Dissecting Turkey's Gulen-Erdogan Relationship
Jillian
D'Amours
Monday,
July 25, 2016
Middle East
Eye
TORONTO, Canada – As reports came in that members of Turkey’s
military were staging a coup on 15 July, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan quickly
denounced the person he believed was behind the insurrection.
The Turkish president repeatedly said the
coup-plotters were being directed “from Pennsylvania,” a reference to the
Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader’s rival, US-based Turkish cleric
Fethullah Gulen.
In the days since the failed coup attempt, Ankara
has formally called on the US government to extradite Gulen, who has been
living in self-imposed exile in the state of Pennsylvania since 1999.
“Once they hand over that head terrorist in
Pennsylvania to us, everything will be clear,” Erdogan told a crowd in Istanbul
last Saturday.
Gulen, meanwhile, has denied any involvement in
the attempted coup, accusing Erdogan of using it as a pretext to attack him and
his supporters. “It is ridiculous, irresponsible and false to suggest I had
anything to do with the horrific failed coup,” the cleric said in a statement [1] on Tuesday.
“I urge the US government to reject any effort
to abuse the extradition process to carry out political vendettas.”
But major questions linger about Gulen’s
involvement, and the role members of the wider Gulenist movement, also known as
theHizmet (Service) movement, in recent events.
Who is Gulen?
Fethullah Gulen was born in 1941 [2] near Erzurum, in northeastern Turkey, and first came to
prominence as a Muslim preacher and intellectual in the 1970s, advocating for
interfaith dialogue, modern education, and faith-based activism.
“The Gulen movement differentiates itself from
other Islamic movements by stressing the importance of ethics in education,
media, business, and public life,” wrote Gurkan Celik, author of “The Gulen
Movement: Building Social Cohesion through Dialogue and Education,” which
presents a very positive review of Gulen’s ideology and activities.
The Gulen movement says [3] it opposes using Islam as a political ideology, and presents
itself as a moderate force advocating cooperation and dialogue.
It is active in the fields of education,
dialogue, relief work and media in more than 160 countries around the world,
according to the Centre for Hizmet Studies, a London-based non-profit
organisation affiliated with Gulen.
Several Gulen-affiliated non-profit groups,
including the Journalists and Writers Foundation and the Alliance for Shared
Values, have been established, while the movement also organises seminars and
conferences. Gulen is said to have millions of followers worldwide, though the
exact number is unknown.
But beyond establishing schools, charities and
non-governmental organisations, Gulenist sympathisers also have a “dark
side,” Turkish columnist Mustafa Akyol recently wrote [4].
Media reports and investigations have shown the
Gulenist to be behind a “covert organisation within the state, a project
that's been going on for decades with the aim of establishing bureaucratic
control over the state,” Akyol wrote.
Last year, Ankara hired law firm Amsterdam
& Partners LLP to investigate the global activities of the Gulen movement,
and expose alleged unlawful acts.
“The activities of the Gulen network, including
its penetration of the Turkish judiciary and police, as well as its political lobbying
abroad, should concern everyone who cares about the future of democracy in
Turkey,” founding
partner Robert Amsterdam said at the time [5].
Turkey officially listed the Gulen movement as
a terrorist organisation in May.
"We will not let those who divide the
nation off the hook in this country," Erdogan said at the time. "They
will be brought to account. Some fled and some are in prison and are currently
being tried. This process will continue."
‘A very bitter divorce’
But relations between Erdogan and Gulen were
not always so volatile.
Erdogan was close to Gulen for decades, and the
two leaders were in common opposition to secular Kemalist forces in Turkey.
They also shared the goal of transforming
Turkey into a state of “Turkish nationalism with a very strong, conservative
religiosity” at its core, said Ariel Salzmann, an associate professor of
Islamic and world history at Queen’s University in Canada.
Erdogan and Gulen were “partners in trying to
assume power for decades,” Salzmann said.
The leaders shared a common opposition to
Kemalist forces in Turkey for many years, and though he did not enter politics
himself, Gulen supported the AKP – and thus mobilised his followers – when the
party was founded and later came to power.
Members of the Gulen movement were also linked
to two notable cases in Turkey – the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer investigations
– that looked into alleged attempts to overthrow the AKP government and
Erdogan.
The Ergenekon case included the arrest of Ahmet
Sik, a journalist who wrote a book about the Gulen movement and the alleged
influence it wielded in the Turkish security forces. Critics say the Ergenekon
case was merely a pretext to target dissidents.
“It’s a modern, Islamic confraternity,”
Salzmann told Middle East Eye about the early Gulen-Erdogan relationship.
“They had common interests and they were
complimentary in many ways,” Salzmann added.
Ties between Erdogan and Gulen began to fray
when Gulenists in the police and judiciary “became a little too independent,”
Salzmann said, and worsened when Gulen himself criticised Erdogan for his
handling of the Gezi Park protests in 2013.
Later that year, Erdogan said Gulen and his
supporters were trying to bring down his government through a corruption probe
that implicated several officials and business leaders with ties to the AKP,
and led to the resignation of AKP ministers. The government has also accused members of the
Gulen movement of wire-tapping government officials.
Since that time, Erdogan has repeatedly said
Gulen is running a “parallel state” inside Turkey and his government has
cracked down on Gulen-affiliated institutions, including the popular Zaman
newspaper and Bank Asya.
“I think the idea that there would be someone
who would challenge [Erdogan], who disagreed with him slightly, with his ideas
and his methods, led to this confrontation, which ended up in the state
takeover of all Gulen-related industries,” Salzmann said.
“It’s really a very bitter divorce,” she added.
Gulenist education network
A central way Gulen has extended his influence
is by establishing schools inside Turkey and gradually setting up public and
private academic institutions in other countries.
According to academic Bayram Balci, these
schools all have the same goal: “making new and modern elites capable of
modernising Muslim societies”.
“The movement is very modern. They provide [a]
modern and generally very secular education, but conservative at the same
time,” Balci told MEE, comparing proponents of Gulen-linked education abroad to
Christian Jesuits, well known for their missionary work.
“They are elitist, modern, mysterious, and they
travel around the world to diffuse their values,” he said.
Balci, an expert on the influence of Gulenist
institutions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, told MEE that Gulen first
focused on expanding into this region after the fall of the Soviet Union in the
early 1990s.
At the time, countries like Albania, Bosnia,
Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and others in Central Asia were
more open to foreign – and particularly, Turkish – influence, he said.
The movement is also reportedly tied to about
150 charter schools – public schools that are privately managed – in the United
States, though many of these schools dispute any alleged connection to Gulen or
Gulenist influence on their operations.
“This denial of affiliation is not unique to
these charter schools,” said Joshua Hendrick, a professor at Loyola University
in Maryland and author of “Gulen: The Ambiguous Politics of Market Islam in
Turkey and the World”.
“What is and what is not an organisation that
is affiliated … with the Gulen movement has always been something that has
never received a straight answer from those who are being asked that question.”
Hendrick told MEE that since these schools are
technically public, they must offer the curriculum requirements set by the
districts they are operating in. The schools do not engage in direct religious
teachings, but they will all offer a Turkish language option and give students
and parents a chance to take a subsidised trip to Turkey.
“They’re far more Turkish in what they’re
trying to deliver as a brand alternative. It’s less their Muslimness and more
their Turkishness,” Hendrick said.
The Gulen movement aims to accumulate and wield
influence, Hendrick explained, with the long-term aim of creating social change
back in Turkey. But Gulenists would rather use their influence to support
political actors rather than directly participate in politics themselves, he
said.
In the US, Gulen-affiliated individuals also
extend far beyond the charter schools, and can be found in media, finance,
retail, restaurants, law, accounting and IT firms, and even livestock
facilities, Hendrick said.
“The schools are just the most glaring and sort
of the anchoring of the community, but by no means is it limited at all to
schools,” he said.
Behind the coup?
While Erdogan systematically removed alleged
Gulenist sympathisers from the police, judiciary and media, the Turkish
military “was the last remaining Gulenist stronghold in Turkey,” Dani Rodrik, a
professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University, recently
wrote [6].
Rodrik said Erdogan was preparing to purge the
army of Gulenist officers, meaning that they “had a motive, and the timing of
the [coup] attempt supports their involvement”.
But a violent coup is not a regular tactic for
Gulenists, Hendrick said.
“Whatever one wants to say about the Gulen
movement, it’s not organisationally inept. They have a tremendous capacity to
play a long game, to exercise patience, to be clear with their goals for their
constituents … And how disorganised and disjointed this all was, how poorly
planned, how quickly crushed, just strikes me as curious,” he said.
“It doesn’t seem like it’s their MO at
all.”
Meanwhile, Salzmann said Gulen has become a
“red herring,” which Erdogan is using to justify cracking down on any perceived
opposition inside Turkey and vastly limiting freedoms.
Since the attempted coup, the Turkish
government has declared a three-month state of emergency, during which time it
will suspend the European Convention on Human Rights.
Turkey has barred academics from leaving the
country, closed hundreds of schools, suspended the annual leave for three
million civil servants, and arrested, fired or suspended at least 50,000
police, soldiers, judges, teachers and other professionals.
‘Cataclysmic’ impact
While Erdogan has cracked down on anything with
Gulenist ties in Turkey, Balci said it has so far been difficult for Erdogan to
shutter similar structures outside of the country.
“It is not easy to declare illegal a movement
and its schools that you have supported for more than 20 years,” he said.
“In Central Asia, for example, the schools
started to make new elites in 1991 when the USSR collapsed, so in 20 years or
more, a lot of people went to these schools in perfect legality.”
Still, Hendrick said if Erdogan could prove –
to a high, international legal standard – that Gulen was indeed responsible for
the attempted overthrow of his government, the impact on Gulenist activities
worldwide would be “cataclysmic”.
“It would immediately become that which its
critics have said it is and has been for 40 years,” Hendrick said.
“Knowing that there is conclusive proof that
this organisation operating in their country overthrew one of their trade
partners, I don’t see how that host country continues to allow the operation of
that entity.
“It would be existentially cataclysmic for their
future if this is proven to be accurate at all.”
Links:
[1] http://hizmetnews.com/18359/fethullah-gulen-issued-following-statement-turkeys-extradition-request/#.V4-MfK5sMfo
[2] http://rumiforum.org/fethullah-gulen/
[3] http://gulen-movement.net/fethullah-gulen/introducing-fethullah-gulen/
[4] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/07/turkey-coup-attempt-indeed-seems-gulen.html
[5] http://robertamsterdam.com/republic-of-turkey-retains-amsterdam-partners-llp-on-expanding-gulen-investigation-into-africa-and-u-s-charter-schools/
[6] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/turkey-coup-erosion-of-law-by-dani-rodrik-2016-07
[2] http://rumiforum.org/fethullah-gulen/
[3] http://gulen-movement.net/fethullah-gulen/introducing-fethullah-gulen/
[4] http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/07/turkey-coup-attempt-indeed-seems-gulen.html
[5] http://robertamsterdam.com/republic-of-turkey-retains-amsterdam-partners-llp-on-expanding-gulen-investigation-into-africa-and-u-s-charter-schools/
[6] https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/turkey-coup-erosion-of-law-by-dani-rodrik-2016-07
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