Erdogan Rising. Hannah Lucinda Smith
opponents of military tutelage – before going on to crush those very same people. The irony was not lost on Amnesty International, who – as Erdoğan intensified his post-coup jailing of opposition journalists in 2016 – wrote an open letter reminding him that they had once stepped in on his behalf when, in 1999, he was imprisoned for reading a religious poem at a rally.
Since Atatürk died in 1938, Turkey has been like a round-bottomed toy that rocks precariously to one side or the other but always returns upright. The opposing pull of the country’s two major forces have always brought it back to a central position – though Erdoğan’s charisma, political skill and good timing might now have upset the balance.
Even amid a purge that has stripped tens of thousands of their freedom and livelihoods, those who are not charmed by Erdoğan can still fall prey to his powers of persuasion. Once, as I was chatting to a man who was telling me how his company had recalled 200,000 T-shirts because they feared the design might offend the president, we came on to the subject of Europe – Erdoğan’s pet hate at the time.
‘But Europe lies!’ said the man, certainly no Erdoğan fan. ‘We have three million Syrian refugees and Europe gives us nothing!’
This was one of Erdoğan’s claims – that almost none of the money promised to Turkey by the European Union under a deal to stop asylum seekers surging across the Aegean had materialised. But it was rubbish. Over a period of eighteen months the EU had signed off on projects worth almost three billion euros, exactly what it had promised, with another three billion ready to hand over. European money was pouring into the Turkish health and education systems, refugee camps, asylum detention centres – and that was just one branch of funding. Billions were also being handed over in accession grants, the money given to countries that might one day be EU members to help them bring their standards up to European level. But Erdoğan had managed to convince his people that Turkey was being screwed by Brussels. Erdoğan’s lies are not a web, they are a paste that he slathers on so thick that nothing of the truth underneath is left showing. His motivations for doing so are clear.
‘Look,’ he is telling his fellow Turks. ‘You may not like me, but I am saving our honour against those who would seek to destroy it.’
It is a well-tested method. Part of Atatürk’s appeal, after all, lies in the fact that he rescued Turkey from nefarious foreign powers almost a century ago. Maybe these two cults share more similarities than either would care to admit.
‘He is Dictator in order that it may be impossible ever again that there should be in Turkey a Dictator,’ wrote H.C. Armstrong, a British officer and contemporary biographer of Atatürk in 1932, as the founder’s reforms moved ahead in top gear. Today it is Erdoğan’s turn to change his country, and to overpower anyone who stands in his way, so that it may never go back to the old order. And that is just the way his tribe likes it.
April 2011 Damascus, Syria
I wandered into my first personality cult off the back of a bad break-up and harbouring a long-term curiousity to see the Middle East. The region fascinated me – especially the Lebanese capital, Beirut, with its evocative connotations of glamour and war. At the time I was a television producer in London, working mostly in the current affairs departments of Channel 4 and the BBC on big investigations, including stories about rampant heroin use in prisons and fire safety flaws in refurbished tower blocks, a full seven years before Grenfell. But I yearned to be a foreign correspondent, writing dispatches from turbulent places for a daily newspaper. Soon I discovered that British journalism is a series of closed shops; the editors hiring for any foreign jobs I applied for weren’t interested in my experience. So, in lieu, I travelled to off-beat places for holidays, and sold an occasional article where I could.
But in between booking my plane tickets and setting off for Amman, the biggest popular protests in decades were flowing back and forth across the Middle East. In Tunisia and Egypt, the old dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak had already been bundled from their palaces by popular grassroots movements. In Libya, the armed rebellion against Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi was soon to win the backing of NATO airstrikes.
In Syria, small demonstrations in the southern provincial city of Deraa, close to the Jordanian border, had been swelling for a fortnight by the time I entered the country. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, initially seemed immune to the unrest spreading elsewhere in his region, partly because he kept his own country so closed. To get a fourteen-day Syrian tourist visa I had enlisted a friend at a small company to fake a letter of employment for me, claiming that I was his secretary. Had I written on my visa application that I was a journalist, there was no way I would have been allowed in by the time I arrived at the border – an American traveller I met in my hostel in Amman had just been turned back at the frontier. By now, a fragmented opposition movement was rising against Assad, and there was a growing security crackdown in response. It was happening mostly in places like Deraa, and the poor outer suburbs of the cities where scores of rural migrants had arrived over recent years, forced from their farms by drought. But young educated activists in Syria’s urban centres – Damascus, Aleppo and Homs – were picking up on the chance to finally challenge the dictator they hated. Via Facebook, they organised ‘Days of Rage’ after each week’s Friday prayers.
All I could see of this from my shared taxi – a Chevrolet so old it was retro that boomeranged along the 125-mile road between Amman and Damascus – was Syrian army tanks blocking the exit to Deraa. The driver looked ahead and said nothing, while the two old couples travelling with me fell into silent contemplation. The TV in my room at the once-glamorous Orient Hotel, a faded grandma located in what had become a red light district in central Damascus, broadcast the official version of events on Syrian state television. From the huge and sagging bed I watched protests in front of the presidential palace a kilometre away, as the area filled with supporters shouting how much they loved Bashar. Sensing my chance to hit on a story, I set about trying to contact opposition activists.
In the meantime, I wandered the old heart of Damascus, a maze of narrow alleyways between thick stone walls, laced with sweet whiffs of jasmine and shisha smoke. Here I found trinket shops dedicated to souvenirs decorated with Bashar al-Assad’s image – lighters, coffee mugs, car bumper stickers. Bunting bearing his face, identical on each little fluttering flag, criss-crossed the rafters of the souk. One morning I walked through the main drag with a new friend, a sweet Syrian girl in a tight white headscarf who had approached me minutes earlier as I stared awestruck at the nearby Umayyad Mosque. She grasped my arm and pointed to him.
‘Beheb Bashar – I love Bashar,’ she said, with the earnest gaze of a recent cult convert. ‘Do you love Bashar, too?’
What could I say? The president is weak-chinned, long-necked and speaks with a lisp. And, already, he was a murderer. As she and I walked through that souk on a fresh April day, Assad’s thugs were opening fire on demonstrators in Deraa, eighty miles down the road, picking them off from the rooftops with the indifference of schoolboys playing video games. I hummed a non-committal murmur, which seemed enough to satisfy her.
After a series of protracted emails, phone calls that came from a different number each time, missed meetings and finally some good luck, I eventually found an opposition activist called Roua. She was one of the young Damascenes – there were so few of them at the time it’s incredible they managed to find each other – who was trying to organise the Day of Rage that Friday. So far, the activists hadn’t scored much success – mere handfuls of people were showing up to their protests, and most were immediately arrested. Their ranks, such as they were, had been fully infiltrated by Syrian intelligence.
When