He was the person who anchored Turkey in the West with membership in NATO and the application to join the European Economic Community (EEC). He introduced the market economy as a development strategy and established popular sovereignty over the bureaucratic autocracy. But the military could not stand such a bottom-up and democratizing modernization process introduced by the Democrat Party (DP) of Menderes.
Then, by September of 1980, Gen. Kenan Evren staged another coup. His men did not hang the top political leaders, but they detained more than 600,000 people, most of whom were either tortured or mistreated. Of these people 250,000 faced a wide range of charges in courts, around 500 were sentenced to death, 14,000 had their citizenship revoked and millions were denied passports to travel abroad. In short, Evren is not a painter in Bodrum, but was a military dictator who turned the country into a prison camp. He has not been tried for his crimes. Instead he made himself the elected president, and is still respected as such.
It is not surprising because there are people who claim to be victims of the 1980 coup but still think that the military had the right to intervene. This is what Süleyman Demirel, the ninth president, believes. He maintains that Article 35 of the military's Internal Service Code gives the military the duty to guard and protect the state.
This is in fact the mindset of a “domesticated” politician. But at one time he was the leader of the Justice Party (AP) who was removed from the post of prime minister twice, once in 1971 and once in 1980. His submissive policies in the 1960s and 1970s did not save him. Despite huge electoral support, the AP under Demirel did nothing to remove the legacy of the coup that hanged its legendary leader, Menderes. Instead the Demirel's AP collaborated with the leaders and institutions of the coup.
His submissive attitude served only to consolidate the tutelage of the military authority over democratic processes and actors. Demirel regarded the military as a natural shareholder of political power and voluntarily shared the will of the people with the military. He made every concession to the military in order to avoid the same fate as Menderes. Whenever the military moved in he took his hat and left quietly. Challenging the pressures of the military was unknown to him.
While people voted for the center-right parties in order to get rid of bureaucratic autocracy, center-right political leaders shared political power with the military. Thus the center-right politics, while championing democracy and the national will, grew submissive to military tutelage. Many people view this attitude as a feature of the center-right political culture.
But Menderes, the founder of the center-right tradition in Turkey, ruled the country without considering the military as a power sharer. When his government decided to join NATO or when it sent troops to Korean War, these were the decisions of the government. When the Menderes government made a formal application to be part of the EEC or participated in the establishment of the Baghdad Pact, these were all political decisions taken by the government.
And he paid for all these decisions with his life, yes. But he created the basic parameters of Turkey's Western-oriented foreign policy, popular democracy and market economy.
Demirel, who claimed to be a successor to the DP, deviated from this self-respecting and autonomous stand and shared the people's power with an unelected and unaccountable military bureaucracy. What Demirel did was to corrupt the democratic credentials the center-right inherited from the DP.
But people have grown tired of this hypocrisy, looking for a leadership that would stand up against military interventions. This is why and how the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) has been able to appeal to voters from the center-right.
It was against this background that the military was shocked when the government defied the April 2007 e-memorandum.
Those who were accustomed to the Demirel-style center-right political maneuvering could not understand the AK Party. A mass political movement with center-right attributes, the AK Party was also expected to behave like the center-right political parties of Demirel. But instead of pursuing a submissive policy towards the bureaucratic power centers of the system, the AK Party, through European Union leverage, tried to enhance democratic rule and limit the bureaucratic/military power and, when necessary, challenged it.
In sum, the AK Party is reviving the roots of the center-right political tradition established by the DP, whose leaders were hanged by the military 48 years ago.
Benzer Haberler 
