The New Republic

July 7, 1997

A Real Turkey

Tansu Ciller's manipulative rise to power.
Turkey is in the midst of a coup--albeit a bloodless one--but that may be the good news. On June 18, Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan yielded to threats from the military and resigned. Erbakan, an Islamic fundamentalist, had always been anathema to the military, which claims a constitutional mandate to protect state secularism. While Erbakan's failure to alleviate any of Turkey's social or economic woes had undermined his fragile ruling coalition, it was the flaunting of his Islamic agenda that pushed the military into action.

Of course, Turkey's generals didn't want to make martyrs out of their Islamic foes, and these days they must also worry about international opinion, their membership in NATO, and their bid to join the European Union. So, after firing a few strategic warning shots, the generals settled for a change in government--and that's where the bad news comes in. The heir-apparent is Erbakan's coalition partner, Tansu Ciller--the singularly ambitious, pathologically duplicitous former prime minister whose craven deal-making with the fundamentalists precipitated the whole crisis in the first place.

Few have squandered their promise as quickly and shabbily as Tansu Ciller. Elected in 1993 as Turkey's first female prime minister, she was the secularists' great white hope. A petite woman with small, pert features, set off by blow-dried honey hair, Ciller suggested the introduction into Turkey's resolutely male politics of a light, likable and thoroughly modern female sensibility--Sally Field in Gidget Goes to Istanbul. And while there was always skepticism about her qualifications to govern a country surrounded by ancient enemies, beset with staggering inflation and cursed with an intractable Kurdish crisis, Ciller nevertheless inspired a limited but quite concrete hope in the West--that she would maintain and protect this hugely strategic country as the only bulwark of democratic secularism in the Islamic Middle East.

Ciller promoted herself as the heir to the legacy of Ataturk, modern Turkey's founder, announcing shortly after the election that she would not be averse to being called "Anaturk." Ataturk, whose real name was Mustafa Kemal, transformed Turkish life, Latinizing the alphabet, replacing Islamic Sharia law with the Swiss civil code, even supplanting the traditional fez with the top hat. Moreover, Ataturk was an ardent advocate of women's rights and education, granting women the vote and banning the wearing of the chador, the Islamic full-length body covering. Ataturk died in 1938 at age 58 of alcoholism, an irony not lost on his pious fundamentalist foes.

In Turkey, where the overwhelming majority of people are secular, Ciller's election was greeted with a downright giddy glee. One Turkish newspaper ran photos of the photogenic Ciller next to Kim Campbell, who had just scored at the Canadian polls, with the headline "ours is prettier!" But the honeymoon was stunningly brief. Inflation soared under Ciller to an unprecedented level of 95 percent, and Citizen Osman, as the Turkish man-on-the-street is known, watched his salary become virtually worthless. Meanwhile, Ciller and her husband had somehow come into a multi-million dollar fortune, which she claimed she inherited from her mother--a woman neighbors described as a destitute widow. "You have to understand," says businessman Zafer Buyukoglu, " that the Cillers have surpassed the Marcoses on a per-diem basis in terms of graft." Fumed one Turkish industrialist I interviewed, "We fell in love with a girl in a nice dress, and it turned out she was wearing a shabby rag. She has no common sense. She is worse than stupid. She is erratic."

Last June, facing an imminent investigation into her finances that threatened her political career, Ciller made a stunning power play. The avowed secularist did the unthinkable: she forged an alliance with Refah, or Welfare, Erbakan's fundamentalist party. Previously, Ciller had ceaselessly demonized Erbakan, who, in turn, had called Ciller "the country's biggest thief." But when the 1995 elections were over, Welfare had just 21 percent of the vote--more than any of Turkey's twenty-eight other parties, yet still well short of a majority. Welfare needed a coalition partner, and Ciller was the only one willing to cut a deal with Refah. Erbakan became prime minister and reportedly promised to block any inquiries into Ciller's finances. Ciller became foreign minister and secured an agreement that the two would swap positions after two years. "It's a dalliance between a religious hypocrite and a secular criminal," says one former U.S. diplomat.

Immediately, Erbakan outlined his agenda for Islamicizing the country. He hinted that he might yank Turkey out of nato and announced that he wanted to form a new, Islamic, nato-style alliance. He threatened to terminate his country's long-standing bid to join the European Union. He invited renegades such as Sudanese officials and Louis Farrakhan to visit, set up Koranic schools throughout the country and vowed to pass legislation that would allow women to wear the forbidden chador to work and school.

Erbakan's supporters in the Welfare Party had some ideas of their own. When asked what he planned to do about Turkey's dire water shortage, Istanbul's fundamentalist mayor, Tayyip Erdogan, responded that he intended to go to the mosque every day and pray. His counterpart in Ankara, Melih Gokcek, who previously belonged to Turkey's fascist party, proposed mandatory veiling for women and gender-segregated facilities.

All of this mightily displeased the Turkish military, which sees itself as the guardian of the secular state. When Erbakan visited Tehran last year to sign a multi-million dollar oil pipeline deal between the two countries, Turkey's generals took notice. And in February, after a Welfare mayor endorsed the Iranian ambassador's call for an Islamic Turkey, the generals took action. They expelled the envoy, tossed the mayor into jail and dispatched tanks to the streets.

At about the same time, the military shored up its long-standing alliance with Israel, the great enemy of Islamic fundamentalism. In February, General Ismail Hakki Karadayi, the military's chief of staff, flew to Israel to expand military cooperation between the two countries. Soon after, Israeli Foreign Minister David Levy visited Ankara. Karadayi saw to it that Erbakan-- who'd once vowed a jihad to liberate Palestine--gave Levy a respectful audience to discuss increased trade and security matters.

Relations between the military and the government reached their nadir in late April, when General Osman Ozbek called Erbakan "a pimp" for meeting with the Saudi king during his hajj to mecca. Soon afterwards, the police--at the military's behest--staged highly publicized raids in the western province of Bursa, shutting down a half dozen Koranic schools and vowing to close " thousands more." Outraged ministers began resigning from the government in protest, and Hurriyet, a major daily newspaper, ran the banner headline: " government's days are numbered."

But how, then, has the discredited Ciller again positioned herself for the prime minister's post? A glance at her history explains much. She grew up as the only child in a political household; her father served once as mayor of Istanbul. A former college classmate recalls Ciller as "ferociously ambitious" and not a little mean-spirited: "Right before exams, Tansu would go to the library and take out all the relevant books so that no one else could read them."

At 17, Ciller married her high-school beau, Ozer Ucuran, and insisted that he take her name so that her family name would not die out. Ozer quickly gained a reputation for "creative" business practices; says one well-known Turkish business magnate, "I wouldn't see Ozer Ciller or do business with him. He's very good looking and cunning as a snake." While a certain amount of graft, corruption and bribes are the cornerstones of Turkish politics and business, the Cillers' detractors say the couple's dealings have exceeded all respectable bounds.

Bedrettin Dalan, Istanbul's mayor in the mid-1980s and schmoozer extraordinaire, met Tansu Ciller in 1987 (while Ciller was a professor of economics) and introduced her to politics. Dalan, who is known for his appreciation for attractive women, made Ciller an adviser. Ciller's enemies whisper that the relationship was more than collegial. "She became famous very fast," Dalan says. "She gave a very brave speech against Ozal Turkey's popular prime minister until his death in 1993 causing the high inflation. The newspapers loved her and ran her picture on the front page. She had a pretty face and said brave things."

In 1994, Dalan ran for mayor along with a dozen other candidates and lost to the fundamentalist Tayyip Erdogan. Some observers said it was Ciller's refusal to support Dalan in the mayor's race that cost him the election. "She thought he would become powerful again and challenge her," says one bitter Dalan supporter. It was an act of betrayal, largely ignored at the time, but one which clearly foreshadowed her skinsaving alliance with Welfare two years later.

Ciller had dumped Dalan to team up with the powerful Suleyman Demirel and his True Path Party. Mentored by Demirel, Ciller became head of her party and its candidate for prime minister, creating a sensation on the campaign trail. "She swept through Anatolia, playing this maternal role, saying she was the mother of all Turks," recalls an Istanbul publicist. "She would say, You're going to vote for your mother, aren't you? You're going to vote for your sister?' And they did!" And, while playing the poster girl of secularism, she also played the religious card. On occasion during her campaign, she would wrap the Koran in her neck scarf, and sometimes, invoking the most shameless symbolism, envelop the holy book in the Turkish flag.

Once in office, Ciller's loyalties continued to shift, depending on political expediency. First, she rallied behind the military and its unprecedented scorched-earth campaign against the Kurds. Then, she swung over to the ultra right, flirting with the nationalist parties, before delivering her country to the fundamentalists. So fickle are her loyalties that her own political godfather, Demirel, has been actively working to oust her ever since.

But that won't be easy, even for Demirel. "She will make a deal with anyone ... anyone who will keep her in power," says Mehmet Ali Birand, Turkey's most prominent journalist. "People have been saying for the last six months that this coalition is doomed, finished, but I am still waiting," says former U.S. ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz. "Ciller is determined to stay in power. Otherwise she has to face the music." In May, Turks got a chastening demonstration of just how far Ciller will go to protect her interests. A day after independent Flash TV broadcast an interview with a criminal who said he had been bribed by Ciller's husband, a mob of fifty gun-wielding men attacked the station, destroying the office and its camera equipment.

Even if Ciller does become prime minister, there will likely be new elections sometime this year. But with runaway inflation and 10 million Turks unemployed, the chronically feuding centrist parties will continue to have a hard time fending off the fundamentalists unless they unite. Although outnumbered, the fundamentalists are highly organized and receive funding from Iran and Saudi Arabia. In every election, Welfare Party volunteers go to the poorest neighborhoods, handing out food and money and promising jobs. And while they campaign against government corruption, they are not above stuffing the ballot boxes themselves. (Dozens of ballots marked for centrist candidates in the 1994 elections were found in a dumpster; police discovered more than 150,000 forged ballots in one runoff election that same year.)

Terrorist attacks from Muslim extremists have been infrequent but deadly. The most chilling occurred in July 1993, when a hotel hosting a conference on secularism was burned in Sivas, a Refah stronghold in southern Turkey. Thirty- seven of Turkey's most prominent intellectuals perished in the fire, torched by a frenzied crowd chanting, "Victory belongs to Islam." A subsequent investigation revealed the collusion of the local police, firemen and mayor.

Fundamentalists have also targeted Turkey's small Jewish community. Jak Kahmi, the country's most prominent Jewish businessman, narrowly escaped death in 1992, when terrorists blew up his car. Fundamentalists have lodged boycott threats against the Jewish developer Ishak Alaton. "It's very silly," shrugs Alaton, who established Turkey's first think tank. "We have 4,500 Muslim employees." Nevertheless, Alaton cautions against too much alarm. "We are 25,000 Jews in a sea of 60 million Muslims," he says. "Remember, Turkey was the first country in 1948 to recognize Israel. Turkey has been a very tolerant, hospitable country for 500 years, so one has to put it all in perspective."

The perspective is an old Middle Eastern one: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It was the recognition of such common enemies as Syria, Iran and Iraq that led to the improbable alliance between Turkey and Israel. Still, while there has never been any love lost been Turks and Arabs, they still share one common bond: they are both Muslim. With its interfaith marriage to Israel, Turkey is gambling on nothing less than the triumph of secular Islam over fundamentalism.

It is a huge gamble and one that the military does not want to entrust to the feckless Ciller. And while the dearth of political leadership means Ciller may prevail by default, the military will likely have the final say. " The military has the support of the secular majority, which is about 75 percent of the country," says Birand. "Secular public opinion is pushing the military to do something. In a way, they are using the military. And vice versa." Given the military's clout and preeminence, it is likely that, at least in the short term, secularism will stave off fundamentalism in Turkey. But the legacy of one woman's greed and duplicity is that the price of this victory may be democracy.