At five past nine in the morning, every 10 November, cannons fire and air-raid sirens sound across Turkey. Public offices blast out the national anthem and a mournful drone of foghorns strikes up from the ships on the Bosphorus. Almost everyone stops what they are doing and stands to attention.
It’s an eerie sight, none more so in the sprawling metropolis of Istanbul where the drivers, who would generally run over their own grandmas to get somewhere a little quicker, stop dead and sound their horns. But it is nothing compared to what happened on 10 November 1938, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the great Republican reformist, breathed his last in an upstairs bedroom in the annexe of the Dolmabahçe Palace. You can still visit the room today, left exactly as it was the day he died with a Turkish flag draped over the bed. Strikingly small and cold compared to the cavernous gold-trimmed halls of the palace proper, Atatürk lay dying here for weeks. Nightly bulletins from the palace detailed the exact statistics of his condition – temperature, pulse, breathing rate. A team of eight doctors attended him, and on some days he seemed to be improving. But the liver failure nurtured by his years of copious consumption finally overwhelmed him.
‘A great soldier, statesman and leader has passed away,’ ran The Times’s editorial on Atatürk’s death:
Of the leaders whom the new Europe has seen emerge from the confusions of war and revolution, none has accomplished more, none faced greater difficulties. He leaves his people in mourning. It may at least console them to know that in this country [Great Britain] their old opponents, now turned friends, who admired him as a redoubtable enemy, deeply regret the loss that Turkey and Europe have sustained in the death of so great a man.
Six days after Atatürk died, the Dolmabahçe Palace was opened to the public to allow Turkey to pay its respects. Within three days, an estimated 400,000 had filed past his body. Twelve people were killed and thirty injured as the huge crowd waiting outside the palace surged in panic on the evening of 17 November. Inside, the mood was different. His ebony coffin, surrounded by torches, was draped in the Turkish flag and garlanded by wreaths placed by İsmet İnönü, his prime minister and now the new president, representatives of the army and of the Kamutay, the national assembly.
‘The dimly lit room is most simple and impressive,’ wrote Jack Kernick, The Times’s correspondent, who joined the throng. ‘Army officers, officials, students and long queues of men and woman of all classes and ages, filing past, bow silently, deeply moved and whispering prayers for the dead leader. The former King Amanullah of Afghanistan arrived this morning and passed incognito among the people, praying before the coffin.’
Ten days after his death, the body of Atatürk was transported to Ankara, the village he had turned into his capital. His coffin was loaded onto the Turkish battleship Yavuz and carried to the port of İzmit, escorted by HMS Malaya and ships from the French, Russian, German, Greek and Romanian fleets. In İzmit his coffin was transferred to a train. At Ankara station a team of soldiers placed the coffin on a howitzer carriage drawn by six black horses and escorted by six generals with drawn swords on either side. In contrast to the maelstrom that had engulfed Istanbul, the streets of Ankara were deserted; residents had been cleared from the whole route to the Kamutay, where a fifty-foot platform had been constructed and painted red. There Atatürk’s body lay overnight, as still more mourners filed past to pay their respects. ‘Orderly and generally mute,’ Kernick reported, ‘but there is obviously much stifled emotion.’
Atatürk’s funeral was held the next morning under a steady late autumn drizzle. Soldiers wept as they saluted the passing cortege. Detachments of foreign armies marched in procession behind the Turks, with the British turning out the largest, of 266 troops including 60 Royal Marines. Fifteen generals flanked Atatürk’s coffin, while another walked behind carrying a cushion pinned with the leader’s medals from the war of independence.
At midday the procession reached the Ethnography Museum, where Atatürk’s coffin would lie as it awaited its final home. Chopin’s funeral march – a symbolically European choice – accompanied this final ritual. It would be played by the military band at the funerals of all Turkish soldiers and statesmen for the next seventy-nine years.
Erdoğan – the born orator, masterful politician and genius populist – has never made a natural commander in chief. Photos from his military service in the early 1980s show a gawky, startled-looking young man cradling his rifle awkwardly. From time to time since he first became prime minister the pictures have been printed in the Turkish press, but he is always careful not to over-egg it. After all, he is the scourge of the military, the man who ascended the ladder of Turkish politics promising to quell the might of the generals. His power lies in his image as a civilian, not as a man in uniform.
But post-coup Erdoğan is wearing his commander-in-chief role with aplomb. When the state of emergency was brought in, allowing the government to rule by decree, it was the security services Erdoğan turned to first. He brought the gendarmerie and the coastguard under the control of the interior ministry, alongside the police, and announced that he would be closing down the military high schools – the training grounds of the officers since the Ottoman era. The military was brought under the command of the ministry of defence, and its ministers now – for the first time – sit alongside generals on the appointments council.
Two days after the revolt almost three thousand soldiers were dismissed. The government insists that only 1 per cent of the military took part in the coup. But the raw numbers hide the real story: the sackings and arrests soon hit the top brass hardest. Within four days, 110 generals and admirals were purged from postings all over the country, many of them places the coup did not even touch. And, as Erdoğan’s military clearout continues, even those who were not in the country on the night of 15 July find themselves in his sights.
In November 2016 I was approached through an intermediary by a group of Turkish officers who were on NATO postings in Europe as the coup played out. They had all been recalled to Turkey following the putsch, told they would be reassigned. But when those who heeded were arrested within days of their arrival, the others decided to stay in Europe and claim asylum. Overall, 650 of the 900 Turkish officers in NATO had been purged by the time the officers contacted me. Stripped of their positions and denounced as traitors, they decided to break their silence.
‘I and my colleagues were informed that our tours were terminated unexpectedly and called back immediately to our country with no further explanation,’ said one officer, who had been based in the UK and used the pseudonym ‘Kemal’. ‘I learned that criminal investigations were made in my former residence address in Turkey. They cancelled my diplomatic passport. I requested many times with phone calls and written official letters that the Turkish armed forces inform me about the bizarre order and charges against me. However, Ankara was earless to my appeals and gave no response. I contacted many lawyers in Turkey but none of them undertook defending me before the courts. Under these circumstances I refused to go back to Turkey as I feared I would be imprisoned with no fair trial, since this is exactly what has happened to all the other members of Turkish military who went back. I know at least thirty-two of them personally.
‘A few weeks after I was called back to Turkey, I learned from the Turkish official gazette on the internet that I, along with 15,653 other people, no longer had a career, any income or any benefits. I was dismissed disgracefully. I was declared guilty of terrorism and punished without any evidence, accusation, legal process or opportunity to defend myself. They destroyed my honour and reputation by a smear campaign, which accused me of being a supporter of a terrorist organisation.’
As Erdoğan’s purge of NATO officers continued, General Mehmet Yalinalp, a former Turkish brigadier general and NATO’s former Deputy Chief of Plans of Allied Air Command, sent an email outlining his concerns to General Curtis Michael Scaparrotti, the current Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO Allied Command Operations:
As the historical purge of thousands of military personnel takes a faster speed, I and my Turkish colleagues observe a considerable rise of ultra-nationalist, anti-western sentiments within our military and throughout our state departments. It is very worrying to witness that some of the newcomers from Turkey to NATO have a radical mindset, some question the values of NATO and even hate western organisations while holding pro-Russia/China/Iran sentiments. For example, during an address to tens of Turkish NATO officers, a Turkish SNR from a NATO Headquarters located in Southern Europe, stated that there are currently two types of Turkish officers within our military; those who are loyal to NATO and those who are loyal to their nation, and the cleansing is carried out to replace the former ones.
Erdoğan’s post-coup new guard are a mix of loyalists at the start of their careers, and ultra-nationalist officers purged under the trials spearheaded by Gülenist judges and prosecutors back in the 2000s, who have now been brought back into the fold. Meanwhile, as the military is decimated, the president is building up an alternative security force, the Polis Özel Harekat (PÖH, or special operations police). Founded in 1982, while Turkey was still ruled by General Kenan Evren, leader of the 1980 coup, the unit’s broad remit is anti-terror operations. It recruits from the regular police force, sucking in the fittest, the bravest and the most dedicated, and trains them in purpose-built facilities in Ankara and the Aegean province of Balıkesir. In the mid-1990s, the head of the unit was entangled in a scandal that blew open the links between the police, the government and the right-wing mafia. In 2010 Erdoğan instructed the interior ministry, which oversees the PÖH, to restructure it and pour more resources in. At that time, the number of PÖH officers stood at around 11,000, armed with machine guns, assault rifles and pistols.
When the Kurdish peace process broke down in mid-2015, it was the PÖH who led the fight against PKK insurgents in the towns and cities. The government announced in March 2016, eight months into the renewed violence, that it was increasing their numbers in response to the terror threat. When I arrived in ruined Kurdish towns where curfews had been newly lifted, I would find their graffiti – PÖH KOMANDO – scrawled all over the rubble.
In April 2016, three months before the coup and as the terror attacks were at their height, I saw the heavily armed PÖH officers in their camouflage uniforms and black balaclavas on patrol in Istanbul for the first time, guarding the entrance of the high-class Marmara hotel in Taksim, the heart of the city. Around the same time, a military adviser told me that Erdoğan was ‘giving the PÖH everything, turning them into Tayyip’s boys’. The military was growing concerned with the creeping power of the police, the adviser added, and they believed that the conflict in the Kurdish south-east was being used as the PÖH’s training ground. On the night of 15 July the special units proved their mettle: the PÖH’s Golbası headquarters in Ankara was bombed by rogue pilots, while the special forces officers led the fightback against the revolt. A few months later, one of Erdoğan’s advisers let slip to me that the PÖH and their gendarmerie counterparts, the Jandarma Özel Harekat (JÖH) are the only officers the president trusts. By 2017, their combined numbers had soared from 11,000 to an estimated 40,000, an almost four-fold increase in seven years.
Their rigid selection process – recruits must be able to run 2.5 kilometres wearing a ten-kilogram backpack in less than fifteen minutes – precedes gruelling training. Over sixteen weeks, the PÖH recruits are schooled in advanced weapons techniques, sharpshooting, waterborne operations, reconnaissance and intelligence gathering, and hostage rescue. At least some of that training is now conducted by a shadowy private company with close ties to Erdoğan.
SADAT, a defence and consultancy firm, was established by a group of former Turkish military officers. It is headed by Adnan Tanrıverdi, a one-star general who was forced into retirement in 1996 due to his suspected Islamist sympathies. He told journalists at the time of SADAT’s incorporation in 2012 that the company’s focus would be African and Middle Eastern countries, and that it would provide services solely to state institutions, not private individuals. A banner on SADAT’s website warns that it will only work with the police and militaries of ‘friendly countries’.
SADAT says it operates in twenty-two Muslim nations, although it doesn’t specify which ones. The world map on its logo shows Turkey coloured in red, and in Islamic green a swath from Senegal in the west to Kazakhstan in the east, taking in the Arab peninsula and some isolated areas: Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Muslim parts of the Balkans. Independent reports claim that SADAT won a contract in 2016 to train the Saudi Arabian air force, and bid unsuccessfully for one with militias in Libya in the same year. Meanwhile the company’s brochure, which I picked up from its stand at the biannual Istanbul arms fair in May 2017, reveals a deeply anti-Western undertone to its mission. The bald, grey-bearded Tanrıverdi writes in his introduction to the company:
Today, there are around seventy ‘International Defence Consultancy Companies’ which are controlled by Western developed countries and which provide service in parallel to and under the control of the armed forces and foreign affairs departments of their countries.
All of these companies were established after the World Wars I and II, and they operate in around 20 Muslim countries. They carry out the most confidential military operations of countries in which they operate. Some of them instigated the civil war in their countries by means of impudent leaders while some turned neighbouring Muslim states into enemies, some were left behind to maintain control in lieu of the armed forces that retreated after the actual occupation and some others committed major crimes against humanity with their ‘hired armies’. As a result, this area was used as a means of exploitation by the West. This situation imposes a liability on us. When other countries needed a military personnel, who have served for the long-established Turkish armed forces with a view to build, train and arm the military forces of friendly and Muslim countries, we were encouraged to form SADAT in order to ensure such countries find the opportunity which organises skilled and idealist commissioned and non-commissioned officers who will attach primary importance to the national interests of such countries and the joint interests of the World of Islam.
In August 2016, a month after the coup attempt, and as the pro-Western generals were being purged from the Turkish military, Erdoğan appointed Adnan Tanrıverdi as his senior adviser. Then, seven days later and with the military chain of command brought firmly to his heel, Erdoğan launched a war he had long been craving. Turkish special forces and allied Syrian rebels stormed across the border into Syria, with the stated aim to drive Isis out of the borderlands. Days earlier, though, the Kurdish YPG had taken the nearby town of Manbij from Isis. In fact, Erdoğan was desperate to stop them advancing further towards the Turkish frontier.
The generals had always blocked Erdoğan’s demands to put troops on the ground inside Syria, fearing they would get sucked into the quagmire. But the Second Army – based in the eastern city of Malatya and in charge of protecting Turkey’s southern borders – was stripped out entirely in the post-coup purge. General Adem Huduti, the commander of the Second Army, had previously briefed junior staff officers that he would not allow an incursion into Syria; he, and all of the 150 brigade commanders along the Syrian and Iraqi frontiers, were arrested and decommissioned straight after the coup attempt even though there had been almost no coup activity in those areas.
Erdoğan’s Syria operation in August 2016, codenamed Euphrates Shield, progressed quickly in its early stages and then became bogged down. The town of al-Bab, twenty miles inside Syrian territory, was an Isis stronghold where the jihadists had dug in. Turkish forces had not managed to set up a fully functioning supply line from the border by the time winter descended. The death toll began to mount: almost every day, another Turkish soldier died. On the bloodiest day, fourteen were killed in one bomb blast on the outskirts of al-Bab. Days later, Isis released one of its glossy, gruesome propaganda videos. Two Turkish soldiers captured by the group in the borderlands in 2015 were shown shaven-headed and dressed in orange jumpsuits, shackled by their necks and caged. They were dragged out on leashes by an Isis fighter who was also Turkish, forced to read statements to camera, and then doused in petrol and set on fire. ‘If you do not retreat, this will be the end of all your fighting soldiers,’ the Isis terrorist, who called himself Abu Hassan al-Turki, told the camera.
The Turkish government claimed the video was a fake, and shut down Twitter and YouTube for four days to stop it spreading. They never made any more official statements, wagering that it would be quickly forgotten. They were right; few Turks I mention the video to today have even heard of its existence.
In January 2018, Erdoğan launched Operation Olive Branch, his second war in Syria. This time his target was a mountainous pocket of Kurdish territory in the north, just across the border from Antakya and controlled by the YPG.
Erdoğan’s already shaky relations with the militia and its US backers had crumbled further in the wake of Operation Euphrates Shield. Once Isis was routed from al-Bab the Turks started threatening to attack nearby Kurdish positions. There were minor skirmishes, and the Pentagon eventually made clear that it would not be withdrawing its own special forces from that area. Erdoğan had hoped the flaky new US president, Donald Trump, might be talked into withdrawing support for the YPG. Trump mulled it over, and then went in entirely the other direction, upping US weapons shipments to the Kurds.
Erdoğan had threatened a full-scale attack on the Kurds near al-Bab but knew it would also lead him into a fight with US troops – and an internecine NATO clash of the type last seen in the Cyprus war of 1974. Instead he swung his guns on Afrin, an isolated bubble to the west of the Kurds’ main territory, where the YPG was supported by Russian advisers in early 2018, but not by American special forces. The YPG occasionally fired rockets into Turkey from Afrin and killed soldiers at the mountainous border posts, provocation enough for Erdoğan to claim they posed a threat to the nation. Public support for the Afrin operation was overwhelming, despite the fact that, again, Turkish soldiers were dying almost daily. In Istanbul, shopkeepers plastered on the walls of their arcades billboards cheering on the Turkish troops, and thousands turned out to the funerals of slain soldiers, turning them into nationalist PR events for Erdoğan’s second war. One month in, with the offensive progressing less rapidly than hoped, the government announced that it was sending PÖH and JÖH officers to join the fight alongside the army in Afrin.
Erdoğan declared victory in Afrin on 18 March 2018, Çanakkale (Gallipoli) Day, the 103rd anniversary of Atatürk’s defeat of British and Australian troops in 1915. In his speech to mark the day the president deftly blended past and present, while praising again the might of the Turkish people during the coup attempt and throwing in a swipe at the Kurds’ Western backers: ‘They assumed that our nation no longer had the courage and perseverance which it had back in Çanakkale. They assumed this nation no longer harboured that unwavering faith. However, they saw in every step they took that they were mistaken.’
The YPG’s fighters had eventually turned and fled from Afrin when they realised the US bombers would not be coming to save them. What could have turned into a months-long urban battle had come to a thankfully swift end – although almost a hundred thousand civilians fled and hundreds were killed. It is a scandalous mark of the scale of Syria’s plight: a small city’s worth of people are forced out of their homes and it barely registers with the rest of the world. Kurdish activists worldwide shrieked that no one was protesting about Afrin because no one cares about Kurds. But that was not what was behind the ghastly silence. Seven years in, more than half of Syrians have been displaced. No one protested about Afrin because ruined towns and the sight of their fleeing inhabitants have become ubiquitous and mundane.
Forty-five Turkish soldiers were among the dead. The news filled with jingoism, mock-ups of the battle and stories of the army’s glorious progress through the mountains of north-western Syria. ‘More towns cleaned of terrorists!’ the headlines screamed. ‘More terrorists neutralised!’
‘The notion of martyrdom is very different in Turkish culture,’ said Faruk Loğoğlu, when I asked him how many Turkish soldiers must die before public opinion started turning against Erdoğan’s Syrian adventures. ‘Look at the parents of those who lost their lives in the operation. They are saying that if they had another son they would send them there, too. It is what I called a magnetic effect of the Mehmetçik’ – ‘Little Mehmet’, like the ‘Tommy’ of the British army. ‘Everybody lines up behind that notion. And the media keeps pumping this.’
The government issues Turkish journalists with a list of exacting instructions for covering the battle. They are not to trust any reports of civilian casualties coming from the Kurdish enemy, either armed or civilian – those are just ‘information pollution’. Neither are foreign journalists’ reports to be trusted. Anything that might ‘boost the morale’ of the other side is banned, and readers and viewers should at all times be reminded that the operation is being conducted with newly hatched, Turkish-produced weaponry. It is a campaign designed to stir nationalist hearts. Since the coup attempt, Erdoğan has repeatedly claimed that Turkey is embroiled in its second war of independence.
The international press corps is less easy to control, but the government’s media men are trying. We get a flurry of emails from the press ministry, pictures with big green ticks and red crosses showing us how the YPG is circulating fake images of dead children. The main press spokesman reminds us that if we try to embed with the Kurdish militia, we will be enabling the terrorists’ propaganda and will be treated accordingly. In lieu, a select few foreign journalists are offered escorted trips across the border with a Turkish government minder, to look at the sprawling refugee camps Ankara is bankrolling and meet families who insist they are pleased the Turkish army is coming. Two weeks into the offensive, a handful of us are called to a meeting with İbrahim Kalın, Erdoğan’s spokesman, in Istanbul’s Yıldız Palace.
I ask Kalın a question about the prestigious Turkish Medical Association and its venerable board, all of them arrested and jailed for an anti-war statement published on their website during the first week of the Afrin operation. The statement, which did not mention Afrin, nor Kurds, nor Turkey, was the broadest kind of protest against harm to civilians. The Turkish government says it was terrorist propaganda.
‘Did they oppose any other war before this one?’ Kalın asks. ‘No. So they are doing propaganda for the terrorists.’
I try arguing back, but Kalın’s wall comes down. More than three hundred people have been arrested for criticising the Afrin operation, yet they find little sympathy from their countrymen. The war is an easy sell. The YPG’s affiliate, the PKK, have wrought chaos in eastern Turkey for three decades. Many of its leaders and fighters in Syria, especially in the earliest days, were Turkish Kurds. The group spits hatred into Turkey from its Syrian stronghold and occasionally fires rockets across the frontier. Even secular Turks who are no fans of Erdoğan’s government fill their Instagram pages with patriotic messages and pictures of Turkish soldiers kissing the flag.
Having fended off an hour of journalists’ questions with the skill of a practised propagandist, Kalın switches seamlessly into another role – that of impeccable host. The Yıldız Palace is where the Ottoman sultan Abdülhamid II holed up as his empire withered and a group of scheming officers, including Mustafa Kemal, plotted a coup. Abdülhamid had been scorned and ridiculed in the early Republican era as a man who squandered both the power of the empire and his own dignity. The liberalising Ottoman reforms of the 1830s were rolled back under his rule, and he dissolved the empire’s first parliament and constitution. He tried to muzzle journalists who criticised him and cartoonists who made fun of his big nose. He saw conspiracies everywhere – some of them real. Several revolutionaries tried to assassinate him, and in the end he was unseated by the officers.
But Erdoğan has rehabilitated Abdülhamid II. A glossy, hagiographic TV series, Payitaht, tells a version of his story so whitewashed it makes historians cringe and swear. Erdoğan says Turks should watch it to learn about their history. In the same week that Kalın called us to the Yıldız Palace, the new Turkish establishment marked the centenary of Abdülhamid’s death. All of the sultan’s descendants – who had been banished from the republic but have recently returned to the limelight singing Erdoğan’s praises – were handed Turkish citizenship.
To celebrate, we are served a halva dessert that was a favourite of the sultan’s. And as I suck the sugary paste from the spoon, I study Kalın’s intellectual face and wonder what he really believes.
Erdoğan’s transformation to war leader is complete; in April 2018, two weeks after the Turkish victory in Afrin, he tours the troops at the Syrian border. Herds of celebrities are bussed in, including Ibrahim Tatlıses, a much-scorned singer of kitsch Arabesque music who tends to attach himself wherever power lies. Erdoğan wears the same uniform as the rank-and-file soldiers who line up to shake his hand – drab camouflage, with his name patch over the right breast.
There are murmurs of early elections. The presidential and parliamentary ballots are scheduled to be held in November 2019 – seventeen months from now – but the economy is sliding fast and Erdoğan knows it. After the next polls, Erdoğan’s reformed constitution will take effect. Whoever gets the keys to the presidential palace will be running an almost one-man show. And right now, in the wake of Afrin, Erdoğan is riding a wave of nationalist fervour.
‘They are now playing the war game,’ Faruk Loğoğlu tells me. ‘They are using this entire episode for domestic political reasons.’
The Erdoğan-hating part of the country snickers; the president still looks out of sorts in fatigues. He wants to be the war hero, that is clear – but he will never quite pull off the look. The jokes are made behind closed doors, at private dinner parties that are becoming more uproarious as Turkey’s public spaces become small-talk-only zones. These days, my friends and I use code words when we discuss Turkish politics in cafés or on buses. In the evenings, within the comfortable circles of close friends, all the words and thoughts and hilarities we have been bottling up all day spill out. With the dearth of reliable information about what is going on in the country, and all the TV channels churning out minor variations on the government’s line, we delve into conspiracy thinking. It’s probably not true but it could be – and we can never know either way.
‘OK! I have a new theory,’ says a friend. ‘How about if, actually, the coup succeeded and now the army is in charge and keeping Erdoğan drugged all the time, and wheeling him out for these appearances!’
We laugh until we cry.
Ayşe Hür, a radical Turkish historian, is unimpressed by Erdoğan’s latest rebrand. When I meet her in a bustling diner on Taksim Square, three weeks after Erdoğan’s appearance in military garb, she has just been slapped with a five-year suspended prison sentence for tweeting that she doesn’t believe the PKK is a terrorist group. She must have known it would land her in trouble.
‘What am I meant to do?’ she says with a broad white smile. ‘Somebody asked me what I thought of the PKK and I answered. Somebody asked me and I felt obliged to give a correct answer. Maybe I am a Christian. Even if somebody asked and there was a police officer next to me, I would answer. People are asking questions and I am a historian journalist writing about historical issues. I should answer these questions correctly. It is my job.’
Hür has made her name by questioning all of Turkey’s dodgy historical narratives, from the Kemalists’ pseudo-scientific explanations of who the Turks are, to the details of what really happened during the ethnic massacres of 1915. She calls it the history of the underdog – and back when Erdoğan was the underdog, he was a fan. These days, when she has turned her attention to unpicking his own fabrications, he is less enamoured. In a witty internet post from April 2016 titled ‘Erdoğan’s ignorance in history and numbers’, Hür forensically examines occasions when the president has played with the facts. In 2003, he claimed that during the Battle of Manzikert (modern Malazgirt) in 1071 – the Ottomans’ first victory in Anatolia – the invading Sultan Alparslan had cried out ‘Allah, Allah!’ and ‘Vatan!’ (Motherland). Hür pointed out that the word ‘Vatan’ did not exist in the Turkish language until the eighteenth century, and even after that there are no recorded instances of it having been cried out during battle.
Then, in 2011, Erdoğan claimed that his great-grandfather was one of the seventy thousand Turkish soldiers who had frozen to death while battling Russian forces in Sarıkamış in the winter of 1915–16. ‘My great-grandfather, Rize Güneysulu Kemal Mutlu, was martyred here in Sarıkamış and embraced with the mercy of Allah. My elders told me, saying: They wrapped around their guns, we saw they had been martyred by freezing, and their tears were like dripping drops of ice,’ he said at a speech to commemorate the tragedy.
Armed with the name, Hür went to the defence ministry archives and scoured the five volumes of records about the Sarıkamış martyrs. The name of every soldier who had died there is listed. Erdoğan’s great-grandfather was not among them.
The questions that really haunt Erdoğan, following him around like a mosquito he can’t swat away, are the ones about his university degree. He claims to have graduated from the business school at Istanbul’s Marmara University in 1981. In 2014, as he prepared to run for the presidency, members of the opposition started to investigate. The president must, by law, have a university degree. The university’s rector produced a degree certificate. But Marmara was only incorporated as a university in 1983, and the questions linger on. Ayşe Hür is one of the people looking into it.
‘I asked Marmara University [to look at their records] but there is an internal law and they cannot give information. I applied to the university asking if there was ever a student by that name there. The answer was that it was about somebody’s private life and that they could not answer,’ she says. ‘Then I asked a teacher’s assistant at the university to check. He researched and it was not there. Erdoğan does not exist in any documents. When I started to research a guy who claims to have taught Erdoğan there was no information and when asked more was told that it was private information. That guy is now living in Israel. I contacted him and asked how Erdoğan was as a student. It turned out it was also bullshit. There are no school friends, no photos. The research assistant found a yearbook from 1983. There is a Recep Tayyip Erdoğan but with no photo. On another yearbook he is not mentioned.’
Those awkward old military service photos also throw doubt on Erdoğan’s claims about his degree. In them he is wearing the uniform of a private – entry level for non-graduate enlistees. If he had indeed graduated, he would likely have been an officer.
The furore died down as Erdoğan’s grip tightened, and these days the degree question is just one on a list of many others that no one talks about. There are the tapes of Erdoğan and his son discussing how to hide money that emerged during the December 2013 Iranian gold-dealing scandal. Or Erdoğan’s second son – not Bilal, the model child who organises traditional Turkic sporting events in the mass rally ground at Yenikapı, but Ahmet, who killed classical musician Sevim Tanürek in a hit-and-run car crash in 1998. Ahmet Erdoğan did not have a driver’s licence and was found guilty on three of eight counts in his first trial. At appeal he was cleared and flew to America. No one talks about him now. Younger Turks might never have heard of him.
It’s little surprise, then, that Erdoğan is also trying to rewrite the history of coup night and its aftermath. The people injured on the night, and on his side, are given the honorific title of ‘Gazi’ (meaning veteran – and also bestowed on Atatürk), and cards that allow them free public transport and other benefits. Now, he is trying to recast his own military history, claiming status as a war hero – not as the timid, cowardly man remembered by those who knew him in the early days.
‘He is trying to identify himself with Atatürk and make them the same,’ says Hür. ‘People do not get it. In Çanakkale the Allies were attacking us. He is saying the same about Afrin even though we are the attackers there. There is false information. Nobody knows about the true genuine facts.’
In a small glass case in the museum at Anıtkabir you can find the first known portrait of Atatürk.
It is an expressionist oil painting depicting him from mid-chest upwards, face turned slightly to the right, his eyes fixed on a point in the distance. It was crafted in October 1915 by Austrian artist Wilhelm V. Krausz, famous for his depictions of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rulers. At the time Mustafa Kemal was an Ottoman officer fighting in the First World War; six months earlier he had won the glorious victory over the British and Australian troops at Gallipoli, establishing himself as a hero among his men and the Turkish press, who dubbed him ‘the saviour of the Dardanelles and the capital’. But back in Istanbul, Atatürk did not receive the praise he believed he deserved. His relationship with Enver Paşa, the general who led the Young Turks, was fraught. Mustafa Kemal considered Enver incompetent, and Enver viewed Mustafa Kemal as an upstart to be watched. He dispatched him to the Caucasus front, out in the eastern wilds, 400 miles from Istanbul.
I’m fascinated by this depiction of a future icon. The canvas is less than fifty centimetres high, and none of the facial features that would later stand out so strikingly seem remarkable. A messy moustache cancels out the sharp cheekbones; the blue eyes seem watery rather than sharp. His rank is not visible, and there is no indication of his achievements.
It is difficult to imagine this soldier’s portrait being replicated millions of times on posters, tea sets and lighters, as Atatürk’s more famous later images subsequently were. By the end of the twentieth century it had occurred to the Kemalists that the old forms of Atatürk-worship – mass rallies in sports stadiums; dour official portraits looming over public squares; above all, harsh punishments for anyone who did not comply – were no longer working. The rising Islamists – men like Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – were forging genuine bonds with the people through their common touch. Thus, the Kemalists decided to bring Atatürk into the private realm. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the republic in 1998, new official exhibitions displayed Atatürk’s evening wear for the first time, and historians went to the archives and started pulling out new photos of him – drinking, laughing and swimming.
Esra Özyürek, a Turkish anthropologist who had lived in the States for many years, noticed a profound change in her people’s relationship with Atatürk on her return to Turkey to study the celebrations in 1998. She writes in her 2006 book, Nostalgia for the Modern:
Although I grew up under the perpetual gaze of the founding father, I was astonished by the omnipresence of Atatürk images on my return to the country after several years’ absence. What startled me most was not the multiplication of his image, but his appearance in strange, new places and in novel poses – the very commodification of the leader. Kemalist entrepreneurs and consumers had creatively adopted the founding father into their personal lives and ventures … Most surprisingly in the newly popular images, Atatürk appeared smiling, much in contrast to his fierce looks in pictures that decorate state offices.
Back in those days, when Erdoğan was still the rebel upstart, Ayşe Hür spent most of her time battling against the Kemalists’ myths. Over strong coffees she destroys one after another little parts of the Atatürk story that I have taken to heart over the past six years: ‘He has fake photographs, like the one where he is sleeping on the snow,’ she says, referring to a famous grainy black-and-white picture of Atatürk on the battlefield. ‘It is staged … There is a story about Atatürk getting hit by a bullet and it bouncing off his watch. This is probably also fabricated. Most of my career has been about deconstructing the Kemalist reading of the era. Over the last ten years, people started to get pissed off because now everyone expects me to give only a critical review of the AKP period. Sometimes I tweet something about Kemalism and people ask what I am doing. They say that this is not the time to be criticising Kemalism!’
We have been speaking for three hours over the din of the coffee shop, our conversation curving through Atatürk and Erdoğan, then back to Atatürk again. Both men are more fictions than fact, we conclude – but Atatürk has one claim over Erdoğan: ‘Atatürk joined the war,’ Hür says. ‘Erdoğan would never do that!’
She gathers her things to dash to her next meeting through the rush-hour crowds on a warm April evening in Taksim. On one side of the square the brutalist Atatürk Cultural Centre – a symbol of the modern republic – is being pulled down by digger trucks to make way for a new opera house. Turkey’s secularists are horrified, seeing it as a metaphor for Erdoğan’s drive to pull apart the nation that Atatürk created, and to refashion Taksim just as he is trying to remould the minds of the people. They will not be soothed by what is happening on the other side of the square, exactly facing the demolition site. Here, the skeleton of a new mosque is rising in exact sync with the razing of the Cultural Centre. It is the project that Erdoğan has been promising for a generation, since he first became mayor of Istanbul.
Just after Ayşe and I say our goodbyes, news comes in. Snap elections have been called, even earlier than everyone was expecting. In two months, on 24 June 2018, Turks will go to the polls seventeen months early to pick both their president and parliament. Either way, the decision they make will reroute the country’s future. Once the winner is called, Erdoğan’s new constitution will come into force, sweeping away Atatürk’s legacy of parliamentary democracy and handing whoever takes the presidency almost unbridled power to shape the country as he, or she, sees fit. The opposition must now scramble to find their candidates. Erdoğan doesn’t have to announce he is standing: it’s a given.