Südosteuropa 58 (2010), H. 3, S. 363-388
CHALLENGES OF EUROPEANIZATION
GERALD KNAUS / EKREM EDDY GüZELDERE
Generals, Christians and Turkey’s European Revolution
Abstract. This paper discusses the process of political change in Turkey since 1999. After a first phase of numerous EU-inspired reforms, this process after 2004 has shifted to a domestic debate over the meaning of these reforms. Understanding how this process unfolds not only is crucial to understanding Turkey, but also to bettergrasping the dynamics of Europeanization. The article looks at two issues in particular that illustrate Turkey’s Europeanization efforts: the position of non-Muslim minorities and the position of the Turkish military. In both fields, reforms have been carried out between 2001 and 2004 followed by signs of serious tensions: a wave of attacks against Turkey’s Christians, culminating in a series of assassinations in 2006 and 2007; and an effort by an important fraction of the military hierarchy to reverse the Turkish armed forces’ loss of political influence. Europeanization in Turkey clearly has become a domestic struggle.
Gerald Knaus is the founding Chairman of the European Stability Initiative and Associate Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy / Harvard Kennedy School. Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere is a political scientist who has worked as an analyst in the Istanbul office of the European Stability Initiative since 2007.
After the Helsinki Moment
Europeanization has a long history in Turkey and deep roots in the history of the 19th century, but it has meant very different things at different periods. The dramatic power struggles between various elites that are currently shaking Turkish politics are also shaped by different understandings of what a “Euro- pean Turkey” is supposed to look like and of the importance of democracy in this context. In the first Ottoman reform period under Sultan Mahmut II in the 1830s most institutional changes “in one way or another had to do with the chang- ing relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Europe”.1 The 19th century saw far-reaching changes in Ottoman law, education, finance and government
1 Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey – a Modern History. New York 2007, 23. 364 Gerald Knaus, Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere institutions that were inspired by the great powers of Europe. European ideolo- gies – secularism, nationalism, constitutionalism, and by the early 20th century also feminism – spread to the Ottoman elites. All of this laid the groundwork for the Kemalist revolution of the 1920s, which followed the collapse of the Empire at the end of the First World War and made Turkey a republic. The new republic adopted the Western calendar, introduced a modified version of Latin script, passed European-inspired penal and civil codes, and endorsed the symbols of European lifestyles – from classical music to bathing suits and the open enjoyment of alcohol – as a pathway to modernity. With the promulga- tion of the Law on the Maintenance of Order in March 1925 Turkey became an authoritarian one-party state. At a time when liberal democratic systems were on the defensive in Europe, Turkey’s authoritarian nationalist system was a recognizably European model of government. Another wave of Westernization set in after the Second World War. Consider- ing itself under various unwelcome pressures from the Soviet Union, Turkey joined the Cold War on the side of the West. Again, the country tried to keep pace with a changing Europe – this time, a democratizing one – by adopting a multiparty regime. This led to Turkish membership in several Western/European organizations. Turkey became a founding member of the Council of Europe in 1949 and joined NATO in 1952. Soon it became a member of most European organizations. Turkish elites viewed European integration as the next stage in their country’s Westernization. Neither the Turkish leaders nor other members of NATO made much of the obvious peculiarities of Turkish democracy: the regular recurrence of military interventions, the division of sovereignty between elected functionaries and appointed ones, and recurrent tensions between the parliaments and the governments on the one hand and the bureaucratic guard- ians of Kemalist ideology on the other. The early association agreements with the EU did not contain provisions for mandatory political dialogue and did little to encourage Turkey to improve its human rights record. Turkey finally applied to become a member of the European Community in 1987. The application was doomed from the start, coming as it did at a time when the armed confrontation between the Turkish Army and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, PKK) in the Kurdish regions of the country was gaining in intensity. In fact, with the end of the Cold War, an ever wider normative gap opened up between Turkey and the rest of Europe. As Philip Robins puts it, Turkey did not share Europe’s democratic euphoria of the early 1990s: “The 1980s saw the beginnings of a new norms based approach to international affairs, especially in Europe and the developed world. […] The ideological change related to the emergence of a hegemony of liberal values, with their emphasis, in the political domain, on democracy, pluralism, human rights and Generals, Christians and Turkey’s European Revolution 365
civil society. […] Turkey just did not connect with the spirit of these normative changes. […] By the early 1990s, however, rather than being transformed by liberal, exogenous factors, Turkey was retreating from such values as a process of de-democratization began to take hold.”2 This normative gap undermined Turkey’s standing in Europe. In the 1990s, relations between Turkey and the international human rights community de- teriorated precipitously. Between 1991 and 1994, human rights organisations cited evidence of several thousand cases of torture; thousands of mysterious killings took place; by the spring of 1996, some 3,000 villages had been razed to the ground in southeast Anatolia, as the state battled the PKK. In 1996, Freedom House labelled Turkey as “partially free”, placing it in the same category as Kuwait. National policies were set not by elected parliaments and governments, but by an unaccountable “deep state” (derin devlet) or “national security state”. This was justified with the need to fight Turkey’s internal enemies, meaning particularly, but not exclusively, the PKK in southeast Anatolia: “The methods of the deep state involved the use of force, physical and psycho- logical intimidation, extra-judicial killings, and the creation of a cordon sanitaire through the razing of villages and the displacement of rural populations.”3 The decisive turning point for Turkey’s most recent wave of Europeanization was the December 1999 EU summit in Helsinki, when Turkey obtained EU candidate status. By this time, democratic values and respect for human rights had become central to the very notion of “Europeanization”, and had been in- cluded in the 1993 Copenhagen accession criteria. Nonetheless, the 1999 historic decision on Turkey’s candidate status was taken by EU governments despite the fact that Turkey’s human rights record had improved very little. In 2000, the European Commission’s annual report still concluded that “the situation on the ground has hardly improved and Turkey still does not meet the Copenhagen political criteria”.4 It was also understood, however, that without meeting the Copenhagen Criteria Turkey would not be able to commence formal accession negotiations. The Helsinki decision triggered a whole new wave of reforms, especially after 2002, when the newly-formed Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) came to power. From the outset of its mandate, the party eagerly embraced the EU agenda. Many reasons have been given to explain this choice.
2 Philip Robins, Suits and Uniforms: Turkish Foreign Policy since the Cold War. London 2003, 29-31. 3 Ibid., 39. 4 Commission of the European Communities, 2000 Regular Report from the Commission on Turkey’s Progress towards Accession, 8 November 2000, 20f., available at
Hakan Yavuz stresses the importance of underlying changes in Turkish society: the emergence of a new bourgeoisie in Anatolia that was both distrustful of old Turkish elites and integrated into the global economy, and also supported the emergence of a new independent intellectual class.5 Ihsan Dağı underlines the insecurity of the AKP’s leaders, whose previous (Islamic) political parties had all been banned by the courts. He explains that AKP’s needs to reassure wary secular elites, to broaden its legitimacy internationally, and to reduce the army’s influence coincided with the EU’s demands for democratization. The Copenhagen criteria allowed the AKP to question almost all key aspects of the traditional Kemalist understanding of the state. The AKP wanted to make the banning of political parties more difficult, to limit the influence of the military – exercised through the National Security Council – and to strengthen civil society, including pro-Islamic associations. The first EU-harmonization package passed by the AKP in January 2003 made it harder to outlaw political parties by requiring a three-fifths majority in the constitutional court. This law actually was to save the AKP itself from being banned in 2008. In April 2004, state security courts were abolished, start- ing a process of dismantling the system of parallel military and civilian courts. International treaties were accorded precedence over Turkish law, challenging an often deeply nationalist judiciary. The state-owned broadcasting service TRT started to broadcast programmes in the Kurdish language, an initially small step that was to lead to a much broader acceptance of the use of Kurdish within a few years. In 2004, the European Commission found that Turkey had sufficiently fulfilled the criteria to recommend the start of accession talks. Critics have argued that once again – as in its 1999 decision – the Commission report had failed to reflect the depth and severity of Turkey’s shortcomings in democracy. It emphasized an encouraging positive trend rather than the actual fulfilment of conditions. Thus, the Commission welcomed that the Turkish gov- ernment was “seriously pursuing” its policy of zero tolerance for torture. The fact that “numerous” cases of torture continued to take place was noted, but not seen as decisive. The expectation was that the positive trends would continue.6 In 2005, it thus appeared as if the AKP’s rise to power and the EU accession process had triggered a virtuous cycle of democratic consolidation and economic development. In a previous paper we assessed that
5 Hakan Yavuz, The Role of the New Bourgeoisie in the Transformation of the Turkish Islamic Movement, in: idem (ed.), The Emergence of a New Turkey – Democracy and the AK Parti. Salt Lake City/UT 2006. See also: Islamic Calvinists. Change and Conservatism in Central Anatolia, European Stability Initiative (ESI) Report, 19 September 2005, available at
“sooner or later in the process of member-state building, every country reaches a ‘tipping point’ at which practically the entire political spectrum becomes focused on the common vision of a different society. It is this mobilisation of political energy that gives the EU integration process its extraordinary potency.”7 For Turkey, we argued, this tipping point was first the “Helsinki moment” of December 1999 and subsequently the AKP’s election victory in 2002. In 2005, however, just as the accession negotiations opened, the mood began to change. Talks with the EU slowed down, as did the implementation of reforms. In 2006, the European Commission warned of serious difficulties concerning the respect for fundamental human rights. Between September 2005 and 31 March 2006, more than 2,000 applications concerning Turkey were brought before the European Court of Human Rights. 2007 saw a sharp increase in internal ten- sions in Turkey. A wave of attacks on minorities occurred, as well as numerous attempts by radical nationalist groups to silence critical writers through the use of the Penal Code. At the same time a number of political assassinations took place. These killings included one carried out in 2005 by members of the Turkish armed forces in the predominantly Kurdish town of Şemdinli. Furthermore, a return to violence in southeast Anatolia was underway. The period also saw rising tensions between the Turkish military leadership and the elected AKP gov- ernment. As the International Commission on Turkey noted in a recent report, “from 2007 onwards, the ruling AKP had to fight off multiple challenges from an ad hoc coalition of old guard opponents including the military, parts of the judiciary and the main opposition Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP)”.8 The number of new reform laws decreased and the reform legislation of the previous years was put to the test. What has often been overlooked in analyses of the heady period from 2001 to 2004 is the obvious fact that serious reforms need time to take root. They require not merely the adoption of new legislation, but also changes in popular (and elite) attitudes. If successful, they lead to real shifts in (relative) power. Even “soft”, non-violent regime change, as it took place in Turkey, creates winners and losers, thus generating internal friction. Between 2001 and 2004, very little of this friction was visible, although the Turkish military in particular expressed its apprehension about ending the system of parallel sovereignty at an early stage. In May 2003, the Turkish General Staff issued a press release, describing itself as “fearless guardians of Atatürk’s legacy”. In March 2004, Aytaç Yalman,
7 The Helsinki Moment – European Member State-building in the Balkans, ESI Report, 1 February 2005, available at
9 Tuncay Opcin, Yakaladım Darbeni Paşa! [I caught the coup general], Yeni Aktüel 157, 13 July 2008, , available at
We will look at two issues in particular that illustrate Turkey’s Europeaniza- tion efforts. First, we will look at the position of non-Muslim minorities in Turk- ish society, a group that is numerically small but very important symbolically. Second, we will address the position of the Turkish military in Turkish politics.
Enemies of the Republic?
Yaşar Büyükanıt, born in Istanbul in 1940, was one of the leading Turkish soldiers of his generation. A stellar military career took him from the Turkish Military Academy to the Army Staff College, from NATO’s military command in Mons, Belgium, to the Alliance’s intelligence department at the Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH) in Naples, Italy. Finally, in 2006, Büyükanıt was appointed to the post of Chief of the General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces.10 It had always been the general’s job to assess and combat threats to his country’s security. In October 2006, speaking at the Turkish War Academy, he warned against “reactionary and separatist terror”.11 On 27 April 2007, he issued a memorandum declaring that those who disagreed with Atatürk’s motto “Happy is who calls himself a Turk” were “enemies of the Turkish Republic”.12 In the summer of 2009, following his retirement, Büyükanıt made his voice heard once again, warning of yet another threat to Turkish security. In an article titled “Atatürk, the Patriarchate and the Theological School”, which appeared in the June 2009 issue of the academic journal of Istanbul’s Beykent University’s Strategic Research Centre (BüSAM), the General focused on the Greek Ortho- dox Patriarchate in Istanbul. His main concern was the issue of the Orthodox Theological School on the island of Heybeli (in Greek: Halki) in the Marmara Sea close to Istanbul. The school was closed by the Turkish state in 1971 and has yet to be reopened. Tiny and remote though it may be (it had a total of 4 students in 1971), the Halki Theological School has been high on the Turkish and the international agenda for a long time. When U.S. president Barack Obama delivered a speech before Turkey’s Grand National Assembly on 5 April 2009, he mentioned the school explicitly:
10 Büyükanıt’s official biography is available on the homepage of the Turkish Armed Forces, available at
“Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond.”13 Following Obama’s visit, the Turkish debate on the future of the seminary became louder. It is in the context of this debate that General Büyükanıt con- tributed his thoughts on the subject – suggesting that the correct way for any patriotic Turk to approach such issues would be to turn to the pages of history and ask: “What did Atatürk think?”14 More than half of the General’s four-and-a-half page article consists of quotes from two interviews that the founder of the Turkish Republic gave in the early 1920s. In the first one, from December 1922, Atatürk referred to the Orthodox Patriarchate as “a treacherous and disloyal den, which is spreading the seed of discord […] we cannot leave the Greek Patriarchate on our soils. What reasons could be given to preserve this dangerous organization in our country?”15 In the second interview, from 1924, he said: “Together with the Caliphate the patriarchates of the Greek and Armenian churches and the Jewish Chief Rab- binate have to be removed.”16 Yaşar Büyükanıt “likes history very much”, as he points out in his article. “People may tell lies”, he cautions, “but history does not”. It is not the history of over five centuries of coexistence that shapes his world-view, however. In- stead, it is the history of the struggle to create a new Turkish Republic from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire – of a time, in other words, when the Greeks, the Orthodox Patriarchate and the Christian powers threatened the very survival of the Turkish nation. Following the Ottomans’ defeat in the First World War, the victorious allies set out to divide among themselves the territories of the Ottoman Empire. An Allied fleet entered the Bosporus. On 8 February 1919, the French General Franchet d’Esperey, supreme commander of the Allied Forces, entered Istanbul riding on a white horse like the Ottoman conqueror Sultan Mehmet II five centuries before.17 While doing so, he was cheered by the Chris- tian population of the city. Three months later, on 15 May 1919, Greek troops landed in Anatolia to occupy Izmir (Smyrna) and – in line with the Agreements stipulated at the post-war peace conference in Sèvres near Paris – to annex parts
13 President Obama’s speech in the Turkish Parliament on 5 April 2009, Hurriyet Daily News, 5 April 2009, available at
18 Alexis Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul and Greek-Turkish Relations 1918- 1974. Athens 1983, 62. 19 Ibid., 88. 20 Donald Quataert, The Age of Reforms, 1812-1914, in: Halil İnalcik / Donald Quataert (eds.), An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, Vol. 2. Cambridge 1994, 759-944, 782. 21 The numbers for the Armenians, Assyrians and Protestants are taken from Nurcan Kaya, Forgotten or Assimilated? Minorities in the Education System of Turkey, Minority Rights Group International Report. January 2009, 10, available at
www.catholic-hierarchy.org/country/sctr1.html>; and for the Greeks from the Turkish For- eign Ministry’s Minority Report of November 2008, available at
In a speech in Brussels held in April 2003, National Security Council (NSC) Secretary General (and General) Tuncer Kılınç openly expressed the view that minority questions were weapons used by the enemies of Turkey: “Since the conquest of Istanbul, the Europeans have viewed us as their foes […]. After World War One they turned the Armenians against us and created the foundation for dozens of horrific events that followed. The PKK is an organiza- tion that the EU has established. The EU is the reason 33,000 of our people were killed. The EU secretly and openly supported terrorist organisations in Turkey.”28 Emruhan Yalçın, another graduate of the Turkish Land Forces Academy and a retired Army Captain, even published an entire book on the Halki Theological School in May 2009. Its title is “The Last Crusader Fortress” (Son Haçlı Kalesi). The final chapter “Why the Theological School on Heybeliada should not be opened” leaves no doubt about its author’s convictions.29 For Yalçın, the re- opening of the Theological School “has to be evaluated as a political demand symbolizing Hellenic and Orthodox aspirations”. The religious education of “men who are enemies of the Turks”, he claims, will “transform Istanbul under the guise of a cultural and tourism centre into a Vatican-style religious city with the status of a state, dividing Turkey and build- ing on the divided parts, following the framework of the ‘Megali Idea’, a Great Byzantine Empire”.30 It was this mindset – viewing Orthodox Greek Turkish citizens as traitors and tools of a foreign hostile power – which had also led to the organized riots against non-Muslim minorities in Istanbul in 1955. Then, Turkish-German scholar Dilek Güven explains in her book “The 6-7 September Events” (translated into Turkish in 2005),31 as the situation in Cyprus deteriorated, the Turkish press launched a hatemongering campaign against Greece and the Greeks. On 6 September 1955, news spread of the bombing of Atatürk’s birth place in Thessaloniki. A mob of several thousand people, geared up to take “revenge”, began attacking shops, houses, churches and institutions belonging to non-Muslims across all of Istanbul. According to different sources, between 11 and 15 people died in the clashes, 300 to 600 were injured, and 60 Greek women were treated in the Greek hospital after being raped.32 As Güven notes, there was an ominous pattern to these events of 1955, re- peated in later periods of agitation against minorities, which were conducted until very recently. The pattern begins with an aggressive press campaign, which
28 Taner Akçam, From Empire to Republic – Turkish Nationalism and the Armenian Geno- cide. London, New York 2004, 7. 29 Emruhan Yalçin, Son Haçlı Kalesi. Ankara 2009, 125-148. 30 Ibid., 126. 31 Dilek Güven, 6-7 Eylül Olayları. Istanbul 2005, 211. 32 Ibid., 54f. 374 Gerald Knaus, Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere is followed by a suspicious provocation (the bombing in Thessaloniki, which triggered the violence, appears to have happened inside the consulate building, and the main suspect, a student from Turkey, was hurried out of Greece by the Turkish consulate). In response, a mob readies itself for violence. The pattern concludes with a series of trials designed primarily to obscure rather than to reveal the true culprits. According to Dilek Güven, it was the “deep state” – comprising “the Armed Forces, the secret service (mainly from the army), parts of the government and unions and student organizations directed by the state” – that was responsible for the 1955 riots.33 This explains why the subsequent trials became a farce, never having come close to finding those responsible for the violence. Although more than 3,000 people were initially arrested, they were soon released.34 There was also a perfidious use of the logic of reciprocity, both in public and in political discourse. “If the Greeks dare touch our brethren, then there are plenty of Greeks in Istanbul to retaliate upon”, read the 25 August 1955 edition of the daily Hürriyet. In recent years, however, this attitude has come under criticism. We have elsewhere described in detail how the debate on Armenians has changed in Turkey since 2005.35 However, a growing number of respected Turkish histo- rians have also begun to research the systematic prosecution and intimidation of the Greeks of Istanbul. The mainstream media has begun to openly discuss their fate. They have also become the subject of a number of popular films.Mrs Salkım’s Diamonds (1999) explored how the extortionary Wealth Tax targeted non-Muslims in the 1940s.36 Pains of Autumn (“Güz sancısı”) opened in Turkish movie theatres in January 2009 as the first Turkish film to directly address the September 1955 events.37 The film is a tragic love story, set in 1955, between a young nationalist Turk and his Greek neighbor. As of May 2009, the movie has been seen by 575,836 viewers.38 Etyen Mahçupyan, co-author of the script, clarified that “this film couldn’t have been made 10 years ago”.39 The debate about history has been deeply political. At an AKP meeting in the small town of Düzce on 23 May 2009, Prime Minister Erdoğan told a crowd: “They have chased members of various ethnicities out of this country. Have we
33 Dilek Güven, via e-mail to ESI on 8 August 2009. 34 Alexandris, The Greek Minority of Istanbul (above fn. 18), 264. 35 Noah’s Dove Returns, Armenia, Turkey and the Debate on Genocide, ESI Report, 21 April 2009, available at
40 Fatma Dişli Zibak, Understanding Erdoğan’s Self-Criticism. Today’s Zaman, 29 May 2009, available at
“I fully agree with the words of Prime Minister Erdoğan. The cruelty of a country towards its minorities is in its full meaning fascism. […] My generation remem- bers 6-7 September. I won’t forget for my whole life the behavior during those days of Turkey towards its Greek citizens […] Small apologies, the sharing of sorrows, condolences, can produce great friendships.”46
The Battle over Turkey’s Christians
In 2004, two Turkish academics, Baskın Oran and İbrahim Kaboğlu, prepared a “Minority Report” for the Turkish Prime Ministry.47 The report openly cites many discriminatory practices of the past, among them the fact that “non- Muslim citizens were recorded in population registers as foreigners until the 1940s”, or that until the 1950s admission into military schools and even civilian institutions was made conditional on “being a Turkish national and a member of the Turkish race”. The report highlights court decisions in which non-Muslim citizens were treated as foreigners. As late as 1995, the Second Administrative Court of Istanbul referred to a Turkish citizen of Greek-Orthodox origin as a “Turkish citizen of foreign (sic!) nationality”. The reason for such patterns of discrimination, claims Oran, is the fact that Turkey, “rather than keeping track of developments in the world with regard to the minority concept and law, is stuck in 1923. […] In the early 1990s Turkey suf- fered from a “Sèvres Syndrome” that the country was about to disintegrate. […] Those who argue that a Pontus State will be founded in the Eastern Black Sea region, that Turkey is governed by Converts or that the Phanar Patriarchate seeks to establish a Vatican-like state in Istanbul, are trying to create such an atmosphere of paranoia.”48 Oran paid a price for being so outspoken: He was attacked and threatened, and had to be protected by the state. He was not the only one to whom this happened. The situation of non-Muslim foundations had started to improve following the Helsinki decision in December 1999, albeit at a very slow pace. The situation of minority foundations is a good indicator for the policy towards non-Muslims. In 1935, many different institutions (schools, orphanages, churches, hospitals) belonging to non-Muslims which were founded before the enactment of the
46 Ertugrul Özkök, Anlıyorum Sayın Başbakan [I Understand Mr Prime Minister], Hürriyet, 27 May 2009, available at
Civil Code in 1926 had to be transformed into foundations. Since then founda- tions “regulate the social lives of non-Muslims in addition to supporting the religious, educational, healthcare and charitable institutions”.49 Today there are 161 Christian and Jewish foundations in Turkey.50 However, in a legally bizarre interpretation of the 1935 Foundations Law, the Directorate General of Foundations (DGF) in 1974 concluded that the non-Muslim foundations had no right to acquire any new property in the future. What is even more remarkable is its decision that all acquisitions of assets by non-Muslim foundations that had taken place between 1936 and the mid 1960s had been unlawful. The decision by the Court of Appeal dated 8 May 1974 reads as follows: “It appears that the acquisition of real estate by corporate bodies composed of non Turkish people was forbidden. This is because corporate bodies are stronger than individuals, and it is clear that the State may face various dangers in case there is no restriction on them to obtain real estate.”51 In the logic of the court, Turkish Christians were “non Turkish people” with limited rights. This decision on the case of the Greek Hospital (Balıklı) Founda- tion, whose members were all Turkish citizens of Greek Orthodox denomination, led to the confiscation of several hundred buildings belonging to non-Muslim foundations.52 After 2001 amendments to the law were made, but they were inadequate. After a series of complaints by non-Muslim foundations, as well as EU insti- tutions, the AKP government reviewed the Law on Foundations. A new draft was made in autumn 2004, allowing non-Muslim foundations “to acquire property, to dispose of existing properties, to replace existing prop- erties and rights with more useful ones under certain conditions (article 12); to allocate to another foundation of the same community immovable properties that are not used for charitable purposes or to convert them into rent-yielding immovables (article 16); to collect cash and in-kind donations and assistance
49 Kezban Hatemi / Dilek Kurban, The Story of Alien(ation): Real Estate Ownership Prob- lems of Non-Muslim Foundations and Communities in Turkey. Istanbul 2009, 7 (Türkiye Ekonomik ve Sosyal Etüdler Vakfı, TESEV), available at
from domestic and foreign institutions and organizations, provided that the Directorate for Foundations (DGF) is informed (Article 25) [...].”53 Thus the struggle to end the discrimination against non-Muslim foundations became openly political. First, President Ahmet Necdet Sezer used his veto right and sent the government-backed bill back to parliament. Sezer’s justifica- tion was that “with these arrangements, existing non-Muslim foundations will be given new rights and privileges that will provide them with economic and social power although there is no change in their nature” and that this was against “national interests and the public good”.54 It took the government until 14 November 2006 to have the bill passed in parliament. Only after the election of Abdullah Gül, the former AKP foreign minister, as Turkey’s new president in August 2007 were the obstacles to the Law on Foundations entering into force finally removed. The new law (no. 5737) was signed by Gül on 20 February 2008.55 But the struggle continued, as the CHP applied to the Constitutional Court in late March 2008 to abolish parts of the Law on Foundations because, allegedly, its articles contradicted the Lausanne Treaty, the character of the Republic and the Constitution.56 Nationalists also targeted the tiny remaining Greek Orthodox community of Istanbul. In the Istanbul quarter of Fener, where the Greek Patriarchate has its seat, the nationalist MHP’s mayoral candidate for Istanbul’s Fatih district, Akif Ak, made the foundations law and the statute of the Patriarchate central parts of his campaign for the regional elections on 29 March 2009. Ak, who is the president of the association of Istanbul’s Muhtars, warned in February that “the latest foundation law was passed under the pressure from the EU and the U.S.; this law gives the minority foundations very big possibilities, and if these possibilities are used in a bad way this opens the way to the creation of a Vatican- like Orthodox (Byzantine) state within the city walls. […] We as MHP want our people to know that we will ably and resolutely withstand these impositions by the West and ask for their votes.”57 Emruhan Yalçın, former captain in the Armed Forces, also discussed the New Law on Foundations in his above-mentioned book, published in May 2009: “Our non-Muslim citizens get in Turkey special privileges and a superior status […] in giving them extraordinary economic power sources, these rights can be
53 Hatemi / Kurban, The Story of Alien(ation) (above fn. 49), 27. 54 Ibid. 55 The regulation of the law was passed on 27 September 2008. 56 CHP, Vakıflar Kanunu‘nun İptali için Anayasa Mahkemesi‘ne Başvurdu, Haberler.com, 24 March 2008, available at
counted as capitulations. The protection and mandate of foreign powers, lays the groundwork for a state within the state and for the foundation of a Vatican- like state by the Patriarchate. It opens up possibilities for missionary activities because they have economic and political support. […] Of these harmful foun- dations, which were founded during Ottoman times, there are now in Turkey about 160 minority associations and foundations. These minority foundations […] will betray the Turkish Republic when they findthe chance. These founda- tions will continue their active work in scenarios of dividing our country.”58 One can find a similar tone in the writings of the radical nationalist writers who in recent years were very active in the Turkish debates. These include anti- Christian (and anti-AKP) best-selling authors like Ergün Poyraz, who warned “Christians” (Orthodox, Armenians, Protestant missionaries) that blood would flow if they were to attempt to “reconquer” Anatolia. Radical lawyers like Kemal Kerinçsiz, who organized noisy protests against the patriarchate, Armenian organizations and Turkish authors questioning the nationalist orthodoxy also belong to this group. As do nationalists such as the spokesperson of the sectarian Turkish Orthodox Church, Sevgi Erenerol, who was repeatedly invited in 2006 to explain to the leaders of the Turkish Armed Forces how the EU and internal Christian traitors are setting out to divide Turkey.59 And yet, despite continued nationalist attacks, overall things have slowly continued to improve for Turkey’s Christians. A new foundation law has passed, even if it has not addressed all issues of compensation for previous confisca- tions. The debate on discrimination and on the need to combat intolerance is more open today than ever before. In addition to the internal positive effects on democratization, better treatment of its Christian minority also has obvious external benefits for Turkey. In fact, whenever patriarch Bartholomew meets with world leaders in Istanbul – Ger- man Chancellor Angela Merkel visited in October 2006,60 Pope Benedict XVI in November 2006, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, in April 2008,61 and U.S. President Barack Obama in April 2009 – he speaks up for Turkey’s aspiration to be accepted as a full member of the Euro- pean Union. In September 2008 he addressed the European Parliament:
58 Yalçin, Son Haçlı Kalesi (above fn. 29), 147f. 59 See European Stability Initiative, Deep State Reader, chapter: The Turkish Orthodox Church Group, available at
“Turkey is a country that belongs to the big European family. [...] We are inter- ested in this as citizens as well as a religious minority. […] For accession to the European Union, some set criteria and European values must be respected. In Turkey, we can see efforts being made in this direction, to modernise the country and to fully implement the EU regulations in the national law.”62 So what view of history will inspire the leaders of the Turkish Republic in the future? Is it the vision of the war of 1922, and the notion that Christian minori- ties, however small, are never to be trusted? Or is it the vision of a Turkey fi- nally at ease with its multiethnic past, of an Istanbul that takes pride in its rich heritage and diversity? If they choose the latter, how much longer will it take for Turkey’s leaders to ignore the warnings of their generals and to reopen the small Orthodox theological school in Halki?
Kemalism and Democracy
Muammer Kaylan was born in 1925, two years after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, and grew up in the west Anatolian city of Isparta. His father having died early, Kaylan was raised by his mother and his grandparents. While his grandfather had never attended school, a government scholarship enabled Kaylan’s widowed mother to study in Ankara and to realise her dream of becoming Turkey’s first female dentist. In his book “The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the fate of secular Turkey”, Kaylan recalls the excitement of the Kemalist revolution he experienced as a young boy: “reforms were being imposed on my generation […] in less than a decade, Tur- key’s legal, social, economic, and political systems were being modernized; the Gregorian calendar was introduced; and a new sense of national identity was created […]. It was a ruthless reform movement based on fervent nationalism and the heroic militant characteristics of the Turks.”63 Kaylan also describes the origins of his lifelong trust in the Turkish military. One of the neighbours of the family in Isparta, a colonel, told the young Muammer about the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which carved up the Ottoman Empire between several foreign powers following its defeat in the First World War. “The Colonel’s voice grew bitter when he spoke of the Greeks, British, French, and Italians – the foreign forces that occupied Turkey after World War One. They all killed and tortured people.”
62 Pontifical Oriental Institute, Bartholomew I at EU, 24 September 2008, available at
But the Turkish nation prevailed. “Every Anatolian male is a Mehmetçik, a man born to be a soldier”, Kaylan writes.64 His vision is of Turkey as an asker millet, a “military nation”, borne of a symbiotic relationship between the generals who founded the republic and the Kemalist values they were sworn to protect. Kaylan, after becoming the editor-in-chief of the mass daily Hürriyet, left Turkey in 1970. He returned in 1999 after 29 years in the U.S., exasperated with the state of democratic politics in Turkey. He now complains that “during the last fifty-four years the secular legacy of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk has been betrayed”.65 The reality of democratic governance in Turkey, he implies, was problematic from the very beginning. Once Turkey became a democracy in the context of its Western alliance and the early Cold War, he writes, “Turkish voters became such a bewildered lot that they repeatedly brought back to power the same looters, habitual liars, scoundrels, criminals and Islamic bigots.”66 He later recalls: “since my arrival in Istanbul, I had been experiencing time travel. This was no longer the progressive, secularist and enlightened culture I had known. A swelling population, alienated from the reforms of my childhood, had turned the Turkish clock right back one hundred years to the times of a collapsing Ot- toman Empire.”67 Kaylan deplores “a movement among the Kemalists themselves to transform Kemalist ideology into an inflexible conservative ideology against the West”.68 He considers the first modern coup in 1960, which led to the execution of Turkey’s elected leaders, a mistake, and acknowledges that repeated military interventions since 1960 have come at a price. Yet this does little to shake his conviction that in a Turkey where the elites are immature and the citizens un- educated, only the strong hand of the military can preserve the Kemalist vision of a modern Turkey. In June 1925, Kemal Atatürk closed down an incipient op- position movement (some of its leaders were later executed), paving the way for an authoritarian one-party state, which, Kaylan suggests, was a price worth paying. Atatürk was “a ruthless but enlightened dictator determined to change his countrymen. He had to be ruthless in order to modernize a backward nation at a time when its illiterate people considered any reform the work of the infidel.”69
64 Ibid., 42. 65 Ibid., 24. 66 Ibid., 23. 67 Ibid., 381. 68 Ibid., 383. 69 Ibid., 64. 382 Gerald Knaus, Ekrem Eddy Güzeldere
As Kaylan later argues: “During Kemal Atatürk’s regime, human rights could only go so far [...] it is doubtful that such deep-rooted revolutionary reforms could have been carried out under the conditions that existed in those times while fully respecting hu- man rights.”70 The dilemma experienced by Muammar Kaylan, a disappointed Kemalist and a fervent believer in Turkey’s Western vocation, is widely shared by today’s secular elites. Given that they perceive enduring threats to Atatürk’s vision of Turkey, they ask whether Turkey can afford the luxury of being a fully demo- cratic state that respects human rights. Is the country ready to become a Euro- pean democracy? As Ersel Aydınlı, Nihat Ali Özcan and Doğan Aykaz wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2006, Turkey’s generals “perceive the country’s integrity to be a corollary of the military’s own” and “view the survival of Turkey as hinging on maintaining the internal cohesion of the corps”.71 The authors, two of whom are former members of the Turkish armed forces, go on: “The top military brass believe Turkey has not yet developed into a cohesive society. The introduction of multiparty politics in the late 1940s magnified the country’s social fragmentation by allowing sectarian, ethnic, and religious dif- ferences to find an expression in public life.”72 Following Turkey’s EU candidate status in 1999, the generals initially embraced the EU accession process. Some viewed the goal of EU membership as the crowning achievement of Atatürk’s vision of a modern Turkey. After a string of reforms (in 2001 and 2003) that fundamentally weakened the military’s politi- cal position – by curtailing its formal influence through the National Security Council – the generals’ unease grew, however. On 30 August 2003, General Aytaç Yalman, Commander of the Land Forces, told reporters: “If there is democracy in Turkey today, it is thanks to the Turkish armed forces […] This is a country where the average national income is $ 2,580, and its aver- age education level is the fourth grade of elementary school. A very small part of the population is living in the twenty-first century, and the rest are still in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Is there a similar country in the world ruled by democracy? This has been possible here thanks to the armed forces.”73 As the generals see it, the modern Republic is the creation of the Turkish army. Were not Kemal Atatürk and İsmet İnönü soldiers – in fact, heroes of the war of liberation – before they became politicians? After 1960, the army’s influence
70 Ibid., 269. 71 Ersel Aydinli / Nihat Ali Özcan / Doğan Aykaz, The Turkish Military’s March Toward Europe, Foreign Affairs 85 (2006), n. 1, 77-90, 80. 72 Ibid. 73 Kaylan, The Kemalists (above fn. 63), 440. Generals, Christians and Turkey’s European Revolution 383 in politics was cemented through the creation of the National Security Council (NSC).74 The 1961 constitution created what one Turkish scholar labels “a double headed political system: the civilian council of ministers coexisted with the national security council on the executive level, and the military sys- tem of justice continued to operate independently alongside the civilian justice system.”75 The NSC became one of the country’s most powerful institutions, dictating a range of foreign and domestic policies to forestall potential threats to the Re- public. It was a sign of the army’s confidence in its power that the Chief of the General Staff could proclaim, in 1992, that “Turkey is a military state”.76 The 7th EU reform package, passed on 23 July 2003, changed the composition of the NSC. Five members of the military were to remain in the NSC, while the number of its civilian members was increased to seven. The reforms also transformed the NSC into a merely consultative body, stripping the generals of their authority to compel the president and the prime minister to follow the Council’s “recommendations”. There were no longer to be NSC representatives on the Supervisory Board of Cinema, Video and Music, the High Board for Radio and TV (RTüK) and the Higher Education Board (YÖK). In August 2004, for the first time in the institution’s history, a civilian was appointed Secretary General of the NSC .77 Aydınlı, Özcan and Aykaz implicitly warned the EU not to press for many further changes: “As the country’s ultimate guardian, the military will carefully balance the EU’s demands for reform, especially those regarding cultural diversity, with national security [...] the EU must bear in mind that it should not hasten to ask for the removal of the military’s remaining footholds in Turkish civilian society [...] Much like captains trying to dock an oil tanker in a new port, Turkey’s top generals are impelled to steer Turkey’s reform with the strategies they have developed over the years.”78 Despite institutional changes that weakened the army’s grip on power, the European Commission’s 2004 report concluded that “although the process of
74 The homepage of the NSC (in English) is available at
The Turkish Military and the Asker Millet
By 2004 some of Turkey’s top generals appeared to have (once again) given up hope in Turkish democracy. In March 2007, the current affairs weeklyNokta published a series of articles investigating the military’s activities against the ruling AKP government. At the heart of the story were excerpts from a journal kept by Admiral Özden Örnek, the former commander of the Turkish Navy, and inadvertently saved on his laptop. On 26 October 2003, Örnek wrote in his personal diary (which later became public as part of a judicial investigation) about a conversation between Turkey’s leading generals: “What we have to do from now on is spread the topic that the EU doesn’t want us. In doing so we can take the EU trump out of the hands of the government and turn it into a domestic policy issue.”81 The entries contained detailed discussions for a military coup prepared by the commanders of the Army (Aytaç Yalman), Navy (Özden Örnek himself), the Air Force (İbrahim Fırtına) and the Gendarmerie (Şener Eruygur). According to the diary, it was the opposition of Hilmi Özkök, then Chief of Staff, which prevented the plotting generals from going ahead with “Blond Girl”, as the coup operation was codenamed (The diaries suggest that Şener Eruygur later planned yet another coup, known as operation “Moonlight“). In a speech held on 11 April 2007, the Chief of the Turkish General Staff, Yaşar Büyükanıt, alluded to the publication of the coup plans by accusing some media outlets of using “information and documents, the sources of which are question- able” and “tampering with pictures to lead to different meanings” in order to “shape the political developments in the country and divert attention from the real problems”.82 On 12 April, Nokta’s offices were raided by the police under
79 European Commission, Turkey Progress Report 2004, COM (2004) 656 final, available at
83 Excerpts of Turkish Army Statement, BBC News, 28 April 2007, available at
“Regardless of statements made, political Islam has taken over the Republic of Turkey. There is only one option left in the fight against political Islam. That is the elimination of the AKP government [...].”85 Silahçıoğlu even suggested a method of toppling the government. He wanted, “to file a lawsuit by the chief prosecutor in the Constitutional Court against the AKP for being the centre of anti-secular activities and to seek the closure of the AKP”.86 This is exactly what the Chief Public Prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals, Abdurrahman Yalçınkaya, did. On 14 March 2008, Yalçınkaya ap- plied to the Turkish Constitutional Court to close the ruling Justice and Devel- opment Party (AKP). The indictment sought not only a ban on the party for it acts against secularism, but recommended that 71 politicians, including Prime Minister Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, be banned from politics. On 31 March 2008, the Constitutional Court unanimously decided to accept the case. In the Court’s decision, announced in the summer of 2008, the AKP escaped closure by a single vote. On 21 January 2008, news broke of a major operation by the Turkish police against an alleged ultra-nationalist network known as Ergenekon. Serious inves- tigations against Ergenekon began in the summer of 2007, when munitions and weapons were found in a house in the ümraniye district of Istanbul. In the police raid on 21 January 2008, 37 people were arrested on suspicion of belonging to this network. One of them was Veli Küçük, who is widely considered by the press to be a former leader of JITEM (Jandarma Istihbarat ve Terörle Mücadele), the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Anti-Terror unit, which was fighting the Kurdish PKK in southeast Anatolia. Many of those arrested had also figured prominently in the campaigns against Turkey’s Christians. Lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz is another key figure in the nationalist movement in Turkey, founder of the Great Union of Lawyers, a right-wing NGO. Kerinçsiz used sections of the Penal Code that curtail freedom of expression, such as Art. 301, to sue journalists, authors and academics. Ioannis Grigoriadis described this strategy in a paper in October 2006: “Kerinçsiz skillfully exploited the remaining illiberal traits of the Turkish criminal legislation, as well as the failure of judicial authorities to readjust the interpretation and implementation of existing legislation on liberal lines.”87
85 Eser Karakas, Sözü Doğu Silahçıoğlu Paşa’ya bırakmak [To leave the word to General Silahcioglu], Star, 2 April 2008, available at
Kerinçsiz and the Great Union of Lawyers were responsible for most of the trials based on article 301. These included the trials of Nobel prize winning author Orhan Pamuk, charged in 2005 for his comments on the Armenian and Kurdish issues, Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, charged repeatedly for “denigrating Turkishness”, writer Elif Şafak, charged in September 2006 for passages in her book, “The Bastard of Istanbul”. In addition, journalists such as Murat Belge, İsmet Berkan, Hasan Cemal, Erol Katırcıoğlu, and Haluk Şahin were charged in 2006 for comments defending the first conference in Turkey about the Armenian issue, which had been held in 2005. Kerinçsiz also staged several demonstrations in front of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, demanding its expulsion from Turkey. The prosecution claims that many of these actions were closely coordinated to prepare the right political climate for targeted assassinations. Finally, in summer 2008 many of the leading military figures mentioned in the so-called coup diaries, including the former head of the Gendarmerie, Şener Eruygur, were arrested in connection with Ergenekon. This was a historic step, since no general that had participated in the previous military coups in Turkey had ever been tried in a civilian court on charges of conspiring to topple a civilian government. The closure of the state security courts in 2003 turned out to have been only the first step on a road that ultimately led to the indictment of generals for plot- ting coups and of active soldiers for committing crimes, as has been happening since 2008. On 25 June 2009, the parliament changed the Criminal Procedure Code, paving the way for civilian courts to try military personnel accused of crimes such as threatening the national security, constitutional violations, organization of armed groups, and attempts to topple the government. On 8 July, the new law was ratified by President Abdullah Gül.88 This is a major step towards dismantling a system of parallel jurisdiction that for decades had ensured virtual impunity for crimes committed by members of the security forces. And despite the Nokta setback in 2007, the Turkish press, above all the independent daily Taraf, began to report in detail on the charges against senior Turkish military officials. Such coverage was a novelty that had been unthink- able as recently as 2005.
Rethinking EU Soft Power in Turkey
From 2001 to 2004, Turkey passed a large number of far-reaching legislative and constitutional reforms. By 2005, the tensions that resulted from the impli- cations of actually implementing these many reforms became apparent. This
88 Lale Sariibrahimoğlu, Turkey Adopts Civil-Military Reform, The Jamestown Founda- tion, Eurasia Daily Monitor, 2 July 2009, available at