By the same token, is it true that Turkish generals are always plotting their last coup, reliving their past experiences of unseating the government in the hopes of being able to do it again, trying to change the world when it is they who should be adopting to changed circumstances, instead?This year on May 27 we will mark 50 years since the army first emerged from its barracks, seized the radio station, arrested the Cabinet and installed a provisional government in its place. And while much has happened since, it is not entirely fanciful to conceive of the 1960-1961 interregnum as a trauma which has lodged undiagnosed, let alone untreated, in the national psyche. At the very least, it’s a poor precedent that the first democratically elected prime minister should have ended his career at the end of a rope. And yet the paradox is that the immediate legacy of the coup was Turkey’s most liberal constitution, one that embodied a suspicion of unchecked government authority, emboldened civil society and which was ultimately shredded by a subsequent generation of officers as unfit for purpose.
There are still those who think of 1960 as the “good coup” -- not that anyone believes that Adnan Menderes deserved execution, but that he had crossed a political line of no return. The government was censoring the press, was on the brink of shutting down the opposition and responding to economic mayhem and its inability to govern by becoming ever more autocratic. It is the sort of criticism leveled by the Iranian and Venezuelan opposition against their own populist presidents.
“In order to understand each coup, you have to understand the one that came before it,” is the advice given to me by a friend who can claim some expertise on the subject: Fatin Rüştü Zorlu, the foreign minister hanged alongside Prime Minister Menderes, had been an honorary “uncle” -- a frequent visitor to the family house. And with this sort of hindsight, 1960 was not an attempt to restore democracy but to institutionalize the arrogance of a cadre who thought they knew best. Also from this perspective it is a logical development that the 1961 Constitution turned into the 1982 Constitution, which protected the state from the freedom of the individual.
And so the battle lines were drawn: I have in my scrapbook of political ephemera an election propaganda a postcard from 2007 which shows the current prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, shadowed by the two political figures whose mantle he clearly claims. One is Turgut Özal, the other Menderes, and all three are described in the caption as “iconic names of love for a nation which Atatürk made strong.”
Today’s Turkey has every right to think of itself as being polarized. It can, of course, trace the roots of those divisions to times before the 1960 coup. Yet the 1960 coup did much to create a sense of us and them and the sense that politics in Turkey was fought not just in the ballot box but in the police stations and in the courtroom. In retrospect, it may not have been a good coup, but it was a more innocent coup with reluctant generals trying to keep control of hot-headed colonels. With Menderes, Turkey gained its lone tragic political hero, a man brought down by his own failings and those of others.
Perhaps I romanticize the past, but the present struggle for power seems far more cynical. If 1960 was a crime of passion, the current generation of plotters seems like the blasé characters of Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rope” in which a bunch of young roués commit murder not from any motive but because they think they can. Or at least that seems to be the mindset of a dedicated department of dirty tricks buried inside the military high command. They were not so much concerned with rescuing a nation they believed to be in peril as creating the peril with bomb and provocation in order to be able to step in as rescuers.
