Turkey: of coups and popular resistance

Supporters of Turkish President Erdogan at a rally in Kizilay main square, in Ankara, July 20, 2016. Hussein Malla /Press Association. All rights reserved.The morning of Saturday 16 July, the sun
rose over a different Turkey. During the night, a group of armed forces
officers attempted an ill-fated coup d'état.
The coup involved a fairly limited but efficiently deployed number of units and
military hardware. A few fighter jets and helicopters, several armoured
vehicles and tanks. Although manpower and materiel came from several locations
in the country, the main thrust of the military takeover was focused in
Istanbul and especially Ankara, where key state institutions are located.

Targets involved the headquarters of the
General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, the National Intelligence
Organization, the Police, the Parliament, the Presidential Palace, Istanbul’s
Ataturk Airport and the Bosphorus Bridges. The coup forces started arresting
top military officers, and seizing TV stations. As a small number of F16s flew
over the two cities, and a helicopter raid to the Marmaris hotel where
President Erdoğan was spending his holidays was unfolding, the Armed Forces
website featured a statement declaring that a “Peace Council” had taken control
to restore democracy, human rights and “peace at home” – a reference to the
founders of the Turkish Republic cornerstones of modern Turkey’s orientation.

Erdoğan who had narrowly been missed by the
soldiers who raided his hotel decided to fight back as did Prime Minister Yıldırım
and his cabinet. The Prime Minister acknowledged that a coup was under way from
the studios of the state broadcaster just ten minutes before it was overrun by
forces loyal to the coup leadership, while the President used facetime to
address the public, declaring the determination of the government to resist and
calling the people to get out in the
streets and defy the curfew that was meanwhile declared. He then boarded a
business jet towards Istanbul.

The decisive reaction of the government,
combined with the fact that the chief of the General Staff, Hulusi Akar, detained
together with other top commanders refused to endorse the coup statement, as
did the leaderships of all political parties, constituted a blow to the coup.
Because a coup d'état is a complex
beast. It rests on the deployment of military force or threat thereof to attain
power, on the systematic identification of targets to attack, occupy,
neutralize or control. It depends on careful and efficient implementation of
the plan. But even more so, it relies to a large extent on the exercise of
symbolic violence. As Edward Bernays suggested in his 1928 book Propaganda,
any attempt to govern depends on organising public opinion – "organising
chaos" as he eloquently argues. Taking my cue from Bernays, I would
suggest that the violent, disruptive act that a coup represents, requires an
elaborate and convincing narrative to be woven, a story that will identify a
wrong past, a future prospect and a semblance of potency that will encourage
key actors to side with it.

A series
of errors, bad timing, combined with the resolute expression of defiance by the
government and condemnation by the opposition did not convince key players in
the military and the civil service to lend their support to what they
considered a potentially moribund rebellion. The government had managed to take
advantage of the chaos the coup had caused and provided its own organizing
narrative of the moment.

The moment of the people? 

President Erdoğan appealed to the public to
fill the streets and squares, while the country’s Presidency of Religious
Affairs (Diyanet) issued instructions
to imams to make similar calls from the mosques, and the ruling AKP party
networks started mobilizing their members. Despite the rejection of the coup by
major political, military and civil institutions, the government decided to base
its fight back partly on mobilizing loyal military units and a heavily
armed police – the product of a long, slow process of militarization of the
latter under the aegis of the AKP and, partly, through the recourse to extra-institutional means, notably
mobilizing the people. Soon enough,
the combined determined response of military and police, and the crowds who heeded
the calls of the government had sealed the fate of the coup.

Although
we do not have hard evidence of who went out in the streets to defy the coup –
it will take a long time to get a clear picture – I think we have sufficient
indications to suggest caution when trying to make sense of the popular
mobilizations that took place both during the coup and after its defeat. It is
clear that the people out in the
streets comprised different actors.

First,
where violent clashes took place, often next to the police forces, one could
discern lightly armed angry mobs that, on occasion, relished in the spilling of
the blood of their opponents. Then, among the defiant crowds who came out in
the streets to express their opposition to the coup through their mere physical
presence one could recognize government supporters, mobilized through the
appeals of the political leadership of the country, either through the AKP or the
mosque networks, or merely the calls of the imams from the mosque speakers and
minarets.

Claims
that the people in its “entirety”
filled the country’s streets and squares may sound appealing and may have a
romantic quality but are only partially true. Indeed, footage and interviews
from the night of the coup with participants in the demonstrations and clashes
with the rebel units, but also the soundscape and visual repertoire of the
post-coup celebrations indicate that the crowds that make up the people are mainly though not
exclusively supporters of the governing party. Having no intention to
underestimate their numbers or belittle their contribution to thwarting the
coup, I would just question the use of a label as inclusive and vague as the people to describe them.

The extra-institutional legitimation of
the counter-coup  

If the coup reveals what was already known,
the highly polarized character of Turkish society, the government’s response to
it alarmingly confirms it. While the attempt by some army officers to usurp
power reveals contempt for the majority of the electorate, the Allahu Ekber cries of the crowds pursuing
wounded conscripts crawling on the bloodsoaked ground reveals the highly
‘tribalized’ character of these popular mobilizations.

Although, in principle there is nothing
wrong with citizens rallying to support their endangered democracy, the President’s decision to appeal to the people to resist, and later to celebrate
night after night in the country’s public spaces such as Ankara’s Kızılay Meydanı,
İstanbul’s Taksim Meydanı and İzmir’s Konak Meydanı, to name but a few, echoes the
sinister politics of the late 1980s in another southeastern European country,
Yugoslavia.

There, another
ambitious politician, Slobodan Milošević, used the “moral panic” which had been
cultivated in Serbia and Montenegro over the sensitive issue of the alleged
“Albanization” of Kosovo – a Serbian autonomous province at the time – to
justify the need for constitutional reform and to launch the notorious “anti-bureaucratic
revolution”, a campaign aimed to cleanse the party and the state apparatus of
inefficient and “treasonous” bureaucrats. To support his anti-constitutional “reform”
programme, that entailed purges and intimidation of the opposition and suppression
of dissenting voices, Milošević and his collaborators encouraged a series of
public rallies and demonstrations between 1987 and 1989 that became known as
instances of “street democracy” (ulična demokracija).

These
mass mobilizations acquired the character of impromptu plebiscites endowing Milošević
with the authority to bypass legal niceties in the pursuit of his powergrab and
provided cover for violent mobs to gatecrash meetings of elected authorities,
demand resignations of their members or terrorise those whose opinions they
disapproved of (Spyros A. Sofos, “Culture, Politics and Identity in Former
Yugoslavia” in, Brian Jenkins and Spyros A. Sofos, eds. Nation
and Identity in Contemporary Europe, 1996). I am in no way suggesting
that history repeats itself, this time in Turkey. But I would argue that we
cannot ignore the linguistic and methodological similarities between the street
democracy of the 1980s and the popular happenings taking place in Turkey today.

Appeals
to the people, an entity hard to
define, let alone to consult, a collectivity that “speaks” with one voice hard
to decipher, whose existence defies the complexity of the social and the
plurality of the political, leave the door ajar for political entrepreneurs who
may want to bypass institutional checks and balances, however weak these might
be in the case of Turkey today. What is more, the binary logic inherent in the
notion of the people whose wisdom and
righteousness is exalted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his party’s leadership will
almost certainly exacerbate the already conflictual character of Turkey’s
politics. Simply because the construct of the
people thrives on and demands homogeneity of values and unity of purpose
and banishes diversity and difference to the realm of the evil other who plots, threatens and
undermines the popular will, such politics will undermine the country’s unconsolidated
majoritarian democracy. It will open the way for a radical overhaul of the
political system and for the total eradication of any remaining dissenting
voice.

Democracy needs the development of durable
yet adaptable institutions and what the late Alberto Melucci in his Challenging Codes, 1996, called “spaces of hearing”,
not a leader that cultivates his misrecognition as the incarnation of the popular-national
will.

As
today’s declaration of a state of emergency demonstrates, at the end of the day
perhaps a coup is not such a complex beast; it might not even require the use
of military force after all. It might simply rely on a romantic notion – in
this case, the moment of the people.