Front page of the embattled Turkish newspaper, Taraf, 22 October 2012.[/caption]
Taraf [ta-RAF ] n. side, facet
Taraf olmak [ta-RAF ol-MAK] v. to take sides
About five years ago, I wrote an article about a Turkish football commentator who publicly criticized the army chief. It was during one of those match-night postmortem shows that drift on endlessly into the small hours. Erman Toroğlu's co-host had just shown highlights of a match played by crippled soldiers, and the sight of them on the pitch had upset him. “They say he's a real democrat, a real gentleman,” he said of the general. “Fair enough. But I don't want a democratic chief of staff, see. My sort of soldier doesn't go in for the softly-softly approach. My sort of soldier bloody well puts his fist down.”
Not long after Toroğlu's little rant, in November 2007, a daily newspaper called Taraf was launched. Its motto was "thinking means taking sides" (düşünmek taraf olmaktır) and it did exactly what it said on the bottle.
Run on a minimal budget, with an initial print run of 3,000, it rapidly became a major player in the big Turkish story unfolding in those days—“civilianization,” as Turks called the fight to drag politics out of the hands of the overbearing military. Taraf was not the only newspaper to take sides with the elected government against generals who had threatened to step in early in 2007, but nobody spoke with a louder voice.
In the West, it was quickly hailed as Turkey’s bravest newspaper, and it was brave. In the 1990s, at the height of the Kurdish war, there had been individual Turkish journalists brave enough to try to uncover atrocities perpetrated by the state, but their stories were often cut to shreds by the editors and the reporters themselves rarely lasted long in the business. Taraf made headlines out of this kind of stuff. It was big and brash. It put its fist on the table. Day after day, it questioned the official military version of what was happening in the southeast of the country. Day after day, it published evidence of plots by senior military officers to undermine the government.
Inside Turkey, Taraf polarized opinion. Istanbul liberals (not that there are very many of them) loved it for its outspoken anti-Kemalism. More traditionally conservative supporters of the government liked that, too. In Kurdish areas, meanwhile, its anti-military stance has made it probably the most widely-read daily apart from Kurdish nationalist papers. But many secularists despised it. They dismissed it as Turkey's first “embedded” newspaper, a conduit for disinformation spread by pro-government circles to undermine their opponents. And there was more than an element of truth to the criticisms. The scoops Taraf became famous for rarely seemed to have anything to do with investigative brilliance: anonymous callers would simply invite reporters to come and collect sacks full of top secret official documents.
Five years on, it is clear that Taraf took the right side in the war. The military has been firmly put in its place. Nobody questions the authority of the elected government now. But victory seems to have disoriented it. Like the city-dwellers in Constantine Cavafy's poem Waiting for the Barbarians, whose entire life revolves around a barbarian threat that ends up never coming, the newspaper appears to have found it hard to adapt to life in the “civilianized” Turkey that it fought for so vociferously.
The cracks began roughly two years when, in the run-up to a referendum on Turkey's judicial system, Prime Minister Erdoğan warned that “anybody who doesn’t take sides will be eliminated” (”taraf olmayan bertaraf olur”). Taraf's editor, Ahmet Altan, did not like that one bit, and who can blame him? All that hard work for democracy, and instead this? Within a few months, the two men were feuding. When Erdoğan vowed to knock down a monument symbolizing peace with Armenia, he accused him of having less aesthetic sense “than a Japanese tourist.” When Erdoğan made disparaging remarks about his family, he accused him of breaking codes of honor that even the mafia respected. “Call yourself a man?” was the title of yet another of his columns attacking Erdoğan.
The editor’s move into opposition soon split Taraf. Several columnists moved to more middle-of-the-road publications. Another resigned in September, publicly accusing the editor of publishing Kurdish separatist propaganda. Last week, the editor furiously turned on another prominent Taraf writer critical of his polemic attacks on the Prime Minister, reminding him that without his patronage he would be a nobody.
For long-term haters of Taraf and its editor, it is a dream come true, and there is a growing chorus of “I told you so,” like in a primary school playground.
When you think about it, though, the editor’s polemical tone and malicious pleasure at his growing isolation are two sides of the same problem: army or no army, Turkey is a society whose public life is dominated by martial virtues. Taraf's editor, like the Prime Minister, is what Turks call a dava adamı, a “man with a cause,” utterly single-minded, devoid of self-doubt, a bit of bully, unafraid—as Erman Toroğlu's ideal general was—to bloody well put his fist down. Watching their feud is like watching war-lords trading insults before the beginning of a battle. It’s not really an argument they are having. It’s a means of proving their fearlessness to the massed ranks of foot soldiers that stand behind them, and to ensure their unthinking loyalty.
In the years when there really was a war going on in Turkey between elements in the army and the elected government (2007 was the year the war reached its climax), these were ideal qualities to have. They bode less well for the future of a country that claims to have solved the military problem.
