Who controls the guns controls the narrative, and in Turkey today, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan controls the guns. I’m in Istanbul’s Gezi Park, where two years ago protests against the Turkish President reached a fever pitch. In the US media, which searches desperately for metanarrative (often at the expense of truth), the tendency was to lump Gezi in with the Arab Spring or with Occupy. But Turkey, while predominantly Muslim, is not an Arab country, and the conflict here does not stem from corporate greed (though as in any conflict, there’s money to be made).
While ostensibly a struggle over land use, at its heart Gezi Park was a struggle over ideas. Erdoğan’s government embodies the push away from the secular, modernized outlook of Atatürk’s Republic of Turkey and back—ideologically, symbolically—toward the glory days of the Ottoman Empire. Gezi Park, former site of the Taksim Military Barracks where the Third Army crushed the religious countercoup, would have been a poetic victory for Erdoğan’s conservative Islamic regime. The Third Army, which in 1909 employed a young officer named Mustafa Kemal, was the military arm of the Young Turks, who favored a secular, constitutional parliament over an absolute monarchy under sharia law. Erdoğan’s plan for Gezi was to raze the park and rebuild the barracks, replete with a shopping mall and a mosque, on top of it—effectively erasing the legacy of secular victory.
To redefine the national identity and to enshrine himself within it—this was Atatürk’s aim in 1923; it is Erdoğan’s in 2015. This is why his Justice and Development Party (AKP) is eradicating cultural institutions and bulldozing neighborhoods. This is why he’s using war against ISIS as an excuse to bomb the Syrian Kurds, whose Turkish counterparts in the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) constitute his most significant electoral opposition. This is why talks on Gezi Park’s development have reopened.
A struggle for narrative is a struggle for recognition and for legacy, and if Erdoğan doesn’t get his early elections (or doesn’t win them), if he is voted out of power, then he must contend with a legacy of failure and a people free to recognize him—and prosecute him—for what he is: a corrupt, bloodthirsty megalomaniac.
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