We knew the repression after Turkey’s attempted coup would be bad. But we didn’t know it would be quite this bad.
The most recent news out of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey is simply extraordinary. Erdogan has banned all academics, Turkish and foreign alike, from leaving the country, and has ordered all academics currently abroad to return to the country. The justification for this measure is, according to one Turkish official, that “universities have always been crucial for military juntas in Turkey, and certain individuals are believed to be in contact with cells within the military.” By this rationale, it is apparently perfectly reasonable that tens of thousands of academics must kept within Turkish borders.
Much of Erdogan’s post-coup crackdown has focused on the educational system, from primary schools to the nation’s institutions of higher education. Yesterday, 21,000 private school teachers had their licenses revoked by the government; at the same time, Erdogan dismissed 21,738 employees of the education ministry and fired nearly 1,600 university deans. The numbers of the dismissed are astonishing in other fields, too: 9,000 police, 2,745 judges, 8,777 at the interior ministry, 1,500 in the finance ministry, 257 executive staff, and nearly a thousand from other ministries. It all totals to around 60,000, possibly more, plus 10,000 arrested. 3,000,000 civil servants have also had their leave suspended, in effect also preventing them from leaving the country.
Erdogan’s intent is nakedly obvious. Taking advantage of the chaos and public sympathy that follows a coup, he seeks to purge the entire government along ideological lines. If you could be viewed as even the slightest of threats to the stranglehold Erdogan desires over the instruments of government, you’re out — and to where, nobody quite knows. (It is rumored that Erdogan has ordered the torturing of captives from the coup, in addition to publically advocating for the reintroduction of the death penalty to be used as an ex post facto punishment for coup participants.)
We are witnessing the construction of a totalitarian state, a single-party regime directed from the office of one man. As in the reigns of totalitarian autocrats throughout history, from Stalin to Mao to Saddam, an absolute allegiance to the leader will be required of all people. Erdogan’s tool for achieving this end is his firing pen. Eventually, once the purges have concluded, the tens of thousands of people he’s dismissed will need to be replaced; when that time comes, personal loyalty to Erdogan will be the first — if not the only — job requirement. The state will thus be constructed along the lines of personal loyalty to Erdogan: not to democracy, not to republicanism, but to Erdogan. And through such a wide-ranging transformation of the institutions of state, the very foundations of social order will be molded in Erdogan’s image as well. (That the Education Ministry, which has the responsibility of guiding young minds, has endured the biggest purges is a demonstration of Erdogan’s intent to remake society.) The road from this to Stalinist show trials is a short one indeed.
Those who opposed the coup will say that the repression could have — in fact, they likely would have — been worse under a putschist regime. They may well be right. But what Erdogan is doing amounts to a coup in its own right. It is the takeover of all government, from the military to the judiciary to the furthest reaches of the civil service, by a single faction. It is the initiation of a one-party state and the elimination of an independent bureaucracy. It is the culmination of Erdogan’s decade-long quest to bring about the end of Ataturk’s model of government. The putschists could have been worse, but it’s hard to imagine prospects grimmer than these.