ documents, which were controversial and never accepted by the defence, were processed and taken into account by the courts in arriving at their convictions. Moreover, the principle of right of defence was frequently ignored.Reference Yalçın²⁸

The ‘Arab Spring’ and Syrian Policy

Erdoğan and his foreign policy staff must have seen in Obama’s election as US President an opportunity to move more freely than before in the Middle East. Obama had already signalled that he would try to improve the negative image of the US in the eyes of Muslims and decrease US engagements in the region. It is indeed in such an atmosphere that the AKP began to change its Middle East politics. Erdoğan harshly criticised Israel in the presence of its president Simon Peres in a panel at Davos on 30 January 2009. He labelled Israel the murderer of the Palestinian people. Consequently, his prestige and fame in the Arab world dramatically increased. His popularity in the region skyrocketed when Turkey, through the mediation of the Human Relief Foundation (HRF), sent a relief ship to Gaza despite Israel’s coastal blockade. It would increase even more when Israeli soldiers stopped and attacked the ship. Later, Erdoğan, in retaliation, even threatened Israel with war. In Turkey, protests were organised to condemn Israel. Meanwhile, as Israel was criticised and attacked, Fethullah Gülen suggested that the United Nations (Ref. 12, p. 215) should find those responsible. Gülen first covertly criticized the AKP’s policies in the context of Turkish–Israeli relations.

The second direct involvement of the AKP in the region occurred during the Arab revolts. Building on the sentiment created against Israel, Erdoğan visited Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. Meanwhile, Turkey had just begun a confrontation with Syria, despite warm relations previously established between the two countries. Erdogan’s family had welcomed Bashar Hafez al-Assad of Syria and his family and together they had gone on holiday in Turkey in 2008. Afterwards, Turkey and Syria signed many agreements, organised common cabinet meetings and mutually removed visa requirements.

In August 2012, the AKP government changed its Syrian policy and became directly involved in Middle East conflicts by taking sides against Assad in the Syrian civil war. In November 2012, newly elected US President Obama made his first international trip to Turkey before going on to Egypt. He sent a positive and friendly message to the Muslim world²⁹ (Ref. 12, pp. 177–178). Warm relations with Syria gave way to a direct confrontation within a short period. Yılmaz Özdil noted that the change of policy and political attitude of the AKP government towards Assad and his regime started with a telephone call between Obama and Erdoğan. Afterwards, Erdoğan declared that the Syrian crisis was a part of Turkish domestic politics. The change was a reversal of foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s so-called zero problem with neighbours’ policyReference Bulut³⁰ (Ref. 12, p. 262). The reason behind this shift, Özdil said, was the Obama administration’s strategy by which Turkey would be put forward against Syria’s regime in the US’s place. Journalist David Ignatius stated in his Washington Post column that Obama used Erdoğan, who had a good reputation in the eyes of Islamist parties in the region, to influence the ‘Arab Spring’. This was why Obama visited Turkey first and contacted Erdoğan 13 times within one year. Erdoğan promised Obama that he would persuade Assad to reform his political regime within a short period. However, as his efforts proved futile, Erdoğan became frustrated against Assad and the relations between two countries became tense (Ref. 12, pp. 266–267).

Erdoğan and his foreign minister Davutoğlu argued that the UN was impotent in the face of the Syrian conflict and called for the Security Council to decide a military intervention in Syria. However, the council rejected such an intervention with the vetoes of Russia and China. The AKP’s Syrian policy was collapsing and Turkey was marginalised in its policies. Considering the multilateral aspect of the conflict, which would also become the main agenda of global politics when chemical weapons were used in 2013, the US, Britain and France also began to give up their offensive policies towards Syria and preferred negotiations with it on the destruction of chemical weapons. Thus, the Turkish government was left alone in its stance on Syria.

The ‘Kurdish Drive’

In such a critical confrontation with the army, The AKP government launched its ‘Kurdish Drive’ in the Police Academy. Vice-Prime Minister Bülent Arınç clarified the semantics in the next days by stating that it was not a Kurdish but a democratic drive. The public did not, in fact, know anything about the Kurdish policy of the AKP government. However, the government and the pro-government media polarised the public into two camps: whoever had objections or doubts about the policy were labelled as ‘fascist’ and ‘racist’ (Ref. 12, p. 185).

When the Syrian crisis erupted, Turkey also learned from the internet that the National Intelligence Organisation (Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı, MİT) had secretly negotiated with the PKK in Oslo and established contacts with Öcalan who was imprisoned in İmrali and Kandil, the PKK stronghold in Northern Iraq (Ref. 12, p. 267). Back in 2003, Turkey had issued a law in the context of its EU relations that allowed PKK militants to come back to the country. Journalist Mehmet Ali Birand wrote that the government negotiated with Norway for the transfer of PKK leaders from Kandil to Norway and that ‘innocent PKK members’ could return to Turkey (Ref. 12, p. 26). However, when news of the Oslo negotiations was released, the government began to arrest many of the members or adherents of the Kurdistan Communities Union (Koma Civakên Kurdistan, KCK), which was the legal arm of the PKK (Ref. 12, p. 268).

The AKP’s Kurdish policy was full of contradictions and indecision. Erdoğan would state that during the CHP’s single-party period in 1938, Turkey massacred Kurds in the Dersim region (now Tunceli), and labelled İsmet İnönü’s period (implying the 1930s and 1940s) as ‘fascist’. However, sometime later, on 28 December 2011, Turkish jets bombed and killed 34 Kurdish peasants crossing the Turkey–Syria border through Uludere for illegal cross-border trade.

The political strategies of the AKP government and the Kurdish movement overlapped in certain cases. Both wished and struggled for the liquidation of the Kemalist national system and the military tutelage over the Islamic and Kurdish movements, respectively. However, this ‘overlap’ disappeared when the AKP frequently adopted its ‘nationalist’ discourse, especially before elections, to earn the votes of the nationalists, Islamic nationalists and the extreme right. It was a tug-of-war played between the official principles and institutions of the regime and the Islamist agenda and discourse of the AKP government. The AKP’s verbal attacks on the Kemalist regime and its symbols did not only show the symbolic war and victory of the AKP over the secular Kemalist republic, but also an ideological, psychological recognition of the Kurdish question.

The release of information on the Oslo negotiations produced a reaction from ‘nationalist’ circles within the state and society. Prosecutor Sadrettin Sarıkaya, who was in charge of the KCK case, summoned Hakan Fidan, undersecretary of MİT, for interrogation. The police had found an agreement signed between the MİT and representatives of the PKK in Oslo. Fidan was accused of ‘signing a treaty against the state and the Constitution’. On the same day, the prosecutor was dismissed from his post and a new law was issued to protect Hakan Fidan, members of the MİT, as well as the special representatives of the prime minister. Intervening in the judiciary and legal arrangements for personal cases became the normal way of ruling under the AKP government.

While the prosecutor had summoned Hakan Fidan for interrogation, some hidden eavesdropping devices were found in Erdoğan’s office. They were not found by the police but only by MİT in a second search. This event was the first overt sign of a conflict between MİT and the police, and between Erdoğan and Fethullah Gülen’s movement, which was considered influential in the police units and judiciary and was not yet able to control MİT.

The Syrian crisis created a new situation for the Kurdish movement. Barzani forces in Northern Iraq and PKK guerrillas intervened in the Syrian Kurdish region of Rojava. The Syrian and Kurdish policies of the AKP government became more complicated as the entire Southern border of Turkey was destabilised. Within Turkey, the PKK adopted a new tactic by which it tried to control certain regions rather than attacking and retreating as before. Kurdish separatism was considered to have regained the power it had held in the 1990s. In addition to Barzani and PKK, Turkey also faced another problem due to its Syrian policy. The Free Syrian Army was located in Hatay province across the border with Syria, and armed Islamist fighters from Afghanistan and Libya crossed the border to fight against Assad’s regime under the coordination of the CIA. Hatay, Gaziantep, Urfa and Kilis were full of Syrians. Pro-government media, on the other side, began to use sectarian language by calling, for example, Assad the ‘Syrian Nusayri dictator’. Turkey had simultaneously entered a regional conflict, exploited a religious discourse, liquidated the higher echelons of its army and tried to solve the Kurdish question. Hence, it had to attack ‘nationalism’ too. Regarding the Kurdish Question, foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu would say, ‘it is the time to settle our account with nationalism’ (Ref. 12, pp. 300–307). Clearly, the alternative of ‘nationalism’ was the sort of neo-Ottomanism that Davutoğlu advocated in his academic and ministerial career.

Barzani was invited to the AKP congress and delivered a speech. In 2013, together with famous Kurdish musician Sivan Perwer, he was also invited to Diyarbekir to underline the government’s determination to solve the Kurdish problem. However, it was all just a show, as there had not been any concrete progress toward a solution. For this reason, the Kurdish side did not show any interest in the meeting. Nevertheless, it also did not sabotage it.

The ‘Kurdish Drive’ began to cost the AKP government some voter support. The government immediately turned to a nationalist discourse. The Kurdish Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP) was shut down by the Constitutional Court, but would be immediately replaced by a new party, the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP), just as Turkey had witnessed many times before. In addition, as mentioned above, many members of the KCK were arrested. The AKP government simultaneously waged war on many fronts. Based on a purported plot, which was allegedly designed within the army to assassinate Arınç, the most secret offices of the army were searched on the orders of a judge. It was a part of the psychological war against the army. Nothing would be found out about this so-called assassination plan, although the pro-government media provoked and exploited the event.

The Symbolic Discourse of the AKP and Erdoğan

The ideological symbolism of the AKP government was abundant. For example, the party organised alternative events in order not to attend public celebrations of the official holidays of the Republic. Erdoğan, Abdullah Gül and his ministers did not attend most of the 23 April (the day Turkish National Assembly was opened in 1920), 19 May (the day Mustafa Kemal arrived in Samsun and started the Liberation War in 1919), and 10 November (the day Atatürk died in 1938) ceremonies. The AKP banned official celebrations organised by the state in streets and stadiums and even abolished the Student Pledge recited by pre-university students every Monday morning since the 1930s. The Ministry of Interior Affairs banned the placing of wreaths on Atatürk’s monuments. On 29 October 2012, the last republican protests were to be organised by Kemalist organisations before the original Parliament building in the Ulus neighbourhood of Ankara. Ankara’s governor refused to allow the demonstration, and the police attacked protestors with tear gas and water cannons. People all over the country streamed toward Anıtkabir (Atatürk’s mausoleum) and the original Parliament building in Ankara. The police did not allow it. It was the symbolic weakening of the Kemalist republic. For the first time in Turkish history, a prime minister did not attend the 10 November ceremony in Anıtkabir. Erdoğan was in Brunei. However, protests, which were clearly republican, secular and modern, spread even into tennis courts.

Within this conflict, Erdoğan, as he had done many times before, again applied a religious discourse and stated that the AKP government wanted to create ‘a religious youth’ and went further by saying that this youth would be the ‘guards of its religion and revenge’. In the coming period, the government introduced its 4 + 4 + 4 education system, thanks to which the intermediary level of the Imam Hatip Lices, which had been closed after 28 February 1997, could be reopened. Moreover, courses on Qur’an and the Prophet Mohammed were included in the curriculum in the form of elective courses. Erdoğan stated that thanks to his government people gained a right to study religion. The Ministry of National Education changed its regulations and removed the requirement to follow the principle of secularism in the preparation of textbooks. Erdoğan continued his ‘religious’ attacks towards the CHP. Distorting news published in 1936 by the Republic newspaper, he claimed that the CHP’s government had converted a mosque to a barn (Ref. 12, pp. 289–290). In another speech, he declared that he was opposed to abortion and Caesarean sections, adding that Caesarean sections were murder, and that ‘every abortion was Uludere’ (Ref. 12, pp. 294–295). He implied that he had no responsibility for the bombardment of the peasants in Uludere, but that instead the army itself carried out the military attack.

Anti-republican discourse and policies were portrayed by the government as ‘anti-militarism’ against the ‘militarism’ of the 1930s’ Kemalist regime. However, the last symbolism of the AKP and Erdoğan would be the construction of a mosque over the ruins of Topçu Kışlası in today’s Taksim Gezi Park, where a religious reactionary insurrection had been organized in 1909 against the 1908 Young Turk Revolution.

Protests against the AKP and Erdoğan began to appear everywhere. The students of Middle East Technical University (Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi ODTÜ) in Ankara protested against him. He came to the university escorted by hundreds of police. The police attacked the students with truncheons and used tear gas. Erdoğan condemned the university’s administration and academic staff for educating the students in that way. Later, ODTÜ would become a prime target for the government and its adherents in different cases.³¹

The government faced criticism from the judiciary many times. The President of the Court of Cassation (Yargıtay) clearly stated that the judiciary in Turkey was pro-government and suggested that instead it should be neutral.

In the 2012 national elections, the AKP received over 49% of the votes. It was an enormous success given that, mainly because of the Kurdish Drive, public surveys had suggested that its support had decreased to 32%, whereas the opposition parties CHP and MHP had risen to 28% and 18% respectively.

One of the important events of the post-election period was match-fixing (şike) operations in football. Aziz Yıldırım, president of one of the largest football clubs of Turkey, Fenerbahçe, and many football players were arrested by prosecutors for allegedly fixing matches. The operation also began to include other large clubs such as Beşiktaş and Trabzonspor. In the public’s view, this crackdown by the government represented an intervention in football for its own interests, to gain the control of yet another sphere of society after the judiciary, the media and others.