Turkey Shoot

National Review, July 28, 1997 by Deroy Murdock

ISTANBUL

Call it a velvet coup. To the West's relief, Turkey's military has ousted this country's first Islamist leader. In just 51 weeks, Necmettin Erbakan flew round-trip from opposition politician to prime minister and back again. Turkey's armed forces and its equally secular political establishment orchestrated his political demise without gunfire. Erbakan's stunning rise and fall shows that, despite Western worries, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to Turkey's secular state has been greatly exaggerated.

The West, of course, is vitally interested in this key ally astride Europe and the Middle East. Within NATO, Turkey's army is second in size only to America's. It's also a rarity: a Muslim democracy. Turkey's large, emerging market grew 7.4 per cent last year and attracted $16.8 billion in foreign investment in 1995, including $885 million from U.S. businesses plus $3.7 billion in American exports.

Seven months after winning a December 1995 multi-party election with just 21 per cent of the vote, Erbakan's Welfare Party agreed to lead a coalition with a secular conservative party led by Turkey's first woman Prime Minister, Tansu Ciller, whose surprising embrace of the fundamentalists is explained by many Turks as a way of evading an inquiry into charges that she and her husband were massively corrupt. But Erbakan quickly frightened the U.S. and its allies by renewing ties with Iran's fundamentalist regime. Official visits with Iran furrowed Western brows, as did a trade deal and a new $21 billion natural-gas pipeline linking the two states. He further ruffled American feathers last October when he visited Libya and described Muammar Khadafi and his people as victims, not architects, of terrorism. His proposal to padlock casinos was no royal flush back home either.

When the Welfare mayor of Sincan staged an anti-Israel rally last February, the military rolled tanks menacingly through the Ankara suburb's streets. Fearing a coup such as those of 1960, 1971, and 1980, Erbakan quickly agreed to 18 "measures" offered by the military to reign in fundamentalist Islamic schools and organizations.

After surviving a May 20 no-confidence vote, Erbakan's government was hit with another broadside. Turkey's chief prosecutor, Vural Savas, filed an 18-page list of charges against Welfare. The party "is against secularism and ... is increasingly creating an atmosphere of civil war," Savas announced. Erbakan promptly offered to take his case to the people through early elections. But he ultimately yielded to the military's backstage efforts to erode his support within parliament, industry, and labor, and resigned June 18.

While some fretted over Erbakan's high-pressure, less-than-democratic departure, he hardly seems missed. The Istanbul Stock Exchange's National-100 index, for instance, soared 16.7 per cent in the first two weeks after his exit. It rose 2.3 per cent higher the day center-rightist Mesut Yilmaz became prime minister. The Motherland Party chief promises to defend secularism and control religious schools. Reinforcing the separation of mosque and state, Yilmaz's government has suspended plans to renovate a Muslim holy place. As he recently told reporters: "Our government will restore the republic, which is built on democratic and libertarian foundations."

Beyond Turkey's tumultuous political factions, a growing community of freemarket intellectuals also strives to keep Turkey open and forward-thinking. Since 1994, the Ankara-based Association for Liberal Thinking (ALT) has advanced privatization, deregulation, school choice, and other voluntaristic solutions to public-policy problems. (Outside America, "liberal" means the opposite of its U.S. definition.) ALT publishes newsletters, a quarterly journal, market-oriented books by Turkish authors, and translated Western works. It also broadcasts two public-affairs programs: Face to Face and Politics and Dialogue. Last summer, five hundred people attended an ALT conference in Ankara. Last fall, just steps, from the rocket-like minarets of the Blue Mosque, an overflow crowd gathered at Istanbul's Armada Hotel for a seminar organized by ALT, the U.S. Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and Germany's Friedrich Naumann Foundation.

"Two years ago, there were no intellectual groups like ours," says ALT president Atilla Yayla. "Now we're well-known and are receiving favorable responses even from small cities in Turkey. People are writing to get to know us. Some are sending contributions. Young academics send articles to our journal."

Free-market ideas "are springing and taking root," says an even more upbeat Besim Tibuk, leader of Turkey's Liberal Democratic Party. "Liberals should make our views even louder. The beast of socialism has been dismembered." Free-marketeers do face resistance, says Eser Karakas, an Istanbul University economist. "Despite all that is going on in Turkey, there is a resistant political class that is Keynesian in nature. They do not want to give up their benefits." ALT's Osman Okyar sees Turkey trying to wriggle out from under a "command economy so pervasive and intricate as to invade every level of the economy." He praised Turgut Ozal, the free-market prime minister who the Turkish Left used to denounce with their chant: "Reaganism/Thatcherism/Ozalism."