Opinion: Ongoing Witch hunt is forcing citizens of all persuasions to seek refuge in dissimulation

Turkey’s growing freedom deficit

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) rose to power in 2002 on the promise that it would give pious Muslims religious freedom. Fourteen years later, “freedom” is the last thing the AKP has delivered.

Today, even AKP supporters need to measure their words carefully, lest they be perceived as criticizing the government or siding with its enemies. This imperative has intensified since the failed coup against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government on July 15. Now, destroying any evidence of association with the AKP’s foes — especially Fethullah Gulen, the reclusive U.S.-based imam whom the government accuses of masterminding the putsch — is a matter of self-preservation.

Erdogan’s government is by no means the first to compel Turkish citizens to hide their preferences and beliefs. Under the secular governments that ruled Turkey from the 1920s to 1950, and to some extent until 2002, pious Turks seeking advancement in government, the military and even commerce had to downplay their religiosity and avoid signaling approval of political Islam.

The leaders of the three Islamist parties that preceded the AKP resented the barriers to religious expression. They held that French-style secularism had perverted Turkish culture. Though careful not to challenge the constitution openly, from 1971 to 2001 they were successively banned as threats to secularism. In 1999, Erdogan himself was jailed for reciting a poem deemed an incitement to sectarian violence. In the same year, Gulen, under investigation for advocating an Islamic state, moved to the United States.

As fellow opponents of secular governance, Gulen’s Hizmet (Service) movement and the AKP were natural allies. Indeed, they spent a decade working together to undermine Turkey’s secular institutions. After a constitutional referendum in 2010 terminated the staunchly secular military’s guardianship of the republic, they saw an historic opportunity for overhauling Turkey’s institutions, though there was some disagreement — and, indeed, tension — over how that should occur.

Erdogan, who was then prime minister, began to transform Turkish society according to his own conservative interpretation of Islam. Religious education was intensified. Alcohol restrictions were tightened. Women were instructed to have at least three children and, later, not to laugh loudly in public. What news media the AKP did not buy off were subdued through threats of punitive taxation and jail time for uncooperative journalists. Secular Turks, once the politically dominant vanguards of modernity, were characterized as lacking in morality, decency and even “Turkishness.”

But devout Muslims were not free from fear, either, not least because of the ensuing power struggle between the Erdogan and Gulen camps. Though Gulen’s supporters initially shared the privileges of power under AKP rule, including preferential treatment in government hiring and contracts, tensions came to a head in 2013, when Gulenists tried to implicate Erdogan in a corruption probe. Erdogan responded by initiating a purge of suspected Gulenists from state institutions.

With two academics having already revealed that several sensational legal cases against the old secular establishment rested on fabricated evidence, AKP officials began to blame Gulen for all judicial improprieties. While there was no doubt that the AKP knew that the victims of the lawsuits, including hundreds of generals, were framed, few Turks said a word for fear of being labeled part of Gulen’s “parallel state.”

Two months after the bloodiest coup attempt in Turkish history, Turks still talk incessantly about the surreal bombardments, the televised images of tanks in the street and the ferocious government response, which has included tens of thousands of arrests. Some wonder whether Erdogan staged the coup to justify the epic purge. Of course, any such questions are raised in private, amid assertions of antipathy to the “Fethullah Terror Organization,” the new official designation for Hizmet. Turks know that the government may equate the slightest connection to Gulen, however old or tenuous, with treason.

Alleged sympathizers are being summarily dismissed from their jobs, if not also jailed. People educated on Gulen scholarships are prime suspects, as are millions who have had dealings with a Gulenist-owned business. Gulenists’ assets are being seized in the biggest wealth grab since the 1940s. Under the circumstances, extolling the merits of the Gulenist charities that are being destroyed would amount to professional suicide.

This is beyond excessive, not least because, whatever the involvement of Gulen himself, the putsch was not the work of Gulenists alone. Disaffected officers of many persuasions participated, as did opportunists seeking promotion. The putsch’s failure may have stemmed from the fact that information about it was leaked in advance, inducing many conspirators, including some key military units, to withdraw from the plot.

Many generals, intelligence officers and other officials hesitated when it became known that a putsch was under way. Erdogan’s top generals and intelligence chief kept him uninformed for hours, even as an assassination squad made its way to his vacation residence. The wait-and-see approach adopted by many Turkish security officials ended up landing some in jail. Among other Turks, too, there are doubtless many who decided to wait to see how the putsch would end before turning against Gulen.

The AKP and many of its opponents agree on one thing: Had the putsch succeeded, the repression would be far worse. And, indeed, AKP supporters far outnumber Gulenists. But the AKP has made bitter enemies over the last 14 years and millions of Turks would have applauded the jailing of its leaders, even as many of those leaders plausibly claimed that their support for Erdogan was feigned.

Today, Turkey is further than ever from creating a society whose members feel free to speak openly and honestly. The ongoing witch hunt causes citizens of all persuasions to fear for their jobs and their lives. They seek refuge in dissimulation — social, political, intellectual, and religious. This pervasive untruthfulness reinforces the underpinnings of Turkey’s recurrent political crises.

Timur Kuran*

Timur Kuran is a professor of economics and political science at Duke University and the author of “The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East.” © Project Syndicate, 2016