Читать книгу Erdogan Rising - Hannah Smith Lucinda - Страница 22

The photo Hüseyin Besli has chosen for the wall of his Istanbul office is a classic of the genre. Erdoğan is smiling, shaded and waving, dressed in a black greatcoat and surrounded by his entourage. It is the new Tayyip in the new Turkey – a place where he is firmly in charge. But with his Marlboro reds, diamond-patterned sweater and tired and sagging grey face, Besli himself looks like a relic of the old – more like an ageing shopkeeper or a minor bureaucrat than the architect of a revolution. His shoulders hunch forward and his smile is resigned. The way he sucks his cigarettes through his own moustache – a little longer than Erdoğan’s and just as grey – suggests a deep sadness. Maybe he is just lost in his thoughts.

We meet in his writing room, a neat, wood-panelled attic in an old Balkan-style house, nestled in the heart of a bubbling district in Asian Istanbul. The streets of Çengelköy are narrow and cobbled, lined with family-run grocers. The district sits on the banks of the Bosphorus, at a point where the land juts out to gift it a panoramic view of the first of the three suspension bridges with the outlines of the mosques of Istanbul’s Ottoman centre in the hazy blue background. The din of a Monday evening rush hour leaks in through the huge window by Besli’s desk as I settle into one of his comfy leather chairs. Revving motorcycles and shouting shopkeepers blend with the wail of the sundown call to prayer. His floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed with books on religion and politics. There is a sticker of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Rabia hand, a four-fingered salute with the thumb tucked under, pasted onto the window, and that Erdoğan portrait is the first thing you’re confronted with as you walk in the door.

Besli chain smokes and occasionally apologises as he breaks off to answer his phone. He says he is sure that I won’t represent his words properly, because the foreign journalists never do.

‘Then why did you agree to speak with me?’ I ask.

‘Because I am polite,’ he laughs.

But I suspect he also craves some recognition for the years he spent moulding the image of the most powerful man in Turkey.

It was in 1974, when Besli was in his mid-twenties, that a tall and striking young man walked into one of his meetings. The National Salvation Party (Milli Selâmet Partisi or MSP) was one of the few overtly Islamist organisations in Turkey at that time, and Besli was head of its youth branch. The country had just undergone its second military coup, and a mushrooming street war between leftist and nationalist youth gangs had sent the murder rate soaring. The rival factions were shooting and stabbing each other to death on the streets and in the university campuses. The MSP stayed outside the violence and the factionalism, meeting to pray, plan and organise. It was a tactic that bore fruit. Throughout the 1970s, the MSP won places in two coalition governments despite never winning more than 12 per cent of the vote, largely thanks to the hopeless fracturing of the non-Islamist parties.

In 1974 Erdoğan, aged twenty-one, was leader of the MSP’s local branch in Beyoğlu, his home borough in inner Istanbul. Besli, a couple of years older, remembers him as a charismatic guy who could already work a room. ‘I don’t remember where I first heard Erdoğan speak, but I remember that he was great, even back then,’ he says. ‘He could make himself heard. When he spoke, people felt sympathy with him.’

Within two years, Besli’s term in office had ended and Erdoğan was elected his successor. They were the young bloods in a party led by the middle-aged and nerdish professor Necmettin Erbakan, who was pursuing an agenda beloved of Islamists since the late Ottoman era. Erbakan insisted that Turkey’s ills could be blamed on foreign meddling and Western influence, and that the cure was to turn it back towards Islam and build relations with the Muslim world. The nefarious secular elites who ruled the republic had done her a disservice by taking her into NATO and cosying up to Europe; what was needed was a revival of strong Islamic morals, population growth and rapid industrialisation to bring Turkey’s living standards up to those of the West.

The establishment was rattled. The army stepped in, launching the third coup of the republic in 1980.

The MSP, like all the other parties, was shut down by the generals. But young Erdoğan’s rise continued. In 1985 he became Istanbul chair of the Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, or RP – which replaced the MSP), and then stood unsuccessfully as their candidate for the mayorship of Beyoğlu in 1989. In 1991 he ran for parliament for the first time – and although he won, had to hand his seat to another parliamentary candidate due to the party’s preferential voting system. None of these setbacks discouraged him. That same year Besli began working as Erdoğan’s speechwriter, assembling the strategy that finally propelled him to the Istanbul mayor’s office in 1994. Erdoğan has never conceded victory at the ballot box since.

‘Our struggle was not so much about power, it was about a cause,’ Besli says, when I ask him what drove them to continue even when so much was stacked against them. ‘When you have a cause, you don’t give up just because you’re not in power. And when you’re a man of fate, you tell yourself that you have to struggle and the result will not be defined by you. You do what is necessary and leave the rest to Allah.’

We are twenty minutes into our conversation, yet it is the first time God has been mentioned. I can’t tell whether it is deliberate; however, when I later ask Besli what their biggest hurdle has been, he admits it was the fear and scepticism of Turkey’s secularist voters. He refers to them as the generation raised by the republic, brainwashed into rejecting their faith and their Eastern traditions in favour of a false affinity with the West. But he also says that a key part of his strategy with Erdoğan was to keep religion away from their image, so that they could broaden their appeal beyond the narrow, pious support base the MSP had commanded. When Erdoğan entered the mayor’s office, he signed a paper promising that no one would lose their jobs because of their political affiliations or be forced to adhere to Islamic rules. On the job, he won respect for his party’s technocratic efficiency.

Erdoğan’s early conciliations in the mayor’s office quickly gave way to a more combative tone. During a rally in the eastern town of Siirt in 1997 he read out a poem that blended nakedly Islamist metaphors with militaristic nationalism: ‘The mosques are our barracks, / The minarets our bayonets, / And the faithful our soldiers.’ The judicial system – dominated by Kemalists – seized the opportunity to take Erdoğan back down to where they believed he belonged. The mayor of Istanbul was sentenced to ten months in prison for inciting religious hatred. And he had already left the Refah Party, which was closed down anyway only eleven months later. But jail time proved the best image boost Erdoğan could have dreamed of.