Waving Ataturk's flag

Mar 8th 2007 | ISTANBUL AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition

There has been a lethal upsurge in ultra-nationalist feeling in Turkey

SITTING in an office plastered with Ottoman pennants, portraits of Ataturk and the Turkish flag, Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer, says his mission in life is to protect the Turkish nation from “Western imperialism and global forces that want to dismember and destroy us”. In the past two years Mr Kerincsiz and his Turkish Jurists' Union have launched a slew of cases against Turkish intellectuals under article 301 of the penal code, which makes “insulting Turkishness” a criminal offence.

Mr Kerincsiz has confined his nationalism to the courts. But elsewhere new ultra-nationalist groups, some of them led by retired army officers, have been vowing over guns and copies of the Koran to make Turks “the masters of the world” and even “to die and kill” in the process. In January one of Mr Kerincsiz's targets, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper editor, Hrant Dink, was shot dead by a 17-year-old, Ogun Samast, because he had “insulted the Turks”. The murder, in broad daylight on one of Istanbul's busiest streets, was a chilling manifestation of a resurgence of xenophobic nationalism aimed at Turkey's non-Muslim minorities and the Kurds—plus their defenders in the liberal elite.

The upsurge threatens to undo the good of four years of reforms by the mildly Islamist government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Indeed, it is partly in response to these reforms—more freedom for the Kurds, a trimming of the army's powers, concessions on Cyprus—that nationalist passions have been roused. The knowledge that many members of the European Union do not want Turkey to join has inflamed them further (the EU partially suspended membership talks with Turkey in December because of its refusal to open its ports and airspace to Greek-Cypriots).

Another factor is America's refusal to move against separatist PKK guerrillas who are based in northern Iraq. If the United States Congress delivers its pledge to adopt a resolution calling the mass slaughter of the Ottoman Armenians in 1915 genocide, Turkey's relationship with its ally would suffer “lasting damage”, says the foreign minister, Abdullah Gul.

Murat Belge, a leftist intellectual who is being hounded by Mr Kerincsiz, sees disturbing similarities between the racist nationalism espoused by the “Young Turks” in the dying days of the Ottoman empire (who ordered the mass slaughter of its Armenian subjects), and the siege mentality gripping Turkey today. The perception, now as then, is that Western powers are pressing for changes to empower their local collaborators (ie, Kurds and non-Muslims), with the aim of breaking up the country. “This social Darwinist mindset that implies it's OK to kill your enemies in order to survive” has been perpetuated through an education system that tells young Turks that “they have no other friend than the Turks,” says Mr Belge. And it has been cynically exploited by politicians and generals alike.

Mr Erdogan and Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People's Party, have proved no exception. When more than 100,000 Turks gathered at Mr Dink's funeral chanting “We are all Armenians”, Mr Erdogan opined that they had gone “too far”. Both he and Mr Baykal have resisted calls to scrap article 301, though there have been hints that it will be amended.

The politicians are keen to court nationalist votes in the run-up to November's parliamentary election. Mr Erdogan also hopes that burnishing his nationalist credentials will help him to coax a blessing from Turkey's hawkish generals for his hopes of succeeding the fiercely secular Ahmet Necdet Sezer as president in May.

Yet a recent outburst by the chief of the general staff, Yasar Buyukanit, suggests otherwise. He declared that Turkey faced more threats to its national security than at any time in its modern history and added that only its “dynamic forces” [ie, the army] could prevent efforts to “partition the country”. These words, uttered during an official trip to America, were widely seen as a direct warning to Mr Erdogan to shelve his presidential ambitions.

Others do not rule out possible collusion between nationalist elements within the army and retired officers who are organising new ultra-nationalist groups (one is said to be training nationalist youths in Trabzon, where Dink's alleged murderers came from). “The real purpose is to sow chaos, to polarise society so they can regain ground [lost with the EU reforms],” argues Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist whose recent book about rogue security forces known as the “deep state” earned her a three-month jail sentence. It would not be surprising if their next target were a nationalist, she adds.

Meanwhile prominent writers and academics, including Mr Belge, continue to be bombarded with death threats. Some are under police protection. Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize-winning author whom Mr Kerincsiz took to court over his comments about the persecution of the Armenians and the Kurds, has fled to New York.

Where will matters go from here? This week one court banned access to YouTube after clips calling Ataturk gay appeared on it; and another sentenced a Kurdish politician to six months' jail for giving the PKK leader, Abdullah Ocalan, an honorific Mr. But a private television station also withdrew a popular series, “The Valley of the Wolves”, that glorifies gun-toting nationalists who mow down their mainly Kurdish enemies, after the channel was inundated with calls for the show's axing. The battle for Turkey's soul is not over yet.

Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.