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Financial Times, Mar. 16 2017
Erdogan’s informers: Turkey’s descent into fear and betrayal
As political pressure intensifies, friends, colleagues and even spouses
are reporting each other for a range of offences
by Laura Pitel
Browsing Facebook at home one Saturday, Bilgin Ciftci saw a post that
made him chuckle. It was a montage of images of Turkey’s President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan placed alongside Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. In
the first, the president and the shrivelled inhabitant of Middle-earth
shared a look of astonishment. The second showed both figures wide-eyed
with wonder. In the third, Erdogan gnawed on a chicken drumstick while
Gollum bit into a scaly fish.
Ciftci, a doctor from the western town of Aydin, clicked “share” and
thought no more of it. But a few weeks later, he was summoned to see the
police and charged with insulting the president — a criminal offence
in Turkey. He lost his job at a public hospital and became trapped in a
legal ordeal that has so far dragged on for more than 18 months. At one
stage, the judge appointed a panel of Tolkien experts to advise whether
Gollum should be deemed good or bad (they ruled that he is good at heart).
Amid the absurdity, there was another, darker layer to the story. When
he shared the meme, Ciftci, 48, believed he was only showing it to those
in his private Facebook network. But the police had a screenshot of his
page. They had not hacked his account or snooped on his computer. The
truth was far more unsettling: he had been betrayed by someone he knew.
Ciftci deduced that the culprit was the husband of one of his relatives.
When he called up to confront him, the relative first denied it and then
hung up the phone.
Ciftci’s ordeal reflects something bigger happening in Turkey, something
that could come straight from the pages of a dystopian novel. On an
almost weekly basis, stories emerge of friends, colleagues and even
spouses reporting each other for a catalogue of offences. “This has
become a phenomenon in our society,” says Ciftci from a café near Aydin
courthouse, an institution now more familiar than he could ever have
imagined. “There are people who are more royalist than the king. They
become citizen informers.”
***
All police and intelligence services routinely use infiltrators and
informers in their efforts against organised crime and terrorism. Turkey
— a country that last year suffered not only 267 separate terrorist
attacks but also a violent coup attempt that left more than 200 dead —
faces many genuine and deeply serious threats. But there are also
countless stories of unpaid, ordinary citizens who have taken it upon
themselves to become a volunteer army of informers.
Bilgin Ciftci: the doctor was charged with insulting the president and
lost his job after a Facebook 'friend' sent the police a screenshot of a
satirical post he shared on the social network © Ivor Prickett
History is rich with precedent for this kind of betrayal, from Hollywood
stars reporting each other at the height of the McCarthyite witch-hunts
to the vast network of informers who aided the Stasi in the German
Democratic Republic. Turkey, too, has a substantial track record. The
paranoid Sultan Abdul Hamid II tried to hold together the fraying
Ottoman Empire with an army of official and unofficial snitches.
A US consular report from the early 1940s notes that Turks who
disapproved of the government would frequently find that their “petty
infractions” were discovered by police, at times with the help of secret
informers “who seem to abound in this locality”. After a 1971 coup, the
ruling generals’ fondness for “dear citizen informers” as a term for
addressing the nation later spawned a play with the same name.
In today’s Turkey, in which opposition parties are toothless and all
major media outlets brought to heel, realms such as the teahouse, the
lecture hall or the Facebook newsfeed are harder to control. For several
years the government has routinely urged elected neighbourhood officials
to keep tabs on those in their local area. Increasingly, these calls
have extended to ordinary citizens, too.
The motivation comes from the very top. “If there’s someone you know,
wherever they are, inform our security services immediately,” President
Erdogan urged in December, speaking in the wake of a series of deadly
terror attacks. “This is not just the job of our security services.”
Egged on by such encouragement and aided by a flawed judicial system,
loyal supporters now patrol both the public and private spheres. Some
even boast about their exploits on social media. “In Turkey, it used to
be considered shameful to give information to the intelligence agency or
the police,” says Melda Onur, an opposition MP who recently shared the
story of a taxi driver who reported a passenger for criticising the
government. “An informer — if known — could not easily survive in our
society,” she says. “This government shattered that idea.”
The stories of those who inform, and those they target, show the dark
underbelly of a country riven by fear and intolerance — and serve as a
warning to western societies grappling with their own political and
social rifts.
***
Ali Dinc was little more than two years into his second marriage but it
was not going well. From a bland café in a shopping mall on the
outskirts of Izmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, he explains that he was
working long hours as a lorry driver and then returning home to an
increasingly abrasive home life.
The 40-year-old, whose spherical belly is a surprisingly pleasing
complement to his round bald head, says he and his wife began to clash
over politics. He claims she swore at President Erdogan while flicking
between TV channels. He both loved the president and found it
unbefitting for a woman to curse. “I would come home from work tired,
sit down and eat my dinner and all I would hear is swearing,” he says.
“I couldn’t take it any more.”
One evening, he snapped and threatened to record her. She told him to go
ahead, he says. He captured what he describes as “21 seconds of
profanity” as she shouted at Erdogan, and took it straight to a local
prosecutor. A criminal case was opened against her. Unsurprisingly, she
filed for divorce, and the case became infamous in Turkey.
Dinc denies that he was motivated by anger and revenge. “It’s because I
love the president,” he insists. “You can’t swear at someone who has
done such great things for Turkey. He’s the head of state. He’s a great
guy. I really love him.” He insists that even if they had been married
for 20 years, he would have done the same thing. He clearly relishes the
idea that his wife will be put in her place. Asked how she is faring, he
says coolly: “She’s fine now. But when the trial begins she will
understand the mistake that she’s made.”
He does not seem to find it remotely sinister that his ex-wife could
face a jail sentence for something said in the privacy of her own home.
Freedom of speech, he insists, is no more restricted in Turkey than in
any European country. I tell him, in detail, of the notorious claim
about David Cameron’s student encounter with a severed pig’s head — and
explain that the authors of the book in which the allegation was made
faced no legal consequence. After a stunned silence, Dinc says simply:
“I have to change the subject. My God.”
***
Despite his protestations to the contrary, it is hard to believe that
Dinc’s actions were not at least partly driven by the anger borne of a
failing marriage. But he also shows the kind of quasi-religious devotion
to Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) that is common among
its supporters, who make up roughly 50 per cent of the electorate. He
speaks movingly of struggling to afford hospital treatment when his son
was a baby — a problem that he says has been solved by the party’s
reforms. In July, when he first saw the gleaming new Osman Gazi Bridge
that would shave several hours off the journey to Istanbul, he cried
tears of joy.
Ever since the AKP swept to power in 2002, there has been antagonism
between the party’s supporters and those who vehemently oppose it — be
they hardcore secularists, liberals, gay rights activists or those who
support greater autonomy for the Kurdish-majority south-east. But the
divisions widened as the AKP’s position came under threat, including
from an over-assertive military. At the same time, Erdogan, first as
prime minister and then as president, was emboldened by a series of
growing electoral victories.
The anthropologist Jenny White has noted the fixation in Turkish
political culture with the “traitors” out to destroy the nation, the
“selfless heroes” ready to vanquish them and the macho, paternalistic
“bigman” leader who will guide them in this struggle. These concepts tap
into deeply ingrained fears that internal and external enemies are bent
on the country’s destruction. The longer Erdogan has remained in power,
White argues, the more he has fallen back on such tropes, developing an
“extreme cult of personality in which he is presented as the heroic
saviour of his people”. Critics, meanwhile, are “savaged” and
“scapegoats cultivated and attacked as traitors”.
Such divisive rhetoric does not only go in one direction. It is not
uncommon to hear diehard secularists pour scorn on women in headscarves
and characterise AKP voters as uneducated, uncultured oafs. But it is
the AKP that has the toolbox of government at its disposal. And as the
divisions deepened, the rallying cries for citizens to inform on each
other began to grow.
After the 2013 Gezi Park anti-government protests, when millions took to
the streets across Turkey, Erdogan urged “my people” to “see clearly
that young people were used as pawns by internal and external traitors”.
He called upon citizens to report neighbours who banged pots and pans in
support of the demonstrators. As he battled corruption allegations and
further ripples of domestic unrest in the following months, he branded
protesters “terrorists”, called foreign journalists “spies” and accused
women who used birth control of committing “treason”.
From the summer of 2015, following the collapse of a ceasefire with the
Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), Erdogan again picked up the theme of
informing, urging elected officials to find out who in their area was a
terrorist and report them to the security services. He railed against a
group of academics who criticised the approach of the anti-PKK
operations and argued: “There is no difference between a terrorist with
a gun and bomb in his hand and those who use their work and pen to
support terror. The fact that an individual could be a deputy, an
academic, an author, a journalist or the director of an NGO does not
change the fact that that person is a terrorist.”
Complaints from all sections of society began to grow. In Kayseri, a man
was taken to a police station after an unknown person complained that he
insulted the president during a conversation on a park bench. In
Sanliurfa province, three teachers were reported to a civil service
hotline for speaking Kurdish and allegedly praising a terror organisation.
Academics, in particular, voice concern about an increasingly stifling
climate in their classrooms after a series of cases of students
reporting their tutors to the university authorities — and even making
clandestine recordings. The impact on academic freedom is devastating.
“I feel less safe at lectures,” says one eminent professor in Ankara. “I
tell my students not to record my lessons. But, really, how can I
control what they do with their mobile phones? We have to be very careful.”
***
The call to inform gained a new sense of urgency after July 15 2016,
when rogue elements in the military commandeered tanks and fighter jets
to launch a violent but ultimately unsuccessful coup. Erdogan blamed the
putsch on the Gulen movement, a powerful Islamic network that had been a
close political ally until the relationship imploded in 2013. He
described Gulenists as a malignant cancer that must be purged from the
body of the Turkish state. Citizens, he stressed repeatedly, must help
to give them up. “You may have friends from that community,” he said in
October. “I say: denounce them. You must inform our prosecutors. This is
the duty of a patriot.”
Thousands heeded the call. Reward payments reached record levels (up to
£900,000 is on offer for the capture of the country’s most-wanted
figures). According to the National Intelligence Organisation (MIT), the
number of people who got in touch online to offer assistance almost
doubled from 34,000 in 2015 to 65,000 in 2016.
Newspaper pages filled with extraordinary stories of betrayal among
friends, neighbours and even within families. A father in Kayseri was
said to have informed police that two of his sons were Gulenists because
he believed that they were laundering the organisation’s money. The
newspaper Karar told of a family unconvinced by their son’s insistence
that he had quit the movement. They warned police that he was about to
flee to the US and he was arrested at the airport.
Police were inundated. A report published in Haberturk newspaper in
October stated that officers were overwhelmed by the number of calls to
their hotline. Many of the claims were not just baseless and rooted in
personal problems, it said, but also a waste of police time.
***
Neither the Turkish presidency nor the interior ministry responded to
questions for this article. But, more generally, officials bristle at
criticism of the response to the growing tumult in their country. They
ask how a British leader would respond if rogue army officers drove
tanks on to Westminster Bridge and bombed the Houses of Parliament. “If
it had succeeded, I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be talking to you
today because I would not be alive,” says Ravza Kavakci Kan, an AKP MP.
“We are talking about a situation in Turkey that would be worse than
Syria. Any developed nation, when faced with an issue like this — a
terrorist attack or a coup attempt — would expect citizens to report on
suspect behaviour.”
But the accusation that someone is a Gulenist, in particular, can be
nebulous. Though the group’s spiritual leader, Fethullah Gulen, denies
masterminding the coup attempt, foreign diplomats and analysts find it
credible that his followers played at least some role. Authorities,
however, are pursuing not only those accused of direct involvement but
also those with subtler ties to the group. Its secretive nature makes it
hard to prove or disprove an accusation of affiliation — and makes it an
easy slur on someone’s character.
The government has warned citizens against making baseless accusations.
Binali Yildirim, the prime minister, said that he would ask security
services not to pay heed to anonymous tips after “injustices” caused by
people wanting to “settle scores” or with “designs on someone else’s
job”. But the calls to inform continue. After a bombing outside a
football stadium by a Kurdish militant group that left 44 dead in
December, the general-directorate of security launched a campaign urging
citizens to report social media users who “support terror, spread terror
propaganda or are terror sympathisers”.
Government critics warn that the perils of false or illegitimate
complaints are compounded by the state of Turkey’s judicial system.
Prosecutors and judges are terrified to drop cases for fear of
themselves being branded terrorists. Many of their critical or
independent-minded colleagues have already been sidelined or replaced
with loyalists.
A recent report by the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner
warned that since 2014 the legal system has been weaponised by the
government. Kerem Altiparmak, an expert on human rights law at Ankara
University, says that this tactic is unprecedented. “In the 1980s, the
state used more naked weapons like disappearances, torture,” he says.
“Now the state is using ‘legal’ tools . . . Rather than controlling the
abuse of law, the judicial system became the centre of this abuse.” A
state of emergency announced after the coup attempt, and so far extended
twice, gave the president the power to issue executive decrees that
bypass parliament.
The Turkish government furiously rejects the notion that its judiciary
is anything but fair, describing the Council of Europe’s allegations as
“unacceptable”. Nor does it accept accusations of an increasingly
intolerant environment. “Each case is different,” says Kan, the AKP MP.
“But arguing that there’s no freedom of expression and that people
aren’t allowed to be critical would be totally wrong . . . If it were
true, the proportion of society who are anti-President Erdogan — a high
percentage of the population — would all be in court.”
Critics, however, counter that a compromised legal system combined with
a network of people ready and willing to police their fellow citizens
makes for a devastatingly effective pairing. In a country with a strong,
independent judiciary, a false claim can be scrutinised and then thrown
out. Without such checks and balances, it has the potential to become
life-shattering.
***
Despite being a self-described anarchist, Volkan Sevinc worked happily
for several years at the state-run Natural History Museum in Ankara, the
Turkish capital, a treasure trove of dinosaur skeletons and giant
fossils. “It had fairly small numbers of visitors,” he says. “But it was
the only place where children could come to learn about natural history
and evolution.”
Though he loved his work curating fossils, Sevinc says that his views,
as an atheist and veteran of protests for LGBT rights, clashed with
those of his “reactionary” museum colleagues. The 31-year-old, whose
face has the weathered look of someone who has inhaled too much
cigarette smoke and tear gas, says he was the only male staffer who did
not go to the mosque for Friday prayers. He cannot help but break into a
grin as he tells how a colleague once asked why the cabinet on the
evolution of man was not more in keeping with the teachings of Islam.
The museum later removed the entire display.
This ideological friction seems to have particularly irked one of his
co-workers — a woman whose Facebook page proudly features an image of
her talking to the president. Last year, she took it upon herself to
collect information about Sevinc’s out-of-work activities — including a
2010 conviction for insulting a police officer and “alienating the
public from military service” after he protested in support of a
conscientious objector. “How can someone like this work here?” she wrote
on Facebook. She also uploaded her findings into an online reporting
system run by the prime ministry. In February 2016, Sevinc was suspended
while officials carried out an investigation. Then, in May, he was
reinstated.
A mere two months later, the coup plotters struck and public
institutions launched vast probes to root out alleged Gulenists. Sevinc
jokingly told his bosses not to bother with him because he had already
been investigated. But, by August, he was suspended again. The following
month, he was fired, one of almost 100,000 public servants to lose their
jobs under presidential decrees issued under the state of emergency.
All of those sacked were generically described as having links to terror
organisations or other entities that threaten national security but
Sevinc does not know the specifics of what he was accused of. He was
never given the chance to defend himself. The energy ministry, which
oversees his museum, did not respond to questions. It is hard for those
fired in the purges to find even the most low-paid jobs. For now, a
friend is helping Sevinc to train as a coffee barista but he has yet to
find new employment.
He is sanguine about the colleague responsible for his predicament.
“It’s not really about this woman,” he says. “It could have been
anyone.” It is the fact that her complaint was taken seriously that
upsets him most. “The point is that this is completely unjust. Even if
you were talking about a member of one of these [terror] organisations,
there is no process. Sure, if I do bad work, if I don’t work hard
enough, open an investigation. But you are firing me on the basis of my
ideas. My crime, ultimately, was not being like them.”
***
Some of the cases to have emerged in recent months would be funny were
they not so serious. In December, Turkish media reported the story of a
court clerk who accused his girlfriend of being a Gulenist after she
shunned his marriage proposal. A columnist for a local newspaper in
Elazig parodied the national climate with an imaginary exchange between
a concerned citizen and a government hotline. “Dear concerned citizen,
this is a tape recording,” it read. “Press 1 to inform on your
neighbour, press 2 to inform on your friend, press 3 to inform on your
fellow villager.”
But the stakes for Erdogan — and for Turkey — could not be higher as the
country heads into an election campaign. On April 16, voters will have
their say in a national referendum on plans to radically overhaul the
system of governance. The proposals would abolish the role of prime
minister (a role Erdogan held for 11 years) and formally transform the
presidency from a ceremonial role to an executive one. Under the new
system, Erdogan could rule until 2029.
With fears that the result could be tight, the president has returned to
a discourse of traitors and heroes. “The position of those who say ‘No’
is taking sides with July 15,” he said in February, linking those
opposed to the changes directly to the coup plotters as well as with the
PKK.
A No vote is not a crime in Turkey. But that has not stopped overzealous
citizens from treating it as such. The leftwing Sol newspaper reported
last month that after getting into an argument with a customer about the
referendum, an off-licence owner was reported to police and briefly
detained. Melih Gokcek, mayor of Ankara, warned on Twitter recently that
opposition posters and political slogans on walls were ruining the city
and anyone seen putting up new ones should be reported to police.
It might be tempting for citizens of western countries to swaddle
themselves with the notion that their states have moved on from the
paranoid climate of the cold war. Steve Hewitt, a senior lecturer in
history at Birmingham University and author of Snitch! A History of the
Modern Intelligence Informer, is quick to strike that down. In most
democracies, he says, it is simply that minorities face the brunt of
informer systems. “I think in western societies because this very
focused surveillance tends to be centred on marginalised groups, the
broader public don’t tend to care so much.”
Since 9/11, it is often Muslims who have been the primary target. As
home secretary, Theresa May imposed new guidance that required schools
and universities to report students who show tendencies towards violent
extremism or “create an atmosphere conducive to terrorism”. During the
US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump called for “big
consequences” for Americans who failed to report suspicions that
neighbours were planning terror attacks.
But the US still has a very long way to go until it reaches Turkey’s
level. The country is not just grappling with questions about the
boundaries of freedom of expression or efforts to delegitimise and
intimidate the press. Weeks away from a vote with vast ramifications for
the nation’s future, academics are scared to discuss the subject with
their students and No voters check themselves before clicking “post” on
Facebook. At dinner parties, in taxis and at family gatherings,
discussions are steered away from sensitive topics. With a segment of
society mobilised to police spaces that the formal state apparatus
cannot, many believe that they can never be too careful.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of all is that citizen informing is not
only a symptom of a deeply unhealthy society — but also a cause of
further sickness. In his book Naming Names, about the McCarthyite
witch-hunts in Hollywood, the American journalist Victor Navasky writes
that informers “pollute the public well”, “poison social life in
general” and “destroy the very possibility of a community”.
Bilgin Ciftci, who now works as a private doctor after Gollum got him
sacked, says that is precisely the point. “They are dividing people,” he
says. “It goes against our national values. But that is what today’s
leaders want.”
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