Now that the dust has settled over last Friday’s failed military coup attempt in Turkey, we are beginning to witness the full extent of that failure. With Istanbul and Ankara back firmly in his grasp, the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – nominally led by Prime Minister Binali Yildirim – has begun a wide-ranging purge of suspected dissidents, including the firing of 9,000 police officers, the suspension of almost 3,000 judges, and the arrest of 6,000 military personnel, including 103 generals and admirals. However, much remains unclear. Who were these coup plotters? Erdogan has blamed the supporters of his former political ally Fetullah Gulen, who currently resides in the United States. Why did they do this now, after almost 14 years of Erdogan rule? And what does this mean for Turkey and Erdogan going forward?
Coups are hardly a rare occurrence in Turkish history. Since 1960, the military has ejected civilian governments about once every ten years. However, this coup was different. First, according to Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy and Cipher Brief expert Soner Cagaptay, “normally Turkish military coups are top-down affairs, but this time it seems to have been a splinter group within the military… perhaps 20 percent of all generals and admirals.” Rather than pit the government against the military as a unitary institution, this coup only mobilized that minority splinter group. Its success depended on the rapid capture of key institutions, including the media, and government officials. In failing to accomplish either of these objectives, the coup plotters quickly lost the momentum, which might have attracted more military leaders to their cause.
The second feature that sets this weekend’s coup attempt apart from past plots was an outpouring of public opposition to the coup across the political spectrum. At the same time, the coup plotters’ willingness to open fire on some anti-coup protesters crossed a “red line” in Turkish politics, which had never been breached before. As Cagaptay explains, “the Turkish military is a conscript army… the only organization in which all Turks participate.” Thus, “the military was sort of firing on itself when it fired on its own people.”
The crossing of that red line, in particular, hints at a new era in Turkish politics, which divorces the military as an institution ever further from society. So far as this represents a popular response against anti-democratic military coups, that is a positive development. However, as former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Cipher Brief expert James Jeffrey notes, it also “strips the military of any stabilizing and unifying role in a country split between pro- and anti-Erdogan factions, and facing a resilient 30 year old PKK insurgency.”
In addition, while popular reactions against the coup attempt occurred across the political spectrum, protests on the street have been dominated by Islamist supporters of Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Indeed, at 1:15 AM on the night of the coup, it appears that Erdogan himself ordered the Diyanet – a religious governing body that coordinates the call to prayer at Turkish mosques – to issue an off-schedule call to prayer in order to rally supporters against the pro-coup forces.
As a result, street demonstrations and public rallies have been dominated by Islamist sentiment. According to Cagaptay, “the counter-coup against the Young Turks in 1909… was the last time you saw a religious movement in the streets.” Since then, the secular nationalism espoused by founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has largely defined Turkish politics, even under mildly Islamist AKP rule. The resurgence of more overt Islamism in public life threatens to inject a measure of sectarianism into the country’s politics, especially as President Erdogan continues his quest to consolidate power by revising the Turkish constitution into a more executive presidential system.
Compounding these political developments has been the ruthless response of Erdogan’s AKP-led government against the coup plotters, specifically those who they believe to be connected to the self-exiled Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, a moderate Islamist preacher who once boasted deep influence in Turkey through his thousands of followers at high levels of government, was originally a powerful ally to Erdogan. However, when “Gulenists” in the police and judiciary launched a series of corruption investigations against AKP officials in 2013, Erdogan turned against Gulen and his followers. Since then, the President has lashed out harshly against critics, pushing suspected Gulenists out of government, arresting journalists, and even shuttering the liberal newspaper Zaman.
In similar form, Erdogan seems to be using this coup attempt – and its alleged “Gulenist” origins – to further rid the government of opponents. The sheer number of government workers arrested or suspended within just two days suggests that, at the very least, those workers have been punished without proper investigation and, more probably, that their names were already on some kind of list.
The extent of this apparent purge has unsettled E.U. and U.S. officials, as has Erdogan’s suggestion that parliament might revisit the death penalty, a policy which would definitively nix the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU. Finally, any Turkish request for Fethullah Gulen’s extradition from the United States, where he is currently a legal resident, may strain relations with Washington, just as recent Turkish cooperation in the anti-ISIS coalition has helped spur gains against the group in Syria.
As Ambassador Jeffrey observes, “no matter how important Turkey’s fate is to America, there is nothing the U.S. can do to fundamentally impact domestic developments.” At least for now, the coup forces failed to destroy one of the world’s largest Muslim democracies. However, the concern is that the attempt will push Erdogan and the AKP too far down the road to autocracy.
Fritz Lodge is an international producer at The Cipher Brief.
