Angry Planet - What it’s Like to Spend 30 Years As a Journalist in Turkey

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

Many people may not realize, but Turkey is a relatively new country--just shy of 100 years old. It was created as a republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, largely by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who stuck around as president until 1938.Since then there have been elected governments, military coups and now a -- well, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has reshaped the country in his own likeness - or at least how he likes.To help us make sense of it all, we’ve invited Andrew Finkel onto the show. Finkel has been a journalist based in Istanbul since 1989, corresponding and freelancing for a variety of print and broadcast media that has included The New York Times, The Times, TIME, The Economist, The Guardian, the Observer, CNN, and the Financial Times as well as Turkish language media. His popular handbook: Turkey What Everyone Needs to Know” is published by OUP (2012).Recorded on 7/8/20Is Turkey a free country? “No.”Who is Erdogan?What went down during the coup of 2016The Gülen of it allThe state of Turkish journalismThe fight over social mediaThe immunity of Western mediaHow Covid is effecting thingsStrangling the economyWhat are the lessons of Turkey’s rise of authoritarianism? War College has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/You can listen to War College on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is warcollegepodcast.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/warcollegepodcast/; and on Twitter: @War_College.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. From my own house, I could hear the Azans mobilizing people to come out onto the streets. There were jets flying overhead. There were bullets in the street. I could certainly hear from my own window. And people basically, you know, confronted the tanks and told them vote to soldiers to go home and eventually they did. You're listening to War College, a weekly podcast that brings you the stories from behind the front lines. Here are your hosts. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields. And I'm Matthew Galt. Many people may not realize, but Turkey is actually a relatively new country.

It's just shy of 100 years old. It was created as a Republican. out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, and largely by Mustafa Kamal Adatur, who stuck around as president until 1938. Since then, there have been elected governments, military coups, and now, well, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and our guest will make sure I pronounce that properly, has reshaped the country in his own likeness, or at least how he likes. To help us make sense of it all, we've invited Andrew Finkel onto the show.

Finkel has been a journalist based in Istanbul since 1989, corresponding and freelancing for a variety of print and broadcast media that has included the New York Times, The Times, which by the way is the London Times, Time, the Economist, The Guardian, the Observer, CNN, and the Financial Times, as well as Turkish language media. His popular handbook, Turkey, what everyone needs to know, is published by OUP in 2012. So, Andrew, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for asking me to talk to your listeners. So what's it like to live in Turkey right now? Would you call it a free country? No. But I suppose the thing is it's never been free.

I mean, there's, I don't know if you're, I don't know if you can hear the Azon, the call to prayer in the background here. So at least it shows that I really am in Turkey, not in the, In New Jersey. Well, difficult to answer because there's always been restrictions on public life, restrictions on politics. But I think these restrictions have anything been becoming much more intense in the last two, five years. And it's become something of a problem to Turkey's development, I believe. Well, can you sort of talk about Erdogan and sort of what role he's had in the change? Well, you did pronounce it reasonably correctly.

Recep Tayepe Erdogan, who is the now president, formerly prime minister of Turkey, started his life as his political career as the mayor of Istanbul in the mid-90s, and was mayor at a time when there was his party, which was, religious-orientated party had was really sort of frowned upon and was undermined by the establishment, the military establishment. And he did his very best to overcome those obstacles, despite a brief time in prison. And I think his sense of having countered, as it were, attempts to keep him out of politics, to keep him out of public life, including this short spell in prison,

for reciting a poem at a public rally has, I think, in his mind, justified his own tactics, which has basically been to push doors wide open when they're a bit of char and to sort of continue to make progress in taking the reins of power into his own hands. Until now he's become a president with really unchecked presidential powers, executive powers, one of the key events which allowed him to do this was a failed military coup, an attempted military coup in 2016 in July, and which he used as an opportunity to impose a two-year period of martial law, not martial law, of emergency law, to rule by decree. So now we see most aspects of Turkish law.

life, the judiciary being the most important, perhaps, but the press coming a close second, which is very firmly under the control of the government, and it's the brave judge or the unwise journalist who really makes a point of going against the ruling party or Mr. Idawan himself or his family. Just to give people a little bit of background, if you could, Turkey was a very secular state, right? I mean, it's Muslim predominantly, but the state set up by Adityirk was supposed to be very secular. Is that correct? Well, it's correct and not correct. It's a state in which religion has been instrumentalized in which religion has really been under the control of the state, but being under the control of the state doesn't mean that it was purely secular. So you have

As you had in the Ottoman Empire, you had a Shai'u of Islam, you had a, you know, a state appointed Islamic cleric. In the Republic, you had a state appointed director of religious affairs who basically, you know, kept his eye on religion. So it's not so much that it's a secular state. It's a state in which religion is kept under the control of the state. and under the current government, we've seen a vast expansion in the powers and influence of the director of religious affairs. So perhaps religion is more prominent. Certainly the early Republicans were much more skeptical, much more mocking, I suppose, of the religious observance of the people. And that indeed was used against them as a populist means of other political.

political parties coming to power. But this is, you know, this, there is certainly a section of society which regards itself as secular, which would like to see religion, you know, not so prominent in public life and just, you know, confined to the private beliefs of its citizenry. But that is certainly less and less the case in contemporary Turkey. Can you give us the background on the 2016 coup attempts? Like, who were the players? What happened, how did it shake out? My strongest memory from that watching it is Erdogan, I believe, on Facebook Live, broadcasting, saying that he was still in power, and then nothing, nobody had taken him down or was going to take him down. And I remember watching it at the time and

thinking, like, oh, this isn't a good look. You know, the leader of a country, kind of making his case to the people via social media while the tanks kind of encroach. But he, he, he won, right? And what was the aftermath of that? Well, it's certainly a curious incident and one which, you know, we have, we certainly have an official version of what happened, but we, because, you know, the press is under control is under that, you know, very closely monitored in Turkey, we haven't had, you know, many independent voices sort of going around and nosing around to find out exactly what happened.

And many commentators, including myself, I am embarrassed to admit, had said that a military coup in Turkey was not possible in a society as complex as Turkey and in which, you know, how do you, you know, in the old days you could occupy the radio station. But, you know, how do you occupy the social media? How do you, you know, how can you control a population in a modern state or just sort of impose your will over them? with a tank in front of a public building, it just wouldn't work, I don't think, and the economy was so complex that any, you know, attempt to really control Turkey by force

wouldn't result in the impoverishment of its people and that, you know, the coup makers would have to bear that responsibility. So I never thought that such a coup was possible, but I suppose in a way I was, right, because it failed. and what appears to have happened that night is that there was certainly a faction within the military. That faction the government very strongly says was manipulated and controlled by an exiled cleric,

someone who lives in the United States in upstate Pennsylvania called Fetula Gulan, who had had a fairly widespread and powerful movement. in Turkey and then clearly was attempting to move his people and his followers into influential positions within the government. At a very early state, well, not an early stage. At one point, they had been supporters of the government, the government. These were people who basically recruited and made their influence known by having a network of schools, both inside Turkey and abroad.

And so they tended to be sort of more sophisticated, better educated than the government's own supporters and were put in positions of power, possibly in the military as well. So increasingly, Erdogan began to see them as a rival to his own power, as a sort of state within a state, and made various decrees, methods, put pressure on them, basically to make their life very difficult.

So it is entirely plausible, though, you know, that we only have, you know, who knows what the actual reality was. But it seems very plausible that certainly one of the factions trying to overthrow the government was this disgruntled sect, which had once been very powerful and was no longer so powerful. the coup they seem to have not been particularly good at making coups whoever was responsible the plot went off early it should have gone off it you know after after midnight when everyone was in bed and people would wake up to a coup instead it it seems that the government got wind of it it maybe even sort of allowed it to unravel in a controlled fashion so that they could control it And of course, there are many people who think it was a false flag operation that there wasn't really a coup at all, or at least there was only a little bit of a coup and that the government played it to their advantage. But as I say, we don't really know exactly what happened that night.

But certainly what did happen was that there was a great popular reaction to it. You know, from my own house, I could hear the Azans mobilizing people to come out on. onto the streets. There were jets flying overhead. There were bullets in the street. I could certainly hear from my own window. And people basically, you know, confronted the tanks and told them the soldiers to go home and eventually they did. And said the next morning the coup was really a complete collapse of complete failure. There really wasn't that popular support for it. and the people had really bravely had had told this incredibly stupid coup plotters to mind their own business. And so in the aftermath, of course, there was a huge crackdown on the Gulen movement or anyone whom the government could really identify as an opposition member and Brandish and Brand as a member of this Gulenist sect.

So in the aftermath of the coup, there was a huge. you know, crackdown, I think 150 publications were shut down, you know, 100, I think the figure was 170, 150 journalists initially arrested, scores of civil servants, military people, teachers, people in every walk of life suspected of having gulandist affiliations were dismissed. So there was a, you know, there was very much a sort of purge of public life. And the result of that purge, I think, is that the government has emerged much more powerful than before. Can you explain who Goulon is? I think that's pretty important to the story and to Erdogan's power, because in many ways, the Turkish, like, he's kind of this boogie man, right?

And you kind of give us the background on him? Well, I didn't meet him once. I'd be opening of a bank. One of his, not really a bank, a sort of non-interest bank, which his followers were opening. He essentially was, I have to say, I don't know his life story all that well, but he was a cleric who had a following, you know, very much a, firebrand teacher he had sort of two sides to him

he could be a very emotional and powerful and moving a speaker in front of his own followers but he was very diplomatic and you know a statesman like in other contexts I mean the one time I met him

was it I said at the opening of this bank and this was when they were the group was at their heyday and that present at this opening was the mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyid Erdogan, one of the man who was to become the president of the Republic under Tava within Erdogan's party, Abdullah Gul, Tansu Chiller, who was the finance minister at the time. So, you know, many politicians courted the influence which he had over the, for his public. And he essentially had this strategy. of, you know, basically building institutions, which I think was, you know, and working within the state,

which was a sort of novel approach. Certainly, I mean, there have been many what they call taricot sects, you know, religious orders within Turkey, but this one seemed to be particularly successful in as much as it embrace modernity. and, you know, it was very sort of nationalist, Turkish nationalist in its own way. But, you know, very much about, you know, educating, you know, recruiting the best and the brightest and educating them and getting them into positions of power. So it was quite, you know, and a shrewd operation. Of course, it was worldwide.

There were good Lentist schools and plenty of them in America. I think there still are, though. I think, you know, at one point there were 100. some odd countries which had these Gulenist schools. And the government sort of relied on this Gulenist movement as a sort of cultural

ambassador to various countries. So, you know, typically a Gulenist school would open up in I don't know, Senegal or the Ivory Coast and and and, yeah, the, this would be followed by, you know,

the opening up of the Turkish consulate, the opening up of a flight agreement with the national airline, and a Turkish businessman would come in and out. So they were very much as sort of what appeared to be an element of Turkish soft power and to which the government at the time relied on,

but I guess they had too much power and possibly history, you know, when we finally get to see the documents and understand exactly what it went on the night of July 15th, 2016, perhaps. they abandoned soft power for hard power but it's a curious story Petalogelan is still alive living in Pennsylvania

which is which is a very odd thing I mean I remember participating in a 60 Minutes program and the 60 Minutes researchers had spent months and months trying to dig the dirt up on this man and what his influence was and why he was, you know, so powerful what he was doing in America.

And at the end of the day, the story they presented was, you know, well, it was a sort of Ripley's, believe it or not, here is this, you know, cleric who has all this power and believe it or not, he lives in, you know, the Pennsylvania Dutch country. You know, that was, it was, that was sort of the best they could do. So, you know, it was a fairly, you know, movement which kept its own counsel, I suppose. It's interesting because from the point of view of the United States, first of all, there's the refusal to extradite him to Turkey, and Turkey's been trying to get him return to that country for years now, right? It's so hard to really understand the story.

And so I'm really grateful that you told it. It just seems like a, you know, weak old man who's being hounded. I think a lot of people in the United States looked at it that way. Yes, I suppose. I mean, I have to say, I was never under his spell, so I don't really quite understand what the charisma that he's meant to have had and the attraction allowed him to maintain this huge following. Maybe my Turkish isn't good enough.

I don't know. but um um um um uh uh he you know he clearly did have

a very loyal and religious following I mean at one level it was you know what he represented was a sort of what used to people used to call

you know moderate Islam or whatever I mean he one of his messages certainly at one point in the movement's history was that of religious tolerance and so they would you know, they would have these breakfast meetings

at the end up during the Holy Mother Ramadan and they would have meetings and they would invite as many people from as many different walks of life as possible and the chief rabbi and the ecumenical patriarch Greek or the Dutch Patriot or the Armenian Patriot

they would all be invited to this dinner as evidence of this great tolerance and I can, you know, I can remember and sadly he died but I can the Armenian Patriarch at the time in this in Turkey

was, you know, I remember meeting him once in the beginning of the year and he said, isn't it great all this, you know,

um, tolerance and this and that, the other thing and understanding. And then I ran into it again at the end of the year. And I think basically,

to paraphrase, he said, if someone mentions the word tolerance once more, I think I'll throw up, you know, um, so, you know,

there was a sort of, I don't know, this certainly belief in tolerance was also very much to create a space for Islamic observance in public life in Turkey where it had not been able to. So, you know, there was a point in Turkish history not all that long ago when, when, you know, women couldn't wear headsguards and have a higher education or couldn't get a job enough in a public office if they dressed in Islamic guard. So, you know, clearly there was a sense of grievance, which they also, not just the Gulen movement, but the government itself represented. Can we talk for a minute about the press? One thing that we read about in the States all the time is a newspaper being shut down or another newspaper being shut down or dozens of newspapers being shut down. can you talk a little bit about what it's like to be a journalist there and also what it takes to run a newspaper in Turkey?

Yes, I can. I mean, you don't read about it so much anymore because they've all been shut down. Yeah. Yes, I mean, well, let me go back a bit. I mean, this is the subject sort of view to my heart. I mean, basically, the Turkish press has never been, you know, the sort of standard bearer of truth and objectivity and holding, you know, power to account. It's there's always been an element of compromise with authority and people, you know, trading headlines for land deals and cheap state land and privatization contracts. So basically as the press retained more, became more influence, particularly during the 1990s when there was a series of unstable coalitions.

And, you know, the press barons really did have a great deal of brokerage power and used that brokerage power both to, you know, put governments in power, but also to sort of promote their own non-media. business interests. But my, you know, the metaphor I use is that it would say basically the media during the 1990s was a bit like, you know, the sort of corrupt policemen. You, you know, if you're if you're a crooked cop all the time, you go to jail, you know, you but if you're, so the thing about a corrupt policeman is that they know when to be corrupt and when to be and when to uphold the law. It's, you know, it's an art.

You do you. So in order to be able to sort of peddle influence, you have to have influence in the first place, so you have to have some sort of integrity, you know, you have to have a sort of modicum of integrity, otherwise nobody buys your newspaper and therefore nobody respects you, or that newspaper doesn't have any power. So it's a, you know, it was a balance which the Turkish media was very, you know, adapted at maintaining. You know, what I suppose, you know, the most interesting thing is that is that this government. came to power in certainly in elections in 2002 without any really major press support at all.

I mean, they basically had no large media backing. The reason they got into power was, again, not because they tapped into the religious sentiments of the people, but because there was a huge economic crisis in 2001. And people were seriously impoverished, and there was a whole set. rejection of the whole post-war generation of politicians. And so, you know, basically you had one of the things was these media barons in the early in the 1990s, it was very lucrative to have a banking license because there were such high rates of inflation that if you had, basically a banking license was you would

take money from depositors, you would lend it to the government. and collect the spreads in between it. It was, you know, I mean, basically you and I could have been a banker in those days. It was a fairly straightforward business. But what happened in 2001 is that there was this huge devaluation crisis. Suddenly, banks couldn't repay their money they'd borrowed in foreign currency. And so a third of GDP just sort of evaporated in these failed banks. And many of these banks, of course, were owned by newspaper proprietors.

And those proprietors, quite rightly, not simply lost their banks, but also lost their newspapers, because the board, which was overseeing the public debt, basically took the assets of these people. So, so you had, you know, you had banks and newspapers, you know, $1 billion worth of debt, $3.6 billion worth of debt, huge numbers in an economy at the time, which was, you know, maybe a quarter of a $250 billion. So basically there was very little respect for the media, and certainly very little respect within the government for the media, because these were people who had betrayed them and betrayed the country. And, you know, there was really very little popular empathy with defending media and the freedom of the press. So this is quite a good warning to lots of other countries.

I think. And what happened was, of course, when the media assets were taken over by the banking regulatory agency, they were redistributed. And finally enough, many of the large media groups went into supporters of the government and cronies of the government and people who build airports and get government contracts and, you know, whatever. So suddenly from having an oppositional press, you had a press that was, I think, you know, the expression people use this. captured, a press that was captured by the government. So, you know, by the mid-90s, sorry, by the mid-2000s, you know, you basically the government from having no loyal press group to back, it had, you know, a very substantial coalition of media at its disposal, including the state-run media and the Anatolian agencies, the quasi-state news agency.

semi-owned independent news agency. Not really not semi-independent at all. And the government continued to consolidate those gains and consolidate and make it really much more difficult for independent newspapers

to survive. So essentially, you know, stop me when this gets boring, by the way. You know, newspapers worldwide, the media worldwide is was facing a particular crisis,

but as the internet became more prevalent, people were less inclined to pay for content. So it became more and more difficult to, you know, keep the media afloat because, you know, people didn't want to pay for the papers anymore because they could, you know, just click on a web page. Well, you don't have to tell us about that. Exactly.

Same thing in the United States, and Matthew and I have worked at enough publications that are on their way out. I realize tapping into a tale of. But you can see in Turkey this was compounded because not simply were you facing an industry that was being devalued worldwide. But the corrupt media, the pro-government media, had a particular advantage because they didn't really need to make money out of their newspapers. they could, you know, the media was a lost leader for the airport they were building or the contract they were getting. So it was, so they really had no incentive to be independent or critical at all. And of course, this, but in and this escalated. Then we, again, if you want to ask another question and stop this, do, but, but.

I have a follow up, but I want you to finish your thought first. Okay, but my thoughts go on for quite a while, so you'll be careful what you wish. I mean, I think a critical point in this development was in 2013, and around this time of the year in 2013, when there was a public protest in support of maintaining a park in the middle of Istanbul, Guesee Park, they're stopping it from being developed into a shopping mall. And there was an occupation and suddenly, you know, at one point that occupation was fairly brutally put to an end. And, you know, this sort of unrehearsed, spontaneous movement in the middle of the city really posed the sort of ontological

threat, I think, to the government who sort of thought that history was on our side, that everything was going their way, and then suddenly here was this movement which they didn't understand and couldn't control. And, of course, the

weapon that these street protesters had was social media, which was something that hadn't really dawned, I think, upon Turkish politicians before then. So, you know, there's You know, the number of tweets per second was, you know, fantastic. And people, you know, would know that there was a Panzer car waiting around that corner because, you know, they could see it on their social media.

So suddenly you have this, you know, this confrontation between a government which was successful in capturing the old heritage media being faced with social media, which it just really didn't understand and couldn't come to terms with. And at one stage, Twitter was banned before the general election, I think, in 2014. And you had YouTube, which was banned for some specious reason for two years. And I mean, we even had, I mean, Wikipedia was used, the access was being denied to Wikipedia until really quite recently after two and a half year hiatus. So, you know, suddenly the battleground shifted and public, you know, how public opinion. it's created and we shifted as well. So, you know, the new, you know, there's no point. Again, it's like my metaphor is, you know, modest and the golden touch or whatever.

He could, you know, he could turn everything he wanted into gold, but that included the food he needed to nourish himself. So, you know, but if you can control the media, but you can't really ensure that when you control the media, that it still acts as a conduit of information in a way of influence. people's opinions. So at present, you know, post, you know, coup, post, attempted coup, post a series of defense, the government controls maybe 80 or 90 percent of branded media in Turkey. And yet, at a municipal election last year, they pretty much lost every major city in the country, you know, and I think, you know, so how does this happen where you control everything but control nothing? Is this something that you feel in your day-to-day,

like is it do you feel like you're in danger doing your job is it something that you worry about or you kind of do you you pick your words carefully um well my job has changed I mean I'm no longer the boy correspondent I was when we first met

I I work with an NGO at the moment and one of other things that we do is to try and defend independent media and try and get journalists who are in jail and draw attention to their situation, trying to get them out of jail, people who don't belong in jail, and try and get justice, you know, the justice system to work.

So I'm not really, you know, engaged in day-to-day reporting in the way that I was, so I didn't have that problem. But I think, you know, I'm close enough to the ground to see what happens and to see what happens with other people. And I think, you know, there was a point I think when, you know, Turkey was this boom economy when everything seemed to be going the right way. And, you know, lots of people were coming here, including hundreds of young freelance reporters. And, you know, Turkey, you know, it was like sort of, I don't know, Paris after the war, Prague after, you know, after the liberation of the, after the breakdown of the eastern block. you know, some cities have their moments of great, you know, resurgence and revival.

I can remember sort of being asked by the observer newspaper one year to write this, you know, piece about, you know, Istanbul boomtown, you know, how people would come here from San Francisco and, you know, have to be dragged onto the plane at 4 in the morning because, you know, and the following year, the observer asked me to write a piece in which they said, oh, you know, the city's become unmanageable. Why don't you write a city of a story about that? So one year, you're on the riding the crest of the way and the next year you're in the trial.

Basically, you have this huge community of freelance tennis, but then, of course, now they found it impossible to operate and they all left, or quite a lot of them left. are there still a fairly large journalist of community. So I think the point is that if you have a large newspaper behind you, if you're the FT correspondent and they're right to be a communist in the New York

Times or whatever, you you know, you enjoy a certain immunity and protection because the newspaper you're writing for. But you know, if you don't have that protection, then you're much more vulnerable. There hasn't

been that much directed against foreign correspondence. Occasionally it does happen. A photography here who happens to have some pictures on his camera from two years ago or something.

There have been attempts to intimidate the foreign press and foreign correspondence. Yeah, I would say that that's a We've had quite a few correspondence, war correspondents, foreign journalists that have come on the show. And I would say that there's a through line with turkey. And everyone has a turkey story.

No one wants their turkey story to be told on the air. Everyone always tells it after we get off the call. And I've always thought that was very interesting. Yeah, I think it would like that. I've got so many turkeys there. which ones to keep under the carpet and which ones not to. But as I've been here too long. I mean, I think the point is that certainly, you know, for, I mean, that, yes, foreign cross-bondens have their troubles.

And we've all had them. I guess my one story, I will tell you, was my favorite story is this was sort of in the mid-early 90s when the sort of, you know, There was great sort of civil unrest and interruption in the Kurdish areas of the country. And I was going to a province where there, you know, they've been villages set on fire and gotten this one. And we went there and it was sort of impossible to do the story. And at the end of the day, I did the story from Istanbul and interviewed people coming off the bus rather than actually try and talk to them on the spot where they would be observed and marched. But at some point I went to a restaurant with the Swedish calling and we were sitting down and, you know, we had a little lunch and the bill came. And it was just, you know, it wasn't a lot, but it was more than I expected.

And I, you know, I knocked at the bill and I said, you know, how come it so much? And the waiter pointed to this guy sitting in the corner who was the man who was following us, you know, who gave us a cheery little way because he put his lunch on. on our bill, which we were happy to pay, of course. But I guess that's a slightly flip-in view. I mean, what we're concerned about now is that they're, you know, I mean, again, it's, I believe we speak up on behalf of journalists, but of course, journalists are not even, are not the most numerous victims of injustice in Turkey.

But, you know, there are, you know, hundred are journalists in jail who don't, you shouldn't be there. And of course, with COVID raging both outside the prisons and creeping into the prisons. We were very concerned about them. And there was an amnesty recently to try and, you know, empty the prison, get rid of the population. And, you know, we've seen, you know, gangsters convicted of murder getting out of jail, et cetera, et cetera, but someone who writes a column critical of, of,

of this or that is still inside jail. So there seems to be a certain vindictiveness towards dissent. Well, and especially anyone that covers anything that's going on on the eastern border, right? And anything involving the Kurds? Well, yeah, I mean, I think we, what, yes, I mean, but of course, was always thus. I mean, you know, the Turkey Turkey always had a bad, I mean, I can recall

writing a letter, you know, a sort of newsletter for the committee to project journalists about journalists in jail. And just as it published, I realized that I was going on trial. This was in the late 90s.

The curse of the CPJ I used to call it. But, but, um, wait you were going on trial oh but this is this is this was another another this was another time another place this was at the end of the 90s when I

I was writing for a Turkish language newspaper and they I was deemed to have insulted the military I mean they weren't very serious about putting me in jail I just um although it didn't carry a potential six years sentence so I was I had to take it seriously but um at the time it seemed more of a career move than a real threat.

I loved it. That's an afterthought, though. I mean, I remember going to a friend, the news editor of one of the big television stations who's winning. And this was just when it appeared on the wires that I was going on trial myself. And I guess this was 98, 99, I can't remember. and you know it was like

I had completed some paternity hazing ritual you know they said oh you know they're not they're not serious about you if they really wanted to put

you know do something to you they would have put you in this court not that court you know and and you know

it's like everyone was one-upping which you know the trials and tribulations that they had faced so this was you know this

you know it was all you know there was always an attempt to use the law to intimidate the media and mainly it was it was done through

by keeping their proprietors on a short leash because they if you were too critical of the government you didn't get your privatization deal or your this or the other thing so this was always the case in Turkey but of course

now it's become much more intense much more dangerous much more You know, I can make a joke of my own situation, but I certainly wouldn't joke about someone in jail at the moment, but, you know, where there's, you know, the pandemic raging outside. All right, we're going to pause there for a break from our sponsors, such as they are. We are talking Turkey. You're listening to War College.

We will be right back. All right. Thank you for sticking with it. us listeners, we were talking about Turkey. Well, how is the, how is the, how is the pandemic affected things in Turkey? How are they, how is the state dealing with it? Is it better there than it is in the U.S.? Because things are not great here.

Well, this is what I understand to be the case. I didn't think anywhere is quite as bad at the United States at the moment. Maybe India, I'm not quite sure. there you know there certainly there certainly is the virus i mean the point is that the government seems fairly confident about its handling of it and i and i didn't think there's that much public criticism of the way they're handling it i mean they have the same um what is it you know sort of ambivalence that exists everywhere you know do you do you deal with the pandemic or do you deal with the economy and you know how can you know how which how does

one balanced that particular seesaw. And, you know, there were fairly strict measures, you know, people over the age of 65, of which I am in a member of that cohort, weren't allowed out at a certain point, you know, at all, for several months, certainly, although I, because I live so much younger, I managed to agree about. But, but, or we're allowed out on Sundays, you know, it's like, like the Teddy Bez picnic. And

younger people were also kept, and there were strange things where during the week you couldn't travel, but at the weekends there was a total lockdown. So there was attempts to slow it down or to do this or do that. And the death rate is, I think there have been about just over

5,000 deaths in a population of about 70, 80 million. So you know, it's, bad but not terrible at the moment I think people are fairly relaxed and there's a great chance that it'll you know the famous

second wave will will erupt but I mean there's a few things that work in Turkey's favor or at least these I've heard these arguments and perhaps they're genuine is that one it's a much younger population the mean age in Turkey I think is $20

or 30 so so you know people have it are more likely to recover the second is that there was an explosion in private health care and because ICU and then so you know are high cost you know high earning bits of kit as we're in the medical profession there's quite a lot of ICU units in Turkey and so that there was there was never a question that

there would be a shortage and I don't know those are the two main containing factors and of course there are a lot of the deaths elsewhere in Europe particularly weren't all in old age homes and you know care homes and then

Turks tend to keep their elderly relatives at home you know look after them themselves or not put them into care so there was you didn't have this contagion spreading through all people's aims because there aren't that many. You know, whether, but of course, the economy is going to contract, you know, maybe 5%. It's a very, of course, Turkey depends on a great deal on tourism.

The European Union at the moment is saying that Turkey is not a safe destination. The UK, I think, is the exception to that. you can travel from the UK, but they're Brexiting anyway. And of course, Turkey, you know, it depends on its tourism revenues quite a bit. You know, its markets, there's both domestic and international demand have slowed down. And so there's going to be, you know, there's a huge amount of pain. The Turkish economy wasn't doing so great before the pandemic. The government's been using its foreign reserves to keep the currency from being devalued completely by, you know, by making it more difficult to deal in LERAs, by selling euros on the foreign currency, you know, by selling dollars on the foreign currency markets, such as that speculation against Lero.

But, of course, the foreign reserves are running down. the you know it's it's in a very the economy is very fragile you know maybe things are looking up a little bit from what they were a month or two ago there's and most analysts don't think there's a crisis that's going to hit tomorrow or the next

day but you know I think you know it definitely has weakened the economy considerably and I think you know people are expecting some serious event relatively seen in Turkey Well, I have to say you were talking about tourism a little bit.

You know, I was in Turkey, I guess it's 10 years ago at this point, maybe a little longer. And I just have to say, if you're looking for signs of the ancient world, there's no place like Turkey. Byzantine, Roman, Greek, it's just fantastic. prehistoric I mean we we one of the most extraordinary finds in recent history in Turkey was they were

excavating for for at a metro station that the train line that would go under the buss to connect Europe to Asian subway system and the thing was held up several years because they

came across the harbors of Byzantia which were under under the water, which were no longer under the water, which were under the earth. But just when they were about to sort of, you know, pack up and say, we've done that in excavate. And that they found, you know, remains from when there was no bosphorus, before the bosphorus had opened, streets had opened,

which, you know, made the city several millennia older than people who thought it was. By discovering these prehistoric, graves, which you know, we're sort of with, you know, footprints in them as a were, which were so perfectly preserved because they, so it's yes, I mean, of course,

one of the attractions of being here is that it's such a, you know, interesting place to be historically and and, and of course it's not really boring the politics are, right, as much as they're are not really boring either. But past and present, Turkey offers quite a bit. Speaking of history and messy politics,

can you give us a little bit of a primer on, especially because you've been there so long and you kind of have this longer perspective. What is Turkey's relationship to the Kurds on its eastern border and how has it changed? Where is it now? What's going on? Well, yes. I'm glad you asked me a short and easy one.

Well, it's deeply ambivalent, of course, is the answer. I mean, the Kurds occupy a sort of remuda, is it a triangle or whatever. in all the nations of on Turkey's eastern and southeastern and southeastern borders have Kurdish populations, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey and each country uses the Kurdish population of its, of the people it doesn't like as a weapon against the other. and so you know how these I'm sorry

can you hear the the outside my window there's someone selling beans or something so there's a speaker it just adds

color to the to the to the audio it's fine that's good sounds like I'm doing a venture the quiz

there um sorry we were talking about cards um um And, you know, Turkey has been remarkably unsuccessful over the history of the Republic in providing its own Kurdish populations with some sort of reassurance of their own cultural identity and ethnicity. And, you know, it was very much keen on assimilating the Kurdish population.

And therefore, its inability to come to terms with its own Kurdish populations meant it wasn't limited. its ability to act as a, you know, as the good uncle, as it were, to do in the region, because, you know, how can you deal with other people's problems when you can't deal with your own? So it was always, you know, it was always a running sore in the day in Turkish politics. And, you know, the answer which success that the government gave was that the best policy was really to sort of, you know, guns, not guns, sort of, a lot guns, sort of, a, electricity and prosperity wouldn't make Kurds, you know, want to be part of the Turkish Republic and would, you know, cure them of all this, you know, cultural autonomy nonsense that they add in their heads. But it never really seemed to work.

So, but again, it's the situation is more complicated than many people account for. I mean, you say that there's a problem in the southeast and east of the country, but of course, I'm speaking to you from the city which has the largest Kurdish population in the world. the city of Istanbul, if you think, you know, 12 or 20% of the population, between 12 and 20% of the population, Turkey, are Kurds, you know, in a city of 17 million, you know, there, that means there's quite a lot of people of Kurdish descent and ethnicity and origins. And yet, you know, again, Istanbul is not, doesn't seem to be a hot spot of unrest. And again, you know, You have a Kurdish minority party in Turkey, which, you know, it has made some mistakes, some big mistakes, but it's also done a lot of reasonable things in terms of, you know, trying to address a broader audience and trying to impress upon the rest of the population that they're trying to solve the Kurdish problem within a democratic format. But it's, you know, it's much better to have this movement inside parliament pissing out as it were, than, movement who which can't,

whose aspirations will never be recognized or met. But there seems to be, and at a certain point, I think, you know, the government and then Erdogan himself recognized that, you know, there was time to solve what they call the Kurdish question. And there were several overtures were made. And the imprisoned leader of the PKK, the principal, opposition

we have armed opposition movement in Turkey with Abdul Eichlan he was enlisted in trying to sort of negotiate a settlement and a peace prospect but at a certain point

the government found itself losing support and a much a much better way of winning back that support was to tap into the nationalist the Turkish nationalist sentiments of its supporters and of the population It's now in a sort of de facto coalition with an ultra-nationalist party.

Therefore, you know, which is, you know, vehemently opposed to any sort of cultural compromise or compromise at all with the Kurdish population. So we find the charismatic, young charismatic, articulate and quite, you know, I would say quite sensible, you know, leader of this Kurdish-leaning, ultra-national. not so international, this Kurdish Nationalist Party, the HDP, he finds himself in jail on bizarre charges that European Court of Human Rights has said that he was, he's being unfairly detained.

But so they immediately re-arrested him on something else, you know. So it's, so basically, you know, there's a, there's a lack of the, the truce, the, the attempt to solve and come to terms with its own population. Kurdish population has really been abandoned and joking for the time being, who knows for how long, which means that it's, you know, it's very nervous of autonomous Kurdish entities on the other side of its border in Syria and Iraq and does its best undermine the credibility and integrity of those countries of those entities. So one last question, which is, do you think there are lessons from what's happened in Turkey, the sort of rise of, I hope you don't mind using the word of authoritarianism, more centralization of power? Do you see any lessons for other countries? Anyone, one beginning with an A. Right. Antarctica. Yes, the need for constant vigilance is constant. I think, I mean, what we've seen in Turkey is the erosion of liberties, of civil liberties. And, you know, it's, it's, it doesn't happen every night. You know, at one point, at one point,

point, you know, this government seemed, this party seemed much more liberal and sensible than it's, then it's, you know, the historic, it's, it's rivals, you know, it was, you know, um, as I said, you know, it was prepared to compromise with, with Kurdish politicians at a time when no one else was, but, you know, the, the, the, I think, you know, once you get a little bit of power, you get a little bit more power and a little bit more power. It's, it's, it's, it's, incremental and then it's I think power is very you know it's quite addictive I suppose it's very difficult to give it up And and you know There's especially when when a lot of people are making a lot of money because you view being in power

It's easy you know even if you wanted to give it up it's difficult to give up I mean that's true in the head You know Bashar al-Assad surrounded by his Praetorian guard in Damascus if he you know if he wanted to give it to, you know, and retire and move to Florida. I don't think, you know, I think the people around him would let him. So, so you know, you get yourself into this corner. You create the famous bubble. You create a sort of echo chamber in which, you know, you're always right and everyone's always wrong.

And, you know, very few people, eventually people lack the, give the courage to try and pierce that bubble, particularly if it lands them in jail or it gets them into trouble, so many things. So, you know, it's a very painful process to watch. And, of course, you know, one trusts in the common sense and decency of ordinary citizens who have the sense. sense to reject that sort of self-engrandizement in excess and become disillusioned with it.

And that, of course, creates its own crises because, you know, once you've lost legitimacy in the eyes of your own population, then, you know, what you do, it's very difficult to get off the treadmill. So it's, there is no one lesson to be learned, I think, from the Turkish experience, but it certainly reinforces the need for constant vigilance. Does that answer your question? It does, Andrew, and thank you so much for joining us this week. My pleasure. Thank you.

That's all for this week, War College listeners. War College is production of War College LLC. It is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. We will be Angry Planet very soon. Very, very soon. Same great show, new attitude, new graphics, new music. If you like us and you like what we're doing, think about going to angryplanet.substack.com,

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