Sunday, March 6, 2010
I saw in the Turkish Daily Tattler this morning that two more journalists have been arrested as part of the so-called "anti-AKP plot" that the Ergenekon trial is supposedly investigating. Sigh.
Nedim Şener and Ahmet Şık were charged with links to the alleged
conspiracy to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's government
and ordered jailed.
They were detained along with six other journalists on Thursday,
after police raided their homes, drawing expressions of concern from
Western governments and international media rights groups.
About 400 suspects are already on trial for membership in an alleged
hard-line secularist network known as Ergenekon, which prosecutors say
plotted to create chaos in Turkey and open the way for a military
takeover. Critics say the ruling government is using the Ergenekon case
to jail critics and undermine Turkey's secular legacy.
It was because of Ergenekon, and the generally superficial way that I felt journalists and bloggers writing about Turkey were talking about the trial that I began the modernized version of this blog in the first place. (Well, actually I set up the blog in order to meet girls, but still—Ergenekon and the way it was covered in the media was also a big part of things).
Anyway, since that time I've written about Ergekenon fairly frequently, but my efforts notwithstanding some people still see this case from the prism of a pretty narrow set of categories. Even today, there are people who claim that Ergenekon is just Turkey's version of the "clean hands" probe that took place in Italy in the 1990s, but of course it's much more complicated than that.
The next time someone tries to tell you that Ergenekon is about rooting out crimes committed by the 'Deep State,' ask them why Sedat Bucak is still a free man
The problem with Ergenekon, I think, is that too many people (outside of Turkey, generally) are trying to find the folks with the white hat. Academic and media types in the United States and Europe rail against the "secular elite" in Turkey—some of them seem to think that everyone who opposes the expansion of religious piety in the public sphere in Turkey were some kind of champagne-drinking millionaire hopelessly out of touch with mainstream opinion in the country (because, as we all know, there can't be a secular Muslim who isn't part of some kind of deracinated, foreign elite, right?). Meanwhile, most of the folks who were willing to criticize the AKP regarding Ergenekon were right-wing Islamophobes (Daniel Pipes, Claire Berlinski*, etc.) who think a jihadist is hiding under everyone's bed, and who despise the AKP not because of that party's authoritarian tendencies but because of its determination to bring religious piety more forcefully into public life in Turkey.
But here's something I think we've all learned from Ergenekon: just because a political party emerges to take on an authoritarian political system that represses people's desire to be Islamically pious, that doesn't mean said party won't be authoritarian in its own right—and authoritarian in really boring, old-school, secular ways, too.
What the AKP is doing—jailing its critics, suing those who mock the Prime Minister and his policies, and generally instilling a climate of fear and self-censorship over the media and civil society—is nothing new, at least in a global context. But it's amazing that over a thousand people have been rounded up and detained under very shady circumstances in a country widely hailed in the United States as a model of democracy for the so-called Muslim world, and yet more isn't being made about this.
That's problematic, no matter what side of the question you're coming from.
*('Islamophobe' is too strong for Berlinski)
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Hahaha you call Berlinski and Islamaphobe hours after I linked to a a piece by her (I thought she was right) over at Jenny's.
I think Hurriyet is censoring itself about this. Of the two Sener had been getting targeted for a while and even a book taking apparently the opposite view to his book about the Dink murder has been published and pushed by Zaman. Şık appears to have been just about ready to publish a book called 'Imamin Ordusu' (people do speak highly of him, so despite the title it may be a good read, apparently only very few people and the cops who conduct these searches have seen the draft though). Anyway these two may be getting the treatment Hanefi Avci did. Whatever it is.
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In retrospect, I wish I hadn't called Berlinski an 'Islamophobe.' I don't particularly like the way she talks about Islam or Turkey, but name-calling is lazy and not very helpful. And compared to US-based neocons like Pipes, she seems hardly Islamophobic.
The point I was making is that most of the people who have been most consistent in attacking the AKP's narrative on Ergenekon tend to be pretty conservative--people who seem very suspicious of the AKP (and 'political Islam') more generally. In the case of Pipes, at least, there seems to be nostalgia for the good old days when the military held a tighter rein over politics.
I take it this (http://ricochet.com/main-feed/Turkey-and-a-Fundamental-Confusion-About-Press-Freedom) is the link you are referring to?
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Well, it isn't too late to fix the prose and sick a note in there. I think 'Islamophobe' is more or less useless (somewhat like 'anti-Semite' but for a different crowd, obviously). There is value in what the term is trying to capture, but unfortunately it is so broad and so overused that it isn't clear it conveys any meaning other than 'this person is somehow bad.' Anyway.
If you can watch the last part of her interview on 'Ucommon Knowledge' you'll see how she reacts to rather ignorant remarks about her Muslim friends and neighbors here. (I checked, google brings it up with the obvious keywords.)
Pipes seems to be a different, um, beast, altogether. That's for a different time though.
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I forgot to type an answer to you question: yes that's the link.
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