On the anniversary of last year’s coup attempt in Turkey, domestic phone calls on Sunday were interrupted by a prerecorded message from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The 15-second message, which played on all phone calls for 30 minutes beginning at midnight, said: “As your President, I congratulate your July 15 Democracy and National Unity Day, wish for God’ mercy on our martyrs, and health and wellbeing of our veterans.”
.. Initially thought to be a service by Turkcell —a wireless provider with ties to the government— it was later revealed to include all calls from all providers, even to the country’s emergency phone number, 112.
.. The commemoration ceremonies for the coup attempt also involved all 85,000 mosques in the country reciting Sela prayers —which was used to mobilize civilians against the army during the night of the coup attempt—and Erdoğan’s widely broadcast speech at the parliament where he promised to restore the death penalty for the putchists before a cheering audience.
Turkey’s Last Coup: What I saw in Ankara
Then came statements from the junta. It was calling itself the “Yurtta Sulh Konseyi,” meaning “Peace at Home Council,” a play on the famous words of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Like coups before it, it was trying to take control of or suppress government organs and communications channels. The state television broadcast was stopped, and a speaker read a text stating that the government had failed in its duties and that the military was taking control of the situation. All of Turkey’s international obligations would be honored, everybody should just stay home, it said. I actually pinched myself to make sure it was real.
.. Unlike in decades past, however, Turks had plenty of private channels to flick around on to see what was going on and receive instructions. Twitter and Facebook were blocked, but slightly tech-savvy people just used VPNs (virtual private networks) to connect. The coup plotters must have thought that they could do their work without effectively blocking communications.
.. It looked as if President Erdogan was in mid-flight returning from a vacation, and then he connected to CNN Turk through a Facetime call. It was surreal watching the president addressing two journalists from a cell phone screen.
.. But there was not a peep where I was in Ayrancı and Gaziosmanpaşa, some of Ankara’s most affluent districts.
.. The booming of jets was near-constant, but was now met with chants from mosques. At first it was a standard call to prayer, which was odd, since it was well past prayer time. By authority of the president and head of Diyanet, Turkey’s religious authority, loudspeakers called upon people to leave their homes and occupy central locations in resistance to the coup. Most of the rest was “sala,” Islamic chants or messages spread from the minarets of mosques. The people’s resistance would have an Islamic character.
.. Chants of “polise uzanan eller kırılsın,” (“may the hands seeking to harm the police be broken!”) and “Türkiye sizinle gurur duyuyor!” (“Turkey is proud of you!”) rose from the crowd. The most popular chant by far however, was “Allahu Akbar,” and there was a vindictive feeling in the takbir, as if it that elation had been caged up for too long.
.. These people were not from my neighborhood up the hill, but from Ankara’s various poorer districts. An overwhelming majority were male, with lean faces and sunburnt skin. Rather than the urbane “Istanbul Turkish,” they spoke in various Anatolian accents, and a few wore traditional Islamic garb the way Arabs do. Many used hand signs with their slogans, either the sign of takbir, an extended index finger (which in Turkey suggests political Islamism) or the sign of the gray wolf, (which belongs to the nationalist party). It was these people who had faced down the junta’s tanks.
.. Many Turks on the left are already uncomfortable with this, pointing out that the same group is known for beating up journalists and oppressing minority groups. Their actions, they say, were more motivated by the will to hold on to power than by a love for democracy.
.. The crowd was now calling for the junta to be put to death.
.. It is difficult to make predictions about how the coup attempt will change things in Turkey. What is certain is that the country’s major political factions will often refer to it to define themselves in the future. The opposition will be rightly proud of having denounced it early on, before anyone knew which way it would go. Secular-leaning media organizations like Dogan News, which owns CNN Turk, will point out that they resisted the junta even as its forces entered its building.
.. Erdogan and his cadre have been mentally preparing for a coup ever since they rose to power in 2002.
.. At worst, the coup will encourage the AK Party’s worst attributes and serve as a stepping-stone to a regime that will make the country inhospitable to others. At best, it will be a uniting force in the country’s politics that leads to a new consensus. Time will tell.
What Caused the Turkish Coup Attempt
Gulen has lived in exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, and the Turkish government is now accusing Washington of sheltering him—which provides the government with an opportunity to deflect attention away from its own actions.
.. The president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is devoted to a view that emphasizes the right of majority rule over concepts of shared control by institutions within a constitutional system. His views are similar but not identical with the Muslim Brotherhood theory of government which does not recognize freedom of press, individual rights against the state, the separation of powers or a clear division between state and religion.
.. —The government accelerated moves in recent years to take over newspapers, TV stations and media outlets, resulting in almost total control of the media by the government;
—In the summer of 2013, the government forcibly repressed peaceful demonstrations nationwide against perceived government authoritarianism;
.. —Changes in Turkey’s educational system have introduced compulsory religious instruction and altered the governance of schools and universities in ways that weaken the secular nature of education.
.. In 1999, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a young politician with religious convictions and regarded as a successful mayor of Istanbul, one of the world’s largest cities, went to jail. He had publicly proclaimed an inflammatory reference to a Turkish poem: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…”
.. In 2001, the Turkish economy imploded with the Turkish currency losing half its value within a few months. Thus, after a decade of bumbling misrule by secular parties, in 2002 the Turkish people, in essence realizing there was no other option, put Erdogan’s party in power with a powerful win.
.. Turkey, rigorously implemented economic reforms that slashed rampant inflation and launched new efforts to join the EU. It did what no previous government had been able to do for decades. Turkey’s GNP tripled within a few years.
.. In succeeding years, he converted the educational system into a religious friendly institution, altered the court system to his advantage, purged the police and judiciary, and with widespread show trials decapitated the Kemalist structure in the army. Extending that momentum, his party moved to dominate the press in Turkey.
President of Turkey Urges Resistance as Military Attempts Coup
Leaders of opposition political parties, who have otherwise worked against Mr. Erdogan’s government, also spoke out against a seizure of government by the military.
“This country has suffered a lot from coups,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main secular opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish initials C.H.P., said in a written statement, according to Hurriyet Daily News. “It should be known that the C.H.P. fully depends on the free will of the people as indispensable of our parliamentary democracy.”
.. Mr. Erdogan blamed followers of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an ally before the two had a bitter falling-out in 2013 over a corruption inquiry that targeted Mr. Erdogan and his inner circle, for the coup attempt.
.. Since the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, the military has staged coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and intervened in 1997. The military had long seen itself as the guardian of the secular system
.. Mr. Erdogan attracted a wide-ranging constituency in the early years of his tenure, including many liberals who supported his plans to reform the economy and remove the military from politics. But in recent years he has alienated many Turks with his increasingly autocratic ways, cracking down on freedom of expression, imposing a significant role for religion in public life and renewing war with Kurdish militants in the country’s southeast.
.. “The people tried to stand up against President Erdogan, but they couldn’t, they were crushed, so the military had no choice but to take over,” said Cem Yildiz, a taxi driver.