OPINION - The FaceTime response to the Twitter coup
Erdogan’s intervention became instrumental in derailing the coup, indicating that effective communication is as crucial to safeguarding Turkish democracy as the misinformation and terror of anti-democratic elements is the gravest threat to it
By Abdelwahab El-Affendi
* Writer is also the coordinator of the Centre's Democracy and Islam Programme; Head of the Politics and International Relation Program at the Doha Institute
LONDON
I happened to be in Istanbul on the eve of March 2014, when rumors swept Turkey about the reason why the government put restrictions on the Twitter website.
One of my Turkish colleagues (most of them detested Erdogan and the government) volunteered her version of the reason: a compromising “sex” video of a senior government figure had been released.
It was a mark of the despair of the opposition that it had begun to pin its hopes for destabilizing the Justice and Development (AK) Party government on such prurience.
As it turned out, the “Twitter event” was more serious and more damning for the shadowy group behind it.
In its folly, the group decided to air a recording of a confidential government meeting discussing Turkey’s Syrian policy.
By that act, it seemed to have lost sight of the boundary between opposing a government and undermining the state and its institutions. No wonder the AK Party won the elections, and did not suffer as the “Twitter Conspiracy” had intended.
However, this episode was only one link in a long series of actions that planned to use the media and state secrets as tools to delegitimize the incumbent democratically elected government.
But the tactics were as clumsy as they were heavy-handed.
For these were not traditional whistle-blowers who peddled state secrets in order to embarrass the government. Rather, it was a shadowy group conducting its own foreign and security policies. Thus it was not content with intercepting information about intelligence agencies engaged in covert operations (itself a treasonous act), but it decided to intercept and “arrest” the undercover agents!
No wonder people began to call these actors the “parallel state”. It was like a zealous Washington D.C. detective deciding to arrest Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 on the basis of unlawfully obtained CIA and Pentagon files revealing his intentions to wage an “illegal war” against Iraq.
The first question raised by these episodes was how and why has such an accident-prone group of conspirators persisted in its efforts that culminated in the equally clumsy and misguided coup, and even managed to paint Turkish democracy in a negative light?
The answer is that it has received help from some AK Party policies and own goals. In particular, the unfortunate events that took place during the Gezi Park protests in May 2013 were a boon to AK Party detractors.
Ironically, also the legitimate action taken against this conspiratorial group was itself portrayed by many as “anti-democratic”.
The disastrous trajectory of the Syrian crisis, and the uneven burden Turkey shouldered as a result of its principled stance on it, had also negatively impacted the AK Party’s image of unrivaled economic and diplomatic success.
Increasingly, the narrative painting Erdogan as a power-hungry dictator became the dominant one in the world media. Some even added the narrative that Turkey was in fact a major ISIS (Daesh) supporter.
So much so that there was little international opprobrium when the PKK decided to resume its terror campaign against the Turkish state, on the pretext of retaliating for the October 2015 Ankara ISIS terror attack against Kurdish activists. (Apparently, it is not just Muslim “radicals” who find terrorism justifiable).
The coup plotters, like the terrorists, bought into their own propaganda and its worldwide echoes. More to the point, “condemnations” of the AK Party government continued even after the coup.
One commentator tweeted then that there had been more criticism of Erdogan in the three days after the failed coup than had been of (Egyptian dictator Abdal-Fatah) Sisi in the last three years.
Someone added that “and more than Assad in the past 5 years”. Just as in Egypt, the demonization of Morsi by the international media had paved the way to the coup in Egypt (Sisi is hardly described as “authoritarian”, nor is the fascist Netanyahu) as it did in Turkey.
However, it is no good lamenting this situation or going on and on about “double standards”. The battle for democratic legitimacy is going to be won in the media, just as coup plots originate in tweets and op-eds.
Erdogan’s FaceTime intervention became instrumental in derailing the coup, indicating that effective communication is as crucial to safeguarding Turkish democracy as the misinformation and terror of anti-democratic elements is the gravest threat to it. But the communication war must be won by countering the arguments of democracy’s enemies, not by silencing them.
Another key factor is uniting the pro-democracy forces. The post-coup mobilization has demonstrated how this could be done. Prior to that, the AK Party had won popular support precisely due to it being the only genuinely democratic party in Turkey: it has no agenda other than the welfare of all Turks.
As a victim of Kemalist authoritarianism, it has worked hard to open up the system. All other parties are either champions of minorities, tainted with a dictatorial past and/or chauvinism.
The AK Party was the first party to champion the rights of Kurds and other minorities, and its peace process with the PKK was as inspired as it was courageous.
It is a pity that pro-Kurdish parties have opted (during the hung parliament episode last summer), to ally with the Kemalists who have always denied Kurdish right, instead of joining the AK Party in a coalition.
They also remain unapologetic supporters of PKK terrorism and fans of both Putin and Assad, while deploring Erdogan’s authoritarianism! What is more revealing is that the majority of opinion leaders in the West seem to take the same attitude.
However, the responsibility of safeguarding Turkish democracy falls squarely on the AK Party’s shoulders, since regrettably there are few other democrats, and it is futile to expect the West to champion democracy in Turkey.
It has not done so in Egypt, Iraq or Syria. The AK Party should not be dragged into overly drastic measures against coup plotters. Some opponents of the Gulenists want to use the AK Party to get rid of them, just as the Gulenists had goaded the AK Party into fighting their battles against their secularist rivals.
It should not fall into either trap. If former sympathizers of the Gulen movement make a clean break with the dark past of the movement and condemn the dirty tricks of their former leaders, they should be allowed to be part of the democratic process.
In short, the AK Party must maintain its credential as the main champion of Turkish democracy, as it has always been. It must not be driven by insecurity into tactics that will taint it and embolden those who want to delegitimize democracy.
*Opinions expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Anadolu Agency's editorial policy.
