People had been warning that it was coming – though rarely openly, and not in so many words.
‘This is coup shit,’ friends told me as we spoke about the tumult that was spreading across Turkey like cancer throughout 2015 and the first half of 2016 – the refugee crisis, the breakdown of the PKK peace process, and then the terror attacks. First there was the dustbin bomb in Diyarbakır in June 2015, then a month later the suicide bomber in Suruç. In October 2015 came the deadliest terror attack in the history of the Turkish republic – 109 people blown apart by two suicide bombers in the heart of Ankara during a peace rally. Then the carnage reached Istanbul. One bomber blew himself up next to a group of German tourists outside the Blue Mosque in January 2016, and another two months later next to an Israeli group on İstiklal, the grand boulevard running through the heart of the city. In June two men blasted their way into Atatürk airport with assault rifles and then detonated their explosive packs. All in, the terror attacks left more than two hundred dead in the space of thirteen months: to people whose lives are ruled by opaque forces, these things are never unlinked. Each of Turkey’s previous coups had been preceded by similar chaos.
Two people were bold enough to say what everyone was thinking: Mehmet and Ahmet Altan, renowned journalists and brothers. When they appeared on the panel of a chat show on the evening of 14 July 2016, they spoke about the likelihood of the army again intervening in Turkish politics, as it had so many times before.
‘Whatever the developments were that lead to military coups in Turkey, by making the same decisions, Erdoğan is paving the same path,’ Ahmet Altan said.
‘It is not certain when it will take its hand out of the bag and how it will take its hand out of the bag,’ Mehmet added.
A day later they were proved right. But this time the coup would be different. The generals would come out the losers and by the end of Turkey’s darkest night, Erdoğan’s power would be galvanised further. And the Altan brothers, instead of being lauded for their foresight and plain speaking, would find themselves accused of sending subliminal messages to rally the coup-makers. They were both sentenced to life imprisonment. Though their convictions have since been overturned, Ahmet Altan remains behind bars.
The coup attempt of 15 July 2016 lasted a little over twelve hours and played out in real time on social media and live television. There could have been no better backdrop for the tanks and bullets than the bridge over the Bosphorus, nor a more obliging set of protagonists than the Turks who rushed out to defend Erdoğan against the soldiers. As the newspapers went to press on Friday night it seemed that the coup was succeeding: the generals had taken over state television and Erdoğan’s whereabouts were unknown. But by the time the first editions were on the newsstands the next morning, the soldiers had been kicked back to their barracks and Erdoğan was addressing crowds of his cheering supporters outside Istanbul’s Atatürk airport.
In the hours in between, the two sides of Turkey collided in a sweaty tangle of rumours, gunfire and fear, as a putsch from a different era met the resistance of 2016. Istanbul shops sold out of bottled water and cigarettes while F-16 fighter jets broke the sound barrier above them, shattering windows in apartment blocks and setting the street dogs howling. The mosques sounded an eerie funeral prayer in the witching hour as soldiers kicked in the doors of television news studios and pulled the presenters off-air. While the devout rushed into the streets wielding wooden planks and murmuring prayers, the bohemians who had been drinking in Istanbul’s hipster bars retreated back into their homes. It was a coup planned via WhatsApp but announced in a message on state television:
Valuable citizens of the Republic of Turkey … The President and the government with heedlessness, heresy and betrayal are undermining fundamental rights and freedoms based on the separation of powers. The indivisible unity of the nation and the state will eliminate the dangers faced by our Republic and ensure its survival.
By the time it was read out by a stunned blonde newsreader with a gun just off-camera levelled at her head, almost everyone had already switched to social media to find out what was really happening.
The real news was that, slowly, the balance was tipping away from the coup plotters. General Ümit Güler, the commander of the First Army, appeared live on the pro-Erdoğan channel A Haber and announced that the coup was merely a revolt from a small group within the ranks. The façade of a fait accompli started cracking. More generals joined Güler, declaring their loyalty to Erdoğan and swearing that the coup would be crushed. Then Erdoğan himself appeared, quashing the rumours that he had fled by private jet to Germany. Unlit, without make-up and appearing against a pale blue curtain reminiscent of a photobooth backdrop, the president spoke to his nation via Facetime, live from an undisclosed location. He looked old and terrified.
The studio cameras zoomed in on Erdoğan’s image on the phone screen, held in the manicured hand of a CNN Türk news anchor, and every channel still operating independently switched to the live feed. Having spent a good part of his presidency railing against social media and bringing court cases against those who used it to ridicule him, Erdoğan was now using it to save his own skin. His aides had spent a frantic hour trying to set up a traditional television link before turning to the twenty-first-century option, a press man later told me.
‘I urge the Turkish people to convene at public squares and airports. There is no power higher than the power of the people,’ Erdoğan said. ‘Let them do what they will at public squares and airports. The chain of command has been violated. This is a step by the lower ranks against their superiors.’
It was in that moment that Turkey’s cities turned into war zones, when the rattle of gunfire began echoing through the streets and the enraged masses steamed into battle. They poured into Taksim Square, onto the Bosphorus bridge, and crowded to the airports and government buildings. The coup plotters, unnerved, ordered their men to fire on the people. In Ankara, they attacked the intelligence headquarters with helicopters and bombed the parliament with F-16 jets. But on the streets, the soldiers who had parked their tanks only six hours earlier, full of assurances from their seniors that they would be taking charge of the country, now began to lose faith. They started to surrender as dawn broke, spilling out and shedding their guns on the tarmac before they threw their hands in the air. Victorious and furious, swinging belts and fists, the civilians set about the men in uniform. The soldiers looked no older than teenagers, frightened young boys wondering what on earth had gone wrong.
The death toll mounted through the morning hours, as bodies were cleared from the streets. The politicians held an emergency session in the bombed parliament. In Istanbul, Erdoğan addressed the crowds outside Atatürk airport.
‘They have pointed the people’s guns against the people,’ he said. ‘The president, whom fifty-two percent of the people brought to power, is in charge. This government, brought to power by the people, is in charge. They won’t succeed as long as we stand against them by risking everything. I have a message for Pennsylvania: You have engaged in enough treason against this nation. If you dare, come back to your country.’
The coup was over, and the battle for its narrative began. Journalists questioned the scale of the arrests and the speed with which blame was pinned on Fethullah Gülen. Other vital information emerged – that the Turkish intelligence services had received a tip-off about the imminent revolt as early as 2.45 p.m. on 15 July, a full seven hours before the first tanks rolled onto the Bosphorus bridge. Why had they not taken action to stop it, and what happened in those hours? If the government was so sure the officers behind the revolt were Gülenists, how had they been able to stay in their positions until now?
Turkey requested the imam’s extradition from the US less than twenty-four hours after the coup attempt began, even as the last rebellious soldiers were making their final stand in Ankara’s Genelkurmay.
The European Union and the US issued statements urging Erdoğan to be restrained in retribution. Three days on from the coup, 7,500 people had been arrested and more than 9,000 dismissed from their public sector jobs. Four days on, the total number of people sacked or sitting in a prison cell had hit 50,000.
On the streets the crowds called for hangings. In Taksim they held aloft nooses and signs: I˙dam istiyoruz! (We want the death penalty!). Erdoğan played their soundbite back to them as he spoke from stages across the city. ‘I don’t look at what Hans and George say. I look at what Ahmet, Mehmet, Hasan, Hüseyin, Ayşe, Fatma and Hatice say!’ he told the delirious hordes.
‘This stuff about the death penalty is rhetoric, I think,’ one Western diplomat in Istanbul told me as the fervour grew. ‘But we are watching Erdoğan closely. There is a danger he may become unhinged.’
I mingle with the throng in Taksim one humid evening as the sun is setting. Erdoğan has told people to stay on the streets to guard against unknown and fugitive coup plotters coming back for a second strike. I spot the flags of Libya, Palestine, Saudi Arabia and the three-starred banner of the Syrian rebels, all mingled with the fluttering, ubiquitous Turkish star and crescents. There are other placards too: Amrika 0 – Millet 1 (America 0 – The nation – 1), reads one. Anger at Gülen, whom everybody now accepts organised the coup, has flash-morphed into anger at the US, whom everybody accepts is sheltering him.
Some of the men here are flashing the hand gesture of the ultra-nationalists – thumb clamped up to the outstretched ring and middle fingers and index and little finger extended skywards to make the shape of a wolf’s head. Others let off huge coloured flares, and I fear a spark may catch the cheap synthetics of the flags and set the whole lot ablaze. There are chants of Allahu Akhbar, Tebkir, Bismillah – the war cries of the Islamists. I have heard them in protests across the Middle East, but never before in Turkey. All the fare gates are open on Istanbul’s public transport system so that the masses from the suburbs can travel in to mix with the elites from the inner districts – there are women in burkas next to teenage girls with bare shoulders. Three years ago this square was the scene of the Gezi Park sit-ins, when leftists and Kurds and football hooligans came together in the first mass show of opposition to Erdoğan. Now, it is the gathering place of his faithful.
The local council has set up a stage here, flanked by two screens and speakers. They blast the usual rota of Ottoman marching music and AKP anthems, but then a video starts rolling onscreen – a glossy CGI-enhanced short film. The chanting dies down as the crowd in Taksim watches. In the film, a grey and faceless assailant is cutting the chain on a flagpole, sending the Turkish flag plummeting towards the ground. Across the country Turks watch in horror as it casts a shadow over buildings, fields and sea. Then they start running – students, housewives, Kurdish farmers and fishermen – as Erdoğan’s sonorous voiceover reads the words of the national anthem. They throw themselves into the Bosphorus and start swimming, ants moving together as the camera takes in a swooping bird’s-eye from above. Finally all converge on the flagpole and make a human pyramid around it – bodies in a pile, each climbing on top of the other to reach higher. The young man at the top grabs the loose end of the chain and pauses for a second before he leaps off the tower of people, sacrificing himself for the nation. The flag is raised again, and the crowd goes wild around me. Then the screen fades to an image of Erdoğan, smiling and with his hand on his heart.
The film, Millet Eğilmez, Türkiye Yenilmez (The Nation Does Not Bend, Turkey Is Invincible), was made by Erol Olçok’s agency, Arter, for the AKP’s local election campaign in March 2014. Back then, it was banned on the grounds that a Turkish flag cannot be used in a political party’s advertisement.
The grey frontage of the Atatürk Cultural Centre, a modernist monolith that borders the north side of the square, looms up behind this ecstatic congregation in Taksim. The centre was built in the 1970s as an opera house and arts space, but within the space of only two decades its brutal lines already looked tired. Decommissioned in 2008, it was used as a base by the riot police during the Gezi protests. Until now, a picture of Atatürk has adorned the building’s frontage, flanked by two Turkish flags, but this banner has now been removed, to be replaced with a portrait of Erdoğan. When news of the switch flashes across social media it causes uproar, so much so that a few days later Atatürk is rehung. But Erdoğan stays up alongside him.
Four days after the coup, İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan’s spokesman and one of his most trusted aides, invites a group of foreign journalists to the Ottoman-era Yıldız Palace for a press briefing. It feels like weeks since I last saw my friends. Dominique, a correspondent with the Associated Press, is eight and a half months pregnant and went on maternity leave three hours before the coup attempt started. With the solid good humour I got to know when we worked together in Iraq amid Isis’s takeover and the 45-degree temperatures, she is now back at work and praying she won’t go into labour. Everyone else just looks exhausted.
Kalın has brought us here to give us the blow-by-blow account of Erdoğan’s escape from the coup-makers, and his quick recovery to overthrow the revolt. It’s a gripping tale that will make the pages of all our newspapers tomorrow:
‘Three helicopters were sent to Marmaris … a group of elite forces sent to kill the president and his family. Their orders were to bring him to Ankara, dead or alive. He left thirty minutes before they landed. Seven people were left at the hotel for security reasons; one was killed and another injured in the shootout. They were going room to room trying to find Erdoğan. When we found out about the attempt we mobilised our forces and agencies. The president made the calls on what should be done. When he saw the tanks and planes in Ankara he became aware of what was happening, and immediately decided to go to Istanbul. Once he landed safely at Atatürk airport, he coordinated everything from there.’
We scribble our notes as Kalın continues in his measured, perfect East Coast accent. This most loyal member of Erdoğan’s inner circle wrote his Ph.D. at Georgetown University. Unlike his boss, he bears the polished finish of a Western intellectual. But he is still an Erdoğan man.
‘It is important to remember what happened, to grasp it fully,’ he tells us. ‘You need to get the narrative right. We have seen some appear to be disappointed that the coup did not succeed. We have received strong international support, condemning the coup unequivocally. That is the way it should be. But when people start talking about how the law should be upheld, it sounds as if the coup didn’t happen!’
By now, Western leaders are looking on with concern. Federica Mogherini, the EU’s foreign policy chief, has reminded Erdoğan that Turkey is a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans the death penalty. A group of European foreign ministers and US Secretary of State John Kelly express public alarm at the talk of executions.
There are also rumours that a state of emergency is about to be imposed. When one of our group asks Kalın if these are true, the otherwise placid intellectual explodes.
‘This is like speaking to the US about the failure of its foreign policy the day after 9/11!’ Kalın booms. ‘We expelled this coup in the name of democracy. We got on the streets and shed our blood. You should all get your facts right!’
Three days later, parliament passes the state of emergency. It will last for three months, and allows the government to rule by decree. Those rulings can include shutting down businesses and other organisations, and sacking people from public sector jobs. Passports can be cancelled. Those arrested can be held for up to thirty days without charge, and in some cases detainees do not have the right to speak privately to their lawyer in case, for example, ‘crypto messages’ are passed back and forth. Those detained can have a ten-minute telephone conversation every fifteen days; their relatives must make an application if they want to visit them. The government has the right to impose curfews and ban rallies, and to censor any publication or broadcast it deems a threat to national security.
The ground at Silivri is parched to bone white. At plastic tables around the scrappy strip of cheap cafés outside the prison gates, men and women sit pale and silent. Most hold their heads in their hands. All wear the drab, modest clothes of the rural poor.
I linger around the back of the stalls so that the gendarmerie officers milling about the entrance won’t catch sight of me. They are nervous at first, these Turks who found themselves cast out of their own society in the space of one terrible evening, but they do begin to talk.
‘He started his military service on Thursday and on Friday there was the coup,’ says a woman from Diyarbakır. When she found out that her son had been arrested she got into her father’s battered old car and drove the 850 miles west to Silivri, this fortress on the edge of Istanbul.
‘He called me the next day,’ she continues. ‘He said an officer had sent his unit to the TRT headquarters, and then to Taksim Square. The next night he called again, and we’ve had two more calls from him since. The last call was from his lawyer’s phone – he was in the court – and he asked for 10,000 liras [for his work]. I sent my son to defend the country. If he hadn’t gone, they would have called him a traitor. But he went and he’s still a traitor. I have to lie to my other family members about where I am, what has happened.’
In the car park behind the cafés, şükriye and şükrü Esoğlu stretch out on the sleeping mats they have pulled from their car boot. They too have driven here from Turkey’s periphery: from Kilis, the town near the Syrian border that has taken in a great number of Syrian war refugees. Sükrü Esoğlu is a farm labourer on a day rate of 30 lira. They have no money for a hotel. They have heard nothing from their son, twenty-year-old Kadir.
‘He had been in the military one month,’ says şükriye, who still has traces of henna on her hands from the party they threw for Kadir before he left for his compulsory military service. The rich can buy their way out of it – the sons of Erdoğan have never served. But for poor boys like Kadir, it is non-negotiable. His family spent 700 lira to rent a local band for his leaving party, and all his friends and relatives collected money for him, to help supplement his wages. Still, he had run short – after around twenty days in Istanbul he had called home to ask for some more. His parents could only spare 50 lira – around £12 – but they sent it to him anyway.
‘Before he started his service he took a test to go in at a level above private, but he failed,’ says şükriye. ‘But he wanted to be in the army – he wanted to serve in the east, to defend Turkey against the terrorists. I wanted him to serve in the west because it’s safer. I was the one who thought Istanbul would be OK. He didn’t know that he could be among terrorists – no, no, no, no! He was so happy to be serving his country. It is impossible that he could have been involved.’
The Esoğlus watched the opening acts of the coup on the television, thinking it was a security alert. Then they went to bed, only to be woken again by the sala prayer blasting from the mosques. They assumed it was an attack by Isis, over the border from Syria just a couple of miles down the road. Then they caught a few words about a coup, and ran to the streets to join their neighbours. They stayed out as the fear turned to anger and defiance, and then finally to jubilation as they realised the revolt had failed. It was only three days later that they got a call from their son’s unit, telling them that he was in custody. Then the duty lawyer called to say that Kadir could be in prison for a long while.
This is the first time they have ever been to Istanbul. ‘The lawyer said our boy was cheated, that he was told it was a military exercise,’ says şükriye. ‘I have had a breakdown. I am using sedatives. I thought it would just be two or three days and then he would be out. But now my fear is getting bigger.’
In the gleaming hallways of the Çağlayan Justice Palace, Nazlı Tanburacı Altaç shuffles her papers and speaks in a low murmur, looking out for anyone who might be unhappy to see her talking to the press. Blonde, preened, in her twenties and sharply dressed, her world would never have collided with that of şükrü and şükriye Esoğlu had it not been for 15 July. As a young duty lawyer in this Istanbul courthouse – opened in 2011 and the biggest in Europe – it is her job to take on the cases that the more senior, better-paid advocates don’t want to. But for these clients, she feels an extra sense of commitment.
‘I’ve been here for forty-eight hours – everyone’s busy,’ Nazlı says. ‘We asked to see the prosecutor and talk with him about the trial but he didn’t respond because of his extreme workload.’
The courts are trying to process the ten and a half thousand now arrested and formally charged. But at the same time, the justice system itself is being purged. It was one of the strongholds of the Gülenists, the government says; so, one week on from the coup attempt, two thousand prosecutors and judges are among the tens of thousands already sacked from the bureaucracy.
Those who remain are working overtime. And a narrative is emerging from the jumble of testimonies given by the accused.
‘Four of my clients are military school students,’ Nazlı says. ‘They’re carefully chosen students who passed difficult physical and mental tests for higher level education. On the night of the coup they were in a camp in Yalova, a city close to Istanbul, and were taken to the bridge by their commanders at about eleven p.m.
‘The prosecutor asked them: “Didn’t you ask where were you going?” They said that they were told it was a drill, a military exercise. They did not know a thing about the coup. They had no electronic devices so no idea what was happening. They were wearing their full equipment and their guns – but that’s normal on an exercise. They saw the new bridge’ – the third over the Bosphorus, completed but not yet opened on the night of the coup – ‘and they were surprised. Then they saw Ataşehir’ – a high-rise district close to the centre of the Asian side of Istanbul – ‘and one of them asked where they were going. The commander told them to calm down.
‘They were taken to the bridge by a bus. Suddenly, at the bridge, the driver was shot and the bus crashed to a stop. After that they found themselves in the middle of the crossfire. One of them died in the bus – he was shot in the eye and died. My client told me: “It’s the first time I saw a dead body. His blood went under my tongue.”
‘There were people throwing stones at them and shaking the bus. They realised there was something very wrong. After a little while, the crowd made a human corridor for them to take them to the side of the road. They rushed to emergency lane. They say they weren’t assaulted or beaten, the crowd saved their lives. They were freed after their pleas. But prosecutors objected and now they’re arrested again.
‘Their families are having really hard times. Some of them can’t hear anything about their sons for days. There are some families who haven’t heard their voices for a week. Some of them call and ask me: “Could he be dead?”’
In the chaotic days and weeks immediately after the coup, some of Nazlı’s clients are released, only to be promptly arrested again. Others disappear into the prisons and no one is able to reach them.
On the outside, the blood lust leaks into the graveyards. The bodies of the 105 putschist soldiers killed during the revolt are to be buried in a ‘traitors’ cemetery’, a patch of ground on the edge of Istanbul that was being reserved for a new stray dog shelter. Major Mehmet Karabekir is the first to be interred. No prayers are said over his body as he is buried, and no headstone sunk into the freshly turned earth.
‘The families of the high-level coup plotters are even thinking of changing their names,’ says another lawyer, sitting outside the gates of Silivri. ‘They ask how their relatives are looking – I just lie and say they’re OK. When the government makes the public feel this way, some of them do not even want to collect the bodies of their relatives. People are deleting their WhatsApp conversations, their Facebook posts. It’s fear. It started straight after that sala call to prayer on the coup night– I saw that people’s mentalities are changing.’
How do you spot a Gülenist? The government says there are ways. Even if they failed for years to notice them in the top ranks of their military and judiciary, they are sure about how to recognise them now. In the weeks following the coup attempt, conspiracy theories feed into news reports, which are then repeated by the politicians and become facts.
First, they claim that the imam in Pennsylvania has been issuing dollar bills to his followers, all of them bearing serial numbers that start with the letter F. The evidence? Eight days after the coup, a correspondent for the state mouthpiece Anadolu news agency reports that the police have found such bank notes on many of the Gülenist suspects they have arrested. Then the politicians take up the thread. Bekir Bozdağ, the justice minister, tells A Haber news: ‘There is no doubt that this one-dollar bill has some important function within the Gülenist terror organisation. Prosecutors are asking as they investigate what these are. What does this mean? Why are they being carried? Does it signify a hierarchy to them? Is it some sort of ID that identifies them to one another?’
Other pro-government newspapers and sources also speculate. Notes with different serial letters have also allegedly been found – so each letter must refer to a rank. Gülen himself blessed the notes before distributing them to his followers, one columnist claims. Quickly, the dollar bill becomes grounds enough on its own for arrest, rather than a bit of coincidental evidence. One of the first to be picked up is NASA scientist Serkan Gölge, who is questioned by police acting on a tip-off a week after the coup attempt. The officers find a single dollar bill in a box in his brother’s bedroom. In February 2018, after nineteen months in prison awaiting trial, he is found guilty on terrorism charges and sentenced to seven and a half years in prison.
But how many people have single dollar bills in their houses? I do – I keep a stack of them for when I’m travelling. It’s small change in the world’s most recognised currency. The bills are lying on top of my writing desk when my landlord comes to pick up my rent money two weeks after the coup. I had always thought of him as one of my allies in Istanbul, a flamboyantly camp guy who greets me with a kiss on each cheek every time we meet. But as he spots the notes he turns round and looks me in the eye.
‘Aaaaah, Gülenist!’ he says, and then tempers it with a cheerful chuckle.
I don’t think he’s serious, but I am spooked. That evening, in the first of many acts that, to an outside observer, might suggest I have lost my mind, I rip the notes into tiny pieces and flush them down the toilet.
Then there are the cheap mass-produced T-shirts from a Turkish chain store with the word HERO printed across the front. One of the coup suspects wears one during his first court hearing and Sabah newspaper decides it is a signal from Gülen: ‘Hero’ standing for Hoca Efendi Razı Olsun (may the teacher – Gülen – bless you). Erdoğan declares that the defendants must all wear brown overalls in the courtroom from now on. Out on the streets, the police start detaining ordinary Turks who are wearing the shirts. Within a few days, more than thirty people have been hauled in.
But despite such ham-fisted, so-called ‘signals’ the Gülenists are secretive, the government officials tell us. They are clever. They are cunning. They hide themselves, drink alcohol and, if they are women, go uncovered so they can pass as secularists. They have made such good work of concealing their true identities that anyone could belong to the movement.
Turks’ hatred for the Gülenists is real: the Gülenists tried to take over the country for their own gain, then they turned the state’s weapons against its citizens. They must be exposed and, if they are so adept at hiding themselves, everyone must be a suspect. Friends turn against each other, husbands inform on wives. There are several reports in the newspapers of divorce cases in which Gülenist sympathies are cited. A pregnant woman is attacked in Istanbul by a group who shout that she is wearing revealing clothes, so she must be a Gülenist. ‘They wanted to lynch me,’ she says.
For those under the state’s microscope, the ones fired from their jobs or left behind when their partner is arrested, the accusations infect like leprosy. In the fashionable districts of Istanbul you might still walk the streets and not realise that a huge purge is leaching the heart out of this country. But I do. Almost every evening and weekend in the year after the coup, once I have filed my stories for the next day’s paper, I travel out on the metrobus lines to the nondescript, unglamorous parts of the city.
There, I meet the outcasts. I don’t know if they are Gülenists or not, but I do know that they are being judged and punished without trial. Almost every day in that first year of the purge, Turks working in the public sector turn to the country’s legal circular, the Official Gazette, to see if their names have been added to the latest lists of dismissals.
‘There were no warnings, no investigations,’ a low-ranking civil servant called Ahmet who has spent his career working in a provincial city hall tells me. ‘I swear I was the best person working in my office. My manager asked several times to have me back. I found my name in the Official Gazette and I was told to take my personal belongings from the office. No letter, no signature, nothing. They kicked me to the kerb. The reason they said is that I am working with terrorist groups – but they didn’t even say which one, PKK or Gülenists. I had a lot of friends who are opponents of the AKP and I am an opponent too, of course.’
Ahmet’s family and friends have turned their backs on him – only the ones who have also been purged still pick up the phone. To fill his empty days he runs through the reasons he might have been targeted, again and again and again. It cannot only be his opposition to the government, he is sure. The most likely explanation is that he once had an account with Bank Asya – a now-closed Gülenist business.
‘I started a postgraduate degree in January 2014 at a state university, and they wanted me to have a Bank Asya account. I wish I had not started that course. I have lost my job, my passport, my friends, my relatives. I lost my future. I am hopeless. All I want is my passport so I can leave this country.’
Another public servant, Mehmet, walked into his office two weeks after the coup attempt to find the police waiting for him. His manager handed him an envelope containing a letter with a single sentence: ‘You have been suspended due to the ongoing investigation.’
‘I had to sign it, and I thought of not doing it,’ Mehmet says. ‘I had long known that irrational steps were being taken. I thought that this problem could not be solved by these people, so I signed it. Then I found out that there was a detention order in my name. We went down to my office along with the police. They searched the bookcase and the desk, and took the computer to investigate further. After that, we went to my house. They took my communication devices, and I was taken to a sports hall together with almost a hundred people.’
Twenty-six days later he was taken into the chaotic courthouse. He still had not been told what he was accused of. The prosecutor began reading out some of his social media posts. Still he did not say what the charges were.
‘I asked in particular if there had been any official complaints about me, and what I was being accused of. The prosecutor replied briefly: “We’re looking into it.” I couldn’t ask out loud why I had been detained for twenty-five days. I knew the answer: The conditions of the state of emergency, and of course, the court’s workload.’
Mehmet was released from court, but ordered to sign in at an Istanbul police station twice a week. Days later, a decree published in the Official Gazette declared that he was formally dismissed from his job. Now he has discovered that he is accused of being a member of a terrorist organisation, and awaits trial. With 77,524 people having been formally charged in connection with the coup attempt as of April 2018 and almost twice that number detained, he will likely be waiting for years, if not decades. His appeal to the constitutional court has gone unanswered. The administrative court rejected it because of the state of emergency. Neither has the court of appeals replied. So, like 25,000 others caught up in the purge, he decided to take his case to the European Court of Human Rights, confident that he would at least get justice outside Turkey. The ECHR has said it can only take on cases once they have been exhausted in the domestic courts. And so Mehmet, like all the others, is stuck in a Kafka-esque loop between a justice system in meltdown, a toothless international court, and a president bent on revenge.
Some of the purged find unexpected ways of coping. Fatma, a woman with flawless English whom I meet with her bouncy ten-year-old daughter, says she started wearing the headscarf only after she and her husband were dismissed. The political connotations were not lost on her.
‘Recently I started wearing the hijab – it was a hard decision. After my dismissal I started to study the Qur’an again. I’m from a secular family – it’s very hard to explain this decision. They don’t have religious roots, but they are culturally conservative, from Anatolia. They like Atatürk, my mum is uncovered, but she supports Erdoğan. But we all have prejudices in this country. People are more separatist now. Some support the hijab, others think it is politically abused. When I was first trying it, I tried different styles. I thought I looked too much like an AKP supporter. I wanted to shout that I am not an AKP supporter, I just believe in God. We have an Islamic government, but it is more difficult to practise your beliefs when you don’t belong. My uncles don’t know yet, but I think their reactions will be related to the government: “You became an Erdoğanist.”’
She found her name on the suspension list at her workplace the Tuesday after the coup attempt – the same day I sat in Yıldız Palace listening to İbrahim Kalın telling us not to question the crackdown. Six weeks later she was fully dismissed.
‘When I was dismissed only a few people called me. They were thinking two things: either that I must have some relationship with the Gülenists, or they didn’t care about that but didn’t want to lose their jobs. That doesn’t surprise me, because people are very afraid of something. Former friends don’t call. The people who are still in contact are in the same situation. This is very normal, because people will say, “Look! They have contacts!” They have made us like this. Us versus them – it is something they buy very easily.’
In early 2017 the European Union prepared an intelligence report about the coup and the subsequent purge. The report states that Gülenists were at the core of the coup attempt, but also that the Turkish government appears to have prepared a list of people it wanted to sack before the coup took place, and which also included civil activists who had been involved with Gezi Park. The events of 15 July have handed Erdoğan the chance to enact it. The report ends:
AKP will try to derive benefit from the attempted coup and it may even strengthen as a result of that. In domestic politics AKP will settle scores with its one and only real rival and parallel with this in its international ties it tries to demonstrate that it is still strong in order to create a full presidential system.
Back in Turkey, millions might be thinking the same, but to suggest such a thing would be tantamount to treason. ‘Thousands of people in prison, thousands fired, and thousands are not talking about these things,’ one woman who lost her own job and whose husband had been arrested shortly after the coup tells me in July 2017. ‘I can’t believe my people, my Turkish people actually. I can understand Erdoğan because he is a dictator. But I can’t understand why Turkish people are not talking. I read about the histories of Iran, Iraq, Syria. I never thought that Turkey could one day be like them.’