G'day all,
Wrote Michael a few days back:
>We have people on the list from Turkey, Argentina, Korea, and many >other
places where very important changes are taking place.
>Unfortunately, we hear almost nothing from the people on the ground in >days places.
Well, I hope Sabri will tolerate (and correct) a few data and impressions I've
been accumulating in and about Turkey of late, as I think just about
everything we discuss here is at its most pointed there. Anyway, I'm just now
returned from an eye-popping three week gallop across the place (with which I
am now deeply in love) and have returned full of pessimism and disjointed
thoughts and observations.
So, mebbe a few words on the recent chronology of the crisis, then some on the
political culture, economic and political prospects - as gleaned from the
Anglophone papers Turkey offers (*Turkish News* and *Turkish Daily News*) and
gratifyingly gruelling raki-soaked tobacco-stained encounters with assorted
locals (it's a pity you need a recent history of such traumatic flux and
uncertainty to breed such a politically astute and articulate people, but that
does seem to be the way of it).
The chronology of the Crisis
March 8: PM Bulent Ecevit announces he won't be following IMF recommendations
after the dingo's breakfast they made of FEbruary (eg the currency float).
March 10: Ecevit admits he went too far on that one, not because the IMF is
any good, just because it is 'an inevitable global reality'.
March 13: The Turkish people hear, for the first time, from an official
source (and Turks seem to know what is going on without the aid of such aids)
that their state bank is rotten to the core, and that the radical
restructuring needed is gonna require instant and substantial international
support - implicitly, on whatever terms available. The military prove they're
on the side of the angels by foreshadowing substantial budget cuts.
March 14: Dervis announces huge privatisation programme, cuts in agricultural
subsidies, and a close exchange rate policy.
March 17: Ecevit sinks the slipper into the US and Europe for not coming to
the rescue soon enough and large enough.
March 19: Cabinet announces it'll do whatever's required to qualify for the EU.
Then comes a week in which the state ups the state security ante a few notches
- death sentences demanded for some Islamic activists (linked with the Millis
Gorus organisation); more leftie hunger strikers starve to death in gaol -
finally getting a couple of moderately sympathetic lines in the media; a
senior police officer is ambushed in Corum; and the Left-leaning paper
*Evrensil* is banned for a week after daring to commemorate a journo beaten to
death by police.
March 26: Foreign Minister Ismael Cem presents the recovery planm to the EU,
who express little enthusiasm and tax him on human rights issues.
March 28: Ecevit admits the government (an unlikely coalition of violently
opposed positions) can't get Dervis's recovery plan through the house or past
the people. The partial privatisation of Turk Telekom is called off and
markets plunge.
March 31: A bank CEO, perhaps the first of several, is taken into custody.
April 6: World Bank says all kinds of sweet things, but pledges bugger-all.
This after Cem and Dervis have loudly been assuring anyone who'd listen that
$12 billion immediate greenbacks was the only thing that might prevent
disaster. Agricultural subsidies'll have to be cut without any transformation
compensation and support.
The big street demos begin. The chief opposition party (the Virtue Party -
which party, it seems to Ecevit and me, is really the banned Welfare Party all
over again - if the High Court finds this to be the case shortly, Virtue will
be banned, too) got 40000 into the Istanbul streets on April 8. I witnessed a
seething mass of desperate small businessmen begin a meeting at the 'Egyptian
Bazaar' - and again, it was Virtue men who were the first to arrive and grab
the megaphones. In fact, every demo I saw before the 14th was organised or
appropriated by centre-right to right-wing activists. And some of 'em were
vicious, too. A small-business turn-out (couldn't count the thousands) in
Ankara flattened a score of cops and culminated in truncheon assaults and
water-cannon reprisals. Turkish TV (and I had just enough Turkish by then to
make the call) is not worthy of its critical, experienced and generally stoic
audiences, and came down against 'em all - 'Provocateurs Take Control' tagged
each of the ten replays of each act of violence, perpetrators and standers-by
were circled for easy public identification, and the fact that the whole
country is either livid or desperate was entirely missed by all. Galatasary's
(ultimately ill) fortunes in the European Cup, pop-star Tarkan's ambiguous
sexuality, and Cyprus took up at least as much space in the papers as did the
details of the legitimacy crisis (which got headlines but little content) and
the social suffering (which got the odd small op-ed but little else). There
was a large union turn-out in Ankara on the 14th - a peaceful one, on account
of the fact the march route had been closed off and they couldn't really get
started on the emotion escalator - but I witnessed only the cop build-up for
that one as I was off for a rubber neck in Cappadocia that day (and about
Cappadocia I could gush for another 10K).
Political Culture
One day in a Turkish city is enough to tell any Anglo-Saxon that the state is
present in every moment and fibre of the Turk's being. Tooled-up cops and
soldiers at every corner; the television stations helpfully drawing red
circles around the faces of demonstrators, so that citizens (the cops call you
'citizen') may be aided in the execution of their duty; Article 312 of the
penal code on every journo's lips (that's the one that applies the
consideration of social responsibility to that of free speech on pain of gaol
- a pain felt by even quite moderate types at the moment); Ataturk's
nation-defining portrait in every shop and his statue in every town square;
the military framed as appropriate commentators on social and economic policy;
loads of government monopolies, huge case-insensitive agricultural subsidies;
a banking system imploding under decades of insider-favours betwixt senior
bureacrats and big boojies (I mean, how does a public bank with which the
whole public sector must invest its allocations and revenues come to having to
borrow at outrageous interest rates just to keep its operational reserves
somewhere near statutory requirements?); ministers constantly under scrutiny
for corrupt tendering practices; thousands of half-completed government-funded
and standardised apartment towers; the bigger half of the petit bourgoisie
(ie, those not flogging carpets) dependent on government contracts;
nationalistic spots on the telly that are almost indistinguishable from those
thundering anthem,flag,blood'n'Stakhanov routines the Soviets used to serve
up; joyfully overbuilt scaffolds holding conurbations of old buildings up, and
briskly busy government service shop fronts in ll the provincial towns.
The next thing you notice is that every Turk seems to know exactly what's
going on (politics remains an oral culture there, and shitty media are not
nearly the powerful hegemon regarding issues of the day as they are in our
parts of the world); has a strong opinion about it (often quite sectarian, I
suspect, precisely because the politics is so communal); naturally links
Turkey's woes to transnational developments (everyone is ferociously down on
the IMF and Bulent Ecevit - the only two articles of faith, besides the
eternal spectre of Ataturk, which unite the otherwise fragmented populace; is
ever casting a nervous eye at the military (which remains, I suspect, quite
happy to keep pulling strings rather than going in mob-handed 1980-style); and
seems capable of sustained argument against categorical opponents without
approximating violence - mebbe coz theirs is not a particularly
individualistic culture yet, and the fact as they do have to live in each
others' pockets (yeah, yeah - gross orientalist generalisations - but waddya
want outa three weeks?).
Turks reckon they're slow to anger, but ferocious when angered - and I ain't
experienced enough a Turk-watcher to pick the decisive moment. As I didn't
see any sign of anger at all beyond the demo contexts, I gotta say I loved
every full minute of being among 'em - the culture struck me as the very human
equivalent of bathing in a warm bubble bath with the jets on full. And no
small-talk, neither - straight into the good stuff. Any political animal with
a formidable tobacco tolerance, a taste for argument, and a streak of
convivial hedonism in 'em would be at home, I reckon. I bloody was ...
Economic Prospects
New economy minister and political clean-skin (if you don't count his
vice-presidency of the World Bank ... ) Kemal Dervis is, for the moment (he
only was appointed on March 2nd), just about the only personality with any
mainstream credibility across the Turkish spectrum (President Ahmet Sezer has
managed to stay above it all, too - either of these blokes could start a new
party and walk it in at the polls right now).
There's little hope of getting growth into the black. Minus two per cent
seems the expectation. The current account is unlikely to get any worse as
the currency has been pounded into submission (halving it in two months) and
few can afford imports and tourists will flock wherever you can get 1.2
million TL to the greenback. That said, exports are grim indeed - they rose
by 1.4 per cent in March, and the primary sector went backwards, in a month in
which the currency plunged by forty per cent.
The March 2 Kazakhstan declaration of interest in shipping oil via the
Baku-Ceyhan pipeline is taken as guaranteeing US patronage and future windfalls.
There really doesn't seem enough on hand to 'restructure' Turkey without huge
public discontent - excess capacity in manufacturing is climbing rapidly (up
to 29 per cent from 23 per cent last year); agriculture and mining have hit
the wall for the foreseeable future; no-one knows the extent of the bad debt
situation yet; I don't think Turk Telekom would fetch much of a price even if
politics allowed its privatisation, and I don't know if the state bank could
fetch any price at all; the World Bank, the IMF and Europe are mouthing
sentiments when they should be injecting bucks; and the legitimation crisis is
such that only a personality-led revival (Dervis or perhaps Sezer) seems
capable of preventing a belligerent fragmentation. The left is pretty well
voiceless (the hunger strikers don't seem to elicit much public sympathy for
their horrible plight at all - perhaps the left is typically associated with
the Kurdish PKK, I dunno - I do know that no-one says the words 'PKK' or
'Kurd' while someone else might be listening).
Political Prospects
Well, the twin forces of small business and religion seem to be driving the
dissent - and becoming one in the process. If Dervis's good early impression
doesn't survive the months to come (he calls himself a social democrat by
nature, but he's forced into a policy position that can only alienate small
holders, peasants and proletarians), and if Sezer keeps out of it, well, that
dissent could assume the sort of proportions to worry the military. The
military, like the Islamic movements, are no monolith - but they're founded on
a very secular tradition, and they've the form on the board to warrant
watching. It certainly ain't gonna go on like it has been doing - indeed the
whisper is he may fall on the sword on the 29th, even though he says
otherwise. If he does, Dervis had better have the numbers, or it'll be on for
young and old by the 30th.
Maybe it's just because I did fall in love with Turkey (falling in love always
induces pessimism in me), but I can't see a road heading anywhere good from
here. If Dervis wins, half the population will be getting dinner off the tip,
and if he doesn't, well, it's either the petit-boojie/Virtue connection or the
military again. Neither fills me with much hope.
Cheers,
Rob.
