The Coup Attempt in Turkey and the Kurds
News from Turkey came at a dizzying pace last night. Factions within the Turkish military – especially the air force, military police and armored brigades, according to reports – tried to stage a coup. Unsure of whom they could trust within their own military, they must have hoped that other officers and units would bandwagon onto their putsch once they secured key media outlets, government offices and transportation facilities in Istanbul and Ankara.
They failed to quickly neutralize President Erdogan or his Prime Minister, however, both of whom ironically took to the very social media they despise in order to call their supporters into the streets. As civilian crowds confronted pro-coup troops in Istanbul and Ankara, the winds clearly began blowing against the coup. The rest of the country’s military quickly lined up behind the government. Thanks to social media and various strategies Mr. Erdogan used to coup-proof the government, last night thus proved to be no repeat of 1960. Then, a polarizing Prime Minister (Adnan Menderes) who was very popular with roughly the same half of the electorate in Turkey and presided over a declining economy, resorted to increasingly authoritarian stratagems to buttress his rule. He was ousted and executed (along with two of his ministers) by a military that saw itself as defenders of the state and its institutions.
By morning, a social media post by someone in Turkey summed up the perspective of many Kurds in the country: "Two hours ago I was scared there was a military coup. Now I'm afraid there isn't one. Both possibilities are pretty horrible." As much as many Kurds in Turkey now loathe Mr. Erdogan and his government, they cannot view the military as their saviors either. It was the Turkish military after the 1971 and 1980 coups that led the harshest crackdowns in Turkey’s history against Leftists and Kurds. Although rumors point to two broad camps in the military regarding policy towards the Kurds – a camp that favors a political solution to the war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and one that favors even harsher offensives against the Kurdish movement – it hardly seems likely that the more conciliatory officers would be the ones to lead an attempted putsch.
The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) thus came out against the coup attempt very quickly, while it was still ongoing. This is the same party that Mr. Erdogan’s government has been going after with a vengeance, stripping HDP deputies of their parliamentary immunity and hitting them with a host of illegitimate terrorism charges that could land them in jail to serve sentences of hundreds of years. Pro-HDP electoral districts in the southeast of Turkey remain under military assault, siege and curfew in many cases, so that probably helped the HDP conclude that neither Erdogan nor a coup are acceptable. The other opposition parties likewise immediately came out against the coup attempt, however, which may attest to the fact that despite all the democratic backtracking of the last few years, today’s Turkey remains a more mature (albeit limited) democracy than it once was.
If there is another beneficiary from the coup’s emergence and failure, it is probably the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq: Erbil long ago cast its lot with the current government in Ankara. While KRG leaders would much prefer Ankara to find a peaceful route to dealing with the PKK in Turkey, they need Erdogan and his government in order to pursue alternatives vis-à-vis Baghdad. It seems that for good or ill, they will have him for a while longer.
Many Erdogan critics suspect that the whole affair was a piece of grand theater by the master political puppeteer, who immediately blamed the Fethullah Gulen movement for the coup attempt. According to this logic, he would use the coup attempt to justify additional assaults upon his critics, further consolidate power, set more curbs on democratic liberties and launch a final push to change Turkey into the executive presidential system for which he yearns. This was no “false flag coup attempt,” however. Such conspiracies need to be kept small and simple in order to succeed. The more people know about the conspiracy, the more likely the real story will get out. The more moving parts involved in any such stratagem, the more likely it is to spiral out of control. There existed a real chance last night that other military officers not privy to the coup plans would have sided with the plotters, or that attempts to neutralize the President and Prime Minister would have succeeded. As it were, there were many deaths as violence raged between military units, police and national intelligence force loyal to the government. Civilians challenging the pro-coup troops were fired upon.
But Mr. Erdogan will undoubtedly use the coup attempt to his utmost political advantage. For supporters of liberal democracy, both a coup and a failed coup attempt thus constitute yet another disaster for Turkey. No one should mistake the failed coup attempt for evidence that Turkey is a stable, functioning democracy in which pro-democracy forces fought back anti-democratic forces. Rather, two authoritarian-minded groups of elites contested political power in the country.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
They failed to quickly neutralize President Erdogan or his Prime Minister, however, both of whom ironically took to the very social media they despise in order to call their supporters into the streets. As civilian crowds confronted pro-coup troops in Istanbul and Ankara, the winds clearly began blowing against the coup. The rest of the country’s military quickly lined up behind the government. Thanks to social media and various strategies Mr. Erdogan used to coup-proof the government, last night thus proved to be no repeat of 1960. Then, a polarizing Prime Minister (Adnan Menderes) who was very popular with roughly the same half of the electorate in Turkey and presided over a declining economy, resorted to increasingly authoritarian stratagems to buttress his rule. He was ousted and executed (along with two of his ministers) by a military that saw itself as defenders of the state and its institutions.
By morning, a social media post by someone in Turkey summed up the perspective of many Kurds in the country: "Two hours ago I was scared there was a military coup. Now I'm afraid there isn't one. Both possibilities are pretty horrible." As much as many Kurds in Turkey now loathe Mr. Erdogan and his government, they cannot view the military as their saviors either. It was the Turkish military after the 1971 and 1980 coups that led the harshest crackdowns in Turkey’s history against Leftists and Kurds. Although rumors point to two broad camps in the military regarding policy towards the Kurds – a camp that favors a political solution to the war with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and one that favors even harsher offensives against the Kurdish movement – it hardly seems likely that the more conciliatory officers would be the ones to lead an attempted putsch.
The pro-Kurdish People’s Democracy Party (HDP) thus came out against the coup attempt very quickly, while it was still ongoing. This is the same party that Mr. Erdogan’s government has been going after with a vengeance, stripping HDP deputies of their parliamentary immunity and hitting them with a host of illegitimate terrorism charges that could land them in jail to serve sentences of hundreds of years. Pro-HDP electoral districts in the southeast of Turkey remain under military assault, siege and curfew in many cases, so that probably helped the HDP conclude that neither Erdogan nor a coup are acceptable. The other opposition parties likewise immediately came out against the coup attempt, however, which may attest to the fact that despite all the democratic backtracking of the last few years, today’s Turkey remains a more mature (albeit limited) democracy than it once was.
If there is another beneficiary from the coup’s emergence and failure, it is probably the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) of Iraq: Erbil long ago cast its lot with the current government in Ankara. While KRG leaders would much prefer Ankara to find a peaceful route to dealing with the PKK in Turkey, they need Erdogan and his government in order to pursue alternatives vis-à-vis Baghdad. It seems that for good or ill, they will have him for a while longer.
Many Erdogan critics suspect that the whole affair was a piece of grand theater by the master political puppeteer, who immediately blamed the Fethullah Gulen movement for the coup attempt. According to this logic, he would use the coup attempt to justify additional assaults upon his critics, further consolidate power, set more curbs on democratic liberties and launch a final push to change Turkey into the executive presidential system for which he yearns. This was no “false flag coup attempt,” however. Such conspiracies need to be kept small and simple in order to succeed. The more people know about the conspiracy, the more likely the real story will get out. The more moving parts involved in any such stratagem, the more likely it is to spiral out of control. There existed a real chance last night that other military officers not privy to the coup plans would have sided with the plotters, or that attempts to neutralize the President and Prime Minister would have succeeded. As it were, there were many deaths as violence raged between military units, police and national intelligence force loyal to the government. Civilians challenging the pro-coup troops were fired upon.
But Mr. Erdogan will undoubtedly use the coup attempt to his utmost political advantage. For supporters of liberal democracy, both a coup and a failed coup attempt thus constitute yet another disaster for Turkey. No one should mistake the failed coup attempt for evidence that Turkey is a stable, functioning democracy in which pro-democracy forces fought back anti-democratic forces. Rather, two authoritarian-minded groups of elites contested political power in the country.
David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He holds the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and is the author of numerous publications on the Kurds and the Middle East.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.