A farewell to rulers in arms

For decades and decades, Turkey’s powerful generals, even if they often remained behind the scenes, ruled the country. And every Turk knew that. They also knew that if the elected politicians make the generals angry, the latter would come down and teach them a damn good lesson.

I got my own share of this national wisdom when I was 8 years old. That was the time when the military coup of 1980 was launched, and all active politicians, including my father, were arrested by the military. Almost all of them were tried for “high treason,” and similar nonsense, and the military prosecutors had asked for their execution.

As a kid, then, I really wasn’t getting what all this meant. I just knew that my father stopped coming home, and started to stay “at a hotel-like place” as my mom told me after his arrest. For weeks, I insisted to join her during her weekly visits to this “hotel.” And, one day, she took me with her.

Saving us via torture

The place was the military prison in Mamak, a destitute neighborhood in Ankara, and it really did not look like a hotel. It rather resembled, to be honest, Auschwitz. There was barbed wire everywhere, besides watchtowers with machine guns, and lots of soldiers with rifles. We waited behind a corridor of barbed wire, at 7 a.m. on a snowy day, and then my father, along with a dozen other men, showed up in the distance. Their heads were shaven, and they were made to walk in a straight line while singing some military march. Then they lined on the other side of the corridor. I just remember that my father looked warmly at my scared eyes and said, “Don’t worry, I will come home soon.”

He could come home only after spending 14 months in prison, a long-term arrest for no reasonable reason. Thousands of other politicians or activists were also jailed for months, and sometimes years, and often suffered terrible treatment. Unlike Auschwitz, to be fair, Mamak had no gas chambers. But, along with other military prisons in Istanbul and Diyarbakır, it had torture chambers. Some people died under the unbelievable agony they went through, which included notorious “techniques” that I don’t have the stomach to talk about.

The Turks who have gone through all this don’t know what to say when some presumptuous foreigners, such as Israeli president Shimon Peres, utter incredible words like this:

“Turkey is the only country in the world where a non-democratic institution, the Army, was in charge of preserving democracy. And they did it.”

The Army, of course, was not “preserving democracy.” It was rather preempting it. It was also preventing us from finding non-military solutions to our acute problems such as the Kurdish question or the stalemate in Cyprus. Besides the military coups and interventions — in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997 — it was perpetually limiting the scope of democratic politics with the “red lines” it drew on all these big issues.

The officers, to be sure, were doing all this to heroically “save” our nation from various threats. But this self-designated saviorship was very much intertwined with their arrogance. “Harbiye graduates are never fooled,” read a popular slogan among them, referring to the top military academy. This self-righteousness blinded the generals from realizing that the authoritarian policies they pursued were often the very reason why we had so many “threats.” By banning the Kurdish language, they fuelled violent Kurdish nationalism. By imposing a tyrannical form of secularism, they made some religious conservatives anti-secular.

The third stage

But, well, everything changes in this world, and even so does Turkey. Since 2002, there has been a government of which we know that the generals are not a fan. But unlike in the good old days, they can’t overthrow it. Moreover, now some of them are even facing justice for attempting to overthrow it. The recent arrest of 50 commanders, including 14 retired generals and four active admirals, is all about that.

This shows that Turkey is entering a third stage in terms of the military-civilian relationship. In the first stage, between 1960 and 2002, the military was clearly dominant and untouchable. In the second stage, from 2002 to the beginning of the Ergenekon case in 2007, it lost its dominance but preserved its untouchability. In 2005, a prosecutor in Van, who dared to point to a top general in his indictment about a bombing of a pro-Kurdish bookstore, was not just stripped of his duties, but also totally excommunicated from the legal profession by the Supreme Board of Prosecutors and Judges, or HSYK. After all, institutions such as the latter, as our top judges often proudly say, exist in order to “protect the regime” – and not to protect the people from the regime.

Yet with the Ergenekon case, we are moving into the third phase, because the military is losing its untouchability, too. The officers, whose brainstorming sessions on how to launch coups have been exposed, are now being questioned.

This is good news for Turkey. For a farewell to arms, and rulers in arms, is a must for democracy