Mustafa Kemal Atatürk[/caption]Cumhuriyet [djoom-hoo-ree-YET] n. Republic
Monday, 29 October was a national holiday in Turkey, the 89th anniversary of Mustafa Kemal's decision to declare a Republic and himself president.
Across the country, there were scenes of enthusiasm (coşku, to use a word much-beloved of the Turkish press—"exaltation" or "rapture"). Officials laid wreaths in front of statues of Mustafa Kemal in towns from Thrace to the Iranian border. In Ankara, for the first time, the head-scarf-wearing wives of senior politicians and bureaucrats were able to attend the big Republican reception at the President's Palace along with their husbands. "The people who stopped me and my wife from coming in here until now should be ashamed," declared Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
A mile or so down the hill, meanwhile, in the old centre of Mustafa Kemal's capital, passers-by were witness to a different kind of coşku, as police clashed with a crowd of many thousands trying to gather in front of the old Parliament building where the great man had informed deputies of his decision about Turkey's Republican future in 1923. "We are Mustafa Kemal's soldiers," shouted the crowd. "We are Mustafa Kemal's soldiers too," the police shouted back, turning on the water cannon and firing tear gas into the air.
Something about the scene reminded me of a well-known phrase attributed to a former Istanbul governor: "So many people have come to the beach that citizens can't get into the water!"
From the start, there was an implicit elitism to Mustafa Kemal's Republic. People were pushed to make a civilisational leap, from fezzes to fedoras, from the "sickly" quarter-tones of Oriental music to the bracing harmonies of Western music, from obedience to Sufi sheiks and religious charlatans to obedience to the forces of order. Failure to conform was a sign of backwardness.
The elitism became much more explicit after the 1980s, as those who refused to conform with the outward trappings of civilisation became more visible. I remember well an article written in 2005 by a prominent secular columnist, a woman, in which she complained about the experience of driving from Istanbul's airport (the "pride" of Westernised Turks) towards the centre of the city. The trip along the coastal road on the weekend, she wrote, was like a trip through "meat-eating Islamistan": mile after mile of "men stripped to their underwear, scratching their bellies," while their wives, "without exception wearing head-scarves," poked the flames of their barbecues. If these people learned to eat fish, the columnist wrote, perhaps they wouldn't be so "stout, short-legged, long-armed" and "hairy."
The column cost the columnist her job, and in the years since that particular brand of elitism has lost its place in the sun. As this year's Republic Day coşku shows, though nothing else has changed.
What do they want to march to the old Parliament for anyway, Prime Minister Erdoğan asked, justifying his support for the police crack-down on alternative commemoration ceremonies. "The state in any case will be mixing with its people" at the Hippodrome later. (The strange formulation is borrowed from a military-drafted constitution that Erdoğan has promised to change.)
And there is another thing in this either-you-are-with-me-or-you-don't-exist view of the world that Turkey's prime minister shares with the old Kemalist elites: complete colour-blindness on the Kurdish issue.
As he and his fellow grandees gathered in the palace, over 400 Kurds in prisons around the country were entering their seventh week of a hunger strike to protest the solitary confinement of a former separatist leader on an island off Istanbul. During the celebrations of the Feast of the Sacrifice last week, Turkey's justice minister visited prisons in an effort to persuade hunger-strikers to change their minds, and at the reception, Turkish President Abdullah Gül expressed a similar hope. But Erdoğan was having none of it.
"Nobody is going hungry," he told reporters, flatly.
