Out with the Old in Turkey

In a referendum on Sept. 12, 58% of Turkish voters approved a raft of constitutional changes. Was this just another round in the Islamist vs. secularist battle for Turkey’s soul? And since the Islamists won, will Turkey, led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, accelerate its supposed turn from the West, as some will no doubt claim? Actually, no. The referendum is part of a profound generational change: a younger cohort in Turkey’s politics, the military and the legal system whose members favor democracy is steadily pushing aging autocrats from center stage.

To judge the referendum properly, it helps to understand the context in which it took place. Foremost is the Ergenekon trial — strictly speaking, a series of trials, concerning a sequence of military plots to topple the government, that began in 2008. The key defendants are retired and serving senior officers. Their alleged plots have common characteristics: contrive a series of faux-terrorist outrages, but with real blood; create a demand for stability; respond by mounting a military coup.

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Two things are noteworthy about the trials. The first is that they are happening at all. Turkey’s armed forces have traditionally been seen, and have seen themselves, as the guardians of Kemalism, the secular, modernist philosophy of modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. They have toppled duly elected governments four times, most recently in 1997. Up to now, civilian prosecutors have never dared investigate retired and serving generals and call them to account. More typical of the Turkish courts’ relationship with the military was the Semdinli affair of 2005, when a grenade thrown into a bookshop killed a man. The perpetrators were members of Turkey’s militarized police, and were convicted of murder and sentenced to almost 40 years. The Court of Appeals however, decided they should have been tried in military court, and they remain free and on duty.

The second thing that distinguishes the trials is their clear evidence of a generational split within both the military and the legal establishment. Many of the tips in the Ergenekon cases have come from inside the military itself, probably from officers who support democracy and have no time for the old games of their elders. In the legal system, younger judges and prosecutors have pursued cases against the military to uphold the rule of law, often in the teeth of opposition from the Establishment. The High Council of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK), for example, which appoints and promotes judges and prosecutors, disbarred the original Semdinli prosecutor for suggesting that senior officers be investigated, and it is trying to replace those in charge of the Ergenekon trials.

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Indeed, a key element of the constitutional reform endorsed in the referendum was a change in the HSYK. Presently, five of its seven members are senior judges, selected by the criminal, civil and administrative courts of appeal from among their members. As the HSYK decides almost all promotions to the courts of appeal, the system produces a self-perpetuating oligarchy. The referendum proposal (which has been endorsed by the European Union) will expand the council to 21 members with a near majority elected from more junior judges and prosecutors — such as those pursuing the Ergenekon cases and their peers. Some argue that this amounts to a government grab for control of the judiciary. It is not. In effect, the judiciary will wrest control of regulating its own affairs from a small, self-selecting clique of older judges.

The referendum gives shape to a more general change within Turkey. The AK Party is itself the result of a generational battle within the country’s Islamist movement. After Turkey’s grand old autocrat of Islamist politics, Necmettin Erbakan, then Prime Minister, was removed from office in the 1997 “postmodern” coup, the movement split. Young lieutenants such as Erdogan and Abdullah Gul, now President, founded the AK Party with a commitment to both democracy and economic reform. They now rule the political roost. The old Islamist dinosaurs founded the Saadet Party, which gets about 3% of the vote.

(Read about how Turkey prepared for the referendum.)

In the referendum, the voters have now backed this generational challenge to the legal and military establishment. What Turkey needs now is change within the main secularist opposition parties, the Republican People’s Party and the Nationalist Movement Party. The leaderships of both shunned any debate about reform, and simply declaimed that any change proposed by the AK Party must be rejected. That didn’t work, and the failure is bound to shake things up. Throughout Turkey, the old guard is under threat.
Byford is an international policy analyst who often writes on Turkish affairs

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