Turkey's civil rights movement and the reactionary coup: segregation, emancipation, and the western reaction.

• Author: Akturk, Sener
• Position: Report

Introduction and the Argument

The failed coup attempt of 15 July 2016 in Turkey, poses a conceptual puzzle for political scientists and historians of democracy. When the Turkish people's massive civilian mobilization and resistance defeated the coup, very different explanatory frames and narratives began to compete in order to make sense of what had happened and why, both in the media and among the scholarly community. In this article, I argue that Turkey went through a civil rights movement, or a "silent revolution," (1) under the AK Party governments between 2002 and 2013, in which the legally sanctioned segregationist measures and categorical inequalities that had structured the country's political and social order since the founding of the Republic were gradually abolished. Most importantly, this silent revolution allowed for the public expression of religious observance and ethno-linguistic distinctiveness, thus elevating the status of previously denigrated religious conservatives and ethno-linguistic minorities to the level of equal citizenship. Removal of the headscarf ban in education, public service, and elected office, which affected roughly sixty percent of Turkish women, (2) and the beginning of publicly-funded broadcasting and education in Kurdish, Zaza, and other minority languages, are the most spectacular examples of this egalitarian movement. The political capital that the AK Party accumulated as a result of these reforms cannot be overstated. Religious conservatives and ethno-linguistic minorities, which together make up a large majority of the electorate, were emancipated from their positions as second-class citizens. The moral high ground that the AK Party gained as a result of these emancipatory reforms helps to explain its successive victories in eleven national electoral contests, including local, national, and presidential elections and referenda, indicating a level of popularity which is unprecedented in Turkish political history.

The AK Party's radical reforms initially elicited a visceral, negative reaction from some secularists and nationalists, but the necessities of electoral competition led to a gradual democratic coevolution of the main political parties, evidenced in the sporadic cooperation between AK Party, the MHP, the CHP, and the HDP on some key issues over the years. However, these reforms posed a far more existential challenge to two clandestine and illegal organizations that use violent means to terrorize society--namely, the Kurdish socialist PKK and the messianic religious cult of Fetullah Gulen. (3) The AK Party's reforms, which allowed for public expressions of religious observance and ethno-linguistic expression deprived the Gulenists and the PKK of their raison d'etre, respectively. The all-out offensive that the PKK launched against Turkey in July 2015, and the Gulenist attempt at a military coup in July 2016 can be interpreted as the most violent reactions (4) to-date against the non-violent civil rights movement Turkey has been engaged in under the AK Party governments.

The Primary Contradiction of Turkish Politics: Secularist (5) Segregation and the Exclusion of Ethno-Religious Expression

Most political communities are founded upon and defined by one or more key contradictions. For example, Anthony Marx analyzed Brazil, South Africa, and the United States on the basis of "race," explaining why and how the white elites' conflict and cooperation over the exclusion of blacks after slavery defined politics in South Africa under apartheid and segregationist southern states in the United States, and comparing these scenarios to the different dynamics underpinning the lack of segregation after emancipation in Brazil. (6) Michelle Alexander discussed American history in terms of three periods, corresponding to the slavery (until 1865), segregation (until the 1960s), and incarceration (present-day) of African-Americans citizens. (7) As such, the segregation and subordination of African-Americans, and the struggles to manage, soften, or overcome the racial fault line, indicate the primary contradiction of politics in the United States.

What has been the primary and defining contradiction of politics in modern Turkey? I previously argued that Turkey was "founded on the basis of an Islamic mobilization against non-Muslim opponents" during the "National (8) Struggle" (Milli Mucadele, 1919-1922), "but having successfully defeated these non-Muslim opponents, [the] political elites chose a secular and monolingual nation-state model," which "led to recurrent challenges of increasing magnitude to the state in the form of Islamist and ethnic separatist movements," providing the primary contradiction of Turkish politics. (9) What role, if any, Muslim identity and Islam as a religion should play in the public sphere and political order of the Republic is the primary question facing modern Turkey. I consider Algeria and Pakistan, (10) the latter as "the Muslim state," and also Israel, "the Jewish State," to be struggling with a similar challenge, (11) to which each country has devised its own particular "solution."

Turkey's approach to religious identity and religiosity in the public sphere was modeled on the French Third Republic; arguably, however, Turkey went beyond the French prototype in excluding and even criminalizing the religious observances and symbols of the majority religion, Islam, from official platforms including the legislature, the executive branch, the military, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy. (On the other hand, Turkey was certainly not Albania, where the Communist state went on an offensive to eradicate religion throughout society.) Thus, a bifurcated political and social structure emerged in Turkey with de facto segregation between religious and secular sectors, where the majority--the more religious conservative populations remained and even thrived in the "periphery," but the political, economic, and bureaucratic "center" was the preserve of the secular sector. (12) Upwardly mobile people from the religious conservative periphery regularly migrated, literally and figuratively, to the secular center, but in this process they either genuinely abandoned or carefully concealed any behavior that might be indicative of religiosity. In short, secularist representatives (elected) and bureaucrats (appointed), including, most importantly, the military elite and the judiciary, governed a country that remained significantly religious-conservative by most international standards.

There are many symbolic and substantive indicators of the exclusion of religious conservatives from the peaks of political, military, and judicial power. Roughly half of Turkish men attend weekly Friday prayers, and more than sixty percent of Turkish women wear some kind of headscarf. (13) In stark contrast to this "conspicuously" religious demography, after Turkey adopted a secular form of government in the 1920s, none of the first seven presidents were known to attend the weekly Friday prayers, which can only be performed collectively in public, and cannot be performed individually. (14) This did not prevent secularist news outlets to speculate, for example, that Ismet Inonu was deeply but secretly religious, (15) which supports my argument that one could only be "secretly" religious in the high echelons of elected office, be it military, judiciary, or bureaucratic. Similarly, as late as 1982, bureaucrats reportedly prevented military coup leader and seventh president Kenan Evren from participating in the Friday prayers that preceded his wife's funeral. (16) After more than six decades, the eighth president Turgut Ozal (1987-1993) was the first one known to attend Friday prayers, and known to be religiously observant in general.

A similar but much better known and politically controversial situation prevailed with the status of First Ladies. None of the spouses of the first ten presidents, including Ozal's, wore a headscarf. In fact, once the AK Party came to power in 2002, the tenth president and ardent secularist Ahmet Necdet Sezer (2000-2007) purposefully chose not to invite the spouses of the members of the AK Party government to official receptions, in order to prevent women wearing headscarves from entering the Presidential Palace and other public spaces of political significance. Eleventh president Abdullah Gul's tenure (20072014) was the first time in more than eight decades that Turkey had a First Lady wearing a headscarf.

Not only were beards for men and headscarves for women strictly forbidden in the military; even female relatives of military personnel wearing headscarves could not participate in social gatherings such as weddings and graduations in the military zones. Six of the first seven presidents, who presided for 54 of the first 64 years of the Republic, were former military officers. (17) The only civilian president during this long period was the one overthrown by a military coup, persecuted in a show trial, and dealt a death sentence, which was converted to a prison sentence due to his advanced age. (18)

The headscarf has both symbolic and substantive significance, as it has prevented more than half of all Turkish women from access to education, public service, and even elected office, as the case of Merve Kavakci demonstrated in 1999.19 To a lesser degree, a similar situation was the case for some religiously observant men whose beards and attire prevented them from public service and education due to the official, secular dress codes. Since far fewer men disobey or deviate from the secularist dress codes than women in Turkey, such discrimination did not attract as much attention. In short, the laws and regulations against many forms of religious observance, including religiously inspired dress codes, had the effect of creating a nationwide segregation between religious and secular lifestyles at all levels of the state apparatus, and in the "public...