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Reforms in Turkey

Marching along
Jul 2nd 2009 | ANKARA
From The Economist print edition

Tension between the army and the government may promote reforms

APCOULD it be Turkish democracy’s great leap forward? On June 26th Turkey’s parliament, dominated by the Justice and Development (AK) Party, passed a groundbreaking law allowing civilian courts to prosecute army officials. Four days later a civilian prosecutor charged and briefly arrested a serving colonel for his alleged involvement in a plan to overthrow AK.

Colonel Dogan Cicek is at the centre of an alleged conspiracy that has rocked the political establishment since it was exposed by a Turkish newspaper last month. The army has ordered an investigation. But it has just as promptly declared the colonel to be innocent and the document, entitled “The Plan to Combat Islamic Fundamentalism”, a fake. In the old days, the army’s growls would have cowed the civilians into silence. But contrary to speculation that he would retreat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, appears this time to be holding his ground.

So is General Ilker Basbug, the chief of the general staff. He is said to be pressing the government to reconsider the bill that will allow coup plotters to be tried in civilian courts. He made his views known during a day-long meeting of the National Security Council on June 30th. The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) also wants the constitutional court to strike the law down, saying it violates other provisions of the constitution. Never mind that CHP deputies voted in favour of it: they claim they were “tricked” into doing so by AK. All eyes will now turn to Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s president, who could send the constitutional amendment back to parliament on the grounds cited by the CHP. “If he does so, his credibility will suffer an enormous blow,” argues Taha Ozhan, who runs SETA, a liberal think-tank in Ankara. “This [bill] constitutes the biggest challenge of this [two-year-old] presidency,” he adds.

It is also the biggest challenge to the army’s immunity. Ever since catapulting into government seven years ago, AK has been chipping away at the generals’ power. The National Security Council, through which the generals often dictated foreign and domestic policy, has been downgraded to an advisory role. A string of abortive coup plans leaked to the media and crude attempts to block Mr Gul’s elevation to the presidency have dented the army’s image and bolstered that of AK.

The latest coup talk may have galvanised Mr Erdogan into a fresh burst of reformist zeal. The government is talking of reopening a Greek Orthodox seminary on the island of Halki off Istanbul, a long-running demand of the European Union. Mr Erdogan also says that talks with the IMF for a new standby deal will resume soon. This helped the Istanbul stockmarket to recover this week, despite the news that gdp had shrunk by a whopping 13.8% in the year to the first quarter of 2009.

Turkey’s secular elite, which has often seen the army as the sole guarantee of a freewheeling lifestyle inspired by Ataturk, is understandably nervous. Many fear that AK’s real mission is not to democratise Turkey but to convert it to Islamic rule. They might take heart from a parade in Istanbul’s main square on June 28th to mark international gay pride day. Girls in tightly wound Islamic headscarves took turns to be photographed with scantily clad transvestites. “We have nothing against them, Allah created us all equal,” opined a bystander who identified himself as a pious Muslim. “This is the kind of freedom we long for in Iran,” sighed Ali Akbar, an Australian tourist of Iranian descent.

The deeper worry among Turkey’s secular elite is not about creeping Islam but over a loss of power to an encroaching class of pious bureaucrats and entrepreneurs that has become increasingly visible since Turgut Ozal, a modernising former prime minister, liberalised the economy after the generals’ third and most recent direct coup in 1980. And are the days of coups over? That the question can still be posed suggests that a risk remains of further military intervention, however small. “The generals feel cornered, and that makes them dangerous,” says a veteran military observer. That may explain why some in the government would be relieved if the constitutional court did indeed strike down their new law.