On one hand, Turkey is trying to come to terms with the historical ghosts and political taboos which have kept it from making the sort of progress its people deserve. On the other, there is a pitched battle between an old and new guard. Those who regard themselves as the custodians of the national will understand that all this talk of democracy will undermine the authority which they believe they deserve. The fight is taking place in the courts, in the pages of the press as well as on the floor of the National Assembly.There are two historically engrained habits which Turkey is trying to give up. The first is the lack of tolerance for any expression of Kurdishness in public life. The second is the tutelage which the military and its bureaucratic proxies have exercised over civilian politics. The two are, of course, related. Turkey’s Kurdish problem and the threat it poses to public order have justified for long decades limitations on individual freedoms.
The government spin doctors have renamed what was first called a Kurdish initiative a “democratic initiative” in an attempt to make it more acceptable to a public weaned on a fear that any acknowledgement of Kurdish otherness would cause the republic to implode. This re-branding is to suggest that they are not conceding a fundamental change to a system of public administration in which the southeast of Turkey will be governed along ethnic lines. Rather they are simply allowing citizens who happen to be Kurdish to exercise that identity without a fuss. Of course, there are many who are less than sanguine that this can be a solution. They argue there is little difference between Kurdishness and Kurdish nationalism or between Kurdish nationalism and approval of the violent tactics of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Any reforms will open the door wider and wider to ever greater demands for political autonomy. Lurking beneath the legitimate demands for the normalization of Kurdishness, they spy a struggle for Kurdish independence.
The same sort of arguments apply to the process going on to pen in the power of the Turkish military. There is a constant series of revelations of how officers (and they become more senior every day) conspired (and with great viciousness) to bring down the government and keep the country in a state of constant unrest. The theater in which this drama is played is the Ergenekon trials of the suspected conspirators. Is the trial in the interest of democracy? The answer is almost certainly yes, but it is also in the interests of the government, which will become stronger as the military retreats. So does that make the trial wrong? The answer is probably not, and yet it understandable that all these revelations make some people whose heart is in the right place genuinely nervous. They are concerned that all opposition to the government is about to crumble.
The real problem, therefore, is the opposition. The main political parties have ended up defending the indefensible. (One opposition MP even spoke up in favor of the bloodshed used to suppress the Dersim Rebellion in 1937-38, and even his party leader, Deniz Baykal, told him to bite his tongue.) They offer no convincing alternative than to make Turkey less open and democratic. The opposition press has tied itself up into similar knots.
I referred in an earlier column to the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the widespread sense throughout Europe that an old regime had imploded. Since then we have seen the “color revolutions” -- civil society uprising in Georgia or Ukraine issuing a demarche to their rulers that enough was enough. Of course, simply getting rid of one set of rulers does not mean that everything suddenly is all right. The people of Eastern and Central Europe have a much more complex view of the world than they did 20 years ago and some have even flirted with a restoration of the old guard. In Russia, for example, it is not clear that the current plutocracy is better than the one they succeeded. If societies have learned one thing since Berlin ‘89, it is that things do not change overnight. But the more important lesson is that societies have to change and that any political class that tries to remain fixed in time is destined to collapse.
