Murad Sezer/Associated Press
Sabrina Tavernise and Sebnem Arsu write in the October 20, 2008 New York Times about a trial that is taking over the headlines in Turkey. Their report begins, “One of the most sensational public trials in Turkish history began Monday, as a court started hearing a case against 86 people — among them retired army generals, journalists and a former university rector — charged with assassinations, bomb attacks and trying to topple the government. …The focus of the case is a secret, ultranationalist group named Ergenekon, a word that refers to a legend about the genesis of the Turkish people.” [more]
Sophia Lee and I were discussing Turkey this afternoon, speculating about just how the secular-Islamist lines are drawn, that it’s not as simple a boundary as it might first appear. We chatted about a spectrum of views, ranging from militant, violent Islamists on the one end through uncompromising, hard-line secularists at the opposite extreme. Most Turkish Islamists are willing to work through the electoral system — indeed, it has worked for them — while wanting to soften those Kemalist laws (or their interpretation) that, for example, prohibit women from wearing headscarves in universities. Most secularists seek to preserve the democratic rights that Turks have slowly gained since the Republic began almost eighty-five years ago, and worry as much about military coups as jihadist bombings. We discussed the possibility that if Ataturk could engage in some time-traveling and come back to Turkey today, he might well wish that the legal opinions rendered by inflexible judges in the name of his revolution were more liberal-minded, more in tune with the times. It’s not 1928 or 1938 any longer. Yet here we are reminded, when reading this news story, that Turkey’s people have yet to reach a stable consensus on questions of national identity. (The place of Kurds, let alone that of Armenians and other Christians, has yet to be settled, as well, and a psychologist would be tempted to speak of a nation with an insecure, or at least incompletely defined, self-image.) In his controversial “Clash of Civilizations?” written in the 1993, Samuel P. Huntington spoke of Turkey as a “torn country:”
“Some other countries have a fair degree of cultural homogeneity but are divided over whether their society belongs to one civilization or another. These are torn countries… Their leaders typically wish to pursue a bandwagoning strategy and to make their countries members of the West, but the history, culture and traditions of their countries are non-Western. The most obvious and prototypical torn country is Turkey. The late twentieth-century leaders of Turkey have followed in the Atatürk tradition and defined Turkey as a modern, secular, Western nation state. They allied Turkey with the West in NATO and in the Gulf War; they applied for membership in the European Community [now the European Union -- EU]. At the same time, however, elements in Turkish society have supported an Islamic revival and have argued that Turkey is basically a Middle Eastern Muslim society. In addition, while the elite of Turkey has defined Turkey as a Western society, the elite of the West refuses to accept Turkey as such. Turkey will not become a member of the [EU], and the real reason, as [former] President Ozal said, `is that we are Muslim and they are Christian and they don’t say that.’ Having rejected Mecca, and then being rejected by Brussels, where does Turkey look? Tashkent [capital of Uzbekistan in former Soviet Central Asia] may be the answer. The end of the Soviet Union gives Turkey the opportunity to become the leader of a revived Turkic civilization involving seven countries from the borders of Greece to those of China. Encouraged by the West, Turkey is making strenuous efforts to carve out this new identity for itself.” [my inserts]
Turkey continues to be a fascinating country, and those Hoggers who will be traveling there this fall are lucky indeed — and we hope that you’ll share your impressions with all of us upon your return.
{ 1 } Comments
Thanks, Peter! Very interesting! The 1996 car crash mentioned at the end of the NYT article took place in a city named Susurluk and created what became known as the “Susurluk Scandal.” The nation was shocked. The event confirmed what many Turks had feared for some time: that inside the transparent, visible Turkish state was something Turks call the “deep state,” a shadowy and largely invisible world where official Turkish agencies (especially security forces) mingle with unsavory characters like ultra-nationalists and even criminal elements. Stephen Kinzer writes about all this in CRESCENT AND STAR (revised edition, 2008), pp. 96ff. and passim. The NYT doesn’t mention a third prominent passenger in that car: a Kurdish clan leader named Sedat Bucak, MP and also head of a private army he hired out to Turkish government forces to fight Kurdish nationalists. Nor does the article mention a fourth passenger: a former beauty queen who was the mistress of the gangster the article says died in the crash. It is interesting to speculate what those four may have been talking about during that final, fatal car ride.
Post a Comment