Istanbul, City of the Fearless. Christopher Houston
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of horrifying human rights abuses post coup but also to acknowledge their own flawed agency as political actors.
Perhaps differences in accounts of those years disclose not only insider or outsider perspectives but also contrary existential perceptions? Ahmad and White’s brief comments express a discomforting experience of passivity in the face of the actions and activities of others. By contrast, activists recollect their own sense of social efficacy extended against the friction of other actors. Activism by definition is a mode of embodied agency, and activists felt and hoped that they were remaking the world. Three years of martial law in Istanbul re-tuned the mood of residents in the city, enacting a perception of helplessness, and traumatizing activists and residents alike in the name of Atatürk.
Justifying the Coup d’État
There is more involved in this public and intellectual disengagement from the critical years before and after the coup, alongside any guilt, anger, or fear felt by militants or Istanbul’s inhabitants about what they did or about what was done to them. The minimal comprehension of that period and the lack of public memory about it are demonstrated in the near complete absence of any officially sanctioned visual monuments to its most striking events. There is one moving, albeit unofficial, memorial to Metin Yüksel in the courtyard of Fatih mosque, leading member of the Muslim youth group Akıncılar, who in 1979 was murdered by MHP commandos after attending Friday prayers. His fallen body shape is etched into the paving stones of the mosque courtyard where he was slain. Prayers are still held there annually in his memory. The lack of sites of memory testifies to a suppression of militants’ voices and perceptions and to an ongoing project by Turkish state institutions to obscure or depreciate the full gamut of acivists’ political and social activities.
Most active in this project is the Turkish Armed Forces, which attributes responsibility for the military intervention to the collective anarchism, terrorism, and class separatism of the militants themselves. In his speech broadcast on State TV and Radio on the morning of the coup, General Kenan Evren drew attention to the “perverted ideologies” that made some people sing the “Internationale” in place of the Turkish national anthem. It is plausible to suggest that denigrating the activists of those years comprised a key policy through which the Turkish military legitimized its preeminent role in post-coup politics. This campaign also ensured the immunity from prosecution of the military personnel responsible for the gross human rights abuses carried out as a matter of regime policy after the coup. It was only thirty years after the intervention, with the junta leaders nearly all deceased, that the Turkish parliament abrogated the constitutional clause granting coup leaders amnesty from prosecution (see chapter 8). At the time of writing, tens of civil court cases have been launched against military personnel. The outcomes of these are uncertain.
In brief, a dominant discourse invokes the increasingly violent polity in the years before the coup as its very justification, binding for better or worse militants and coup-makers to each other. That narrative positions the activists of the late 1970s as the city’s fulcrum generation, negatively but causally linked to the restructuring of Istanbul and of Turkey itself. Activists themselves live with that status, rejecting the implication that they deserved their arrest and torture while reflecting upon the failure of their struggle to transform urban society.6 Indeed my interviews with ex-activists reveal how in retrospect they are intensely critical of the faults and shortcomings of their own groups and factions in the years before the coup (see chapters 2, 4, and 5), a critique, in short, of themselves, as well as an imagining of their own partial responsibility for the present flawed development and state of the city. This sober self-examination informs many ex-activists’ identities and practices in the present.
Reference above to a “dominant” discourse suggests that it is insufficient to say that the 1970s have not been written about or analyzed. More precisely, it is the complex and varied modes of activism, including consideration of the diverse practices, motivations, experiences, intentions, and ethics of militants in the urban environment that have been simplified or ignored. By contrast, there is a large literature listing and explaining the context of events leading up to the coup. The best-disseminated account has been the discourse of the junta, broadcast (for years) after the coup in censored media space. Book chapters in general histories of “modern Turkey,” often referencing the picture of the 1970s sketched out by the junta, comprise a second literature, while work oriented to dependency and world-systems theory is a third, analyzing the struggle over the political economy as a significant reason for social conflict.
The junta’s narrative justifying the intervention was repetitive and clear, consistently made in speeches or interviews given by members of the National Security Council in the months after the coup and published in the strictly controlled press. It included the following claims: the armed forces are a disinterested institution sitting above the grubby affairs of politicians, political parties, and partisan civil society, called upon to act for the benefit of the neutral citizens who are disadvantaged by the politicization of state services; indeed the intervention was an obligation forced upon the military as a result of the conditions of its existence, given the duty bestowed upon it by Atatürk to protect and guard the Turkish Republic; it had warned the government and the opposition numerous times to get their house in order, but they had refused to act to solve the biggest “regime crisis” in the history of the Republic; the country was in peril on a number of fronts, particularly from the politicians’ inability or refusal to protect the constitutional and democratic institutions of the state and regime; further, a grave threat was posed by the actions of inside and outside powers who armed, brainwashed, and released militants into the environment, leading to anarchy, terror, and separatism, and to the needless deaths of twenty or more young people each day.
Single chapters in general political histories of modern Turkey comprise a second literature describing the 1970s (see for example Zürcher 1995; Ahmad 1993, 2003; Pope and Pope 1997; Davison 1998; Howard 2001; Kalaycıoğlu 2005; Akşin 2007; Waldman and Calışkan 2017; Ter-Matevosyan 2019). Although they usefully chronologize an incredible array of events—elections, coalitions, prime ministers, galloping inflation, price-hikes for food and oil, balance-of-payment deficits, Cyprus tensions, strikes, acts of violence and assassination, notorious massacres—in the main these chapters lack, paradoxically, both theoretical analysis and description of actors’ concrete experience and perspectives.
Further, the narrative of the junta influences much of their analysis. In more than a few accounts, society is described as threatened by anarchy; activists are reduced to “terrorists” and “extremists” fighting in the streets; and politicians are criticized as incompetent, naive, or frivolous (Gunter 1989, Kalaycıoğlu 2005: 124), and the military—far from being presented as turning a blind eye to or even sponsoring certain perpetrators of urban violence—is portrayed as forced to disinterestedly intervene in society to resolve a social and political crisis for which (it is implied) it had no responsibility in generating, in order to restore the tenets of the Atatürk Cumhuriyeti (Atatürk Republic). To give just one example: in his introduction to Ersin Kalaycıoğlu’s Turkish Dynamics (2005) Barry Rubin writes, “At times, extremists of left and right fought in the streets. As a result, the military—which saw itself as the guardian of Atatürk virtues—repeatedly had to intervene. Yet if the system’s problem was the sporadic coups, its strength was that each one returned the country to a democratic system” (2005: xii). Clearly, the military constitution of 1982 did not return Turkey to a democratic system, at least in any normative sense of the word. Further, in some writings, activist violence is condemned even as the violent imposition of non-violence for “civil” society is condoned (see Gunter 1989 for an egregious justification of torture, while citing the military regime’s own publications after the coup as his chief source of information about “terrorist” events). In some of these accounts the coup is presented as enacting a necessary depoliticization of Turkish society rather than as simultaneously instituting a new political-economic model in its place. For example, in his chapter “The Troubled Years 1967–1987” in Turkey: A Short History (1998: 199), Roderic Davison repeats approvingly the military’s argument that the 1982 constitution restricted the scope of democratic rights to prevent their abuse by those who sought to undermine democratic