A historical perspective on the July 2016 coup attempt in Turkey.

• Author: Jacoby, Tim

The fact that a faction of the Turkish military took up arms against the government on July 15 this year is perhaps not quite as surprising and extraordinary as many have suggested. Despite their rigid hierarchies, militaries are not the unitary, undifferentiated organs that they are often assumed to be--nor do these internal divisions remain permanently subsumed beneath civilian authority. Instead, there are endemic tensions between the forces of state and the force of arms. Some political systems manage these better than others, but all are--given the right set of circumstances--vulnerable to sections of their armed forces taking direct action. As this paper will demonstrate, Turkey is no different, and has been no different for as far back as you might wish to go. In the following pages, I will set out this background of interventionism, before going on to discuss the challenge that the AK Party has presented to both the armed forces' internal unity and their political role. It then presents three key imperatives which explain the coup attempt itself--the resistance of external pressure/internal dissent, the promotion of a certain version of Islam and the promotion of the military's commercial interests. As we shall see, none of these is new and each has been a regular driver of similar interventions in the past.

Turkey's Long-Divided, Long-Interventionist Military

As soon as the Ottoman state stopped expanding in the 16th century, the availability of spoils decreased and sections of the military became increasingly unhappy with the scale of the Porte's revenue absorption. Once the empire's frontier became stationary, especially during a century and half of inconclusive warfare with the Habsburgs following the failure to take Vienna in 1529, many of its officers began trading across the border, thereby modifying their allegiance to the state.

Increasingly short on specie following the collapse of its silver-based currency under pressure from Spanish-American imports, the Ottoman state attempted to re-impose control through a new tax farming system and the extension of the standing janissary corps to operate alongside its larger cavalry regiments. Both rebelled regularly. Insubordination forced Sultan Murat III to have his Rumeli governor and treasurer executed in 1589, while military disquiet over the surrender at Karlowitz of 1699 ousted Sultan Mustafa II. Similar ends befell Sultans Ahmed III (1730), Selim III (1807) and Mustafa IV (1808), underlining the praetorian character of the Ottoman military's political oversight.

Indeed, the very origins of the Turkish republic are to be found in the politicization of the empire's armed forces. The revolutionary Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)--or so-called Young Turks--was founded not in factories, cafes or newspapers, but in the Military Medical School. Its moment came as a consequence of the Third Army Corps' mutiny in 1907. In fact, it would have probably been crushed within a year had not the same military units (including a young Mustafa Kemal) not intervened to depose Sultan Abdulhamid in 1909. Several years of in-fighting between different factions of the land-forces (each backing one of the two principal political parties) culminated in a coup in 1913 and more than 30 years of stratocratic rule.

Despite this governing elite almost entirely consisting of serving or recently retired military officers (Talat Pasa was an exception, being previously a postman), internal divisions persisted. Mustafa Kemal, himself, narrowly avoided a court-martial during the First World War and, as Erik Zurcher has often pointed out, the subsequent War of Independence (1919-1922) was as much a conflict between different elements of the Ottoman armed forces as it was a liberation struggle against foreign occupation. (1) Some senior generals (Vehib Pasa, for instance) chose not participate, while others, like Suleyman Sefik Pasa, commanded Ottoman units still loyal to the Sultan and opposed to the nationalists. Irregular militia leaders led by former Ottoman officers such as Ahmet Anzavur and Topal Osman also plagued the nascent republic with ongoing campaigns of sedition.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the military elite remained both divided and highly politicized from the very establishment of the republic onwards. Opposition to Mustafa Kemal's early social reforms centered around some of the empire's most senior officers--key members of the so-called Second Group which left his political party in 1924. These included Ali Fuat Cebesoy (Commander of the Second Army), Kazim Karabekir (Commander of the First Army) and Rauf Orbay (Chief of Naval Staff). All were dismissed following a plot to assassinate Mustafa Kemal in 1926 and amid suspicions that they might have assisted the Sheikh Said rebellion the previous year. Having prohibited serving members of the armed forces from holding elected office (a measure which usefully prevented the traditionally recalcitrant junior officer corps from extending their influence), Mustafa Kemal thenceforth relied on a carefully selected coterie of western Anatolia elites. Between 1931 and 1943, two-thirds of the entire electoral body was continually returned to office as the proportion of deputies born in their constituency steadily declined. (2)

Following his death in 1938, however, divisions emerged over who should succeed him as president. Eventually, the Prime Minister and former General, ismet inonu, secured the support of the First and Third Army Commanders and thus controversially overtook the favorite, Chief of Staff Fevzi Cakmak. Many within the officer corps remained unhappy with this and rumors of coup plots persisted throughout the 1940s--particularly after inonu first gave in to democratizing pressures and, secondly, rigged the subsequent elections in 1946.

When he eventually lost power in 1950, the new government under Adnan Menderes sought to reduce the military's influence by initially dismissing the entire army command within a month of taking power and then relaxing many of Mustafa Kemal's bureaucratic controls. The officer corps was again highly divided over how to respond. A radical faction led by former Nazi-liaison officer, Colonel Alparslan Turkec, favored an aggressively rightist intervention followed by a prolonged term of military governance. Its potential threat to the chain of command was certainly an element in Chief-of-Staff Gursel's decision to remove the government in 1960 and to make Turkec his new Presidential under-secretary. Ultimately, though, enduring concerns over the politicization of the officer corps led to the expulsion of Turkec with other leaders of his faction, as well as the dismissal of 235 generals and more than 5,000 other officers. A failed counter-coup attempt in 1963 prompted Gursel to order the hanging of two of the conspiring officers and to discharge a further 1,500 officer cadets. (3) The ongoing severity of these divisions helped to persuade the military elite to keep the Presidency in its hands (ultimately for the next 30 years) and to use its control of the newly-formed National Security Council (NSC) to arrange the political make-up of the subsequent coalition governments. The result was an attitude of what Semih Vaner has called 'benevolence bordering on complicity' from its civilian counterparts throughout the 1960s. (4)

The March 12 memorandum of 1971 which removed the government was therefore as much about responding to the perennial problem of political dissent within the military as the paralysis of the legislature or the ongoing conflict between right and left on Turkey's streets. More than 60 generals and 500 colonels lost their jobs for 'having gone outside the hierarchic mechanism' as severe limitations on the freedom of the judiciary, the media, universities and the Assembly Houses were imposed. (5) This was enforced through the declaration of martial law and direct military control over a series of non-party governments between 1971 and 1973 in which Turkec (now the leader of a small political party) and his faction were given the Deputy Prime Ministry and control over two other important Cabinet portfolios.

Nonetheless, the NSC could not prevent the public sector from becoming highly polarized as politically motivated murders rose throughout the decade. The coup of 1980 was thus not simply about the need to restore public order. As Chief of Staff Evren made clear, it was also 'to save the army from politics and to cleanse it from political dirt.' (6) However, with only 14 percent of the officially acknowledged arrests between September 1980 and February 1983 being from rightist organizations (compared to 54 percent from the political left), Turkes' direct action units were able to continue their association with sections of the armed forces. (7) Indeed, some were permitted an ongoing role in the deployment against the PKK once the latter extended its campaign to include state targets in 1984--a development which is also likely to have contributed to the decision to create a Defense Industry Support Fund the following year. 'Nearly exempt from Turkish accounting and bidding laws,' it was initially derived from a 5 percent levy on income tax and had reached an estimated value of $1.5 billion by 1991, despite the fact that the military budget had already long exceeded the combined allocations for Education and Health. (8)

Such substantial increases in its economic power, coupled with ongoing emergency rule and a new Constitution affording the armed forces extraordinary supervisory powers, greatly undermined successive civilian governments thenceforth. Any effort to extend their authority outside fiscal matters was carefully monitored and frequently circumscribed. Such was the Staff Command's influence that it was able, for instance, to remove Prime Minister Erbakan in 1997 for stepping out of line with his staunchly secular, pro-military coalition...