It has been a bad month for Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and so, as has been the pattern in Turkey for the past 17 years, it has been an even worse month for those Turkey’s mercurial ruler wishes to scapegoat.
After having lied about Turkey’s immunity to the coronavirus crisis in its initial weeks, Erdogan and his advisers now seek to deflect blame and attention elsewhere. Under Erdogan, Turkey’s press freedom has been atrocious. In his first decade at Turkey’s helm, Erdogan benefited in the early years of his crackdown by liberal apologists such as Cengiz Candar, now at the Stockholm University, who defended the arrests and blamed criticism of Erdogan on Jewish animosity Candar and others deflected from an ominous trend: In Reporters Without Frontiers’ annual survey of press freedom for 2002, the year before Erdogan formally took power, Turkey ranked 100, near Israel and above countries such as Russia, Belarus, and Afghanistan. This year, it is below them and looks poised to join the ranks of Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia in the coming year. Just as Erdogan called the 2016 abortive coup “a gift from God” because it enabled him to declare a state of emergency and jail opponents for little or no cause, so too has Erdogan now used the coronavirus crisis to crack down on remaining media.
When an opposition television station interviewed a professor of infectious diseases but misidentified him as a professor of public health, for example, the government fined it almost $1,000. Meanwhile, pro-Erdogan channels promote conspiracy theories absent any factual basis without ever facing a fine. The government then banned another commentator and prosecuted him for insulting religion when he questioned why Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs demanded that victims of the coronavirus be labeled “martyrs” absent any religious or legal precedent.
The government cracked down on Cumhuriyet, a newspaper that its previous editor Erdogan prosecuted after exposing Turkey’s arming of al Qaeda-affiliated groups in Syria after it reported that Erdogan’s press secretary had illegally built an extension to his house on public land. Erdogan and the judiciary, dominated by his Justice and Development Party, AKP, ignored the violation of zoning laws and appropriation of public land and instead charged Cumhuriyet with terrorism because it “exposed where a high public official lived, showing it as a target for terrorists,” never mind that the paper mentioned only the city district and not the address. Security forces then arrested the local district chairman (who belongs to the secular opposition) when he photographed the house and, when the Istanbul CHP party chairman defended him, launched an investigation upon her, as well, for praising a criminal act.
Erdogan’s increasing malevolence goes beyond the press. He has released thousands of prisoners — swindlers, rapists, murderers, and mafioso — from Turkey’s prisons to alleviate crowding in the face of the coronavirus. However, he not only kept purged diplomats, civil servants, and academics in prison but also refused to allow them to spread out to alleviate localized crowding within the prison compounds. In effect, Erdogan will embrace convicted criminals such as Sedat Peker, among Turkey’s most famous mafioso, but will work to hasten the deaths of those who challenge him intellectually.
Can the opposition unseat him? Many diplomats and analysts, who see opposition victories in local elections in Istanbul and Ankara as a sign of hope, ignore the fact that Erdogan holds democracy in disdain. His answer to local losses is not to play fair but rather to punish those who had the audacity to vote against him. He initially won power in part because the AKP excelled at constituent services, while incumbent parties were ineffective or disinterested. The AKP has grown lazy, however. As Erdogan tightened his grip, even within the AKP, its various functionaries understood that their future meant pleasing Erdogan rather than serving the public, and AKP constituent services floundered.
Even before the coronavirus hit, Turkey’s economy was floundering. As the need has increased, opposition parties such as the secular-left Republican Peoples Party have sought to come to the rescue. In response, Erdogan’s government banned opposition-controlled municipalities such as Istanbul and Ankara from engaging in supplemental food and mask distribution or cash handouts. Officially, the explanation is that there is only one government in the country, with Erdogan’s administration stating, “We cannot allow parallel operations. No parallel government is permitted.” In practice, however, while AKP-controlled police stop opposition party charities, they are allowing the AKP and its allies to carry out such activities freely.
Democracy should be built on an even playing field with equality for all under the law, but not so in Turkey where, in the spirit of George Orwell, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
Turkey is in a sad state. While some U.S. diplomats have, like Trump, drunk Erdogan’s Kool-Aid, Erdogan’s decision to respond to the crisis not by helping Turks but by furthering his crackdown shows that the problem is Erdogan, not us, and the U.S. government should take no action which endorses, embraces, or enables Erdogan’s continued leadership in Turkey.
Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.
