In 2013, protests erupted in the heart of Istanbul after police responded brutally to a protest over the government’s planned redevelopment of Gezi Park, one of the few remaining green spaces in central Istanbul. The international community roundly criticized Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Several died after being beaten or shot by police. In what was in hindsight a dry run for his post-coup purge, Erdogan rounded up hundreds.
In the wake of this past month’s protests, Erdogan joined anti-American dictators in Iran, Russia, and China to chastise the United States for alleged systematic racism. Erdogan openly employs a troll army to push his pronouncements and target critics at home and abroad. While Twitter recently purged several thousand Turkish trolls, they appear to be just a drop in the bucket. Many Erdogan supporters have argued that the U.S. has no right to criticize Turkey because the events in Minneapolis and the subsequent riots elsewhere show moral equivalence between what Erdogan did and what the Trump administration, state governments, and municipalities around the country have done.
Earlier this month in the Washington Post, Turkish journalist Asli Aydintasbas, a liberal who was purged by Erdogan’s thought police almost a decade ago, wrote:
The differences, however, are vast, so Erdogan and his supporters should think twice about drawing comparisons. Indeed, progressives who compare the two are often blinded by their own ideology or are far more provincial than they realize: They do not understand the reality of the world outside and so cannot properly access the reality of American life, warts and all.
Why can there be no comparison between Istanbul and Minneapolis? First, authors and analysts like me who signed the 2016 “Never Trump” letter need not fear arrest or financial ruin for criticizing the president. The same cannot be said for any Turk who raises his or her voice against Erdogan. Turkey is the world’s greatest prison for journalists. (As the Turkish joke goes: “A prisoner asks the prison librarian for a book. The librarian apologies profusely and says, ‘We don’t have books here in prison. We only have their authors.’”)
Second, while police brutality exists (although statistics show it is nowhere near as systematic or as race-based as Black Lives Matter activists say), it is prosecuted. The policeman involved in George Floyd’s botched arrest and death faces second-degree murder charges, and the policeman who killed Rayshard Brooks after Brooks allegedly tried to attack him with his own taser lost his job and may also face murder charges. Activists are outraged that courts have exonerated other policemen (both black and white), but the difference between mob retribution and impartial justice is often evidence examined in the courtroom.
In Turkey, however, no such justice exists. If a policeman or an activist associated with Erdogan kills a man, woman, or child (or if he merely tortures them), he can do so with impunity. Indeed, Erdogan should answer the question: Seven years after Gezi, how many perpetrators of police violence have faced justice? How many ministers have been called before parliament to testify and defend their actions? Or even more basic questions about justice in Turkey: Why, according to Turkey’s own interior ministry, did the murder rate of Turkish women increase 1,400% in the first seven years of Erdogan and his political party’s rule. Unofficial data show that the murder rate of women has doubled again in Turkey between 2012 and 2018. None of that even begins to touch the brutality that Kurds face at the hands of Turkish police and security forces.
During the Soviet Union, publishing houses regularly churned out magazines and pamphlets arguing that the U.S. was near social collapse and that the Soviet model provided far greater domestic tranquility. It was nonsense, even if those motivated by either ignorance or ideology wanted to promote it as fact. The same is true with Erdogan’s statements about America.
There is one simple truth, however: There is no moral equivalence between dictatorships and democracies. Both may have social problems, but only one resolves its problems openly through the rule of law. Likewise, it is impossible to expose and resolve problems without the ability of politicians and people to debate openly. The U.S. embraces such debate. Erdogan fears he cannot win one on its merits, so he suppresses it and punishes those who would persist in an intellectual argument.
In short, Istanbul is not Minneapolis. Minneapolis has freedom, and the rule of law will still prevail. In contrast, the real growth in the post-Gezi-era is in prison populations, police impunity, and femicide. Truth and justice are nowhere to be found in Turkey today.
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.
