Читать книгу Erdogan Rising - Hannah Smith Lucinda - Страница 15

If you have ever read Daphne du Maurier you might recognise Erdoğan’s relationship with the blue-eyed blond. Just as the unnamed narrator of Rebecca obsesses over her husband’s dead first wife, it is easy to imagine how the thin-skinned Erdoğan, desperate to establish his own place in history, spends hours fretting over the continuing popularity of his biggest rival.

You could forget that Atatürk is no longer with us. He is so present in Turkey that you might expect him to pop up at a rally, or be interviewed on TV. Like the Queen, his face is so familiar it becomes difficult to see it objectively. Right now, he is the only person who might wield more power than Erdoğan. He is definitely the only one whose picture you will see more often as you travel around Turkey. Erdoğan’s face, always twenty years younger in photos than in real life, looms large from the banners strung between apartment blocks in conservative neighbourhoods. But it is Atatürk who hogs Turkey’s limelight.

It helps that he was photogenic – a natty dresser who instinctively understood the power of the camera at the exact moment the camera was becoming ubiquitous. Each stage of Atatürk’s career – officer, rebel, war hero, visionary – together with his transformation from conventional Ottoman gentleman to twentieth-century statesman and style icon, is represented in a series of classic images.

Anıtkabir, Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara, can probably be classed as his fanbase HQ, but you will find miniature shrines around every corner and underneath almost every shop awning. In his earliest portraits and photographs he looks like any other stiff-backed Ottoman officer. But in later images Atatürk swims, dances and flirts with the lens, dressed in finely tailored clothes and smoking monogrammed cigarettes. There is the famous silhouette of him stalking the front lines at the Battle of Gallipoli, deep in thought with a finger on his chin and a fez on his head. There is another of him in black tie and tails dancing with his adopted daughter, sleek in her sleeveless evening gown. There is the one where he stares directly into the lens, his cigarette in one hand and the other in his pocket, a Mona Lisa smile on his lips. There he is in a nerdish knitted tank top, teaching the newly introduced Latin alphabet to a group of enthralled children. The list goes on …

I like to try to guess the character of any individual Turk through the picture they display. Whenever I see a military Atatürk pinned up behind a counter I imagine the owner to be a patriot who looks back on his own military service with pride and warmth. If they have opted for a besuited and coiffed Kemal, I wager them to be pro-Western intellectuals. If, as in one meyhane (a traditional rakı-and-fish restaurant) close to my flat, the walls are plastered with various portraits from the start of his varied career to its end, I guess them to be full-blooded Atatürk fanatics.

My own favourite is the picture pulsing with such life and humour that the first time I saw it, hung behind the cash register of an Istanbul bakery, I yelped in delight. It is a colour photo of Atatürk on a child’s swing, aboard a pleasure steamer on a trip to Antalya. It was taken three years before his death, and he is not a well man. His sunken bright eyes and his receding blond hair, his pallor and stout middle betray his love of drink; he would die from cirrhosis of the liver aged fifty-seven. Yet he is grinning so widely you can almost imagine him whooping as he flies. A second, less famous frame taken minutes before or after this one shows him standing on the swing with a young child peeping between his legs. This, I thought, is a personality cult I could get with – and a personality cult is what it is. Insulting Atatürk or defiling his image can still land you with a prison sentence, or at the very least the probability of a beating from the nearest Atatürk devotee. Back in 2007, under Erdoğan’s government, a court decided that all of YouTube should be blocked because it carried a few videos deemed insulting to Atatürk. The ban stayed in place for two and a half years.

Internet censorship is still widespread, although these days insulting Erdoğan is far more likely to bring down a court order. Meanwhile, though, Atatürk’s genuine appeal burns strong. It is not unusual to see young Turks use an image of Atatürk as their Facebook profile picture, or tattoo his signature down their arm. You can buy T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and keyrings emblazoned with his face. My own collection boasts a wine carafe, an egg timer and a compact mirror. In almost every town you can find small museums dedicated to him in some way, staffed by volunteers and visited by Turks who earnestly take selfies with the Atatürk waxworks. During Gezi, the 2013 summer of riots sparked by plans to concrete over the eponymous park in Istanbul, the young protesters quickly realised that if they added an Atatürk image to the anti-Erdoğan slogans they spray-painted on the walls, the authorities would not paint them over. The council workers charged with this unenviable task decided to walk the tightrope between the two camps by painting out the slogans while fastidiously leaving the Atatürks. Though Erdoğan might dislike it, Atatürk’s cult endures. And so, Erdoğan has nurtured his own.

Shortly before the parliamentary elections of November 2015 – a contest in which Erdoğan, by that time president, was not even running – I visited his home district of Kasımpaşa, a port neighbourhood in central Istanbul. In a backstreet shoe shop, I found Fatma Özçelik, a lively 59-year-old who had known Tayyip from childhood.

‘Ooooh, he was so handsome!’ she told me. ‘So tall. So handsome! Yes, he’s a bit aggressive on screen. But what can you do?’

I asked who she would be voting for.

‘Tayyip!’ she replied.

But Erdoğan isn’t on the ballot, I said. Did she mean she would be voting for the AKP?

‘Nope!’ she insisted. ‘Don’t like any of them! I’m telling you, the guys ruling the AKP now are terrible. They’re blaming Tayyip for all their shit.’

I pressed on. But would she be giving her vote to Ahmet Davutoğlu, the prime minister (later purged by his boss for being too independent of spirit), knowing that it would actually be an endorsement of Erdoğan?

‘Nope! I don’t like that Davutoğlu, I don’t trust him. I don’t like any of them – only Tayyip! They can’t replace him. It can’t be the AKP without him.’

She would not countenance any other option, and I never did get to the bottom of whether she would be voting or not.

Around the corner I dropped in on Ahmet Güler, perhaps the most famous barber in Istanbul, with the country’s most famous customer. A small TV screen in a corner of his shop played live footage of Erdoğan speaking at a rally in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakır. Both Ahmet and the cloaked and shaving-foamed customer in his chair had the same clipped moustaches as their hero.

‘We should all be proud of Erdoğan, he’s a son of Kasımpaşa!’ he told me. ‘He’s still one of us. I know him well and I don’t feel he’s changed at all.’

He paused, thought a little, and then added a brutally honest and very Turkish appendix:

‘Well, OK – he’s tired and old, so he’s getting bags under his eyes. But otherwise, I have only positive things to say!’

How does he do it, this grumpy old man in an ill-fitting suit? It is a question I have often asked myself as I travel around Turkey talking to his faithful. Usually I get the sense of a demographic who feel their time, and their man, has come. For decades Turkey’s poor, conservative voters found they could participate in democracy, as long as they did not threaten the order. When the politicians they elected looked as though they might actually change things in the way their supporters had been yearning for, the army – self-appointed guardians of Atatürk’s secularity – stepped in to overrule them.

Yet that is only half the story. Alongside the women banned from universities and the public sector because they wear the headscarf, and the men who long yearned for a politician who prays and abstains from booze just as they do, there are others who you would never expect to support Erdoğan – yet they do. Over lunch on a waterside terrace one afternoon, a blonde, wine-drinking academic who grew up in the UK spoke openly about the things that irk her about Erdoğan. Single, secular and childless, she said she felt personally offended when the president had described women like her as incomplete, his latest in a series of bullish statements alienating anyone less pious than he is. Ultimately, though, she – like his other supporters – let him off the hook. When I asked her why the most powerful man in Turkey appeared so sensitive, so petulant and so undiplomatic, she threw back her glamorous coiffed head and laughed: ‘Because he’s a Pisces.’

What is the root of his appeal in these unexpected quarters? One secular, Western-educated journalist told me that she has two great political heroes – Erdoğan and Margaret Thatcher. She sees the same traits in both of them – a tireless work ethic, and a single-minded belief that their way of doing things is the right way, and screw all the haters. She also admires the way that both were self-made, people who had started from modest backgrounds and clawed their way to the top. Others, even if they do not admire him, can appreciate the way Erdoğan has broken the grip that the Kemalists, the devotees of Atatürk, kept on the country for decades.

It is easy, now that they are the underdogs, to romanticise Turkey’s secularists, and to imagine that all would be right with the country if only they could seize back power. But those who remember the secular glory days know they could be as despotic as any religious regime. The dogmatic banning of headscarved women from higher education and from working in the public sector after the coup of 1980 confined millions to a life of child raising and housework – ironic, given Atatürk’s outspoken feminism. Atatürk pushed his own bizarre law banning the fez, the iconic, tasselled, brimless red felt hat ubiquitous in the later Ottoman Empire. This decision sparked a ‘Hat Revolution’ on the part of stubborn fez-wearers in the conservative eastern city of Erzurum that was crushed by Atatürk’s military, thirteen of the ringleaders being executed.

Though Atatürk may not have wished for it, the self-appointed keepers of his legacy – who for decades dominated the courts, the universities and, most notably, the army – stamped down on anyone who stood in the way of their mission. And if you find yourself in eastern Turkey and talk to the Kurds, you’re unlikely to find many Atatürk fans – for it was he who ordered their cities bombed when they revolted against his Turkish national project. Even today, in the Kurdish regions, the Atatürk statues seem a little bigger, a little more brash: visual slaps to the descendants of those who died at the hands of their own government. The plaques engraved with one of his most famous sayings – ‘How happy is the one who says, I am a Turk’ – seem to be there simply to mock the Kurds. The first Turkish president to apologise for what happened in the 1930s? Erdoğan. It’s odd, now that Erdoğan is waging his own war against Kurdish radicalism.

‘You see the look the Erdoğan people have in their eyes now? That conviction that they know the ultimate truth? Well, that is exactly the same look as the Kemalists used to have,’ said one Turk who remembered very well. Half of his family, a bunch of outspoken leftist intellectuals, were imprisoned following the 1980 coup.

Here is another way of looking at Erdoğan’s success: lucky timing. Erdoğan is not the first politician with ambitions to take Turkey in a new direction, he is just the latest in a line of leaders who have professed their piety, and their opposition to the old order. The support base has always been there. Atatürk never fully, or even mostly, achieved his ambition of making Turkey a truly secular country. And Erdoğan’s demographic is growing more rapidly than Atatürk’s – put crudely, the poor and the religious tend to have more children. Meanwhile, the opposition screams foul at Erdoğan’s plans to grant citizenship to around one in ten of the three million Syrians who have settled in Turkey after fleeing their own country’s civil war. They are convinced he is only doing so to reap their votes in the future.

But what differentiates Erdoğan from his ideological predecessors is how he managed to gather support from those outside his base – social liberals, supporters of globalisation and free trade, opponents of military tutelage – before going on to crush those very same people. The irony was not lost on Amnesty International, who – as Erdoğan intensified his post-coup jailing of opposition journalists in 2016 – wrote an open letter reminding him that they had once stepped in on his behalf when, in 1999, he was imprisoned for reading a religious poem at a rally.

Since Atatürk died in 1938, Turkey has been like a round-bottomed toy that rocks precariously to one side or the other but always returns upright. The opposing pull of the country’s two major forces have always brought it back to a central position – though Erdoğan’s charisma, political skill and good timing might now have upset the balance.

Even amid a purge that has stripped tens of thousands of their freedom and livelihoods, those who are not charmed by Erdoğan can still fall prey to his powers of persuasion. Once, as I was chatting to a man who was telling me how his company had recalled 200,000 T-shirts because they feared the design might offend the president, we came on to the subject of Europe – Erdoğan’s pet hate at the time.

‘But Europe lies!’ said the man, certainly no Erdoğan fan. ‘We have three million Syrian refugees and Europe gives us nothing!’

This was one of Erdoğan’s claims – that almost none of the money promised to Turkey by the European Union under a deal to stop asylum seekers surging across the Aegean had materialised. But it was rubbish. Over a period of eighteen months the EU had signed off on projects worth almost three billion euros, exactly what it had promised, with another three billion ready to hand over. European money was pouring into the Turkish health and education systems, refugee camps, asylum detention centres – and that was just one branch of funding. Billions were also being handed over in accession grants, the money given to countries that might one day be EU members to help them bring their standards up to European level. But Erdoğan had managed to convince his people that Turkey was being screwed by Brussels. Erdoğan’s lies are not a web, they are a paste that he slathers on so thick that nothing of the truth underneath is left showing. His motivations for doing so are clear.

‘Look,’ he is telling his fellow Turks. ‘You may not like me, but I am saving our honour against those who would seek to destroy it.’

It is a well-tested method. Part of Atatürk’s appeal, after all, lies in the fact that he rescued Turkey from nefarious foreign powers almost a century ago. Maybe these two cults share more similarities than either would care to admit.

‘He is Dictator in order that it may be impossible ever again that there should be in Turkey a Dictator,’ wrote H.C. Armstrong, a British officer and contemporary biographer of Atatürk in 1932, as the founder’s reforms moved ahead in top gear. Today it is Erdoğan’s turn to change his country, and to overpower anyone who stands in his way, so that it may never go back to the old order. And that is just the way his tribe likes it.