On a quiet summer night in July, at ten o’clock in the evening Istanbul time, as the Turks were preparing to receive the Sabbath, the weekly holiday, suddenly successive gunshots rang out at the headquarters of the General Staff of the Army in the capital, Ankara, it was zero hour for an attempt A new military coup in the history of the Turkish Republic, a coup prepared by a group of officers in cooperation with men from the organization of Fethullah Gulen in the army, police and judiciary;
With the aim of overthrowing the Justice and Development government and excluding Erdogan and his comrades from power.
The coup group was able to control the army’s chief of staff, and at half past ten, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim announced in a televised intervention that what is happening is “a coup attempt by a group of the army, and that it will not be allowed to happen and those in charge of it will pay a heavy price”[1]. At the same time, the putschists had captured the mastermind of the army, Lieutenant-General Hulusi Akar, the Chief of Staff (the current Minister of Defense), and after an hour and a half had passed, they broadcast on the official television the number one statement of the success of the coup and their assumption of power in the country.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was spending his vacation in a hotel in Marmaris in the state of Mugla on the Mediterranean coast, but he managed to get out of the hotel minutes before the putschists besieged him, before the president went out with the famous CNN Turk reporter Hande Furat. Through the “Time Face” application, it calls on the masses of the Turkish people to descend in groups and individually to the public squares in all provinces to resist this “coup coup that does not represent the whole of the Turkish army” and to receive it soon at Ataturk International Airport in Istanbul[2].
Not a few minutes passed from Erdogan's call until the masses went down to confront what Erdogan described as the military minority that wanted to take Turkey back, and sections of the army, police, special forces and gendarmerie were still declaring their support and loyalty to the elected president and the government.
On that day, the Turks set an example in resisting the return to the time of coups, starting with the old men and women who rushed to the streets carrying red Turkish flags in the face of the hum of bullets fired from helicopters near the Sultan Selim Bridge in Istanbul, and those young men standing with their bare chests in front of tanks in the streets of Istanbul Its bridges, and some parliamentarians who barricaded themselves in their parliament under F-16 fire, up to the non-commissioned officer, “Omar Halis Demir”, who alone resisted an entire squad and was able to kill its commander, Brigadier General “Samih Tarazi” when she wanted to control the headquarters of the Special Forces in the capital, Ankara, however. They fired him with shots that wanted him to be a martyr, so he became a hero in all of Turkey.
Countless scenes in which the popular resistance coalesced with the steadfastness of the uncapable armed sectors of the army, police, gendarmerie and intelligence in the face of the attempted coup of July 15, 2016, and by three o’clock in the morning Erdogan’s plane landed among tens of thousands of Turks who received him at Ataturk Airport, beginning a series of collapse The failed coup and the completion and arrest of the putschists in succession, even if fifteen hours had passed, the Justice and Development Government was able to thwart the coup, arrest hundreds of its participants, and liberate the Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Hulusi Akar, for Erdogan to announce, "The coup organizers will pay a heavy price for this attempt, which It betrayed the state and worked to fragment its unity, weaken it and divide its sons”[3].
Indeed, the strong security grip of the Turkish state has begun to pursue those belonging to the Fethullah Gulen organization and its civilian and military affiliates whom the president accused of infiltrating the army and police, as thousands of them were arrested according to their organizational levels and the danger they represented in the depth of the Turkish state and its institutions, while Turkey officially asked the United States to extradite the leader of the organization. Fathullah Colin, who lives in the US state of Pennsylvania, is a demand that Washington refuses to this day.
The Turks were able to resist the July 15 coup across various states, and took to the streets and squares and agreed with their various intellectual and age groups to confront the coup and actually succeeded in that, but there is a question that remains open to this day, despite the passage of five years since the anniversary of the failed coup attempt: Why did the resistance succeed? The coup and why did the putschists fail in this particular attempt? Was the first experience of the coup and the execution of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes in 1960 before the Turks on the night of July 15, 2016? And what previous measures has Erdogan taken to confront any possible coup?
On October 13 of last year 2020, Twitter pioneers were surprised by a short tweet of a member of the Supreme Constitutional Court in Turkey, Engin Yildirim, in which he says: “The lights are on,” accompanied by a picture of the Supreme Constitutional Court and its lights are lit in the evening, which caused a sweeping attack on him. From all spectrums of the Turkish people and its institutions, on top of which is the account of the Ministry of Interior, who responded with a picture of the ministry at night in a decisive answer: “As for our lights, they never go out”[4]. Engin Yildirim retreated under the pressure of that sweeping attack, saying: "I only meant the lights of justice that never go out, and I didn't mean anything else!"
The phrase “the lights went out” had very bad historical and political connotations in the Turkish collective mind and still do; As it is intended to ignite the lights of the General Staff at night in preparation for the coup against the elected government and the assumption of power in the country, as happened in the process known as the February 28, 1997 operation, in which the Turkish army intervened softly in the political process by issuing a memorandum that overthrew the coalition government headed by Necmettin Erbakan, The spiritual professor of Erdogan and his comrades at the time.
The operation of February 28, 1997 led to the army’s return to the fore again, under the pretext of protecting the “Ataturk secular principles,” which had always been the army’s preferred loophole to undermine civilian political life and combat any manifestations of religiosity or Islamization in Turkish society, including the ban on headscarves and veiled women. From entering public and educational institutions, and even expelling them from Parliament, as happened with MP Marwa Qaoukji, who not only expelled and insulted her, but also withdrew her Turkish citizenship from her to immigrate to the United States, before she returned to her country and was finally appointed as Turkey’s ambassador to Malaysia.
With the declaration of the Republic on October 29, 1923, modern Turkey completely broke off from its Islamic, Ottoman and Eastern identity. The founder of the Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, until his death in 1938, continued to undermine the Islamic presence in various areas of life;
He abolished the caliphate and the Sharia courts, amended the constitution to abolish religion from its texts, prohibited the activity of all religious groups and methods, and made changes that obliterated some aspects of Islamic history such as the abolition of the fez, the veil, the Arabic alphabet, the Hijri calendar, and the Friday holiday [5].
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
In contrast, manifestations of Westernization and secularization were approved, such as the hat, the Latin letter, the Gregorian calendar, and the Saturday and Sunday holiday, and Ataturk went further when he imposed the principle of secularism in the constitution and established state institutions that supervise religious affairs, and “control” the movement of imams and preachers who turned into employees at the time. The state abolished religious lessons from schools under the Unification of Teaching Law. However, despite Ataturk’s success in destroying the system of culture and values prevailing in Turkey at the time, he was not able to establish the principles of secularization and westernization among all social classes, especially those living in conservative Anatolia, and his success in consolidating these principles was limited to a “kemalist” elite formed of officers, employees and employers. Free professions, while the overwhelming majority of Turks remained linked to Islam in presence and faith[6].
Since the declaration of the Republic in 1923, until the end of the Second World War in 1945, Turkey has been completely loyal to all manifestations and Ataturk laws. Otherwise, the country was ruled through a non-pluralistic political system controlled by a single party, the Republican People's Party, which became part of the state structure that It was founded by Ataturk, but the changing global situation at the time, and Turkey's approach to the Western camp led by the United States and NATO, which was in the process of forming against communism, made the then President of Turkey Ismet Inonu declare that "he is ready to make adjustments in the political system in line with the changing conditions in the world." [8].
In the end, it was allowed to create an opposition party to absorb the state of public discontent resulting from the crises experienced by Turkey at the time, and at that time, the People's Party split from four figures who resented the policy of their old party;
They are Adnan Menderes, Jalal Bayar, Muhammed Fuat Koprili and Koraltan's companion, to announce the founding of the Democratic Party, which affirmed its commitment to the Kemalist Ataturk principles, along with the values of liberalism and democracy[9].
Adnan Menderes
The Quartet’s declaration of their commitment to the Ataturk line was a smart political tactic to ensure that the state would not be hostile to them, and so that their fledgling party would not be dissolved. and the Umma Party, although some of the heads of these parties were among the most active members of the Republican People’s Party, founded by Ataturk.
Under the pressure of this nascent partisan pluralism, the door was carefully opened to the press and Islamic associations that had previously been banned. The goal of these associations was to demand the Republican People’s Party to abandon the policy of secularism and its interference in people’s religious affairs, and to abolish or relax laws that impose forced secularization.
During these four years, the People's Party was forced to accept some of these demands, and for this reason, as soon as the elections were held on May 14, 1950, the Democratic Party headed by Adnan Menderes was able to snatch a landslide victory with an absolute majority by obtaining 369 seats in Parliament compared to 68 seats for the People's Party Republican.
The defeat of the Ataturk People’s Party represented a severe blow to the party’s economic and political ideas and vision. It sent a message of popular protest that reached the Turkish state and the old pillars of the party. They retreated back until a while, and the ten years (1950-1960) began during which Menderes and his party revived the political, social and economic life in Turkey. Turkey.
Those years witnessed an attempt to reconcile with the most important and numerous social classes in Turkey, those conservative classes that had long opposed the CHP's trends with popular uprisings or, at the very least, not obeying laws and decisions silently. Menderes was keen to reintegrate the Islamic religious culture in the fifties through many measures, such as allowing the call to prayer in Arabic, canceling the ban on religious programs on radio and reciting the Qur’an in it, legalizing religion lessons in the middle school, and granting legal status to institutes of imams and preachers known as “imam preacher” [11].
At the same time, however, he was keen to reject any form of Islamic party organization, so he issued a circular to protect the statues of Ataturk, and pursued members of the Tijaniya order and imprisoned its leader, the ruler of the most famous Islamic thinker, Said Nursi, and the well-known thinker Najib Fadel, and Islamic publications were closed during his reign, and critics of Kemalism and secularism were prosecuted. And other measures that reflected the difficult balance that Menderes manages between the entrenched secularism within the state, and his efforts to give an outlet for the gradual return of Islamic manifestations.
However, this balance did not appeal to the Republican People’s Party nor to the army leaders who saw an Islamic expansion in political and social life, especially when the Democratic Party’s counter-exclusion of all its competitors from political life began, as the party began to restrict freedoms in the late fifties, which It represented a pretext that opened the door wide for the first military coup in the history of modern Turkey on May 27, 1960, when the lights of the General Staff were lit that evening and Menderes and some of his comrades were arrested, before the military court issued a death sentence for them.
Execution of Adnan Menderes
The coup against Menderes was the first page in the crowded Turkish coup book, which was followed by a soft military intervention with a memorandum in 1971, followed by the most violent coup in the country in 1980, then the coup against Erbakan in 1997, and the latter was directed exclusively against the success of Islamic currents in conjunction with an Islamic awakening in the whole Middle East. However, what is remarkable about the failure of the July 2016 coup is that the Justice and Development Party has well absorbed the lessons of civil-military relations, thus highlighting the media’s dangers of military coups, and proceeding to take further steps when prosecuting those involved in these coups. In 2012, after the abolition of Article 15 of the Constitution, which stipulates that members of the National Security Council cannot be tried, the famous trial of Kanaan Oren, the leader of the 1980 coup, and his assistant commander of the Air Force, Tahsin Shahin Kaya, began., which ended with sentencing them to life imprisonment while they were on the cusp of their nineties, before the call for their death later expired [12].
In 2013, the trial of the organization called "Ergenekon", a secret organization that brought together military and civilians of various military and social ranks and positions, with the main goal of "preserving Turkey's secularism", began. Investigations revealed that officers, journalists, writers, businessmen and members of political parties were involved in an attempt A serious coup against the government of justice and development and its prime minister at the time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and sentences ranged from 6 to 49 years in prison[13].
These constitutional, legal and media tools that the Justice and Development Party used before the failed July 15 coup cut off many wings of the Justice and Development Party’s opponents, especially the army generals who have always positioned themselves as guardians and guardians of Turkish democracy in the name of secularism, but the most important thing is that Erdogan was able to Neutralizing important military sectors in order to adhere to non-interference in politics and help in consolidating the system of democracy, in addition to this, of course, the General Intelligence Service led by “Hakan Fidan”, the man whom Erdogan considers his mastermind, and his indispensable wishes, who played a role in the rapid action Killed the July 15, 2016 coup.
Those were the most prominent reasons that led to the failure of that coup, reasons that combined the collective historical memory charged against the repeated interventions of the Turkish army in the political process and the accompanying flagrant violations of human rights and the deterioration of political life, and decisive military, judicial and intelligence transformations established by Justice and Development over the years. His rule, to prevent Turkey from returning to the times of coups again.
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Sources
Başbakan Yıldırım'dan 15 Temmuz gecesi "Ölümüne direneceğiz"
Darbe Gecesi Cumhurbaşkanı Recep Tayyip Erdoğan CNN CNNürk
Recep Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Atatürk havalimanı basın açıklaması
"Işıklar yanıyor" ne demek?
Muhammad Noureddine: Hat and Turban, p. 20.
the previous.
Tariq Abdel Jalil: The Military and the Constitution in Turkey, pp. 57, 58.
Firoz Ahmed: The Making of Modern Turkey, p. 231.
MENDERES, Adnan, Turk siyaset ve devlet adamı
Manal Saleh: Necmettin Erbakan and His Role in Turkish Politics, p. 31.
Muhammad Nour al-Din: Previous p.
Kanlı 12 Eylül darbesinin üzerinden 40 yıl geçti
Ergenekon Davası