Pro-Erdoğan supporters wave Turkish national flags during a rally at Taksim square in Istanbul on July 18, 2016, following the military failed coup attempt of July 15.ARIS MESSINIS/AFP/Getty Images
A lot is still uncertain about the failed coup in Turkey on July 15, but one thing seems clear: The coup leaders believed they were acting in a long Turkish military tradition of protecting Turkey’s democracy from its elected leaders. Since 1960, the military has seized the reins of power in Turkey four times, acting, in their view, to guard the values of the Turkish republic from those who would threaten it.
This time the threat, they thought, came from Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
Erdoğan, who won a heated presidential election in 2014 after a long span as prime minister, has governed in an increasingly authoritarian fashion: censoring the press, arresting political opponents, brutally quashing protests, and attempting to abrogate greater and greater powers to his office. While eschewing radical Islamist movements and publicly reaffirming secularism, he’s given a stronger role to religious education and ramped up his own Islamic rhetoric.
It’s hard to puzzle out the truth amid the events of what Kerem Öktem, a professor of Southeast European studies and modern Turkey at the University of Graz,described to me as a “hyperreal coup,” where both Erdoğan and some of his opponents are “blurring the line between reality and fabrication.”
On the surface, the coup was the most recent exchange of fire between popularly elected leaders and a military that believes it, not the voters, knows best how to guard the country’s democratic legacy. But behind that, there’s a morass of conspiracy accusations, deep-rooted paranoia, and real plots that goes back decades.
Why does the army think it’s so special?
Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1922, the army has seen itself as the most important part of the country. Much of that is because of the man who made the nation, Mustafa Kemal — better known as Atatürk, “Father of the Turks.” (That’s a surname given to him by a grateful people in 1934, not the world’s greatest case of nominative determinism.) Go anywhere in Turkey and you’ll pass by busts of Atatürk gazing paternally down on the country he made.
Keystone/Getty ImagesMustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938), Turkish general, nationalist leader, and president. Photo circa 1916.
Before Turkey, there was the Ottoman Empire, which by World War I was a crumbling, failed power trying desperately to reform. When the Ottomans picked the losing side in the war, it proved the final blow to the imperial system. Atatürk, one of the few successful Ottoman generals, carved the new, modern Turkish state out of the ruined body of the empire, establishing Turkey as we know it today.
He did so in the teeth of opposition from the victors, who had planned to split the Ottoman territories up between them, dividing up the fallen empire in a treaty signed in Sevres, France, in 1920. Brilliant resistance by Atatürk, including successful campaigning against an invading Greek army and others, produced the new nation.
That gave the army the most respected place in the new Turkey, but it also created a permanent military-political anxiety: “Sevres syndrome,” the belief that the rest of the world was always conspiring to split up Turkey. Outside forces weren’t the only enemy, however: Atatürk was determined to drag his country kicking and screaming into the modern world, and he saw religion as one of the chief obstacles to that.
The Ottomans had positioned themselves as the ordained leaders of Sunni Islam, but for Atatürk, Islam had been a dead weight on the country’s progress. Although he used religious language in public and claimed to be a Muslim in his autobiography, he was probably an atheist, or at least a tough-minded agnostic.
Atatürk borrowed a French idea, laïcité, the control of religion by the state. He brought religious bodies under the hand of the government, suppressed religious courts, changed the weekend from Friday and Saturday (the custom in most Muslim countries, since Friday is Islam’s holy day) to the Western style of Saturday and Sunday, and banned religious headgear for all but a select few.
The religious reforms were just one part of a much wider modernization program that included banning the traditional Turkish hat (called a fez) and switching from Arabic to Roman script, as well as visionary plans to promote women’s education, work, and political involvement. But while nobody was that attached to the fez, religious feeling would prove much harder to root out.
Independent Picture Service/UIG via Getty ImagesStreet vendor selling red fezzes and scarves, Turkey.
However, while the leaders of the new republic were secularists, even atheists, they were decidedly Sunni secularists — men who, as a local adaptation of a popular joke has it, believed “there is no Allah, and he chose Abu Bakr to lead the caliphate.” Mainstream Sunni institutions got softer treatment than more unorthodox forms of Islam like Sufism, yet alone Shia Muslims or Christians.
(This legacy lingered; when I worked at the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul in 1994 as a teenager — I had an unusual childhood — the priests there had to switch from their clerical robes to business suits whenever they went outside to avoid being charged under the secularist laws. It was vanishingly rare for such a charge to be brought against Islamic preachers.)
That gave them the space to survive, and eventually to thrive again — and to play the role in politics that Atatürk had most feared.
Keeping democracy in hand — over and over again
After Atatürk’s death in 1938, “Kemalism,” as his policy of reform, secularization, and national unity came to be known, became the guiding ideal of the army, especially the officer class. With Islam out of fashion, Kemalism was the new faith, and Atatürk’s massive mausoleum, with its murals depicting the army guarding the republic, was its Mecca.
While Turkey was a one-party state, it was easy for the military to directly retain control. But as the country democratized after World War II, the growing power of the civilian government and a revival in religious practice increasingly worried military elites who saw themselves as the guardians of Atatürk’s legacy — especially against Islamic influence. The army still enjoyed plenty of privileges, including separate military courts that made its members virtually immune from civilian oversight or prosecution.
Yet that wasn’t enough. The military intervened repeatedly to keep Turkish democracy on what it thought was the right course in times of instability, staging forceful coups in 1960 and 1980 and effectively dismissing prime ministers from office in 1971 and 1997.
AA/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesFormer commander of the Turkish Air Force and one of the leaders of the 1980 military coup Tahsin Sahinkaya (second right), who died at the age of 90 in a hospital in Istanbul, Turkey, on July 9, 2015, is seen with former commander of the Turkish Armed Forces Kenan Evren (center), former Turkish Naval Forces commander Nejat Tumer (left), former chief of the Army Nurettin Ersin (second left), and former commander of the Turkish Gendarmerie Forces Sedat Celasun (right) during a Turkish Victory Day parade on August 30.
It banned numerous political parties, especially ones with strong Islamic ties. But at first, the main targets tended to be the left, particularly groups sympathetic to Turkey’s embattled Kurdish minority. In its self-appointed task as the “guardian of democracy,” the military committed numerous atrocities.
The worst period was in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, when hundreds of thousands of citizens, mostly young people with left-wing sympathies, were arrested and tortured. Each time, democracy was eventually restored, but with considerable restraints imposed by the army
But it’s the 1997 coup that perhaps most typified Kemalist fears. Instead of being triggered by generalized instability, it targeted the power of the Islamic parties. These parties were riding a wave of renewed popularity — in large part because the military’s earlier actions had repressed more secular opposition groups and nearly shattered the left. The army’s thuggish excesses had ended up creating the very thing Kemalists most feared: a widely popular Islamic opposition.
It was this atmosphere that created the massive success of Erdoğan, a former mayor of Istanbul. His four-month prison sentence for reading an aggressively Islamist poem in 1997 only served to give him extra credibility to a public fed up with the military’s controls.
Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (more commonly known by its Turkish acronym, AKP) won a sweeping electoral victory against a divided opposition in 2002. Combined with a sudden economic boom in the early 2000s, this gave Erdoğan the mandate he needed to fight off Kemalist resistance.
The military, put off balance by the AKP’s success and as enthusiastic about Turkey’s sudden economic might as anyone else, failed to act. For his part, Erdoğan seemed to prefer pragmatism to Islamism, reassuring the public that he represented an accepting, compromising form of Islamic politics.
Turkey’s “deep state”: a political underworld
But to understand the atmosphere of fear and distrust swirling in Turkey, you need to take into account not just the military, but what Turks call the “deep state.” Buckle up, because things are about to get really weird.
You know your friend on Facebook who posts about how 9/11 was a CIA plot, Sandy Hook a false flag operation, and that Obama secretly conspired with Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden? Imagine that everything he said was, if not true, at least plausible, and you have some idea of what the deep background of Turkish politics looks like. Attempting to map out the relationships between the powerful ends up looking like one of those crazy boards full of string where the Illuminati control the Boy Scouts.
NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty ImagesLike this, only slightly more plausible.
The term to know here is “deep state,” or devin devlet, a term coined in the 1970s to describe the shadowy anti-democratic cabals that allegedly linked the military, organized crime, terrorists, foreign and domestic intelligence agencies, the government, and the judiciary in Turkey.
A loose outline goes like this: From the 1950s onward, backed by CIA funds under the anti-communist “Operation Gladio” — a Europe-wide program to create stay-behind forces in the event of Soviet invasion — elements within the Turkish military suborned numerous other groups to pursue their agenda.
This included ties to organized crime and heroin smuggling, especially from the 1970s onward, and the use of ultranationalist terrorist groups such as the Grey Wolves, a fanatic pan-Turkic movement, to create instability and murder the military’s enemies.
There’s no doubt that many of these conspiracies are, or were, real, and that elements in the Turkish military have always been willing to use dirty tricks, murder, terrorism, and repression to achieve their goals. The basement of Turkish politics is deep, dark, and full of spiders.
But the idea that all the various plots are part of one deeper, continuous conspiracy is only half-true. The problem is that the “deep state” has always reflected the worst fears of those making accusations about it. To Islamists, its fundamental purpose is to crush religion; for liberals, it’s anti-democratic; for Kurds, it’s fanatically nationalist and anti-Kurdish; for nationalists, it’s secretly in league with the US; for anti-Semites, it’s an Israeli-backed scheme.
A labyrinth of conspiracies, some overlapping with each other, and many undertaken primarily to line the pockets of their backers, seems far more likely than a single, centrally directed grand conspiracy. But agencies inside the military, such as the “Special Warfare Department” and “Gendarmerie Counter-Terrorism Unit,” were undoubtedly the minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, crunching on the bones of thousands of sacrificial victims.
By the 2000s, the Turkish public was fed up with being lied to, eager for change, and a massive producer and consumer of new media. Major scandals in the late 1990s exposed the dirty links between the security forces, the government, and organized crime and fueled a desire to see the “deep state” exposed.
The increased openness, and the AKP’s anti-Kemalist sentiments, brought some of the atrocities of the past to light. The perpetrators of past coups were put on trial. Constitutional reforms weakened the role of the military, especially its courts. The reputation of the army plummeted in Transparency International’s surveys, from the most trusted national institution in 2004 to being perceived as just as corrupt as politicians by 2011.
Yet the idea of the deep state also acted as a vehicle for a new wave of political persecutions, and as a shield for the corrupt to defend themselves against accusations. That’s been particularly the case for Erdoğan, an enthusiastic campaigner for the “annihilation” of the deep state.
The exemplar was the 2008 Ergenekon accusations, where hundreds of defendants — a mixture of military officials and civil leaders — were blamed for a secret plot to overthrow the government. That plot possibly existed, in some form or another, but it was also clear that many of the defendants were there for opposing Erdoğan, and that the campaign was a way to further his own power.
Islam Yakut/Anadolu Agency/Getty ImagesSedat Peker, alleged Mafia leader with links to the “deep state” in the Ergenekon coup plot case, is released from Silivri Prison in Istanbul on March 10, 2014.
Think of McCarthyism in the US. There were real Communist infiltrators, but their numbers were tiny compared to the frenzy of accusations hurled by McCarthy for the sake of his own career.
So it is with Erdoğan: As the coup has bloodily shown, he has real and dangerous opponents — but his accusations have always gone far beyond their real numbers, and threaten innocent and guilty alike. (This prescient 2012 New Yorker profile by Dexter Filkins is worth reading in full.) The Sledgehammer accusations in 2010, another supposed military plot, served the same purpose as Ergenekon while being even less plausible.
Instead of bringing a cleansing light to Turkish politics, then, the AKP-led attacks on the “deep state” ended up being part of the transformation of its own support base into a new form of the deep state.
“There is plausible circumstantial evidence that the old deep state, together with new additions, is back on the streets,” Öktem told me. “The kind of violence and symbolic humiliation and extrajudicial killings is extremely reminiscent of the 1990s, when deep state operatives were pretty much ruling the Kurdish provinces. The novelty is the presence of actors who seem to use a jihadist rhetoric and a deeply religious language.”
False flags and exiled teachers
Complicating this is the role of Fethullah Gülen, a charismatic Islamic preacher, businessman, and educator who has built up a massive movement in Turkey since the 1970s (although he’s lived in the US since 1999 for “health reasons”).
His movement emphasizes modernity, community, and social action, and he has strong ties to Sufism, a peaceful, esoteric Islamic tradition with a long history in Turkey. This let him build up his power base while being seen as a potential ally to every side.
Even his form of Islam was acceptable to the Kemalists, with its emphasis on private worship and obedience to the Turkish state; it also struck a chord with millions of Turks who valued faith but didn’t want it to dominate life.
The Gülenist movement emphasized joining the state in order to gradually shift it toward Islamic ideals; thousands of military and police officers, judges, and civil servants were members or sympathizers, often owing their job to other Gülenists.
OZAN KOSE/AFP/Getty ImagesEmbroidered images of Fethullah Gülen (left) and Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (right) are displayed in a shop on January 17, 2014, in Gaziantep, near the Turkish-Syrian border.
At first, Gülen was a strong ally of Erdoğan. Gülenist media cheered on the Ergenekon case and called for the destruction of the old “deep state.” The Gülenists could be ruthless in exploiting their power, too; investigative journalist Ahmet Sik was detained for a year, and his work destroyed, when he wrote a book on the movement.
But in late 2013, Erdoğan turned on Gülen and his followers, accusing them of being the new deep state, working to subvert the intelligence services and overthrow his government Although tensions had been building for some time, the immediate cause was a corruption scandal involving the children of senior AKP leaders, including Erdoğan, which the president claimed was a plot by the Gülenists.
Today, Gülen functions in Erdoğan’s rhetoric in much the same way Leon Trotsky did in Joseph Stalin’s: as a traitor and manipulator who can be blamed for everything that goes wrong. Gülen’s supporters have been systematically purged from the police and the government.
It is no surprise, then, that Erdoğan immediately accused the Gülenists of masterminding Friday's coup attempt. While it is unclear at this point whether Gülen and his followers were in any way involved (which they have flatly denied), it’s certainly possible, since the army was virtually the only area that hadn’t yet been ideologically cleansed since 2013.
That meant there was still a substantial collection of officers with Gülenist ties, as there had been in every Turkish institution before the purges. They had good reason to fear that they might be the next target — which could have been what prompted the sloppy and ill-planned coup.
But in a twist typical of conspiratorial politics, Turks opposed to Erdoğan, including Gülen, are already accusing him of being behind the plot. That seems an improbable and highly risky move.
Yet he’s seizing the chance to eliminate his enemies, calling the coup a “gift from God.” The event is being compared to the 1933 Reichstag fire that gave Hitler his final excuse to seize absolute power; Erdoğan has said outright in the past that he admires Hitler’s “reforms.”
The military’s threat to Turkish democracy may now be over, perhaps for good. But with it may go other aspects of the Kemalist legacy: a desire to look to Europe, a preference for the modern and the urban, and the will to keep religion from dominating politics.
Erdoğan’s populist authoritarianism threatens a frightening change in Turkey — a dictatorship with the barest veneer of democracy laid over it as cover, fueled by resentment and religious conviction, and drawing in elements from jihadists to intelligence officers to organized crime to shield itself and assault its enemies.
Disturbing pictures of soldiers lynched on the street are already emerging, although it’s hard to tell whether these represent semi-organized violence by Erdoğan-affiliated militias or the fury of the crowd in response to the army’s own killings. Erdoğan has begun a wave of rolling purges and arrests removing the last vestiges of his political and judicial opposition.
Despite their fear of Erdoğan, the opposition turned out into the streets that night to save democracy from the military. Whether they can keep together to defend the rights the Turkish people faced down tanks to protect is another question.
James Palmer is a writer and historian living in Beijing.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan flew into Istanbul early Saturday, denouncing an attempted coup by a rogue group of military officers as an act of treason in a live, televised speech. Hundreds of supporters greeted Erdogan at Istanbul's Ataturk Airport. He said that Prime Minister Binali Yildirim had given orders to "eradicate" soldiers involved in the uprising and that many arrests of officers were underway. The Turkish military on Friday said that it had assumed power over Turkey, yet early Saturday, Turkish authorities said the coup attempt had been repelled. Martial law has been imposed across the country. The situation was fluid through the night, with reports of explosions, including at least two bombs striking parliament in Ankara, gunfire in Istanbul, and reports of a Turkish fighter jet shooting down a helicopter used by coup plotters. Early Saturday, police officers and military traded gunfire at Taksim Square, with reports saying military soldiers then laid down their arms. A helicopter attack on a police special forces headquarters Friday in Ankara left 17 officers dead, according to the state-run Anadolu news agency. Western intelligence and military officials are closely monitoring developments in NATO member Turkey, a key U.S. ally in the war against Islamic State terrorists. Turkey also supports the moderate opposition looking to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Events began Friday when the army put out an email statement, read on Turkish television, saying it had "fully seized control" of the government to protect democracy and maintain human rights. Speaking to the people Erdogan, who conducted a FaceTime interview from an unknown location with a local TV station late Friday, urged the Turkish people to go to the streets to protest the soldiers' actions. He said those behind the move were associated with U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen is a former ally of Erdogan who has accused the president of corruption as part of an apparent power struggle. In response to the upheaval in Turkey, a nonprofit group serving as a voice for the Gulen movement rebuked the violence. "We have consistently denounced military interventions in domestic politics," the Alliance for Shared Values said in a statement. "We condemn any military intervention in domestic politics of Turkey." U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry issued a statement calling on all parties in Turkey to support the country's democratically elected government. Prime Minister Yildirim told private NTV television that the group stormed the main TV station, TRT, and forced broadcasters to read a statement saying a curfew had been imposed. The soldiers also forced CNN Turk off the air. "The government elected by the people remains in charge. This government will only go when the people say so," Yildirim said on NTV. In Istanbul, massive crowds gathered in the city, including Taksim Square, waving flags and shouting support for Erdogan. Erdogan, who said, "I never believed in a power higher than the people," vowed that the coup plotters would pay a "very heavy price." Growing tensions VOA's Dorian Jones said the chaotic events came amid growing tensions between Turkey's secular military and the pro-Islamist Erdogan government, which have been simmering since Erdogan came to power in 2014. Jones said there have been concerns in Turkey that the airport bombing and other terrorist attacks, the government's crackdown on Kurds, and Erdogan's attempts to solidify control over the media could spark a reaction from the military. By late Friday, a VOA correspondent in Istanbul said police were arresting rogue soldiers. Other pro-coup soldiers were beginning to return to their barracks and would face harsh repercussions, said Turkey's intelligence spokesman Nuh Yilmaz Friday night there were numerous reports that hostages were taken in Ankara. CNN Turk said the chief of military staff, General Hulusi Akar, was among those being held. But Akar had been freed by early Saturday. Ataturk Airport in Istanbul is apparently closed to traffic, and tanks are blocking the entrance. Security forces had also blocked all traffic from crossing the Bosphorus and the Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges, the two main bridges over the Bosphorus Strait in Istanbul, but cars appear to be moving again. Ankara Correspondent Yildiz Yadicioglu said credit cards and ATMs were not working there, with lines forming in front of banks. Scrambling for information U.S. military and diplomatic officials were scrambling to try to find out exactly what was going on in Turkey. A senior U.S. Defense Department official said officials were monitoring the situation closely. "As of this time, there has been no impact to Incirlik Air Base and counter-ISIL air operations from Incirlik continue," he added, using an acronym for Islamic State. Former intelligence officer Patrick Skinner said, "The coup really throws regional crises into a different stage." Skinner now works with the Soufan Group, a New York organization that provides strategic security intelligence services to governments and multinational organizations. Current and former U.S. intelligence and military officials have long pointed to Turkey's critical role both in the Syrian refugee crisis and in blocking the flow of fighters and supplies to the Islamic State terror group. "A military government would likely crack down on ISIS and extremist groups that heretofore the government had perhaps seen more in the light as a tool against Assad than a domestic threat," Skinner said, using another acronym for Islamic State. "But perhaps the focus shifts a bit as internal needs supersede CT [counterterror] concerns." He said it was possible that a military government could look to strengthen its ties with the West, but that there was no way at this point to know for sure. Issues facing Turkey There was also concern as to how a series of other issues would be impacted by the apparent coup, including the fate of Turkey's Kurdish population, and those in Iraq and Syria, too, as well as the involvement of Russia and Iran in the region. "One would be hard pressed to pick a more destabilizing place for a coup right now," Skinner said. Earlier this week, CIA Director John Brennan admitted to disagreements between the U.S. and Turkey, and not just over Syria, where the U.S has repeatedly urged Turkey to do more to crack down on IS. "There are some things that are going on inside the Turkish political system that are subject to a lot of debate and even controversy," he said. "But I'll just leave it that we do work closely with the Turks," Brennan added. "I have very close interaction with my Turkish counterpart." VOA's National Security Correspondent Jeff Seldin, Mary Alice Salinas at the White House, Dorian Jones in Istanbul, Jill Erzen, Ken Schwartz and VOA's Turkish service contributed to this report.
Edward N. Luttwak noted "The technique of the coup is the technique of judo : the planners of the coup infiltrate and subvert a small critical part of the security apparatus, which they then use with surgical precision to displace the political leadership from its control of the rest of the state bureaucracy". This was not the normal military coup that Turkey had experienced multiple times in the past. This time, it was a group of a few thousands officers and soldiers within the military who tried to overthrow the government - more a mutiny than a full scale coup. With remarkable prescience, Michael Rubin wrote in March 2016 that " ... given rising discord in Turkey as well as the likelihood that the Turkish military would suffer no significant consequence should it imitate Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s game plan in Egypt, no one should be surprised if Turkey’s rocky politics soon get rockier."
What Happened
On 15 July 2016 Turkish security forces closed portions of both of the Bosphorus bridges in Istanbul that link the European continent with Asia. Military jets and helicopters have been deployed over Turkey's capital, Ankara. Gunfire could be heard in Anakra as the aircraft flew over at a low altitude. Local television channels in Istanbul reported the closures of the Bosphorus bridges but did not immediately provide a reason. Footage by Turkey’s Dogan News Agency showed cars and buses being diverted from the bridges as a result of the unprecedented closures. Only when military tanks and vehicles occupied the city center did it become clear that a military coup was underway. Whether or not the jets were used for aerial bombing remains unclear, but scenes of destruction from the parliament confirm heavy artillery was used on the building, injuring some of the MPs inside. Helicopter fire, though, was widely documented on social media. Military personnel moved swiftly to disarm Turkish police officers, who tend to back Erdogan's government, before occupying the TRT Turkish national television station to announce martial law and declare the coup a success. The Turkish military broke into the headquarters of state broadcaster TRT. After seizing the channel, Turkish Armed Forces broadcast a statement declaring martial law and announcing that they had “completely taken over the administration” with the aim of “reinstat[ing] constitutional order, human rights and freedoms.” Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) announced that the country's government was confiscated its entirety. The statement, "President deluded, misguided and even traitors; Peace Council seized the country's leadership at home!" it said. Turkish Armed Forces said in a statement: "Turkish Armed Forces, the constitutional order, democracy, ensure the repetition of human rights and freedoms and facilities, enabling dominate again the rule of law in the country, deteriorating public security order of confiscated whole administration of the country in order to ensure again. All international agreements and our commitment remains with all countries of the world, we hope to continue our good relations." President Erdogan's office website said he was safe and and that a coup attempt by a small group of soldiers was "unsuccessful." In his appearance on CNNTurk via a reporter's mobile phone, Erdogan urged people to take to the streets to protect "democracy." He said "This is an act encouraged by the parallel structure. ... I believe that this act will have the necessary punishment that will be given by our nation." Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said a group within Turkey’s military had attempted to overthrow the government and security forces had been called in to “do what is necessary”. Yildirim said in comments broadcast by private channel NTV “Some people illegally undertook an illegal action outside of the chain of command ... “The government elected by the people remains in charge. This government will only go when the people say so.” Speaking live on local television, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Numan Kurtulmus said Erdogan's AK Party was still in charge of the government. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag claimed that the people behind the coup are members of the movement that is loyal to US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, according to Reuters. President Erdogan and his supporters within the government described the military behind the coup as a small faction. The takeover saw a night of explosions, air strikes and gunfire. The Turkish parliament in Ankara was bombed and Istanbul's main airport was seized. The coup attempt also led to the temporary seizure of the state broadcaster TRT. Erdogan, who had been holidaying on the southwest coast when the coup was launched, called the uprising an "act of treason" and said that those responsible would pay a heavy price. Among the top military officers arrested was the commander of the Third Army Corps, General Erdal Ozturk, based in Istanbul, who would face charges of treason for alleged links to the coup plot. General Adem Huduti, the commander of the Second Army, was also detained. In past Turkish coups, the chief of staff of the military and other generals have been the main ringleaders. This time, that appears to not to be case. There were local media reports that the chief of staff and other members of the military top brass had been taken captive by pro-coup forces and held at the main military base in Ankara. Turkish officials said July 16, 2016 that 2,839 soldiers and officers who attempted a coup had been arrested, as the president accused an exiled cleric of organizing the plot. A number of high-ranking military officials fled to neighboring Greece by helicopter and requested political asylum. According to local media reports, some of them are believed to be among the architects of the coup. Greek police said that the arrested Turks include two majors, four captains and two sergeants first class, differing from earlier reports. Greece's government said they will return a Turkish Blackhawk helicopter "as soon as possible" but will examine the asylum claims made by eight Turkish military personnel who were on board. Turkey's four main political parties condemned the failed coup attempt in a joint statement read during a symbolic parliamentary session, just hours after government control was reinstated. In a speech to parliament, Kemal Kilicdaroglu - the leader of Turkey's main opposition, the secular Republican People's Party (CHP) - said the failed coup attempt had brought political parties closer to finding common ground to improve democracy. There were varying reports of the number of people killed in clashes. Updating the death toll, the Turkish government says 265 people were killed during the failed military coup. Officials say 161 civilians died, including conspirators. A further 104 military plotters were also killed. Conditions remained tense in Istanbul, Ankara and some other provincial cities, and there were reports of sporadic continuing violence. Turkish media reported intense clashes at a large military barracks outside Ankara that was believed to be a stronghold of the coup plotters. As many as 2,745 judges reportedly were suspended for allegedly having links to the cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Turkish media also reported that 140 arrest warrants had been issued against members of Turkey's Supreme Court. Turkish officials continued to arrest judges and military officers in connection with the coup attempt, detaining more soldiers Sunday. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said 17 July 2016 around 6,000 people had been detained.
What went Wrong?
A senior EU source monitoring the situation said: “It looks like a relatively well orchestrated coup by a significant body of the military, not just a few colonels. They’ve got control of the airports and are expecting control over the TV station imminently. They control several strategic points in Istanbul. ... Given the scale of the operation, it is difficult to imagine they will stop short of prevailing. It’s not just a few colonels”. As it turned out, it was just a few colonels. After 8 hours of ongoing fighting, the military coup attempt began to falter. Erdogan landed at Ataturk airport, where he delivered a speech to reassure supporters. Soon afterwards, police officials began arresting plotters and posting videos on social media of military personnel in handcuffs, and some of them being lynched by angry mobs. Addressing his supporters in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called on the US to either arrest or extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric who he accuses of being behind the coup attempt. He told the crowd: "The army is ours, not that of the parallel structure [behind the coup]. I am chief commander."
The plan was undertaken in haste, apparently an effort to pre-empt an anticipated purge of the military and judiciary expected in August [that list of 2700 judges who were purged did not come out of no where]. Under these circumstances, there were limits to the number of people who could be recruited, and the number of contingencies that could be addressed. The planners must rely on potential recruits whose discretion can be assumed even if they refuse to join the plan.
The Erdogan regime had recently surrounded itself with commando formations - Gendarmerie Special Forces (GSF / JÖH - Jandarma Özel Harekât) and the Police Special Operations (PSO / PÖH - Polis Özel Harekât) - consisting of several tens of thousands of recently recruited troops with combat experience against the Kurds, and readily available to ensure regime survival. Although these formations have not received a great deal of public notice, Saddam Hussein [with the Republican Guard, Special Republican Guard, etc], or Putin, or Hitler, or Boris Yeltsin, with similar concentric rings of protection, would have understood the theory quite well.
Luttwak wrote that "... the confused and dramatic events of the coup will mean that the radio and television services will have a particularly attentive and receptive audience. In broadcasting over the radio and television services our purpose is not to provide information about the situation but rather to affect its development by exploiting our monopoly [or other de facto control] of these media." In this case, the coup never gained control of the media, and the incumbent government quickly used the media to convincingly claim it was still in charge. Erdogan broadcast from his smart phone a statement to the people, tweeted to his supporters and relied on the media.
Edward Luttwak, Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, said the plotters broke “Rule No. 1, which is to seize the head of the government before doing anything else, or at least to kill him.” A coup seeks to replace one set of senior government officials with another, yet none of the senior officials in Erdogan's government were taken into custody. It is reported that the coup leaders were unaware of Erdogan's whereabouts, and bombed the resort at which he was staying after he had left.
A coup seeks to displace those who control and use major government buildings, such as the Presidential Palace, Legislature, and so forth. This did not happen. A few pilots involved in the plot bombed and strafed the parliament in Ankara, the MIT intelligence agency's headquarters and military forces tanks near the presidential palace. Troops were sent to several facilities, but none were seized.
Edward Luttwak, writing in Foreign Policy magazine, said: “Rule No. 2 in planning a successful military coup is that any mobile forces that are not part of the plot — and that certainly includes any fighter jet squadrons — must be immobilized or too remote to intervene. ... But the Turkish coup plotters failed to ensure that these loyal tanks, helicopters, jets were rendered inert, so instead of being reinforced as events unfolded, the putschists were increasingly opposed.”
It appears that the few thousand soldiers under the coup commanders was insufficient to complete the various tasks at hand. Although some troops showed up at various strategic locations, they were too few to seize and hold them. The troops that seized the Bosporous brigdes made for a good photo op, but their contribution to a favorable outcome is less clear.
Top military leaders denounced the rebellion. The navy chief and special forces commanders spoke out against the coup plotters. The chief of staff, General Hulusi Akar, was not part of the coup, nor was the head of the army in Istanbul, who took overall command briefly while the plotters held Akar captive. In two out of four previous coups in Turkey since 1960, the top military brass were involved and were able to use the chain of command to ensure success.
As the attempt unfolded, it became clear that the ringleaders did not have widespread support within the military, nor any serious political or public backing. None of Turkey’s opposition parties endorsed it, and even Erdogan’s die-hard liberal and secular critics in the media and civil society denounced the action, saying Turkey had had enough of coups.
Naunihal Singh is an academic and the author of Seizing Power, a groundbreaking book on coups. According to Singh, the failure of Turkey’s coup wasn’t likely determined by the coup plotters’ military strength, or even their support inside the military. It was determined by their inability to make it seem like they were going to succeed. The ability to shape perceptions of success, often through media, is crucial in coups — basically, if people think a coup is going to succeed, they usually just join up because they don’t want to be on the wrong side of the guns.
Why
For a long time it seemed that Erdogan, who is pursuing a policy of a creeping but inexorable Islamization, had the upper hand, after suppressing the resistance of the generals, forcing them to resign themselves to giving up the secular principles of Kemal Atatürk, and getting rid of a “fifth column” in the midst of the armed forces, having “purged” the officer corps through a series of large-scale court trials. It turns out this was not quite the case. From the point of view of many residents of Turkey and a considerable section of its elite, the president bears responsibility for destabilizing the domestic political situation in the country. Society is split, as was testified by the mass protests in 2013. Yet the authorities stubbornly refuse to listen to their opponents and are implementing the social mandate only of their voters, who represent about half of the population. Erdogan provoked a resumption of a civil war in Turkish Kurdistan. In the opinion of many Turkish politicians and Kurds themselves, it was his actions that triggered a flare-up in hostilities and wiped out years of efforts to establish a peace dialogue. As a result, the country has found itself in a state of war, although just a couple of years ago there were neither reasons nor preconditions for this. In its foreign policy the Turkish leadership managed to ruin relations with practically all the key global and regional players. The diplomatic results of Erdogan's rule are dismal. The events in Syria are following a scenario that is absolutely at variance to Ankara was counting on. In Egypt, Erdogan's protégé, Islamist Mohamed Morsi, has been ousted. Relations with the EU are ruined.
Why Now ?
The government pointed fingers at the Gulen movement, President Erdogan's rival and a declared terrorist organization, but it was unclear who was behind the coup. The Supreme Military Court was getting ready to expel military servicemen said to be affiliated to the Gulen movement in August 2016, so the mutiny sought to pre-empt that purge. For weeks there were signs that tensions between Turkey's secular military and the Islamist-aligned government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were reaching a boiling point. Semi-public disagreements between the politicians and the generals, especially over Syria policy, were becoming all too frequent. Military briefings appeared increasingly to be at odds with government statements. And some analysts in recent weeks had feared a coup might be in the offing, with concerns mounting in military ranks about the series of recent deadly terrorist attacks in Turkey, the government's no-holds-barred war on the Kurdish minority in southeast Turkey, and Erdogan's attempts to consolidate ever greater control over the media and judiciary. Afzal Ashraf of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank, said he was surprised by the level of hostility among officers toward the government. They expressed increasing alarm at the autocratic tilt of Erdogan and anger at what they saw as the creeping Islamization of Turkey. "For the first time in 15 years, young officers were making comments about their government in cynical terms," said Ashraf, a frequent visitor to Turkey. That was unusual, especially in front of visiting foreigners, he said. He noted, though, that top-ranking officers seemed more supportive of the government.
Now What ?
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan wasted little time Saturday before launching a purge of his enemies. He promised on his arrival at Istanbul Ataturk Airport to punish the coup plotters who had tried to kill him. “They will pay a heavy price for this,” said Erdogan. “This uprising is a gift from God to us, because this will be a reason to cleanse our army,” the president told supporters at the airport. Few regional analysts doubt that he will now use the failed coup to strengthen his presidential powers and to cleanse not only the military but other institutions suspected of harboring opponents. Adding to fears that the government’s reaction to the coup would match Erdogan’s threats and his record of ruthlessness, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said the government was considering legal changes to bring the death penalty back “to make sure this does not happen again.” Former US ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, told VOA he was very concerned Erdogan might use the attempted coup as a pretext for becoming more authoritarian than he has been. "Erdogan, who has already shown some very strong anti-democratic tendencies before the coup, will use the coup plot and the attempt of the generals to take power as a justification for cracking down on society even more. And I think we may see a more restrictive environment for Turkey — less press freedom, less political openness".
Turkey has rescinded a contract with a state-owned Chinese manufacturer that would have seen the company build Ankara its first long-range missile defense system.
"The deal was cancelled," an official from Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's office told AFP.
The USD-3.4-billion (EUR-3-billion) contract was clinched with China Precision Machinery Import and Export Corporation (CPMIEC) following talks with the firm in 2013.
The deal originally raised eyebrows among other NATO members, which complained that the defense apparatus would lack the qualities enabling it to work in tandem with other such systems in the Western military alliance.
Turkey has US-manufactured Patriot missiles stationed along its border with Syria.
The Chinese company has been placed under sanctions by Washington allegedly for selling items that are banned under US law to curb the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
The Turkish official, whose name was not mentioned in the report, said, "One of the main reasons is that we will launch our own national missile project."
Prior to the cancellation of the deal, however, Turkish Defense Minister İsmet Yılmaz had emphasized that Ankara's decision to opt for a Chinese-built system and avoid integration with the existing NATO defense infrastructure was in line with the country's national defense interests.
Experts had also argued that choosing a Chinese partner would ultimately enable Turkey to own both the system and the technology.
French-Italian consortium Eurosam and US-listed Raytheon Co have also submitted offers to help build the Turkey Long Range Air and Missile Defense System (T-LORAMIDS).
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