Ufuk Seçgin is a Turk without Turkish citizenship and, at heart, a liberal. In Germany, where he was born, grew up and went to university, he supports the left-leaning Social Democrat Party. In Britain, where he has a second citizenship and runs his business, he is a Remainer. But in Turkey – in his DNA – he is a solid supporter of Erdoğan and the AKP. It is about more than just clever marketing.
‘You should have been in Turkey in the 1990s. Compare that with now, it’s day and night!’ Seçgin tells me in his crisp German-accented English. ‘Going to hospital was high risk, basically. I can remember how we were buying medicine from pharmacies in Germany and sending them because either they were not available in Turkey or they were so expensive they couldn’t buy them. And food banks, water cuts – there was no clean drinking water. Like fuel stations you would have water stations in the city. People would go with their empty containers and fill them, every day. Electricity just a few hours a day. You see that and then you see this, what’s going on now. And you say, well, this was definitely a success of the Ak Party.’
As a child born to Turkish migrant parents in Hamburg in the 1970s, Seçgin could at first only claim Turkish citizenship. His German identity documents listed him as a ‘son of a Gastarbeiter’, the name for the Turks who flocked to Germany as economic migrants in the post-war boom. They were not allowed to become German nationals. Then, in the election campaign of 1998, the Social Democrat Party pledged to lift the rule that meant only people born of German parents could claim citizenship. Seçgin, a business student with big plans, saw a new spread of opportunities open up with the promise of EU citizenship. But though the SDP won the election they were shunted back on their promise by pressure from the right wing. The amendment to the citizenship law that was eventually passed allowed the children of Turkish migrants to become German citizens – but only if they renounced their Turkish nationality. Migrants from anywhere else were allowed to keep both.
‘That was because they wanted to avoid people running on both cars,’ says Seçgin. ‘It’s black or white. You’re German or you’re Turkish. Where are your priorities, that type of thing.
‘I still remember, I went into one of my local meetings with what was then the head of the foreign commission in the German parliament, a so-called veteran of politics. He had been forty years an MP in our region. I asked him why are you doing it this way, and gave him a list of citizenship rules from other countries. He started to give me stupid answers and I pushed further, and further. And the answer he gave me was: “What if Turkey enters a war against Germany? Who would you fight for?”’
Seçgin took German citizenship, and renounced his Turkish, in 2004. The Turkish government provides German-Turks in the same position as he is with a blue card, which allows them to live and work in Turkey as if they were citizens but without the right to vote. Nonetheless, they are invested. Seçgin was studying for an MBA at Cardiff University when the AKP was first elected in 2002. He was already a keen supporter. His flatmate – another German-Turk who, unlike Seçgin, weaved a booze-filled, Casanova-like path through British university life – joined the party online as he saw the votes coming in.
‘I said: “Anything Erdoğan or the Ak Party says is completely the opposite of what you believe. So why on earth are you joining?” And he said: “I’m going to be a businessman, and the earlier I join AKP the better for me in the future.”’
Both Turkey and Germany have since yanked at Ufuk Seçgin, trying to make him decide whom he loves more, but really all he wants is to be a successful Muslim businessman in a globalised world. Like many Turks he feels fed up with the EU and the endless merry-go-round of Turkey’s attempts to join it. He once supported Turkey’s membership bid, but now feels it would be better outside it. At the same time, in the UK he is facing the impacts of a Brexit he didn’t vote for, and which doesn’t appeal to him. He will no longer be able to hire talent from the continent with the same ease as he hires British workers, or to work across borders so easily.
Now, in the AKP and Erdoğan, Seçgin sees a party and a leader with some problems. He says there are few signs of a succession plan, no new generation of leaders being nurtured, and he feels the arrests of journalists in the wake of the coup attempt have gone too far. He worries that the Turkish economy, once so buoyant, may soon start to shrivel. But in uncertain times across the span of his world, Erdoğan is one of the few certainties Seçgin can cling to. The president has brought wealth, stability and honour to Turks like him – and to those looking in from the outside, Erdoğan’s flamboyance masks many of his flaws.
‘I don’t see, who has got that charisma? Someone like Erdoğan doesn’t come along every ten years. He comes along every thirty years or whatever,’ Seçgin says. ‘Even his opponents say he is really charismatic, knows his stuff. He has put Turkey back on the map.’
Seçgin is part of a wave of pious businessmen who have made it big in Erdoğan’s Turkey. Halalbooking.com, the business he co-founded in 2009, is an online holiday booking service aimed at observant Muslims. It is a fast-growing market; Halalbooking.com is currently valued at $60–70 million.
In May 2017 – the start of his most successful season to date – I accompany Seçgin on a tour of the halal resorts of Antalya alongside two dozen businessmen and women, all of them European Muslims. Thirty-six-year-old Songül, a stylish German-Turk from the city of Bremen, donned the Islamic headscarf and started practising her religion by the book six years ago after the birth of her two daughters. It was only then that she realised the dearth of lifestyle brands aimed at middle-class Muslims – and so she became one of the pioneers. Songül started her online bookings business in 2016, and still had only one competitor in the online halal tourism sector in Germany a year on.
‘It was a boutique industry before, all very expensive,’ says Songül. ‘You would either hire a private villa or go to exclusive resorts where it costs around four thousand euros for a family holiday for one week.’
Over four days, Seçgin leads us on a tour of the new wave in pious holidaymaking – the mass-market halal hotels. The Bera, the first to be awarded halal status in Turkey, is our first stop. The sweet smell of hookah smoke wafts through the cavernous lobby, and a wide panorama of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge with a mosque in the foreground hangs behind reception. The Bera is owned by a conglomerate with ties to Erdoğan: when he was mayor of Istanbul, the municipality sold it a piece of prime real estate in the heart of the city for a fraction of its true value. The television screens are showing ATV, a pro-Erdoğan channel, and Yeni şafak and Sabah, its newspaper equivalents, are propped up in a rack by the door. On leaving, I am handed a gift: an encyclopaedia of Ottoman history.
Otherwise, The Bera is just like any other package resort: filled with hyped-up small children and parents who look as if they’ve been craving this holiday since they flew home from the last. I ask a couple from Preston who are slumped in the lobby’s comfy chairs as their two tiny girls scoot around whether they thought twice about a holiday in Turkey after the coup attempt and terrorist attacks.
‘We’ve not really heard about those,’ the mother tells me, clearly wishing I would move on so she can relax. ‘We just came here last year and we liked it, so we decided to come again.’
The food at the buffet is halal – but otherwise no different to any other resort. In my comfortable, clean room I find not a Gideon Bible and a minibar stocked with beer and wine but a Quran and a Qibla, an arrow stuck to the ceiling to show the direction of Mecca. At reception in the women’s spa and beach area I am frisked by a (female) security guard and stripped of my phone and camera before being gestured through smoked-glass doors. Through the changing rooms and treatment suites, the path leads out onto a fifty-metre stretch of beach surrounded by billowing curtains of fabric hung between flagpoles thirty metres high. You cannot see out to the sea – the view is blocked by the sails, although the water can still lap in underneath. The women wear reasonably conservative bikinis on this boxed-off beach, even after being freed of the male gaze. I ask one if it bothers her that she cannot contemplate the horizon as she sunbathes.
‘But if it was open, the men could look at us as they come past on boats and jet-skis,’ she replies.
In the lobby that evening, as we relax with tea and flavoured tobacco, I ask Seçgin how the drop in visitor numbers to Turkey since last year’s coup attempt has affected his business. He looks at me as if I were crazy.
‘Drop?’ he replies. ‘Last year we doubled our business, and this year we doubled again!’
By 2017, Turkey has risen to become the world’s third most popular destination for halal travellers, a four-place rise on the year before (only Malaysia and the UAE score higher). In a global halal tourism market now worth $151 billion annually, Turkey dominates the beach-holiday sector. The country accounts for a disproportionate amount of the hotels listed on Halalbooking.com, not out of a conscious effort on Seçgin’s part but simply because Turkey is the place with the best-developed concept of what an all-inclusive halal holiday means. This, after all, is an evolution of the model the Turks have been fine-tuning on booze-soaked European tourists since the 1980s.
‘Turkey is the centre of package resorts,’ Seçgin continues. ‘At the lower end there are the mass-market resorts. And at the high end in the halal market there’s the Angels Resort, where the rooms start at three hundred and fifty euros a night. I have one customer from Ukraine this year – he booked six weeks there and spent thirty-one thousand euros!’
But this is Turkey. And here, the sacred always comes with a side serving of the profane.
The original pioneer of the country’s now-booming Islamic leisure sector is the unlikely Fadıl Akgündüz, who goes by the nickname ‘Jet’ and is a conman of such confidence that every time he is released from prison he starts plotting his next swindle. Most recently, he served fifteen months for a libel conviction after he claimed that the governor of an Aegean province had tried to assassinate him in a car crash. Before that, he defrauded hundreds with dodgy timeshare deals, and back in the late 1990s he collected millions of pounds from investors, many of them Turks in the European diaspora, for a construction project in Ankara that never materialised. Before that, though, he launched his first and only successful project: Turkey’s first halal holiday resort.
The Caprice Hotel in the Aegean seaside town of Didim is a monstrosity of glass and plastic façades that looks, at a distance, like the stern of a sinking cruise ship. Inside, it is pure neo-Baroque. The domed ceiling of its lobby is painted with tulip motifs in the style of the old mosques of Istanbul. Its floor is inlaid with gold mosaics. Like any other hotel catering to the mass tourism market, it has an all-you-can-eat buffet every mealtime, a huge swimming complex and spas, and a path leading straight to the beach. There are also à la carte restaurants serving Chinese and Italian food, and a designer boutique offering some of Turkey’s top brands. Turkish stars perform in the hotel’s entertainment centre every week. The well-heeled tourists who stay here would have no reason to leave its gaudy confines, apart from acute claustrophobia. And if they are devout Muslims – as almost all of them are – they can relax safe in the knowledge that they will never miss prayer time.
Jet Fadıl Akgündüz opened the resort in 1996 with the strapline: ‘A modern vacation complex, where the call to prayer is heard five times a day.’ The idea of a hotel catering to the Islamic market was unheard of in Turkey at that time. It was the era when the Refah Party’s Necmettin Erbakan was prime minister and Erdoğan the mayor of Istanbul – but Erdoğan’s jailing and the toppling of Erbakan’s government in the ‘postmodern’ military coup of 1997 would remind everyone that the Kemalists were still in charge. Local residents in this largely secular part of Turkey were dismayed when Akgündüz bought what had once been a resort for debauched European tourists and turned it into a haven for the devout – but his business boomed. Muslims with money to spend had previously had to share their hotels with customers who followed totally different lifestyles: drinking alcohol, sunbathing in bikinis in mixed-gender areas, and disregarding the patterns of the Islamic day. Now, they could spend their leisure time in an environment just like that of their homes. In halal hotels, the swimming pool and spa areas are segregated by gender, there is no trace of alcohol anywhere, and prayer rooms are provided so that guests can slip straight from the poolside to the prayer mat.
Slowly, other Turkish businessmen caught on to the potential and by the time the AKP took power in 2002 there were five halal hotels in Turkey. By 2014 the sector had mushroomed to 152 halal resorts, spas and boutique hotels across the country, including a halal ski resort and a cruise ship. Part of that growth can be explained by the overall rise in wealth in Turkey over the same period, which lifted the poorest – and generally most pious – section of the society from a subsistence-level existence to a level affording them disposable income. The average annual income in Turkey in 1998, two years after the Caprice opened, was $8,567 and the average rent costs in the gecekondu – literally, ‘built in the night’ – districts ate up half of a family’s income. By 2014 the average wage was $19,610 and rent or mortgage repayments now only took up a quarter of their pay. A new middle class has risen, buoyed by a growing class of businessmen from the conservative cities of central Anatolia. And they want in on all the things the elites have been enjoying for decades.
There is also the Erdoğan factor.
‘There is more Islamic political influence now,’ says Seçgin. ‘Muslim people are standing up and saying: “Hang on, I also work hard, I have more money, I want to take part in all these great things that everyone else is doing, the upper ten to fifteen per cent of the society.” The industry was starting to develop before Erdoğan, and until recently there hadn’t been a single policy by the tourism ministry in support of this industry. Nothing. So, you might argue that without Erdoğan the industry would probably have developed anyway. But my fear is that for political and ideological reasons, some people in Turkey may have tried to prevent this sector from thriving. By Erdoğan and the AK Party being in power, their passiveness, they have helped the industry to thrive. They didn’t support us at all, but they also didn’t do anything to prevent or hinder us. And that’s already a good thing, because under different governments, I can imagine some would have tried to stop this industry from going further.’
The Turkish Standards Institute started providing halal hotel certification in June 2014. Until then Turkey had lagged behind in the sector compared to other Islamic countries such as Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates; even the UK’s tourism board, Visit Britain, held halal tourism conferences before Turkey. But without much official help, the sector has taken root and flowered amid the fleshpots of the Aegean and Mediterranean coastlines. Some of the halal resorts are spanking new and purpose-built. Others are older hotels that were once stuffed with hard-drinking Russians and Europeans but which have now been converted – stripped of their bars, fitted with prayer rooms, their swimming pools and beaches divided into men’s and women’s sections.
As the halal tourism market evolved, so too did the business plan of its original entrepreneur, Jet Fadıl Akgündüz. As more mass-market resorts opened, he upgraded the Caprice to a five-star luxury resort and changed the ‘Hotel’ in its name to ‘Palace’.
‘Thank you, Caprice Palace, for providing so much for the ladies!’ gushes the dubbed star of the hotel’s tacky and stilted promotion video, as an unseen male narrator guides her through the seemingly endless facilities. ‘My god! What beauty is this? What spaciousness? What tranquillity? Caprice Palace … I wouldn’t have believed that a palace like this existed in the world!’
Akgündüz was also working on other projects: a second Caprice in Istanbul, a residential complex in Ankara, a football club packed with celebrity players and a plan to manufacture Turkey’s first indigenous cars in the impoverished eastern province of Siirt, his birthplace. None of them came to fruition, and scores of investors were left empty-handed and furious. Akgündüz fled the country in 1998 to avoid criminal charges, but only four years later, after the 2002 elections (in which the AKP took power for the first time), he returned to Turkey after standing for and winning a seat in Siirt as an independent candidate. His political career was short-lived; the high election council immediately cancelled his parliamentary membership, meaning that he was also stripped of the immunity from prosecution that he had briefly enjoyed as an elected deputy. He was sent to the Istanbul courthouse and then to the prison in his private limousine with the number plate 34 JET 25.
A year later Akgündüz was freed, and spent the next decade skipping town before serving another jail term and then hatching another plan. In 2014 he announced that he had bought an island in the Maldives, which he would turn into ‘an island for the Muslims’. He began to dress in robes and turban in the style of an Ottoman dignitary, and claimed to be investing $170 million in his new project. Some of Turkey’s most prominent pious Muslims gave it their backing by issuing a fatwa (an Islamic legal decree) stating that such a project was permissible in the eyes of Allah. When investors in this latest scheme discovered that it was a swindle, too, one of the preachers who had given it his stamp of approval was confronted by a journalist. ‘I didn’t say buy a place. I just said it’s permissible under the fatwa,’ he insisted. ‘If you didn’t listen and did a stupid thing, so did I. I lost my apartments, too.’
In 2015 a court order was issued for the original Caprice to be confiscated in order to help pay the compensation claims levied against Akgündüz’s still-unfinished Istanbul project. The local police raided the Caprice Palace Didim and began loading the furniture, minibar fridges and computers onto trucks in front of 600 startled guests. At the last minute the hotel’s lawyers managed to cut a deal, and the fittings were returned – but three months later Akgündüz was arrested on embezzlement charges. He served sixteen months, and then immediately began talking about his next project.
‘The east will come to life, Turkey will be developed!’ he proclaimed to journalists waiting at the prison gate on the day of his release in March 2017.
Akgündüz remains a free man – for now. The original owner of the similarly high-end halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, Turkish businessman and newspaper owner Akın İpek, has not been so lucky.
İpek shot into the stratosphere of the Turkish business elite during the first decade of the millennium – the early AKP era. It was a time when certain connections promised considerable bounty, both political and economic. İpek, like many others, was an open supporter of Fethullah Gülen – the cleric turned cult leader who built his small Turkish congregation into a worldwide movement. Born in 1941 in the eastern province of Erzurum, Gülen trained as an imam and joined the Diyanet, the state’s religious agency, which was set up under the republic’s first constitution in 1924. The Diyanet employs all of Turkey’s clerics and posts them to mosques around the country. Gülen graduated in 1958 and was dispatched to coastal İzmir, where he quickly began working to extend his reach outside the mosque. According to the movement’s biography, he began speaking in tea houses and at town meetings. ‘The subject matter of his speeches, whether formal or informal, was not restricted explicitly to religious questions; he also talked about education, science, Darwinism, about the economy and social justice,’ the biography claims.
Having built his local following, Gülen retired from the Diyanet in 1981 and started preaching freelance both in Turkey and abroad. He also began opening schools and charitable foundations.
In the conservative city of Kayseri, one businessman remembered how a charismatic imam came to town in 1986 and started delivering lectures to huge crowds. ‘His speeches were so good, all the women in Kayseri’s high society soon started wearing the headscarf. We all liked his speeches and meetings so much that we started collecting money for the movement. I gave one cheque to them. There was a doctor, he wasn’t interested in religion but the hoca [teacher] even converted him. After a while I began to see that they are conmen, but lots of people didn’t care. All the state contracts were given to Gülenist businesses when the AKP came to power. One of my friends said to me, “I got rich because of them, they are buying everything from me.” People wanted to believe in what the Gülenists were saying because there was so much state pressure on religion. And here was a Muslim organisation that was working in every area except the political space.’
In February 1997, the Turkish army launched what became known as its postmodern coup. Tanks rolled through Ankara and Istanbul, setting off a series of events that would eventually force Fethullah Gülen into exile. The generals had been stirred into action after Necmettin Erbakan, leader of Erdoğan’s Refah Party, became prime minister in 1996 – Turkey’s first full-blooded Islamist premier. After the generals issued a memo from their boardroom, and Erbakan’s governing coalition partners rounded on him, he stepped down. For the next years political Islam was again forced into the shadows in Turkey; Refah was shut down, Erbakan’s political career was finished, and the AKP’s shoots started growing in the dark.
Gülen moved to the United States in 1999 and has remained there ever since, now living in a vast secluded ranch in Pennsylvania and rarely venturing out. But he has never stopped preaching. Gülen’s videos draw millions of views and both adulation and hilarity on YouTube (one has been superimposed with cartoon watermelons to make it look as though the imam is chopping them with his flailing hands as he rants).
Although he was little known outside Turkey, Gülen’s following had grown so huge by 2013 that he was propelled to the number one spot in Time magazine’s annual 100 Most Influential People in the World list. His devotees, loyal, worldly and highly organised, had voted en masse to get him there. The magazine’s blurb betrays the bemusement the editors must have felt at finding the votes flooding in for this unknown man. But there is also a prescient hint of what was to come:
Fethullah Gülen is among the world’s most intriguing religious leaders. From a secluded retreat in Pennsylvania, he preaches a message of tolerance that has won him admirers around the world. Schools founded by Gülen’s followers thrive in an estimated 140 countries. Doctors who respond to his wishes work without pay in disaster-afflicted countries.
Gülen, however, is also a man of mystery. His influence in his native Turkey is immense, exercised by graduates of his schools who have reached key posts in the government, judiciary and police. This makes him seem like a shadowy puppeteer, and he is scorned by almost as many Turks as love him.
The political rise and fall of the Gülenists is the murkiest and most controversial part of the Erdoğan story. But the first thing to say is that the core of Erdoğan’s allegations against the group are true – that as bizarre and conspiratorial as it sounds, Gülen’s followers really did become a shadowy cabal who spent decades inching their way up through the Turkish state.
Here is a taste of how the Gülenists operated. In September 2015, as the relationship between Erdoğan and Gülen was imploding, an email dropped into my inbox from Hawthorn Advisors, a London public relations and ‘reputation management’ agency, publicising a study written by a group of British barristers. It was titled A report on the rule of law and respect for human rights in Turkey since December 2013, and had been commissioned by the Journalists’ and Writers’ Foundation – a well-known Gülenist front group. Established in 1994, the JWF operated from an office in Istanbul’s pious Üsküdar district and was, according to Joshua Hendrick, a US academic who immersed himself among the Gülenists in the 2000s, ‘the primary public face of the movement’.
‘They have a very strategic and long history, in Turkey and the world, of peddling favour from influential people, including elected officials, journalists and other leaders,’ Hendrick told me.
They had certainly picked the report’s authors well. Two of the four were serving British politicians, Sir Edward Garnier in the House of Commons and Lord Woolf in the House of Lords. Garnier’s Register of Interests entry for the work reveals that the JWF paid him £115,994 for his 100 hours spent on the project. Six months after the report was published, Garnier stood up in the Commons during a debate on the EU–Turkey migrant deal to raise the ‘serial and appalling human rights and rule of law abuses by the Turkish government’.
‘While these abuses continue,’ he said, ‘there should be no question of opening any chapters [on Turkey’s EU membership] at all, even though we need Turkey as a member of NATO and its agreement to help with the migration problem.’
Although he mentioned in his statement to the House that he had worked on the report, he did not reveal who had commissioned it. In his response to me in August 2016, when I reported the story in The Times, Garnier insisted that he and the other authors ‘are not supporters or adherents of [the Gülen movement] but wrote the report as independent English lawyers based on the evidence we had reviewed’.
There is no doubt that he knew who he was working for, though – the original press release sent to me by the Hawthorn PR agency had included a blurb about the Gülen movement at the end: ‘The Gülen movement is a civil society network of individuals and religious, humanitarian, and educational institutions that subscribe to Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen’s advocacy of interfaith dialogue, community service, and universal education.’
It is easy to see how a British politician might be sucked in. Outside Turkey the Gülenists sell themselves as purveyors of modern, pluralist Islam, a pitch that is directly and deliberately tuned to Western ears. Using that narrative they have built up a large following within the Turkish émigré community and organised endless outreach programmes and round tables in the West. In the UK, where much Gülenist capital has fled since Erdoğan’s crackdown started, they still run a lobby group, The Dialogue Society, which has hosted Cherie Blair and former Liberty director Shami Chakrabati among its guest speakers, as well as an educational trust that offers free weekend tuition to pupils in the state school system. You have to dig fairly deep into their websites before you see that these organisations are linked to the Gülen movement.
Inside Turkey, the Gülenists were best known for running high-achieving private schools for the children of rich families and subsidised university dormitories for those of the poor. ‘Everyone was aware of Gülenists but they were not seen as particularly threatening,’ said one Western diplomat based in Turkey in the early AKP era. ‘They were seen as a kind of irrelevance, a rather eccentric secret society that raised money, did good things and ran schools in Turkey and other parts of the Islamic world. It felt like a normal part of the Turkish society. We did not, as diplomats, focus on things that we probably should have done more. It did have the civic elements, particularly in Anatolia. It felt almost like Germany or old UK, like the Rotary Clubs. It almost fell into that bracket rather than a serious political thing.’
Overseas the Gülenists ran Turkish language and cultural institutes. Their members, having come up through the elite Gülenist schools or been handpicked in the university dorms, were the brightest, the best educated and the most fluent foreign-language speakers – the perfect cultural ambassadors for Turkey abroad. While some members were directed by the higher ranks of the movement to take jobs in the Turkish state and security services (and often handed stolen test papers in advance to ensure they would get the plum positions), others went abroad and opened more schools overseas. Poorer, developing nations – particularly the Muslim parts of Africa, the Balkans and central Asia – were delighted to have such polished and pious people coming to provide education. An opaque group called ‘Citizens Against Special Interest Lobbying in Public Schools’ has released a document online titled ‘Every continent but Antarctica’, listing 101 countries where Gülenist schools were allegedly operating, from Afghanistan to Zambia.
‘I remember that after the Berlin wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated, there were hopes from Turkish nationalists and even centre-right parties to bring in their brothers through Central Asia under the Turkish umbrella, sort of a near abroad for Turkey,’ says a US lobbyist who has previously worked for the AKP government. ‘They were going to go as far east as the Chinese border. Those hopes were quickly dashed because seventy years of communism takes its toll – their plans did not work out. But there was still a soft power idea more modestly expressed. The Gülenists were seen as a useful tool. And the Gülenists wanted to do it. It was a win-win situation, and it only became a liability later. It’s funny because for years it was a Turkish foreign policy priority to get these schools up and running. Now the priority is to close them down.’
In those early AKP years Erdoğan was happy to piggyback on the Gülenists’ established networks. His party was electorally strong but institutionally weak, and facing a hostile state and military dominated by the Kemalists. There were few AKP people working within the bureaucracy – this was, after all, the party that had risen from the fringes, and was only now making its way to the centre. The army wanted to bring Erdoğan down. Much of the judiciary wanted to bring him down. The only way he – and his party – could survive was to build alliances.
‘After the AKP came to power in 2002, I, like many others, was hearing informal reporting that the Gülenists were being recruited more and more in some government departments, especially in the police and the judiciary,’ says one former parliamentary deputy. ‘I tried to collect some information on such informal reporting, but I couldn’t get much reliable results. In one case I talked to an ex-Minister of Interior who had recently left that position, asking if it were true that large numbers of Gülenists were being recruited to the police. He said yes, to some extent it was true, but rhetorically asked “what could I do when those people performed much better than others in the entrance tests and examinations?”’
Erdoğan’s alliance with the Gülenists was only one among many. The AKP was also reaching out to liberal, anti-army activist groups, and to members of the secular opposition who had grown tired of their stale old parties. Many joined up with the AKP right at the start in 2001. Süleyman Sarıbaş, a lawyer who had been a deputy in Turgut Özal’s Anavatan Party (Motherland Party, or ANAP) since 1983, signed up shortly before the elections of November 2002. Erdoğan personally approached him to join the party. Sarıbaş agreed, despite some misgivings about Erdoğan’s character.
‘I regarded Erdoğan as a civilian, but he never completely retained Western values,’ Sarıbaş says. ‘He was emotional and easily scared. Timid. His lifestyle was something between an urban lifestyle and the provincial rural lifestyle. He was very much in the middle. I will give you one example. He would pull out his Swiss army knife from his pocket and clean his teeth with it. He is a villager in that sense. But he has been raised in Istanbul and he is very urban at the same time. In the period I met him, he was being judged. He had court cases against him. He was afraid about being arrested. After he became the chairperson of the AKP there was a court case against him about his property. He seemed to have too much property and it was not clear how he had managed to own it all. He said that it was the gold belonging to his children that he had exchanged. At about five p.m. we went to see the prosecutor and he wanted to put him under arrest. They were about to close the court. The judge arrived a little bit late on that day. We waited for half an hour for the judge to arrive. Erdoğan was white at the fear of being arrested.’
Sarıbaş joined the AKP because it seemed, in 2002, to offer a reformist agenda. Within three years he had left it again, part of the party’s first mass wave of resignations. He was one of thirteen deputies who quit between February and April 2005, throwing the AKP into its first real crisis. Erdoğan was already showing himself to be ‘fretful and ill-tempered’, according to an AFP report on the mass exit of members. On resigning, Sarıbaş said that the party was not truly committed to EU-focused reform, and that its inner workings were corrupt and authoritarian. Musa Kart, a cartoonist at Cumhuriyet, a secularist newspaper, depicted the prime minister as a cat tangled in a ball of yarn as the crisis in his party grew. Erdoğan sued him for $3,500. He also called the defectors ‘the rotten apples in the bag’.
The mass of remaining deputies seemed willing to overlook any growing disquiet about Erdoğan’s character. The AKP survived its 2005 crisis, and two years later scored a huge victory over its old enemy, the army – and over the CHP, the largest opposition bloc in parliament. In May that year, the generals threatened a coup over the nomination of AKP founder Abdullah Gül as president. The constitutional court took up the thread and started a case to close down the AKP. Gül is a moderate Islamist and a pro-European. The army’s problem with having him as president? His wife wears the Islamic headscarf.
Erdoğan called their bluff and called a snap election. The AKP won overwhelmingly, affirming the people’s support for the democratically elected government over the self-appointed secularist saviours. Tens of CHP deputies and hundreds of rank-and-file members left their party and joined the AKP.
‘The AKP between 2002 and 2007 seemed to be following a reformist political line,’ says Haluk Özdalga, a CHP deputy who was among those who crossed the floor. ‘We had extensive consultations with party people, and a majority supported the idea of going over to the AKP. In Ankara, which is my political district, a couple of hundred CHP members followed with us, and they gradually got various elected positions within the AKP organisations. This flow of members from the CHP to the AKP continued until approximately 2011. I consider myself as a social democrat, and at that time the AKP stood ideologically closer to me than the CHP. That may sound a little unusual for those not knowing the CHP and the AKP of that time. Many social democratic politicians in Europe at that time felt the same way. The AKP appeared to be structurally a more democratic party, not dominated by a single person.’
Another of the nine who joined in 2007 was Ertuğrul Günay, a CHP veteran who had left the party in 2004 and was in parliament as an independent. Günay believed he saw in the AKP the promise of a new type of Turkish politics. Erdoğan appointed him minister of culture.
‘It was directly from Erdoğan that I received a proposal to join the AKP,’ Günay says. ‘After a few meetings, and after consulting my friends, I accepted. During its first term in government the party was promising on the issues of democracy, social welfare and pluralism. CHP as the only opposition party in the parliament followed a much more conservative line about the issues of EU and pluralism – I know many “leftists” from the CHP who thought that the EU would divide Turkey. I had hoped that with the AKP, a new social movement in Turkey would form itself, leading to the rise of a progressive politics that would be at peace with the values of the people.’
Erdoğan at that time was a man willing to take criticism, to listen to others, and to learn: ‘well-intentioned and sincere about democracy’, according to Günay. One diplomat said that in his early years as prime minister Erdoğan would arrive at meetings with a stack of notecards on the issues to be discussed. Another said that he was ‘one amongst many important people in the system … more equal than anybody else but there were other players who argued with him, whether Abdullah Gül, Abdüllatif şener [another AKP founder, who left the party in 2007], or Ali Babacan [economy minister]. These other voices were from smart individuals, who had come into government with a lot more experience on a world stage than Erdoğan. He relied on them. He trusted them and respected their advice and judgement.’
In the rest of the world, too, this charismatic rising star of Turkish politics was making a good impression. The AKP won its first elections in November 2002, just as the US and its coalition of the willing were gearing up to declare war on Iraq. They desperately needed allies in the Middle East – and a moderate Islamist, westward-looking Turkey fitted the bill perfectly. Erdoğan visited Washington in December 2002, while he was still legally blocked from serving in parliament, but when it was clear that the law would be changed and he would become prime minister. According to Faruk Loğoğlu, the Turkish ambassador to the US at the time, Erdoğan was ‘given the red-carpet treatment … received by George W. Bush in the White House, not in the Oval Office but in the Atlantic Room. He could not go into the Oval Office because he was not a prime minister but it was important for American interests at the time. It was not a secret that he was going to become a member of parliament. It was not something that the US discovered on its own. It was an open secret.
‘Turkey was the lead for the US in the fight against Islamic radicalism. It was like fighting two birds with one stone: Turkey could fight radical Islam, and be part of the Sunni axis containing Iran.’
Turkey watchers within the US State Department knew that Erdoğan would be unlikely to live up to these high expectations. When he became prime minister on 15 March 2003, parliament having voted to overturn the law that blocked him from office (a move supported by the CHP), he inherited a problem. Two weeks earlier, the Turkish parliament had voted against joining the US-led war on Iraq. It was a surprise to everyone – AKP ministers had appeared open to joining the coalition. But the deputies’ votes reflected the overwhelming opposition to the war among the Turkish population. They had chosen to satisfy their people rather than kowtow to their powerful US ally. Over the coming years, Erdoğan would repeatedly make the same calculation knowing that, without the support of his people, he was nothing. And the US generals would never forget the Turkish betrayal.
‘We oversold this idea of the democratic Muslim thing because it seemed to combine everything, from the Muslim Brotherhood to membership of the EU,’ said one US diplomat. ‘Diplomacy is a competitive business. You are the coach at a beauty contest and you want all the attention. There is first place, a very distant second, then almost an irrelevant third place and then everybody else. Therefore, you try to get presidential visits. The first visit of the Obama administration was to Turkey. In a rational world, Turkey is an easy sell. It is still today. But it brings so much baggage in what it does. And even more baggage in our warped perceptions of what a “loyal” NATO ally should be.’
While Erdoğan built his reputation as a democratiser overseas, back at home the Gülen network was quietly using the leeway afforded it by its alliance with the AKP to stretch out further into the police, judiciary, bureaucracy and army. It was fast turning into an anti-democratic, secretive and powerful force within the Turkish state and society. As journalists, academics and opposition politicians began digging into the murky network and asking questions about what their true intentions were, the Gülenists used their connections and positions to punish and silence them. One foreign journalist based in Turkey in the early AKP era told me how he discovered that his home phone and internet had been tapped by the group when the non-Gülenist police, who by this time were launching investigations into their own colleagues, called him in and presented him with reams of transcripts. Separately, an official from the prime ministry told me a nearly identical story.
Most notoriously, it was Gülenist prosecutors and judges who, with Erdoğan’s blessing, brought a series of court cases that collectively decimated the power of the military. Between 2008 and 2013, hundreds of officers, journalists and politicians were found guilty of coup plotting and handed hefty prison sentences. The trials proved a turning point. On the one hand, the Gülenists had helped Erdoğan neutralise his biggest foes: the army and the Kemalists. On the other, they had shown him how much power they could wield – and so Erdoğan’s fear of the military was gradually replaced with a fear of Fethullah Gülen.
‘Erdoğan felt more liberated because of his increasing neutering of other institutions but also more threatened by the Gülenists,’ said a diplomat posted in Turkey as the relationship between the two men began to crumble. ‘As a reaction, there was a series of events from 2009 until the attempted coup in 2016. Erdoğan started striking the opposition, particularly aiming at the Gülenists.’
The one-time allies began circling each other in the ring. In 2013 Erdoğan, still the prime minister, announced that he would be running in the coming year’s presidential elections. Meanwhile Gülen was rumoured to be planning his return to Turkey from the US, where he had lived in self-imposed exile since 1999.
Erdoğan had also overseen a détente with the PKK through a peace plan engineered in the mid-2000s, and it riled Gülen. The PKK, with its core ideology of godless leftism, made a natural enemy for the devout Gülenists. In south-eastern Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, the movement moved onto the PKK’s turf by opening their study centres and schools. As far as Gülen and his people were concerned, it was piety – not political dialogue – that would defeat the PKK. In a piece for the movement’s website, university researcher Adem Palabıyık wrote:
Attendance at Friday prayers, the spread of the headscarf, Quran courses and the emergence of a young generation that is familiar with Islam is the last thing that [the PKK] would like to see because members of such a generation would not go to the mountains; instead, they would attend Friday prayers and they would fast in Ramadan. Moreover, they would not kill others, they would not be hostile to their state and they would have an Islamic code of ethics.
Both knew there was not enough room in Turkish politics for two charismatic and pious men. The smouldering Erdoğan–Gülen alliance combusted in December 2013, when a Turkish police investigation revealed a huge corruption scandal with all the ingredients of a Hollywood thriller. At its heart was a series of gold deals between Turkey and Iran that had helped Tehran evade US sanctions. A Turkish-Iranian gold dealer called Reza Zarrab had oiled the transactions with bribes to people in high places in Turkey – Rolex watches, primarily, and cash stuffed in shoe boxes. Turkey’s state-owned Halkbank was implicated, as were the sons of Erdoğan and four of his ministers.
Turkey still crackled with the scent of uprising at the time: only seven months had passed since Gezi. As the intrigue grew, Istanbul exploded again into a riot of Molotov cocktails and tear gas. Graffiti covered the streets: Thieves everywhere, it read. I have never been tear-gassed so badly as I was during those protests of December 2013, nor seen demonstrators in Istanbul so intent on causing maximum damage. On İstiklal, the mile-long pedestrianised shopping street that runs through the heart of the city centre, they used fireworks as weapons and tore up cobblestones from the side streets to lob at the police – I saw one unfortunate onlooker take a glancing blow to the back of his head. Others used shop frontages and roadworks signs to build flaming necklaces of barricades along the street. When the police mounted their fight-back, it was savage. First they sent water cannon down İstiklal to douse the fires, then they used tear gas and smoke grenades, and then in the fug of panic and smog they fired rubber bullets into the crowd and down the narrow side streets where everyone was escaping.
I barged into a bar with around twenty others in a scrambled attempt to avoid being hit. Thinking I had made it to safety, I started to relax and even thought about getting a beer as the chaos rumbled on outside. Then a fresh tear-gas canister landed right outside the window and its fumes leaked in through the side of the panes. Like everyone else I tried to escape the acrid cloud by running up to the next floor, but soon the entire place was filled with gas. Choking and almost vomiting, I dashed back out into the narrow street where the police were still firing rounds of rubber bullets and ran blindly, somehow making it to the other end and out onto the wide Tarlabaşı boulevard, haunt of Kurdish mobsters and transsexual prostitutes. Finally back in fresh air, I collapsed onto the kerb and heaved deep breaths as a kind shop owner passed me some water and gave me milk to splash on my burning face. The only good thing about tear gas is that its effects wear off almost as soon as you get away from it, leaving you feeling ridiculous for being so sure that you were about to drown in your own fluids only moments earlier.
That night, it looked as if the government might fall, but everyone knew the scandal was not all it seemed. There was little doubt among the Turks on the streets that Gülenist police chiefs had organised the investigation, as true as its substance might be. Even at the height of the protests, those taking part knew what might happen.
‘We fear that we may be seen as acting with the Gülenists,’ one young woman who had joined the protests told me. ‘Actually, we want the people of Turkey to have the power.’
Within days Erdoğan had accused Gülen of orchestrating the investigation in a bid to topple his government. Hundreds of high-ranking police officers were sacked, the case files were closed, and Erdoğan clung on to power by his fingernails. His party would never be the same again. In the days following the scandal, eight AKP deputies who raised their voices in protest at the way it had been handled by the government resigned from the party under threat of expulsion.
Haluk Özdalga, who had crossed the floor from the CHP to the AKP in 2007, was one of them. ‘At that time [in December 2013], I had already begun considering to part ways with the AKP … I spoke out almost as soon as the graft case became public, even before the government made its position clear on the issue. There was credible evidence of graft against four ministers, so they must resign and be given a fair trial, and we all get to know if they are innocent or guilty. The party, after some deliberations, instead decided to avoid a legal process, and took a politically motivated vote in the parliament to sweep the case under the carpet.’
Once he had re-entrenched his power, Erdoğan moved into all-out assault mode against the Gülenists. First, he ordered their network of private schools, which had been some of the most high-performing in Turkey, to be closed. Then the courts started targeting businessmen with links to the movement. One of the first was Akın İpek. His conglomerate, Koza İpek, was the umbrella for twenty-two companies spanning media, education, mining, tourism and air travel. In its stable was not only the halal Angels Resort in Marmaris, but also the Bugün newspaper and Kanaltürk television channel – both of them opposition voices.
In September 2015 the Turkish government opened an investigation into İpek and his links with the Gülenists. There were certainly strong signs that he had been involved with the movement, although he denied ever having bankrolled it in return for leg-ups for his businesses. Up until late 2012, İpek had still been granted private audiences with Erdoğan, although they had been growing increasingly frosty – in the last, according to İpek, the fuming prime minister read out a critical Bugün column to his face. Now, İpek found himself the first victim of the war. The private university he had set up was closed down, and his brother and several other relatives were arrested while İpek himself fled into exile in London. In November 2015, three days before parliamentary elections, the courts seized his company and its $7 billion worth of assets. In the pro-government press İpek was accused of plotting alongside Gülen to unseat Erdoğan, and in one particularly unconvincing piece of joining the Freemasons in London. After a convoluted chain of emails with a man who appeared to be İpek’s assistant, I finally managed to get him to answer some written questions in March 2016.
‘In my whole life, I have never even committed a traffic offence,’ İpek told me. ‘We are a loving family who only helped poor people. The reason the government is attacking me is that I refuse to be part of the pro-government media. This is not about the Gülen movement. [The government] created two choices: you are with them, or against them.’
The next big name to fall was the Zaman newspaper – the unofficial mouthpiece of the Gülen movement, and the biggest-selling title on Turkey’s newsstands. It had been a consistent voice of support to Erdoğan, even featuring his advisers as guest column writers, until the December 2013 graft scandal when it turned into a consistent voice of opposition.
In March 2016 the courts ordered the takeover of Feza, Zaman’s parent company. Police officers entered the newsroom, detained the editor and chief columnist, and then looked over the remaining journalists’ shoulders as they typed their stories. The editorial board was sacked and replaced with caretakers who tossed away those stories anyway, and instead filled the paper with pro-government pieces apparently written in the newsroom of government-supporting Sabah. The last edition of Zaman sent to print, in the hours after the court ordered the takeover but before the police raid, featured a defiant front page declaring a ‘shameful day for free press in Turkey’. A day later, the front page bore a photo of Erdoğan and a story about how he was to lay the final stone on Istanbul’s controversial third bridge project, under the headline, EXCITEMENT BUILDS FOR HISTORIC BRIDGE.
‘It is like the paper died on Friday night and was resurrected in a different body on Sunday morning,’ Zaman’s foreign editor, Mustafa Edip Yılmaz, told me a week into the new regime. ‘This feels like the worst time in the history of the Turkish republic for freedom of expression. I have never seen in my life violations as bad as they are today.’
The paper’s new direction hit its bottom line immediately. Within a week, its circulation dropped from 650,000 a day to 6,000.
Since then, and particularly in the wake of the 2016 coup attempt, Turkey’s media has been scythed. Almost two hundred media outlets – some of them Gülenist but others Kurdish, leftist or just critical – have been closed down by government decree. Aydın Doğan, a moderately independent media baron who owned CNN Türk, Hürriyet and the Doğan News Agency, finally gave up after years of government pressure and sold his titles to a pro-Erdoğan conglomerate in April 2018. All in, 319 journalists have been arrested since the 2016 coup attempt and more than 80 are currently behind bars – the highest number of any country in the world.
For fifteen months journalist Ahmet şık was one of them. His book, The Imam’s Army, revealed the Gülenists’ infiltrations into the Turkish state and led to his first arrest in 2011. Back then, in the era before the alliance between Erdoğan and Gülen broke down, the Gülenist-dominated courts accused him of being a Kemalist trying to overthrow the government. Now, in the post-alliance era, a justice system declawed by Erdoğan is charging him with links to the Gülenists and the PKK. şık was arrested in December 2016. In April 2018 he was convicted of ‘assisting’ banned terrorist groups, and handed a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence, suspended pending appeal.
With Turkey’s press castrated and the Gülenists in flight, it would take four years and an unlikely hero to bust open the truth about what had really happened in Turkey in December 2013.
When Adam Klasfeld opened the docket on his desk in March 2016, distant bells of recognition sounded in his head. This New York court reporter was used to covering cases that resonated outside the United States. In his decade working at the Southern District New York courthouse, one of the city’s federal courts, he had watched villagers from the Ecuadorian Amazon try to sue one of the world’s largest oil companies, while down in Maryland he had covered the enthralling progress of the military court martial against soldier-turned-WikiLeaker Chelsea Manning. He had visited Guantánamo, where he chipped away at the extent of the CIA’s use of torture against terrorism suspects held there. The painstaking, often tedious work of his day job bore fruit in the satisfaction he got from knowing that he was often the first on to something big. The newspaper correspondents would turn up at the end of the major trials, just in time for the denouement, but he was always there from the start. Often, he would be the one to turn everyone’s attention to the smoking gun that had just been revealed in the courtroom – the leaked document, the taped conversation, the killer testimony.
The case of Reza Zarrab was clearly going to be a juicy one – though not for the reasons Klasfeld first assumed.
‘Back when it began, obviously the 2016 US presidential election campaign was going on [and] I was looking at it through a US-based lens,’ Klasfeld tells me down the phone one evening in his rapid-fire New York accent. It is the second week of 2018, and the US east coast is being lashed by blizzards and winds that the media has branded ‘bomb cyclones’. US President Donald Trump is battling his own storm: an explosive new book detailing the chaos at the heart of his administration. Klasfeld is huddled in a cubicle on the top floor of the courthouse, sipping his morning coffee from a novelty mug that reads Someone at the Pentagon loves me, and preparing for his next job covering a terrorism case.
‘When it really started getting attention was when Trump’s allies started being on retainer for Zarrab, including Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor, including Michael Mukasey, a former US attorney general, a very influential Republican,’ he says. ‘But the gravity of the case was a very slow dawning, I think. I didn’t realise just how important this case was for the millions of people in Turkey.’
Reza Zarrab: the gold dealer at the centre of the allegations of sanctions-busting, and the embarrassment who Erdoğan hoped had gone away.
Zarrab had continued his high-rolling life in Istanbul as Erdoğan’s war against the Gülenists escalated after December 2013. He was often pictured dining in high-end restaurants with his Turkish pop star wife, with whom he had a daughter. They lived in a luxury villa on the shore of the Bosphorus, and kept seven yachts and a light aircraft. His friendship with Erdoğan endured. Zarrab had donated almost $5 million to a charity set up by Erdoğan’s wife, Emine, and received an award for it as a mark of thanks. Erdoğan himself referred to Zarrab as ‘a great philanthropist’. In Turkey, amid the growing crackdown on the Gülen-linked media, few journalists dared report on the now-closed corruption case lest they be labelled Gülenists themselves.
But in March 2016 Zarrab, for reasons unknown and hotly debated, decided to take his family to Disneyland in Orlando, Florida. He must have known it was a risky move – the case may have been closed in Turkey, but there was nothing stopping the US authorities detaining and charging him as soon as he landed in Miami. That is exactly what happened. He was arrested, and an indictment against him was prepared by Preet Bharara, an attorney known for his cases against Wall Street fraudsters in the courthouse that Adam Klasfeld covers. Also named as defendants in the document were four Halkbank executives and Mehmet Zafer Çağlayan, Turkey’s economy minister at the time of the December 2013 corruption scandal and still a serving AKP member of parliament in March 2016.
Bharara’s indictment made few bones about the links between Zarrab and Erdoğan’s government. ‘High ranking government officials in Iran and Turkey participated in and protected this scheme,’ it reads. ‘Some officials received bribes worth tens of millions of dollars paid from the proceeds of the scheme so that they would promote the scheme, protect the participants, and help to shield the scheme from the scrutiny of US regulators.’
Çağlayan, the former economy minister, was accused of taking bribes in cash and jewellery totalling tens of millions of dollars for his role in concealing Zarrab’s transactions from the regulators. Back in Turkey, the pro-government press did a U-turn on fallen hero Zarrab, accusing him of links to Gülen. Erdoğan, though, took a special interest in his plight. While in New York in September 2016 he met with US Vice-President Joe Biden and lobbied for Zarrab’s release. A month later, the Turkish justice minister Bekir Bozdağ – a close ally of Erdoğan’s – flew to meet US attorney general Loretta E. Lynch to do the same. Phone calls from Erdoğan to President Barack Obama followed over the winter of 2016.
When Donald Trump won the White House in November 2016, Erdoğan believed that he could build a relationship with the new US president – they had so much in common, after all. Despite Trump’s vitriol against Muslims and immigrants, the pro-Erdoğan press had nothing bad to say about him between the election and his inauguration. ‘We can work with him,’ one government official told me. Behind the scenes, Erdoğan and his people had started to lobby Trump and his people on the Zarrab case. It initially appeared to be bearing fruit. In March 2017, a year after Zarrab’s arrest, Trump fired Preet Bharara, the attorney who had filed the indictment. In the same month, Zarrab hired a new legal team including Giuliani and Mukasey, both men with strong links to the Trump administration. There were reports that Erdoğan had even tried to offer a prisoner exchange deal with the US to secure Zarrab’s return to Turkey.
But in October 2017, a month before the trial was due to start, Zarrab disappeared. The Turkish foreign ministry found itself unable to contact him at the federal prison where he had been held. The Turkish press speculated that he was being held hostage by the American government. In reality, Zarrab had struck a deal: he pleaded guilty to the charges against him, and agreed to turn witness against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, one of the Halkbank executives named in the indictment. Zarrab took the stand on 29 November 2017 to deliver an explosive testimony fingering Atilla and the other Halkbank executives, and claiming that Erdoğan and his former economy minister, Ali Babacan, had personally signed off on the scheme.
Klasfeld knew little of the building anticipation for the Zarrab case in Turkey when he started live-tweeting the trial, nor of its potential ramifications in Ankara. But within minutes, he was inundated with notifications of new followers.
‘It was instantaneous, once I just made it known that I would be live-tweeting the case,’ he says, still overawed by what happened next. ‘That was retweeted by a lot of the Turkey watchers in the US who follow me. So that got some attention in Turkey and then it just happened. Within minutes. Thousands and thousands of people continuously started following.’
The names of Klasfeld’s new audience were flecked with strange diacritics and often seemed unpronounceable. But otherwise, he found he had a lot in common with this growing group of Turks who were hanging on his every tweeted word from the courtroom. Many were highly educated and spoke great English. Some of them started translating his tweets into Turkish so that those who were not English speakers could follow too. Lots cracked Turkish witticisms – and where a lesser reporter might have stuck solely to the job at hand in the courtroom, Klasfeld fired some jokes back. He even learnt a few words of Turkish, and started opening each day’s tweets with Günaydın [good morning] from New York.
‘When I tweeted that I was going out to lunch, people would send me pictures of Turkish food and recommend that I eat it. I would get a lot of things like, “Visit Turkey! But just not yet”,’ he says. ‘Imagine thousands of people arriving at your front doorstep who largely speak another language and are being very kind to you. You become a little interested, more than a little interested, especially if they’re as fascinating as the Turkish people and Turkish country.’
And amid the growing warmth and humour of these exchanges, Klasfeld realised something: he had become the go-to reporter for a news-starved country that he had never even visited. With Turkey’s pro-government media channels all bellowing that the trial was a Gülenist plot, and the battered opposition media barely brave enough by this point to counter that claim, Turks were consuming Klasfeld’s hard facts like a bone-dry sponge soaks up water.
‘People wanted to know everything. They wanted to know how many audio recordings there were, what was on those recordings. I knew that it was a reckoning over the 2013 corruption scandal,’ he says. ‘I’ve never had quite the same experience, to have so many followers and so much interest in what I’m tweeting. I took this to be the hunger for information, that’s what it was. My impression was that there is this tremendous hunger for information that relates to the Turkish government and relates to their future and their history.’
At four o’clock in the afternoon on New Year’s Eve 2017 in New York – as the clock was striking midnight in Turkey – Klasfeld raised a glass of rakı with his American friends to toast his new friends on the other side of the world. Three days later, the jury found Atilla guilty on five of the six counts against him.