One barometer of the political mood in Turkey is to count the number of policemen in riot gear on Istiklal Avenue, the main artery of Istanbul. The faces of the young men in black uniforms indicate the nature of the day’s political gathering. They are tense and edgy if the Kurds, the Kemalists, or another group critical of the government marches down the street. They are relaxed and chain-smoking if Turks waving national flags gather to protest the Russian bombing of Syria and shout, “Putin Katil! Putin murderer!”
On the afternoon of May 29, 2016, I was struck by the absence of the police and the unusual amount of festivity on Istiklal Avenue. Posters showing profiles of two men separated by five centuries were pasted together on the walls. On the first poster were the words, “We are celebrating the 563rd year of the conquest,” and a picture of Sultan Mehmet II, who led the Ottoman army to victory against the Byzantine forces and conquered Constantinople on May 29, 1453. Sultan Mehmet, a figure revered by all Turks, was projected by the Kemalists in their own image as a man who knew Latin and Greek and appreciated Western art. The rise of the AKP and Erdoğan saw Sultan Mehmet’s conversion into a great warrior of Islam. A Turkish company produced an epic movie about the conquest of Istanbul, Fetih 1453. The film and its trailers opened with a hadith, a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad: “One day Constantinople will be conquered. The commander who will conquer it will be a blessed commander.”
On the Istiklal poster, Sultan Mehmet wore an ornate imperial dress and charged toward a shore on horseback, his eyes fixed on a prize. Below his picture, large red letters exhorted: Rise Again! The second poster, a few inches from the Sultan’s image, repeated the exhortation: Rise Again! The face of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gazed purposefully into the distance. Mannequins of Ottoman soldiers with bows and arrows were placed along the street; an awkward group of Turkish young men were dressed in burgundy Ottoman uniforms. In another part of town, Turkey’s recently appointed Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım called upon a massive crowd to “stand up with the spirit of the 1453 conquest and be united with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.”
Scholars of Turkey have been marking milestones on Erdoğan’s road to authoritarianism. Cengiz Çandar, an influential liberal writer who supported Erdoğan in the early years, saw the court packing of 2010 as a major signpost. “That was when Tayyip Erdoğan let it be known that he can do anything,” Çandar told me. In Erdoğan’s third national election in 2011, where he handpicked the candidates for his party, Erdoğan’s AKP won about 50 percent of the vote. The Arab Spring uprising was roiling the Middle East, and Erdoğan lent his support; the world talked about how Erdoğan’s Turkish model, combining moderate Islam and market-friendly policies, was the path the Arab world should follow. “Erdoğan’s ambitions went beyond Turkey. He was projecting himself as the leader of the larger Muslim world,” Çandar told me. Erdoğan even spoke directly to the greater Muslim world in a speech after the elections. “Believe me, Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul, Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, the West Bank, Jerusalem won as much as Diyarbakır,” Erdoğan declared.
Yet Erdoğan’s bid to be a regional, even global, Islamic leader would be met with an Arab Spring-like challenge. It finally came when protesters gathered at Gezi Park and Taksim Square in 2013.
Taksim Square is a paved, open space at the end of Istiklal Avenue, encircled by the modernist Atatürk Cultural Center, the Marmara Hotel, an old church, and a Burger King. Nearby, Gezi Park, a small patch of green with a few rows of benches shaded by sycamore trees, is an oasis of relief from the bustle and crush of Istiklal Avenue. On most days, young couples, old men, middle class Istanbulites, and Syrian refugees all seek shelter there.
Erdoğan had risen to power at least partly by making construction and infrastructure a major focus of his leadership. In May 2013, the AKP government announced plans to tear down the trees in Gezi Park and replace them with an Ottoman-themed shopping mall. “In terms of scale and presumption, it would be as if Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor, tried to erect a five-story shopping mall in Bryant Park with façades like blinking Bloomberg terminals,” wrote Suzy Hansen, an American writer based in Istanbul.
The decision touched a nerve, and a small group of environmentalists set up tents and began a peaceful protest to stop the demolition of the park. They were soon met by police in riot gear and bulldozers. That only intensified the support for the demonstrations, which by then had spilled into Taksim Square. Over the next two weeks the area and adjacent streets turned into a pungent battleground, as police burned down the tents and tear-gassed the protesters.
News and images of the violent eviction spread across social media, and discontent with Erdoğan found a voice. The demonstrations at Gezi Park resonated with many Turkish people; soon there were supporting protests across the country. Huge crowds gathered at Taksim Square, leading the police to withdraw. Protesters set up an Occupy-like camp there. The demonstrators defied Turkey’s usual divisions between religious and secular. They included men and women of varying political inclinations and socio-economic backgrounds.
Erdoğan responded by announcing plans to demolish the Atatürk Cultural Center and replace it with a mosque at Taksim Square. “I won’t seek the permission of a few looters in such decisions,” he said. He threatened the protesters with mob violence. “We are barely holding our supporters—50 percent of this country—at home,” he told reporters. Tens of thousands of his supporters responded, shouting: “Give us permission and we will crush Taksim.”
Erdoğan had ensured a media blackout of his crackdown. CNN Turk, a television network owned by the Dogan Group, a media conglomerate which had been forced to pay hundreds of millions in taxes by Erdoğan, broadcast a documentary on penguins as the protests continued; another television network ran cooking shows. A small history magazine, NTV Tarih, dedicated a whole issue to the Gezi protests. Its owners refused to print the issue and shut down the magazine entirely. The editor Gursel Goncili decided to publish the issue online for free. The cover image of the last issue of the NTV Tarih was an Ottoman style miniature painting depicting the masked policeman of Taksim Square in Ottoman clothing pepper-spraying a woman in a floral red dress. Turks recognized the woman as Ceyda Sungur. On a late May afternoon, Sungur, a young academic at Istanbul Technical University, a few blocks from Taksim Square, had walked over in solidarity with the protesters. She wore a cotton red dress, a plain necklace, and hung a white tote bag on her right shoulder. An officer stepped out of a formation of riot police, crouched, and sprayed her face with tear gas from a few feet away. She turned her back to the policeman, who was wearing a gas mask, and he charged at her and sprayed her over her back. Sungur walked away gracefully. Osmal Orsul, a photojournalist with Reuters, captured the moment. Choking and gasping for breath, Sungur collapsed on a bench.
“The problem here was that Erdoğan was behaving like an old-fashioned, 1930s ruler. Doing everything, managing everything,” the famed Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said in an interview with The New Republic. “The Taksim events were a good way of saying to Erdoğan, or to any future leader of Turkey, or to anybody in this part of the world, that once a country gets too rich and complex, the leader may think himself to be too powerful. But individuals also feel powerful.”
The Gezi Park protests became a rejection of authoritarian and majoritarian politics, an insistence, as anthropologist Jenny White put it, “that an elected government must also protect the rights of the people who did not vote for them, the right of the minorities, the rights of the people whose ideas or lifestyle the electoral winners might not agree with.”
Hande Sakarya, a freelance film editor, was in Taksim Square when the police tear-gassed the protesters for the first time. A tear gas shell exploded near her feet. “It felt like a revolution. All those days of protests felt like a euphoria, felt like being in love,” Sakarya told me. “The protests weren’t just about a park. Erdoğan always speaks in terms of his electoral majority and ignores the plurality. His rhetoric makes people enemies of each other. You can’t go on ignoring the ethnic, religious, sexual minorities. He is always on television, always telling us how many children women should bear!”
After more than two months of demonstrations, Erdoğan finally backed down from his plans to tear down Gezi Park, though not before 11 people were killed and thousands were injured during crackdowns. Gezi might not have translated into a political formation, but it made an increasing number of Turks think critically. After the media blackout of the protests and the propaganda in the pro-government papers, Sakarya’s father, a fierce nationalist, revaluated his view of the Kurds. “He began to talk about disappearances in the southeast in the 1990s. He began saying how the press had lied to the Turks about the Kurds,” Sakarya told me. The ideals of equal citizenship and liberal democracy that Turkish citizens like Sakarya dream about have remained ever elusive.
Turkey was still reeling from the aftermath of Gezi when a new crisis erupted—Erdoğan was falling out with his old ally Fetullah Gülen.
One of the first significant triggers was the intense Turkish nationalism of the Gülen network, which meant they vehemently opposed Kurdish autonomy. Erdoğan’s bid for Turkey to join the EU had prompted him to try to end the 30-year-long conflict with Kurdish insurgents, and over time he hoped the peace process would be a large part of his legacy. At the end of 2012, Erdoğan announced that his administration was in negotiations with jailed Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. By March, a ceasefire was hammered out, and the PKK withdrew all of its armed insurgents a month later.
Whether Erdoğan truly believed in peace with the Kurds was to be seen, but far more important to his rise to power was his image as a pro-business, infrastructure-building technocrat. He had especially trumpeted the highways, roads, hospitals, and tens of thousands of subsidized homes that he built in Istanbul and other Turkish cities. But a third bridge over the Bosphorus, which irked a lot of Istanbulites, was being constructed at a cost of $2.5 billion; a new airport outside Istanbul went up for $14 billion. That December, an Istanbul prosecutor ordered a criminal investigation of dozens of people connected with the AKP. Among those arrested were the chief executive of the state owned Halkbank, a construction mogul, a mayor, and and sons of three ministers in the Erdoğan government. Police raids found millions of dollars stacked in shoesboxes. Prosecutors and police were investigating real-estate corruption and illicit money transfers to Iran, and the three ministers whose sons were arrested were forced to resign. The Minister of Environment and Urban Planning suggested that Erdoğan himself should resign, as it was the prime minister who gave the nod to public construction plans. The corruption scandal was also reportedly tied to a money-laundering scheme involving an Azerbhaijani businessman accused of buying Iranian oil with Turkish gold to bypass American sanctions on Iran. An anonymous source released audio recordings that purportedly feature Erdoğan telling his son Bilal to quickly get rid of tens of millions of dollars supposedly made under the scheme. Erdoğan claimed the recordings were “montages” and dismissed the corruption charges as a plot by foreign forces and the Gülen network to discredit his government.
Three and a half months after the corruption scandal erupted, the AKP faced municipal elections. Although the charges had inflicted damage on Erdoğan’s reputation, the AKP retained power thanks to support from a loyal base. After the election victory, Erdoğan accused Fetullah Gülen of orchestrating the scandal from America. “You know those people who used that blood-dripping, anger-inducing, hate-mongering headlines,” he said during a victory speech. “Today, they have lost heavily again. Oh, Pennsylvania! Oh, the media who support them from here…”
Two months later, Turkish officials closed the graft probe. The Chief Public Prosecutor in Istanbul dropped the corruption and bribery charges against the accused, arguing that the evidence had not been collected properly and that there was insufficient evidence and no criminality. The millions seized in shoeboxes were returned with interest.
By 2014 Erdoğan had been prime minister since 2003. Although there is no official term limit for the position, the AKP itself decided to uphold a three-term limit for its leader, which meant that Erdoğan would have had to step down in 2015. Erdoğan, who retained good health at age 60, then set his eyes on the Turkish presidency, which would allow him to hold power for another ten years. Hitherto the president had been largely a figurehead chosen by Parliament, but Erdoğan was planning to hold Turkey’s first direct presidential election in August.
The corruption charges had failed to discourage the AKP’s dedicated base of pious Muslims, and a big chunk of far-right voters impressed by the strongman crossed over to embrace Erdoğan. Campaigning on a platform of increased prosperity, improved government services, and greater global importance for Turkey allowed Erdoğan to comfortably defeat his challenger, a retired diplomat.
A few weeks after his victory, President Erdoğan moved into Ak Saray (the White Palace), a presidential residence of more than 1,100 rooms in Ankara that Erdoğan built in a mixture of modernist and Seljuk architecture for $350 million. He even conveyed his Sultanesque self-image by dressing the presidential guard as warriors of past Turkic empires, from the Huns to the Ottomans, during a visit by Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. The images of soldiers in strange, multi-colored costumes carrying spearsand wearing gold helmets were worthier of a Richard III or Macbeth production.
With his power reestablished, Erdoğan wasted no time in going after the Gülen network. Apart from increasing repression of the press in general, Erdoğan began specifically targeting Zaman and Samanyolu, the Gülen movement flagship newspaper and television network, both of which had turned from being cheerleaders to bitter critics. In December 2014, police arrested more than 20 people in raids on Zaman and Samanyolu. Ekram Dumanli, the editor of Zaman, was briefly detained. Hidayet Karaca, the head of Samanyolu, and the crew of a Samanyolu soap opera that had depicted the government efforts to broker peace with Kurdish rebels as an Iranian conspiracy, were sent to prison and charged with “forming and leading a terrorist organization,” ironically echoing the charges Gülenist prosecutors had leveled against journalists during the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials.
Every few months Erdoğan pricked the Gülenists, refering to them as a parallel state, arresting journalists associated with them, or seizing their properties and newspapers. On an October 2015 afternoon, I drove from central Istanbul to Bahçelievler, a middle-class area near the Atatürk Airport. Bahçelievler is an ugly suburb of glass-fronted tower blocks housing offices and residential apartments, a monument to neoliberal excess. An enormous building on a barren road housed the Zaman and Zaman Today newspapers. Video cameras recorded every corner of the building. Bulent Kenes, the editor of Zaman Today, recently arrested for tweets deemed insulting to President Erdoğan, had been released a few days earlier.
Kenes worked out of a minimalist office on a higher floor. Two framed posters stood on a sleek white cupboard behind his sparse desk. “Free Media Cannot be Silenced,” one read. The other had a photograph of Kenes in a red check shirt holding a poster with the blue Twitter logo behind bars, and the words: “No let up in struggle for democracy.” Kenes sat behind a bare desk in a dark jacket and a light blue shirt. Heavyset, with a clipped beard and restless eyes, Kenes looked like a hunted man.
After working his way up through several Turkish papers, Kenes, who is in his early fifties, was brought over from another Gülen paper to edit Zaman Today in early 2007. Owing to the scarcity of English-language news sources from Turkey, Zaman Today became an important venue.
Kenes edited Zaman Today through the constitutional amendments of 2010 and the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer trials. He tore into critics like the economist Dani Rodrik, and wrote spirited defenses of the trials in his paper and in foreign ones like The Guardian. “We supported the government throughout the EU process, through the constitutional amendments,” Kenes told me. “We were with the AKP throughout the main struggle against the junta and the deep state.” There was pride in his voice as he spoke of defeating the establishment. His imprisonment was a far cry from his days atop the media pyramid, when the AKP and the Gülen movement were allies in their battle against the military.
The social media warriors for Erdoğan’s party are referred to as “AK trolls.” “They threatened and abused me on Twitter, on email, on the phone,” Kenes told me. During Ramadan in 2013, he got a call from the police informing him they had intelligence from a western Turkish province about a plot to kill him. His lawyers suggested accepting police protection. That night, he was alone in his apartment. A traffic ramp ran parallel to his apartment window. Around 11:30 p.m. a car drove slowly on the ramp. “Someone inside the car fired six shots at my window. I lied down on the floor till it was quiet and the car ran away,” Kenes told me. “I don’t think it was a coincidence.”
Kenes continued running Zaman Today even after the split with the AKP. I read it regularly and followed Kenes on Twitter, where I was struck by the quantity and ferocity of his tweets. One day before the 2015 national elections, Kenes tweeted, “A thief, a liar shouldn’t be a Prime Minister/President.” Kenes was charged with insulting the president, which carried a sentence of up to four years in prison. (About 1,900 people have been charged with insulting Erdoğan between August 2014, when he became president, and March 2016, according to Turkish government figures.) In the first half of 2015, more than 50 percent of the requests Twitter received for removal of content from its site came from the Turkish government. On Facebook, only Modi’s India, with 15 times the population, had more content removal requests than Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Kenes was jailed for five days, and upon his release was barred from leaving Turkey and ordered to present himself at a police station every Sunday until his trial began. Kenes returned to edit Zaman Today the next morning, but he and his colleagues feared their paper might not survive long. “There is a rumor the government will take over Zaman and Zaman Today,” Kenes told me. “Fuat Avni has tweeted about it.”
Fuat Avni is a self-proclaimed whistleblower who has taken Turkey and Twitter by storm. He claims to be a man working in Erdoğan’s inner circle, and tweets sensational goings-on and confidential plans of the government. Several of his predictions have come true, giving him a substantial degree of credence in the country’s conspiratorial culture. Fuat Avni had tweeted about government plans to take over the Feza Media group, which published the Zaman dailies, Cihan News Agency, Aksiyon magazine, and the publishing house Zaman Kitap. He had mentioned other Gülen-affiliated targets: Koza Ipek Holdings, which owned gold mining, construction, and tourism businesses and ran Bugen newspaper and Bugen television network; and Samanyolu Broadcasting Group, which produces news and entertainment. Kenes believed in Fuat Avni’s prophecy that Erdoğan planned to take over all of these groups, step by step.
The predictions of the Nostradamus of Turkish Twitter came true after a few months. On March 5, 2016, Turkish officials announced that they would appoint administrators to run Zaman and Zaman Today. Police fired tear gas and took over the building. Zaman produced a last defiant edition with a black front page and the headline: “Constitution is Dead.” Abdul Hamid Bilgi, the editor, was immediately fired.
A few days after the takeover I tried to look up some old articles from the Zaman archives. A web page opened with the Turkish words, Sayfa Bulunamadı, or Page Not Found. Erdoğan’s men had set out to erase any trace of the Gülen paper from the web.