From the deck of a pleasure boat cruising down the Bosphorus, the white house looks like any of the old Istanbul mansions on the water. Intricate wooden trellis-work frames its windows and gables, and its terrace doubles as a private jetty. Peer through its windows and you might catch a glimpse of serious twenty-somethings hammering at their computers, or suited men and headscarved women locked in animated discussion around the conference table. Visitors enter through a small doorway on the other side of the building, next to a busy main road. There is little to suggest what is housed here, other than the security camera looming over the doorbell.
Erdoğan’s daughter is a regular visitor to the white house. So too are several of his closest party allies, and although the president himself wouldn’t be so indiscreet as to be seen here in person, his name and spirit is ever-present in its high-ceilinged rooms. Because this mansion on the water, built as a summer retreat for an elite Ottoman family before Istanbul swelled up and swallowed it, is the nerve centre of a huge propaganda operation. From within these walls a prime minister has been toppled, British politicians have been courted, and a clique of ambitious young men and women have secured their positions as the most powerful political influencers in Turkey.
The Bosphorus Centre for Global Affairs, the organisation that rents out the white house, markets itself as a think tank, its mission to ‘bring different groups of society together to address national and international political, social, cultural and economic issues and come up with sustainable solutions’. It hosts foreign journalists and politicians at roundtables together with Turkish government figures, and runs a plethora of ‘fact-checking’ websites and social media accounts in Turkish and English which, it says, aim to push back the morass of fake and biased news about Turkey – and Erdoğan – in the international press. There was plenty for the centre to sink its teeth into when it opened in late 2015.
‘I had started catching lies on social media and fact-checking during Gezi,’ said Fırat Erez, who was headhunted for a job at the Bosphorus Centre. Erez’s background might suggest that he would have taken the side of the protesters during that spring of demonstrations against Erdoğan’s government in 2013: he is an artist, a self-described atheist, and an old communist who has mellowed into liberalism in middle age. The living room-cum-studio of his house in a ramshackle old Roma neighbourhood of Istanbul is packed with flea market artefacts, and a sketch of a female nude is pinned to the fridge. But it was the conservative, Islamist Erdoğan who Erez ended up siding with during Gezi.
‘At that time I saw that Erdoğan’s government was opening up Turkey to the West, ending torture, enlarging our freedoms,’ he said. ‘They had improved transparency, started a peace process with the PKK. And meanwhile they were also under attack from all the rotten old ideologies – Kemalism, socialism. I supported Gezi when it was about saving the trees in the park. But then it turned into a kind of attack on the government, a coup or an uprising.’
As Erdoğan sent the riot police into Taksim, the Gezi protesters turned to social media to spread their message to the world. Turkey’s television channels shut them out; even the independent CNN Türk broadcast a documentary about penguins as Gezi Park erupted in a swirl of tear gas. But falsehoods quickly crept into the ungoverned internet space. Some Gezi protesters claimed that the government had deployed Agent Orange in the heart of Istanbul. Others said that the cops were deliberately shooting to kill protesters. Erez started using his Twitter feed to argue back.
‘And the leftists crucified me,’ he said. ‘All politics in Turkey is so tribal. I became estranged from my own friends, and after Gezi I started to feel that I am pro-AKP.’
After Gezi, Erez approached local AKP officials with the idea of setting up a fact-checking project. He landed gigs writing columns for Karar, an Islamist-leaning newspaper, and often appeared on state television as an analyst. When the Kurdish peace process collapsed, Erez turned to deconstructing the disinformation coming from the PKK’s social media propagandists. His first score came when he revealed that an apparent police special forces officer, who the guerrillas claimed they had captured and paraded on camera, was actually a homeless man from the eastern city of Elazığ, known locally as Crazy Ersin. Kurds on Twitter rounded on Erez and accused him of carrying out psy-ops for Turkish intelligence. Then, in September 2015, he received a phone call from Hilâl Kaplan, a columnist at Sabah, a rabidly pro-Erdoğan newspaper.
Sabah has the look of a downmarket tabloid and a reported circulation of more than 300,000 – the biggest on the newsstands. Its sensationalist headlines are filled with outrage at whomever it has decided are Turkey’s enemies of the today. Meanwhile, Daily Sabah – its English-language counterpart – models itself on a dry US broadsheet with a sensible typeface and lots of text. It boasts a circulation of just 7,000, but presidential advisers and AKP politicians flock to pen opinion pieces in its pages. The articles here may be more erudite than their Turkish-language cousins, but they pursue the same themes – foreign meddling, domestic plots, and praise for the man who is battling both.
Hilâl Kaplan is Sabah’s star writer, a headscarved woman from the conservative fringes who made it to Istanbul’s prestigious Bilgi and Boğaziçi (Bosphorus) universities. In 2004, when she started her first degree, the headscarf was still banned in the halls of learning. So too was the Islamic beard, as sported by Soheyb Öğüt – her fellow student and the man she would later marry. Kaplan had grown up in Fatih, Istanbul’s ultra-conservative inner district where women roam in black shawls with only their eyes and noses peeping through. But when she walked the smart streets around her colleges, people would stare at her colourful headscarf, teamed with a modest fitted coat – the outfit that felt so modern in Fatih – and whisper. In class she covered her headscarf with a hat. Once, in the street, a drunk tried to pull the scarf off her head. It was an attitude she had lived with all her life; when she was five or six years old, she heard a Turkish man telling her covered mother to ‘Go back to Iran.’
At university Kaplan joined the Genç Siviller (Young Civilians), a small activist group that pulled social liberals together with conservative Muslims in an alliance against the Kemalists. They wanted Turkey to democratise by breaking free of its secularist dogma and military custodianship, and the headscarf was high on their agenda. Kaplan turned it into a feminist issue, telling an online news outlet in 2010:
I believe it’s wrong to associate taking off your headscarf with freedom. It’s said that taking off your headscarf is liberating for a woman. However, there is a lot of media related propaganda against women who are not covered. There are moulds that are hard to fill, such as the weight and height women should be. Sadly these are set from a man’s point of view and are commodifying women. This situation is increasing the amount of women suffering from conditions such as anorexia and bulimia. There are also millions of women who are having plastic surgery in order to free themselves from societies, which is ruled from a male point of view, comments etc … Whether she is covered or not, every woman tries to be free.
Kaplan struck an eye-catching note on the issues: personally pious, socially liberal. Religious classes in schools should be available but optional, she argued. She said her biggest inspiration was Hrant Dink, a Turkish-Armenian journalist murdered in 2007, most believe for his outspoken work on the massacres and deportations of Anatolian Christians by Turkish and Kurdish soldiers in 1915.
In 2008, in power for six years and having defeated the Kemalists over the nomination of Gül as president, the AKP started moving to lift the headscarf ban in the universities. In his speech to a party congress that year, Erdoğan hit the same note as Kaplan: ‘What do they say – only citizens without headscarves can be secular? They are making a mistake falling into such segregation. This is a society of those, with and without headscarves, who support a democratic, secular social law state.’
Liberals and the religious bloc applauded. But although the law was changed to allow covered women through the doors of the universities, most rectors – largely CHP sympathisers – refused to recognise it. The CHP started a case at the constitutional court, seeking for the law to be blocked. Amid the furore, Kaplan and another Genç Siviller member drafted a communiqué stating that they would not be happy going into the universities with their heads covered until Turkey also addressed its problems with discrimination against Kurds and religious minorities. It was a genius move. Now, the issue was about all of Turkey’s democratic flaws, not just its attitude to the pious. The court ruled that the headscarf ban should stay, but Kaplan had become a revolutionary figure. Already making a name as a newspaper columnist, her rise began.
The headscarf ban was finally overturned in the universities in 2011, in public offices in 2013, and in the police and civilian sections of the armed forces in 2016. Kaplan, meanwhile, is no longer a revolutionary underdog but a firm part of the Erdoğan establishment, sitting at the top of a new journalistic elite. Her private office in Sabah’s building on the European side of İstanbul comes with a sweeping view of the Bosphorus and its soaring bridge. She is often at Erdoğan’s side as he travels around the world, a member of the select press pack allowed on his presidential jet.
Like the newspaper she works for, Kaplan has two sides. In English, she comes across as polite and reasonable even if it is always clear where her views lie. In Turkish, she can be abrasive, combative and often downright aggressive. Twitter is her domain – she is one of an army of pro-Erdoğan journalists who open fire on anyone who might criticise their man. She churns out dozens of tweets a day to her nearly 500,000 followers.
Fırat Erez says that when Kaplan approached him to join the Bosphorus Centre in September 2015, she sold it to him as an independent think tank, with no political links or funding. She told him that the money was coming from Medipol, a private business conglomerate with close ties to Erdoğan. But it was clear what the centre’s role would be: to fact-check critical stories about Turkey in the international media, and to highlight the positive things that the AKP was doing in social welfare and for Syrian refugees. Erez was offered the position of creative director, and was made head of the fact-checking department in October 2015. He lasted in the role for just five months. In January 2016, a group of 1,128 Turkish academics signed a petition calling on the government to end the fighting with the PKK, which was mushrooming from street skirmishes into full-blown civil war. Erdoğan exploded, calling the signatories ‘enemies of the state’ and demanding that they be punished. The arrests and sackings started almost immediately. Erez believed Erdoğan was taking the wrong course of action against the academics, and said so openly in the office – to the chagrin, he says, of Hilâl Kaplan. Two months later, in March 2016, he was fired. Soon after, the Bosphorus Centre would soar to national notoriety.
Ahmet Davutoğlu, the foreign minister with whom Erdoğan had forged Turkey’s expansionist Middle East policy, was the man he handpicked to take over as prime minister when he stepped down to become president in August 2014. On paper, Davutoğlu was now the most powerful man in the country – officially, the office of president was ceremonial and non-political (Erdoğan also had to resign from the AKP when he took the job). But when Erdoğan selected his diminutive sidekick the rationale was clear: meek-mannered Ahmet might have ideas, but he would never have the balls to try to outshine Tayyip, the real rock star.
The parliamentary elections of June 2015 were Davutoğlu’s first test: he must win them for the party, of course, but he must not do so with any great charisma. The AKP’s final election rally on Istanbul’s Yenikapı parade ground a week before the election was a double headliner. Davutoğlu spoke first, but he was just the warm-up for the main act. Erdoğan had been campaigning for the party despite his new non-political role, using endless official openings of public buildings and infrastructure projects as a thin cover to make almost daily speeches. It was a clear flouting of the rules. So too was the party’s use of two fighter jets from the air force’s aerobatics team, the Turkish Stars, which screamed overhead pumping out red smoke behind them as the crowds swelled onto Yenikapı.
I looked around at the merchandise stalls as I shuffled towards the parade ground with the crowd. There were the usual Erdoğan T-shirts, headscarves and banners, but though I searched high and low for some Davutoğlu tat, there was none. When he took the stage, the prime minister – who always seems to be smiling under his grandad moustache – tried to affect the booming vocal style of his boss. It was comical, almost tragic. His voice is too high and too gentle, and he winced as if his vocal cords hurt. After half an hour, Davutoğlu wrapped up to weak applause and Erdoğan came to the stage to show him how it should be done. The crowd erupted ecstatically.
The AKP had all the advantages and took the largest share of the vote, but not an outright majority of parliamentary seats. It was the first time since 2002 that this had happened – and the first time Tayyip had tasted anything less than total victory since he last lost an election in 1989. Selahattin Demirtaş’s party, the Kurdish-rooted HDP, had managed to bust through ethnic identity politics to build a broad coalition of leftists and social liberals. It was roughly a partial and evolved Gezi movement, two years on. Demirtaş opposed Erdoğan’s plans to introduce to Turkey a presidential system, and included gay rights in his manifesto – a first for any party in the history of the republic. The HDP took more than 13 per cent of the vote, crashing through the 10 per cent threshold that had previously kept the narrowly focused Kurdish parties out of parliament. Their gain came at the AKP’s expense. In the south-east, and the liberal neighbourhoods of the western cities, street parties stretched into the night as the results were called.
Now the AKP had to form a coalition in order to govern, for the first time in its history. Davutoğlu got to work, sitting down to endless meetings with the CHP, the nationalist MHP, even the HDP. All the talks failed – Erdoğan, alien to the idea of sharing power, opposed them all. Another election was called, and in the meantime the PKK called off its ceasefire. As the casualties started mounting, the HDP’s Turkish voters in the west of the country waited for the party to oppose the PKK’s new violent campaign. The denunciation never came. By the time the fresh elections came round in November 2015, the HDP’s support outside its Kurdish base had withered and the AKP took back its majority. June’s heady optimism gave way to a glum sense that nothing ever really changes in Turkey.
Davutoğlu had finished the job and restored the AKP’s majority, but his own political future now looked bleak. He had started to speak his mind and wanted to shake things up – to reconstruct Turkey’s entire political structure and culture to make it more democratic and less personality-led. Everyone could see that a collision was coming.
‘Davutoğlu is a bureaucrat. He is intelligent and he is hard working. But he is not a politician and he will never be,’ said Davutoğlu’s former adviser, Etyen Mahçupyan. An Armenian Catholic by descent and a liberal ally of the Islamist centre since the Refah Party era of the mid-1990s, Mahçupyan was perhaps the last outspoken voice within the AKP. His tenure with Davutoğlu lasted just six months, from October 2014 to March 2015. In that time he managed to repeatedly irk Erdoğan’s inner circle by loudly criticising many aspects of the party’s workings and policy.
‘Erdoğan’s advisers had decided that the person to be chosen’ – that is, chosen to become prime minister once Erdoğan stood down – ‘was also going to be the leader of the party. One of those advisers came to me and asked my opinion on Davutoğlu. I said I thought he would be a very good prime minister but an awful leader … He cannot manage the semi-corrupt rules of the politics of the party. There was also … a clash between Erdoğan and Davutoğlu; a mismatch of characters. Davutoğlu is full of himself. There is no doubt in his mind that whatever he says or thinks is the ultimate truth. He has this disadvantage. On the other hand, he is the most educated and knowledgeable person. Without anyone to challenge him, he started to believe more and more in himself. I have spoken to Davutoğlu many times and he said that the job of prime minister was not in reality as it was promised to him. Erdoğan could say something today and change his mind tomorrow. Davutoğlu was frustrated so he stopped giving information to Erdoğan. That pissed Erdoğan off, and it escalated … But what happened then was very humiliating.’
In May 2016 the AKP’s executive board voted to strip Davutoğlu of his powers to appoint provincial officials. They moved while the prime minister was out of town, and when he returned to Ankara to face his party it became apparent that this was really a power tussle with Erdoğan. Following an hours-long meeting with the president, Davutoğlu then faced the AKP’s executive committee. In the press conference that followed he appeared shaken and defeated. He would be stepping down, he said, at the party’s upcoming congress, scheduled for just two weeks later.
‘I decided that for the unity of the party, a change of chairman would be more appropriate,’ said Davutoğlu as he gripped the podium with white knuckles. Ever the diplomat, he betrayed no malice towards the man who has always remained his boss. ‘I will not accept any speculation over my relationship with Mr Erdoğan. We have always stood shoulder to shoulder. His honour is my honour.’
Pelikan Dosyası – The Pelican Brief, named after the 1990s book-to-film legal thriller – is 2,700 words of pure bile and intrigue, published on the most basic WordPress template a week before Davutoğlu was ousted. In florid and often opaque language, it outlines twenty-seven points of conflict between Erdoğan (whom it dubbed Reis, or boss) and Davutoğlu (Hoca, or teacher). There is the jailing of critical journalists and academics, which Davutoğlu was known to be uncomfortable with. There is the Dolmabahçe agreement to permanently end the war with the PKK, which Davutoğlu announced and Erdoğan then retracted. And there is the proposed switch to a presidential system, on which Davutoğlu is far from convinced.
‘This is a fight,’ the blog post ends, addressing Davutoğlu directly. ‘It is certain you will lose!’
Pelikan Dosyası went viral on Turkish Twitter almost as soon as it was posted. Suspicion about who wrote it fell immediately on Soheyb Öğüt, Hilâl Kaplan’s husband and the director of the Bosphorus Centre. He had written a strikingly similar article eleven months earlier – three weeks after the AKP’s humiliation in the June 2015 elections – in the now-defunct magazine Actuel. Titled ‘Bravo, hocam, bravo!’ it accused Davutoğlu of betraying Erdoğan in starkly similar tones to the later Pelikan Dosyası. As Twitter speculated, I requested a meeting with Hilâl Kaplan.
Six days after Davutoğlu’s dismissal I arrived at her Sabah offices. Kaplan is pale-skinned with hypnotic green eyes, and if it were not for the tight headscarf and full-length buttoned-up coats I am sure she would turn heads. Despite her reputation as an attack dog, she was disarmingly likeable and funny, chain-smoking as she told me why Davutoğlu fully deserved his cruel fate.
‘They have been working together since 2009 – Davutoğlu was Erdoğan’s adviser, then his foreign minister. They were working very closely and Erdoğan trusted him. Davutoğlu is not a good orator, but he has the image of a Hoca. He smiles a lot, and Erdoğan wanted him to use those qualities. But in the end he had a know-it-all attitude. Erdoğan won the November 2015 elections, but Davutoğlu acted like it was all his success … Erdoğan has huge credibility among the AKP. The opposition may hate him, but he has huge credibility. He is the centre of the state because he takes his power from the people.’
Kaplan dismissed the possibility that there might be another round of elections to give the public stamp of approval to whoever was anointed Davutoğlu’s successor: ‘Erdoğan does not like snap elections. During Gezi Park some members of the party thought it would be good to hold snap elections. He said no, we should follow the routine elections.’
To replace Davutoğlu there were three options, Kaplan told me: Bekir Bozdağ, the justice minister, Binali Yıldırım, the transport minister, and Berat Albayrak, Erdoğan’s son-in-law and energy minister. All three are arch-Erdoğan loyalists.
She thought Yıldırım would get it. He had worked with Erdoğan since the 1990s, when Erdoğan was mayor of Istanbul and Yıldırım his loyal ferries chief, in charge of the passenger ships that criss-cross the Bosphorus. ‘He has great support among the party’s base,’ she said. ‘And great experience.’
Whether she was involved in Davutoğlu’s end or not, Kaplan was right about Yıldırım’s rise. Days later, the AKP’s executive committee appointed him prime minister and leader of the party. He quickly established himself as a wider-smiling, more jovial, even greyer figure than Davutoğlu. And as for the former prime minister, now gazing down his path into the political wilderness?
‘Davutoğlu will go on being a party member,’ Kaplan said. ‘He will rebuild his credibility. He will continue a path in politics. But I don’t think he will succeed.’
Berat Albayrak, the smooth-browed, half-smiling businessman who married the president’s daughter Esra Erdoğan in 2004, was perhaps too young and inexperienced to take the job of prime minister after Davutoğlu’s ousting. It would have been hard for the party ranks to swallow, too openly nepotistic a move. But there was no doubt that he was at the start of a sharp ascendant.
Albayrak is well connected, and his addition to the Erdoğan family has allowed the president to reach out into areas beyond the state. Albayrak’s brother, Serhat, is general manager of Turkuvaz Media Group, which owns Sabah, Hilâl Kaplan’s newspaper, and a clutch of other virulently pro-Erdoğan news outlets including the shouty, caustic television news channel A Haber, always the first to land the political exclusives. Turkuvaz’s titles were once left-leaning opposition voices, before the group was seized by the government in April 2007 as part of a debt-collection action against the conglomerate that owned it. A year later Turkuvaz was sold at auction to Çalık Holding, the conglomerate of which Berat Albayrak was then CEO, a quarter of its $1.1 billion price tag being covered by a state loan (the other bidders had all dropped out by the time the deal was awarded). Serhat Albayrak was appointed vice-president of the board of Turkuvaz, and instantly, Sabah and A Haber became Erdoğan’s principal media flag-wavers, though they failed to bring in profits for their owners. Over the next four years, they accrued losses of $200 million, and while international media giants including Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp and Time Warner Inc. expressed interest when Çalık Holding put Turkuvaz up for sale in 2012, they backed off when they saw the books. In the end, Turkuvaz was sold in a closed deal brokered in Erdoğan’s house. The buyer was the Kalyon Group, a Turkish conglomerate that is one of the major contractors for Erdoğan’s huge state construction projects, including Istanbul’s new airport. Kalyon set up a subsidiary called Zirve Holding to buy Turkuvaz, and the sale was approved by Turkey’s competition commission in December 2013. Eleven days later, Berat Albayrak resigned as CEO of Çalık, and began writing occasional columns in Sabah.
Today, Turkuvaz also owns Fotomaç, the biggest-selling football weekly, which often carries AKP adverts in its pages, and the downmarket Takvim, which once carried a half-page picture of me claiming that I was a British agent. That puts me in good company with other foreign journalists; those who have displeased the president’s circle have often enjoyed the same treatment.
Eighteen months after he resigned from Çalık Holding, Berat Albayrak’s political career took off – he was handed an AKP seat in the June 2015 elections. The Bosphorus Centre launched two months later, in August 2015. Two months on again, in October, Albayrak was appointed energy minister, and soon it was whispered that Erdoğan was grooming him to be his heir. Finally, in May 2016, Davutoğlu as prime minister was toast.
In December 2016, the web of ties between Berat Albayrak, Soheyb Öğüt, Hilâl Kaplan, Turkuvaz and the Bosphorus Centre was revealed when WikiLeaks spilled a tranche of Albayrak’s emails – a cache it dubbed ‘Berat’s Box’.
One email, from an executive at Turkuvaz to Berat Albayrak and dated 5 October 2015, revealed that Turkuvaz was employing a network of more than 600 people to bump up the circulation of its titles. ‘A total of 200,000 newspapers are distributed every day in 79 cities and 290 districts,’ the report reads. ‘The distributions are mainly made in cafés, coffee shops, patisseries, restaurants, taxi stands, town halls, hairdressers, private hospitals, hotels, bus companies, various artisans, student dormitories, etc.’
An attached spreadsheet details the exact locations, and the number of each title distributed in each, the kind of painstaking detail the AKP excels in. The freebies push Sabah’s real circulation down to just 100,000 – fourteenth place on the newsstands, rather than first.
On 5 September 2015, Soheyb Öğüt emailed Berat Albayrak, just weeks before the launch of the Bosphorus Centre and two months before Albayrak was appointed energy minister. ‘One-off costs,’ Öğüt’s email begins, before moving into a delightfully pedantic list.
All the details on it, from the staff to the location of the office to the furniture, match those I have seen on four separate visits to the centre. It includes £4,550 for ‘high quality furniture as possible to accommodate the ambassadors, international media representatives and politicians in comfort’; a regular monthly budget for ‘Foreign and Domestic Transportation; reception of guests (food, drink, transportation, gift); printing banners and booklets’, and a ‘vettori chester sofa set’ at £777. According to the exchange rate at that time, the whole lot – from teaspoons to the director’s salary – totalled £70,000 in set-up and first-month operating costs, followed by a monthly stipend of £27,250. This was the sum requested by a purportedly independent think tank of a man who was already a parliamentary deputy and Erdoğan’s son-in-law, and who two months later would become a high-ranking minister.
Hilâl Kaplan, although often present at the centre and deferred to as a boss by its staff, flatly denies any official involvement. Another leaked email suggests otherwise, at least in the conception stage. Again addressed from Öğüt to Albayrak and dated 8 September 2015, this one lists the suggested names for the centre’s management board. Kaplan’s is at number four.
In a blog he has started since leaving the Bosphorus Centre, Fırat Erez has publicly described the Pelikan Dosyası and the expulsion of Davutoğlu as a ‘right-wing coup’: the moment when ultra-loyalist forces in Erdoğan’s court – the clique gathered around son-in-law Albayrak – took over the party, the government and ultimately the country. The trigger for Davutoğlu’s banishment, Erez says, was the arrest of Reza Zarrab, the kingpin of the alleged Iranian sanctions-busting plot, in the US in March 2016. According to Erez, that was when the organisation shifted its attention away from semi-genuine fact-checking and a bit of light spin to ‘building a wall against the West’ – stoking Turkish public scorn towards the US and Europe, so that any allegations against Erdoğan emerging from Zarrab’s trial in the near future could be dismissed as part of a plot against Turkey.
‘The liquidation of Davutoğlu was very important because it was him who got the promises from the West on the refugee deal,’ Erez said. ‘He had pulled the date for visa-free travel in the Schengen zone earlier. Even the Turkish opposition accepted Davutoğlu’s successes and prestige in the West.’
On 6 May 2016, five days after the Pelikan Dosyası was published and a day after Davutoğlu stepped down, Erdoğan made the first of many speeches that would turn Turkey’s relations with the EU toxic, blowing up all the bridges that his banished prime minister had built. ‘We’ll go our way, you go yours,’ the president told EU leaders. He delivered the message not in the cordial and closed-doors meetings that Davutoğlu had held with European heads of state, but in his preferred arena – in front of the television cameras and baying throngs of his fanatics in Istanbul.
At the other end of Europe, another difficult partner was also entering torrid waters with the bloc. Britain had always been one of Turkey’s best allies in the European Union, consistently supporting its ambitions to join. Yet, when it came to the referendum on leaving the EU, Britain’s Eurosceptics latched on to the possibility of Turkish membership as one reason why the UK should leave the bloc as soon as possible. Then they took that unlikely prospect and twisted it into imminent danger.
12 MILLION TURKS SAY THEY’LL COME TO THE UK! screeched one front-page headline in the Sunday Express in May 2016. Its evidence, revealed in paragraph two, was predictably thin. Sixteen per cent of 2,500 Turks questioned said they would consider relocating should their country join the bloc – a fast-fading possibility now that Davutoğlu had been booted and Erdoğan’s hate-bombing campaign on Brussels had begun. Two months earlier UKIP had released a party political broadcast based entirely on scaremongering about what might happen should Turkey join the EU in 2020, bringing its huge and growing Muslim population with it (the blonde and furrow-browed presenter was superimposed over background footage of Istanbul, and explained that the growing crackdown on the press in Turkey meant she was far more comfortable recording her assertions about the country without actually visiting it).
Such hyperbole and misrepresentation might be expected of the Sunday Express, a newspaper chiefly concerned with jingoism and Princess Diana, and of UKIP, a party founded on a single nativist objective. But what about Boris Johnson, who in June 2016 co-wrote with his fellow Leave campaigner Michael Gove a letter to then prime minister David Cameron, demanding assurances that the UK would use its veto powers in the EU to halt Turkey’s accession talks and block the visa-free travel arrangement – everything that had been hard-won by Davutoğlu only three months earlier? ‘If the Government cannot give this guarantee, the public will draw the reasonable conclusion that the only way to avoid having common borders with Turkey is to vote Leave and take back control on 23 June,’ the letter concluded.
Vote Leave, the lobbying group fronted by Gove and Johnson, also produced a billboard poster claiming that a vote to stay in the EU was akin to opening the door to 76 million Turks. It was Vote Leave who commissioned the survey that led to the dodgy headline in the Sunday Express. And evidence submitted by Facebook to the House of Commons committee on culture, media and sport’s inquiry into fake news in July 2018 showed that Vote Leave had hired data company Aggregate IQ (a Canadian firm linked to Cambridge Analytica, the political consultancy famed for mining voters’ data during the 2016 US presidential elections) to place targeted ads on the pages of British voters with the strapline ALBANIA, MACEDONIA, MONTENEGRO, SERBIA AND TURKEY ARE JOINING THE EU. SERIOUSLY. Another claimed that ‘Turkey’s 76 million people are joining the EU’, next to a graph showing the average wages of Britons (£25,692) and Turks (£7,368). Viewers were invited to vote yes or no on whether this was ‘good news’. Other ads claimed that ‘Turkey’s 76 million people are being granted visa-free travel by the EU’, that Turkey was joining the EU, meaning that ‘Britain’s new border is with Syria and Iraq’, and that furthermore ‘We’re paying Turkey £1 billion to join the EU’. A graphic showed the money flowing east from Britain to Turkey. Under repeated questioning from the committee, Rebecca Stimson, Facebook’s UK head of public policy, eventually revealed that the adverts generated by Aggregate IQ were likely to have reached ‘most’ of the site’s UK users.
Such Turk-hate proved good – perhaps winning – campaign fodder in referendum-era Britain. James Kerr-Lindsay, an academic at the London School of Economics, concluded his study of the campaign saying ‘there is a good case to be made that the unfounded claims made by the Leave campaign about Turkish membership of the EU have ultimately cost Britain its own membership of the Union’.
Boris Johnson got stuck into his new role as Brexit campaigner-in-chief in February 2016, when he officially threw his considerable weight behind the Leave campaign. At first he spoke cautiously on Turkey. ‘I am certainly very dubious … about having a huge free travel zone,’ he said in March 2016 when asked about the visa-free promise that Davutoğlu had just clinched under the migrant deal.
Boris turned combative as soon as he stepped down as mayor of London on 8 May 2016 and launched his rebrand as a Leave campaigner. Ten days later, he won a contest set by the Spectator to write a rude poem about Erdoğan. Johnson’s limerick, published in the magazine and widely circulated, refered to the Turkish president as ‘the wankerer from Ankara’ and suggested he had intimate relations with goats. But inside Berat’s Box and the forgotten news cuttings of a time-not-so-long-ago, there is proof that Johnson is no Turkophobe.
Boris had been making a good impression on Turkey, and vice versa, since he first campaigned to become mayor of London. In 2007, on the BBC’s pop-genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are?, he revealed that his great-grandfather had been an Ottoman diplomat kidnapped and hanged by Atatürk’s agents in 1922 for his continuing support for the Sultan. This disclosure propelled Johnson to the top of a small but prestigious group of Britons with Turkish origins (others include artist Tracey Emin and Lords member Baroness Hussein-Ece). Johnson was appointed (and remains) the president of the Anglo-Turkish Society. Almost as soon as he was voted into the mayor’s office in May 2008, he took his family on a sailing holiday to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, where the local newspapers reported that he was pondering buying a villa, and he was gifted a rug, table cloth, coffee pot and cups and saucers by the mayor of the resort town of Göcek. The mayor of Istanbul, AKP man Kadir Topbaş, visited London two months later, when according to records from City Hall he presented Johnson with a ‘paperweight and plate’.
Over his eight years as mayor, Turkey lobbied Johnson harder than any other country bar Qatar, sending AKP deputies, ambassadors and PR firms to his office. Meanwhile, a network of London-based Gülenists with high-level connections back in Ankara went out of their way to schmooze and flatter him. In September 2009, the Business Network, an organisation run by Gülenists to serve their supporters setting up businesses in the UK, put Johnson on the front cover of the inaugural issue of its glossy magazine with the splash THE TURKISH MAYOR OF LONDON. Interviewed inside, Boris said he believed that Turkey’s entry to the EU would ‘contribute enormously to a better Europe; indeed it will help recognise the considerable contribution they currently make’.
A year later, the Business Network awarded him the ‘Most Supportive British’ prize at its annual Most Successful Turk Awards, held in the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The glittering ceremony was attended by Ünal Çeviköz, Turkey’s ambassador to the UK, and Aliye Kavaf, the Turkish families minister and previously the long-term president of the AKP’s women’s branch. Although Johnson didn’t attend that year, he was the keynote speaker at the 2011 awards, which Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Ali Babacan, and Ahmet Davutoğlu, then foreign minister, both attended.
In February 2013 Egemen Bağış – a close ally of Erdoğan, and at that time Turkey’s Europe minister and chief negotiator with the bloc – travelled to London for a meeting with Johnson, who was fresh from the success of the London 2012 Olympics. The two discussed Erdoğan’s own mayorship of Istanbul in the 1990s, the huge development projects planned for the Turkish city, and its bid to host the 2020 Olympics. They also talked about Johnson’s Ottoman heritage, and his call for the people of London to fast for a day to get a better understanding of their Muslim neighbours’ endeavours during the holy month of Ramadan. Bağış’s emailed account of the meeting to Berat Albayrak is full of praise verging on eulogy for the mayor of London:
[Johnson] wholeheartedly supports Turkey’s membership of the European Union, even against those who try to block it. He does not hide his admiration for Istanbul … He said he was following the growth of Istanbul closely. I asked him for his support on Istanbul’s Olympic bid, and he gave his support without hesitation.
Details of the conversation were immediately leaked to London’s tiny but vibrant Turkish-language press, which, just a day after the meeting, reported that Boris backed Istanbul 2020. Bağış was forced to resign seven months later, in December 2013 – he was one of the ministers implicated in the Iranian gold-dealing scandal. But although he was no longer in the cabinet, he retained his seat in parliament until June 2015 and even after that has continued to serve as one of Erdoğan’s most loyal enforcers within the AKP. According to Fırat Erez, Bağış was a regular visitor to the Bosphorus Centre in the months after it was founded.
In February 2015, as he entered the final year of his second term in the London mayor’s office, Johnson was still full of praise for Turkey, saying that he hoped to visit the country again before he stepped down. Then, a year on, he announced he was backing the Leave campaign – and everything changed.
Although Prime Minister David Cameron repeatedly tried to assure the public that there was no imminent prospect of Turkey joining the EU, Johnson and the other Leave campaigners pumped up the threat of mass Turkish immigration in their campaign rhetoric, their claims growing more absurd and divorced from the facts as the Brexit battle reached its bloody crescendo. Theresa Villiers, the secretary of state for Northern Ireland, claimed that six hundred Isis fighters who had left Syria for Turkey would soon enjoy visa-free travel in the EU. Penny Mordaunt, later to become Britain’s first female defence secretary but then a backbencher, said that levels of criminality in Turkey were far higher than in Britain (leaving it to be implied that Turkish criminality would inevitably wash over into the UK if Britain failed to exit the EU). Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, claimed that Ankara had been promised accelerated membership.
As the Brexit campaigning progressed, back in Turkey the knives were gathering behind Davutoğlu and his refugee deal was being dismantled. The numbers of migrants landing on the Greek islands started to creep up again, and Erdoğan openly threatened to open his borders unless Brussels handed Turkey more money. It all fed into the Brexit camp’s rhetoric about the dangers of imminent Turkish membership of the EU, even though events in Ankara and Erdoğan’s increasing Europhobia made it less likely, not more, that Turkey would join the bloc at any foreseeable point. On the same day as Johnson’s poem was published in the Spectator, Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu insisted that Turkey would not amend its anti-terror laws to satisfy the EU’s human rights rules, effectively quashing the promised visa-free travel arrangement that Davutoğlu had won.
After the Leave campaign won and David Cameron resigned, the new UK prime minister Theresa May appointed Boris Johnson foreign secretary. His first visit was to Turkey, where he was tasked with nurturing new trade ties of the kind that would be key to Britain’s economic success post-EU. In front of the press pack in Ankara, Johnson praised his Turkish-made washing machine, dismissed his Spectator poem of five months ago as ‘trivia’, and restated the UK’s support for Turkey in the wake of the coup attempt, which had unfolded just three weeks after the Brexit vote.
‘The United Kingdom is totally behind the Turkish people and the Turkish government in resisting the forces that tried to overwhelm your democracy,’ Johnson said. ‘It was great to see the way that the Turkish people responded to that challenge and of course we discussed the importance of a measured and proportionate response now to what has taken place, and I believe it’s overwhelmingly important that we support Turkish democracy.’
A year later, in August 2017, Johnson was back on another sailing holiday in Turkey, his anguish at the thought of hordes of Anatolian peasants flocking to Britain apparently overridden by the lure of the turquoise coast. Meanwhile the Business Network, which had once hosted him as guest of honour at their sumptuous and influential awards ceremonies, has been driven underground in London and is now helping some of the Gülenist businessmen who have fled Erdoğan’s crackdown into exile in the UK. In early 2016, it was through an intermediary on a Business Network email address that I conducted my convoluted interview with Akın İpek, one-time owner of the halal Angels Resort and the Bugün newspaper, after his businesses had been seized and his brother arrested. İpek remains in London, despite attempts by Turkey to have him extradited to face charges at home.
In January 2019 Johnson delivered yet another volte-face on Turkey, claiming in a public speech that he had never raised the issue of the country’s membership bid during his Brexit campaigning. By now, he had quit the Foreign Office and set his sights once more on the Tory leadership and Number 10 – and so he attempted to drop his very recent xenophobia into the memory hole. Too bad for Boris that the British press and public have memories that can reach back two years; he was immediately called out and ridiculed. But maybe we shouldn’t have been so surprised at Boris’s frequent changes of heart on Turkey, his fickle relationship with the Turkish community in London – or at Erdoğan’s unprecedentedly laid-back response to his poem. Because Johnson and Erdoğan have more in common than divides them – they are playing from the same rulebook. For populists like them, winning is the only part of democracy that matters. It doesn’t matter how many lies you tell, how often you change your ideological course, so long as in the end you take your place on the winner’s podium.
To fully understand Britain’s relationship with Erdoğan’s Turkey, you need to look beyond Boris Johnson to the bottom line. In its post-Brexit era, as the UK gropes for new trade relationships to keep its economy afloat, Turkey is turning into an increasingly important ally. Bilateral trade between the two countries is worth $20 billion annually in 2019, more than double what it was a decade ago. Theresa May’s second visit on becoming prime minister was to Ankara in January 2017 – she flew straight to her meeting with Erdoğan from Washington, her first overseas destination. In Turkey, she signed off on arms deals worth £100 million and said almost nothing about Erdoğan’s escalating post-coup purge or war against the PKK, to the horror of human rights campaigners. Diplomats insist that May aired her concerns behind closed doors.
Four months later, in May 2017, British defence companies and trade bureaucrats flocked to the cavernous halls of the World Trade Centre close to Atatürk airport for Istanbul’s biannual arms fair. Here, more deals were struck between Rolls-Royce and Kale, a Turkish defence company, for a project to help Turkey produce its first indigenous jet engine. Come summer, when the British embassy in Ankara hosted its annual garden party to mark Queen Elizabeth’s birthday, the manicured lawns and gilded rooms of the grand main building were scattered with adverts for iconic British brands, from JCB to Aston Martin (several Turkish cabinet members and scores of Erdoğan’s advisers attended). In May 2018, even as Erdoğan spat venom against other European countries and leaders, he was welcomed in London for a two-day visit that stopped just short of full state honours. After speaking with investors and attending a string of lunches and dinners thrown in his honour by the London branches of the AKP’s various lobbying groups, he went to Buckingham Palace for afternoon tea with the Queen.
The roots of the special business relationship between Britain and Turkey go back to July 2010, when David Cameron, elected prime minister two months earlier, visited Ankara. Following his meeting with Erdoğan, he gave a speech setting out the future shape of relations: ‘I have come to Ankara to establish a new partnership between Britain and Turkey. I think this is a vital strategic relationship for our country. Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy … Today the value of our trade is over $9 billion a year. I want us to double this over the next five years.’
That speech kick-started a flurry of economic diplomacy, with much of the legwork on the British side being carried out by the City of London Corporation, the opaque administration that governs the heart of the UK’s financial sector in the ancient warren of the Square Mile. It is the only part of the country over which Parliament has no jurisdiction: a unique cross between local municipality, business interests lobby and charitable organisation that has existed for more than a millennium. Although separate from UK government, the work of the City often overlaps with that of Whitehall, most frequently when it is used as a soft power arm by the Treasury and Foreign Office as they nurture relations overseas. Other financial centres, from Wall Street to Tokyo, may command more capital than the City of London, but none can compete with its gothic dining halls, medieval guilds and sumptuous costumes. It is the Lord Mayor of London (not to be confused with the Mayor of London), successor of Dick Whittington and wearer of fur-trimmed capes and gold chains, whom Britain sends on trade missions to the countries it wants to impress.
Six months after Cameron’s speech, Lord Mayor Michael Bear visited Turkey together with a thirty-strong business delegation. It was his first major foreign trip of the mayoral year, and he hosted a series of events in Istanbul and Ankara, including a reception in the capital ‘to meet contacts working in the infrastructure and construction sectors and “set the scene” for the discussions focused on opportunities for UK firms’, according to the official report of the Lord Mayor’s visit.
Those opportunities centred around Turkey’s growing public–private partnerships (PPP) sector, the investment model powering the wave of mega-projects that have transformed the country, beyond recognition in many places, and defined the later Erdoğan era. Since the AKP took power, it has built eleven new airports (and fully refurbished as many again), thousands of miles of new roads and railways, and extended a once-minuscule metro system across Istanbul. Erdoğan and his ministers hail these projects as the crowning proof of their success. Their devotees believe them.
The PPP funding model is based on the private finance initiatives – or PFI – dreamt up by the UK’s Conservative government in the 1990s, and brought to full fruition in the Tony Blair era of the 2000s. Private companies are contracted to build and service public assets such as hospitals, schools, waste disposal facilities and roads. The government does not have to pay anything up front, but the state is locked into decades-long payback agreements, under which the taxpayer ends up shelling out many times more than the original construction would have cost due to the high rates of compound interest and non-competitive servicing deals. PFI is a classic example of instant gratification on a grand scale – the government of the day takes credit for the sudden explosion of shiny new public facilities, the debt stays off the books, and the country is left paying for it long after the politicians who signed off on it have retired. In 2015, the UK’s National Audit Office found that PFI projects end up costing the taxpayer more than double what they would if the government borrowed the money directly and built them itself.
In the UK, the PFI model has been largely discredited and abandoned. After the financial crash of 2008, credit lines dried up and so did Britain’s construction boom – and at the same time, the number of new PFI projects fell off a cliff. But as the rich Western economies tightened their belts, global lenders started flooding emerging economies, including Turkey, with cheap money, allowing them to launch their own construction booms, and for their governments to start toying with the PFI model. Companies that had grown rich from PFI projects in the UK started turning their attention overseas, where they marketed themselves as originators and experts in the field. In doing so they were supported by the British government, which through its embassies and consulates promotes the PFI model, the UK as a centre of PFI expertise, and British private companies that can advise on and deliver the projects to foreign governments.
Prior to the Lord Mayor’s visit in 2011, Turkey had signed off on just six PPP projects. By January 2018, it had over two hundred completed or in progress, with a combined value of $135 billion – among the highest of any country in the world. The largest and most expensive of these is also the most recent – the new Istanbul airport, which opened in April 2019 after months of delays.
British companies have done well out of Turkey’s PPP spree – at least partly thanks to the Lord Mayor’s visit. ‘The Lord Mayor met with the Minister of Transportation and Communications, Binali Yıldırım,’ the report notes. ‘He was keen to work with UK firms on implementing key projects focusing on maritime infrastructure (including ports), roads (including highways and interstates), rail (both urban and intercity fast rail), airports and an advanced metro system in Istanbul.’
In the wake of the 2011 visit, Turkey passed a package of PPP laws based on British legislation. Since then, Arup, a major British construction and consultancy firm that hosted the networking reception where Lord Mayor Bear met Yıldırım, has won contracts on scores of Turkish PPP projects including the new Istanbul airport. Ankara launched its £8 billion PPP healthcare scheme in 2014 following a visit, sponsored by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to PFI-funded hospitals in the UK for Turkish ministry of health officials and businesspeople. Mott McDonald, a consultancy firm, was appointed as an adviser on Turkey’s first six hospital PPP projects. In 2015, the Treasury estimated that the scheme would be worth £2.5 billion in contracts to UK firms.
For Turkish taxpayers, Erdoğan’s mega-projects – which he wields constantly as proof of his success – are costly monuments to the vanities of a leader who increasingly has little else to offer. As Erdoğan’s erraticism, domestic crackdowns and foreign misadventures dent both Turkey’s image on the world stage and its economy, these credit-financed projects are turning into his sole plan for sustaining economic growth and keeping his domestic image afloat. His support base, who once venerated him for keeping the rubbish collection going while he was in the Istanbul mayor’s office, now cheer when they hear how his government builds the longest tunnels, the biggest hospitals and the most new roads. So, even in the face of a looming recession and a huge crash in the value of the Turkish lira, Erdoğan is determined to push on. It is unclear where the money might come from; the European and World Banks were once keen to pour money into Turkey’s PPP projects, but the gush of international funding has slowed to a trickle since 2016.
It is certain who benefits as the projects keep coming. Worldwide, five of the six private construction firms with the most government contracts by value in 2018 were Turkish. The top two – Cengiz and Limak Holdings, both of them owned by pro-Erdoğan businessmen – are part of the group that won the contract for the new Istanbul airport. So too is Kalyon Holding, at number five – the conglomerate that owns Turkuvaz Media. Those figures are even more remarkable in the context of Turkey’s global rankings among international contractors. Based on the value of contracts won outside their home country, Turkish firms come way down the list. In 2018 only eight Turkish construction companies made it into the top 100, with Rönesans Construction the highest ranked at number thirty-six. Cengiz Holding, the world’s biggest recipient of government construction contracts, is at 225.
Back in the City of London, the blossoming financial relationship between Turkey and the UK has been sweetened with the kind of glamour and prestige that the Corporation excels in. Amid the crooked alleyways and gleaming glass towers, members of Erdoğan’s circle have received a string of honours, continuing even as he has burned almost every democratic check and balance in his country. In November 2011, the Corporation held a banquet in honour of President Gül during his state visit to the UK. In April 2016, Turkey’s ambassador to Britain, Abdurrahman Bilgiç, was awarded the Freedom of the City of London. It is a title first presented in the thirteenth century to individuals who were recognised masters of their trades, and allowed them privileges including the right to drive sheep across London Bridge and to be hanged with a silk rope if they faced execution. Over the years, it has been opened up: starting in the nineteenth century, you could be awarded the honour ‘by redemption’ if you made a cash donation to the City, and since 1996 foreign nationals can also apply. Bilgiç took advantage of both liberalisations, and was nominated for his honour by Emma Edhem, a British barrister of Turkish-Cypriot descent who has served as a City of London alderman, and had represented Erdoğan in a defamation case against the Daily Telegraph. (The newspaper had claimed that the AKP had taken a $25 million campaign donation from Iran; Erdoğan settled in March 2011 for an undisclosed sum.)
On the evening of 11 September 2018, guests at the Global Donors Forum awards ceremony at Mansion House – the official residence of the Lord Mayor, owned by the City of London Corporation – were startled to see Emine, Erdoğan’s wife, receive an award ‘in recognition of her humanitarian service’. It was given to her, the organisers said, for her championing of Rohyinga refugees who had escaped genocide at the hands of the army in Myanmar – and was well trumpeted in Erdoğan’s tame media back in Turkey. ‘The true owner of this meaningful award, which I will be honoured to cherish for the rest of my life, is my country, my state and my nation which respond to any cry for help no matter where it comes from and regardless of religion, language or race,’ the first lady gushed as she was handed the solid glass trophy.
Back in Turkey, on the same day, Emine’s husband had appointed himself head of the country’s sovereign wealth fund, where the assets stripped from businesspeople accused of being Gülenists are pooled, and sent his intelligence services to Moldova to seize and extradite Turkish citizens accused of links with the group. In Ankara, a leftist Turkish-Austrian activist had been arrested on terrorism charges, prompting the Austrian government to demand a full explanation from Erdoğan’s government.
A second award at the same event was handed to the Turkish Red Crescent, which describes itself as ‘an auxiliary to the Turkish government’, while Turkish Airlines, which is 49 per cent owned by the Turkish state, was handed the ‘creative philanthropy award’ for its campaign of sending cargo planes loaded with food to Somalia.
While these awards were nominally organised by the Global Donors Forum, which describes itself as ‘the biannual convening of the World Congress of Muslim Philanthropists’, it was at least partly the brainchild of the City Bridge Trust, the City of London Corporation’s charitable fund. Minutes from the Trust’s meeting on 2 May 2018 reveal that its representatives had met with the Global Donors Forum and proposed to host the September event ‘as part of a range of international relationships we are building’.
London’s relationship with Ankara, and its prioritisation of business over human rights and democratic values, is a harbinger of the kind of mercantile foreign policy that the UK will be pursuing in its post-EU era. But it is also a glance into the future, at how all of the old order might be forced to deal with the new. Erdoğan is no longer the only populist in Europe, and Turkey not the only country that was recently deemed to be democratising but is now backsliding. Hungary and Poland, both EU member states, are led by men with autocratic tendencies who have stifled the media and captured the judiciary. The far right is on the rise in Italy, Germany and Spain, while on the periphery of the bloc most of the Balkan states are ruled by nationalists who would be happy to drag their region back to war. Even Britain and the US, cradles of liberal democracy, have been rocked and reshaped by their own brands of populism. Europe is well beyond the point where the forces of illiberalism can be ignored or contained. As the power and influence of the old global centres declines, it is countries like Britain who are on the back foot – growing poorer and weaker and desperate for friends, and so forced to keep taking tea with Erdoğan and his ilk.
Since Davutoğlu’s deposition, the Bosphorus Centre has focused on producing coup-themed propaganda, launching social media attacks against critical journalists and academics and, right after the coup attempt, enlisting Hollywood wild child Lindsay Lohan as Erdoğan’s chief celebrity admirer. In the autumn of 2016, Lohan made the first in a series of bizarre appearances in the Turkish media when she visited a refugee camp in Nizip, close to the Syrian border. The camp, which has since been closed, was stunning; the Syrians living there were housed in caravan-style homes with beautifully tended patches of garden often attached. Angela Merkel visited in March 2016 and spoke with the delighted, grateful and handpicked residents. Every foreign dignitary and celebrity who saw Nizip came away chattering about how generous and hospitable the Turkish government is to the refugees it hosts. In many ways that is true, but Nizip was not representative. Less than 10 per cent of the 3.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey live in government-run camps, of which many are squalid, isolated and overcrowded.
Lohan gave interviews to the Turkish press at the Nizip camp, her head swathed in a Turkish-style headscarf, Hilâl Kaplan at her side. ‘[An aid worker] saw that my eyes lit up when I told her that her headscarf is beautiful. She waved to me and said, come with me, I followed her and she gifted it to me. I was so moved and touched by this that I wanted to wear it in appreciation for all of the generosity and love I received from everyone at the camp … We can do more for each other, we should do more for each other. And we can start by giving support to Turkey which did its part in this huge human tragedy called Syria by welcoming three million refugees.’
Next, Lohan met with Erdoğan. In January 2017 she arrived at his palace for an audience with him, his wife Emine, and a little girl from Aleppo who had become famous for her tweets under siege. Lohan posted the pictures on her (now-wiped) Instagram page: ‘What a dream it is for Mr President Erdoğan and The First Lady to invite me to their home. Their efforts in helping Syrian Refugees is truly inspiring.’
Her agent, Scott Carlsen, who was also present at the meeting, posted his own image from the day on his Facebook page: ‘Had the chance to sit down and chat with the president of Turkey and First Lady a week or so back. Feeling very grateful and thankful for the opportunity,’ he captioned it.
Hilâl Kaplan claimed that the Lohan connection had come about by pure chance through a mutual connection, and that the Nizip trip had happened because the actress genuinely wanted to meet refugees. But the arrangement quickly turned into one of mutual benefit for a president struggling with his international reputation and a celebrity with her career on the rocks. Soon after her visit to Nizip, a source inside a soft drinks company for which Lohan is a paid ‘brand ambassador’ told the press they would be donating to refugees for each order placed online. Then Lohan gave an interview at the opening of her new nightclub, Lohan, in the Greek capital Athens. She was bleary-eyed, rambling, and intent on telling the interviewer about her work with refugees.
Most fascinating, though, was her awkward insertion – twice – into the interview of an Erdoğan catchphrase, ‘The world is bigger than five’. It refers to the UN security council’s five permanent members – China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States – and the unfair influence the Turkish president believes they wield over the rest of the world. The phrase originated as the brainchild of a group of pro-AKP activists in 2015, and is now repeated by Erdoğan at every opportunity. It is the title of a series that began airing on the state-controlled television channel TRT in September 2017 and ‘deals with global conflicts and crises as new rivalries and alliances are formed as the era of a unipolar world ends’. It is the theme of a tuneless song with a glossy video that features people from the smaller nations, angry that the five make the world’s decisions without them. And it is the title of a book, The Vision of New Turkey: World is Bigger than Five, that Erdoğan often presents to foreign visitors at his palace.
Lohan made plenty of other pro-Erdoğan and AKP comments during her six-month love-in with Turkey, both on her social media accounts and in interviews with Turkey’s pro-government press. Since then, the friendship appears to have gone quiet. When I approached her agent for comment in February 2018 he told me they were ‘not doing interviews at the moment’.
The Bosphorus Centre has also shifted focus to Britain. In December 2017 it brought British Labour MP John Woodcock to Turkey to visit the country’s flagship camp for Syrian refugees and to meet with interior minister Süleyman Soylu. In an interview with Daily Sabah at the end of the trip, Woodcock was pushed to give his views on why Turkey and its fight against Kurdish militancy is so misunderstood in the West. Back in 2015 he had sponsored a Westminster event hosted by the PYD, the political wing of the Syrian Kurdish militia, the YPG. Now was his time to repent.
‘I will be painfully honest – I was ignorant back then of the scale of the links between the PYD and PKK. This visit to Turkey has reinforced my new understanding of the reality and I am keen to work with our Turkish allies to spread that understanding in the UK so fewer British parliamentarians make the mistake I did,’ Woodcock said.
Woodcock listed the visit in his register of interests, as is required of every Member of Parliament for all earnings, gifts and hospitalities they receive. He estimated the cost of the four-day trip at £3,941.08, all of it covered by the Bosphorus Centre, and recorded the purpose of the visit as ‘[A] fact-finding delegation to meet officials and activists, to learn more about Islamist radicalisation, Isis and Turkey-Syria regional dynamics. Visited camps for internally displaced people.’
Two months afterwards, in late January 2018 – as Turkey was launching a cross-border offensive against the YPG in the Syrian region of Afrin – the centre brought another delegation of British politicians to Turkey for a three-day visit. Lord Stuart Polak, Lord David Trimble, Lord James Arbuthnot and Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones met with ‘politicians, artists and businesspeople’ during their stay. They visited the parliament, which had been bombed by rogue fighter pilots during the 2016 coup attempt. And, for the finale, they met with Erdoğan in his presidential palace.
All filed the trip on the register of interests, but without the estimated value of the hospitality: ‘visit to Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey, 29 January–1 February 2018, to hold meetings with government, political and business leaders and build relations with Turkish civil society and media with view to deepening understanding of Britain-Turkey relations; flights, local transport, food and accommodation provided by local NGO Bosphorus Center for Global Affairs.’
Hot on the heels of those four Lords members came another – the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. In February 2018 he flew into Turkey and met with Erdoğan. The meeting was trumpeted in Sabah and other pro-government titles, but kept quiet by the archbishop’s office back in London. Turkey’s small band of Anglican priests said they were not told about the visit, and were ‘mystified’ as to why it had taken place now. Because as Welby met Erdoğan, Andrew Brunson, an American pastor who had been preaching to a tiny Protestant congregation in İzmir since the 1990s, was spending his seventeenth month languishing in a Turkish prison cell. He had been arrested in October 2016, accused of links with the Gülenists, and Erdoğan had then tried to trade him with the US government for Gülen, who was still hiding out in Pennsylvania. Weeks after Welby’s visit, Turkish prosecutors announced that they were aiming to ensure Pastor Brunson received a life sentence for ‘seeking to overthrow the constitutional order’. (Brunson was finally released from custody and handed back his passport in October 2018, but only after sanctions imposed by the US over the case sent the Turkish lira crashing to its lowest level in fifteen years.)
‘We have no doubt that Archbishop Welby’s visit was well-intentioned, though seen as deplorable,’ Canon Ian Sherwood, the chaplain of Christ Church Istanbul told the Church Times as news of the archbishop’s trip leaked out. ‘The Diocesan Bishop responsible for Turkey as well as HM Embassy in Ankara could not add any further light to the situation. We look forward to hearing about it. So far we have heard not a peep.’
When I called Lambeth Palace to find out why the archbishop had made the visit, I was told he had done so in a personal capacity. Welby has not only not revealed his motives for visiting Erdoğan, but has also not recorded his visit on his Lords register of interests. John Woodcock declined to comment. Meanwhile, the other Lords members did not answer my request to ask a few questions about their visit; instead, they forwarded my email to Hilâl Kaplan.