Abstract
Just a few years ago, Turkey was hailed as a role model for the Middle East, with a bright future. But then everything changed.
Dancers in Zero nightclub in October 2003 in Istanbul, Turkey, an image featured on the front cover of Newsweek in 2005 (see p54)
CREDIT: Yoray Liberman/Getty
The European Union began accession talks with Turkey in December 2004, but the magazine said the country was doing fine without the EU. Turkey was a success story: authentic, entrepreneurial, self-confident.
Coverage of Turkey until 2013 was often this way: an Edenic place waiting to be discovered by foreigners. “Why Turkey is Thriving,” said an article in the Project Syndicate; Turkey was a “competitive democracy”, according to The New York Times; and The Economist called it a “vibrant democracy with the rule of law”. The Financial Times described Turkey as “a dynamic economy led by Islam’s equivalent to Christian Democrats”.
Such pieces made little mention of Hrant Dink, who was among many intellectuals accused of insulting Turkishness under a new article in the penal code, or the imprisonment of journalist Hakan Albayrak for defaming the memory of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, or the plight of Mehmet Ali Birand, who faced a criminal investigation for interviewing lawyers of a jailed Kurdish rebel leader.
Alexander Christie-Miller covered Turkey for The Times from 2010 to 2016 and explored the country in The Christian Science Monitor. The experience inevitably altered his view of the country.
“Before I arrived in Turkey, my view was very much shaped by the media and literature I had read in preparation for going there, and also by conversations I had with other journalists who had covered the country,” he told Index.
“The impression I formed was that Turkey was a democratising nation coming to terms with its difficult past, and which had immense potential for the future. I had read several recent political histories of the country, such as Hugh and Nicole Pope’s Turkey Unveiled, which tended to end on an upbeat note when it came to the dawn of the AKP [Justice and Development Party] era. I viewed with suspicion those foreigners and Turks who were sceptical of the AKP, and indeed was explicitly warned against [those sceptical of the AKP] by some journalists I spoke to prior to arriving in Turkey.”
Then, in 2010, everything changed. A state prosecutor accused a large group of high-ranking military officers of plotting to overthrow the Turkish government, and a
By the end of 2013, positive stories on Turkey had become all but history darker picture began to emerge. A Turkish newspaper leaked details of a coup plot and published electronic documents listing hundreds of journalists, ordinary Turks and NGO members with claimed links to a shadowy organisation named Ergenekon.
Christie-Miller was among the first to raise the alarm about the authenticity of evidence.
“In my first couple of years, I reported a lot on the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases, which was the main domestic political story at the time. It was clear, especially in the case of Balyoz – which was more straightforward and easier for an outsider to understand than Ergenekon – that there was something seriously amiss about these trials,” he said.
The narrative prevalent at the time was that these cases were a kind of “clean hands” reckoning with a dirty past that would aid Turkey’s democratisation, but it seemed to Christie-Miller “that the evidence of widespread and highly organised police and judicial corruption seriously complicated this narrative”. What surprised him about that whole experience “was the way in which the foreign media as a whole was happy to settle on a single narrative and report that narrative rather than digging into the facts beneath it”.
2010 marked the start of the slide from paradise, but 2013 became the true annus horribilis for Turkey’s representations in the press. The intervening three years had seen solitary voices such as Christie-Miller’s interrogate the Turkish judiciary, but with the anti-government protests in the summer of 2013, graver problems with the police force now came to the fore.
Footage of cops burning tents of activists provided the spark that started countrywide protests which left 11 dead and around 8,000 injured. A country that only a few years previously was viewed as a role model in the wake of the Arab Spring was now considered a harbinger of the emergence of majoritarianism in countries including India and the USA. Some later wondered whether the Brexit campaign used tactics similar to those used by Turkish politicians. Both were signs that “liberal democracy, that has long dominated the world […] is now in the midst of an epic struggle for its own survival”, wrote Yascha Mounk in Slate in a 2016 article entitled The Week Democracy Died.
By the end of 2013, positive stories on Turkey had become all but history. During 2016, Isis and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) intensified their war on Turkey and, in the eyes of many, Newsweek’s “Cool Istanbul: Europe’s Hippest City Might Not Need Europe After All” was replaced by “Scary Istanbul: Europe’s Most Dangerous City Might Need Europe After All”.
Today, Christie-Miller is finishing a book on Turkey. Like many other foreign journalists covering Turkey, he has migrated and spends most of the year in London. He remembers he was covering the Van earthquake in 2011, and the government’s response to it, when he decided “Turkish politics was a zero-sum game in which the various actors were unable to look beyond their own narrow interests, even following a tragedy that entailed substantial loss of life”.
Looking back at this, he added: “I am struck now by my own naivety, more than anything else.”
The change in Turkey’s representations was swift and awkward and it recently became the subject of academic research. İlker Birbil, a professor of industrial engineering at Sabancı University, analysed 1,472 articles and 44 editorials in The New York Times about Turkey’s rulers between 1 January 2004 and 10 October 2014. Birbil found that the most positive editorial was posted during the 2011 elections that resulted in the governing party’s victory; the lowest point, meanwhile, was April 2014, when the Turkish government closed down access to Twitter.
It is difficult to guess whether Turkey can once again be the Edenic, hip, cool place it was in 2005, but for those who live in Turkey one thing is clear: here the past has indeed become a foreign country.
Magazine covers from Newsweek from 2005 and The Economist in 2017
CREDIT: Yoray Liberman photography/Newsweek; Economist
