Oxford Analytica versus Turkish democracy

İhsan Yılmaz

Last week the US ambassador to Turkey created havoc when he directly commented on a legal case and declared that he was confused about freedom of the press in Turkey. The case in point concerns the infamous Ergenekon terrorist organization and journalist Soner Yalçın, who has been charged for being a member of the organization.

Based on the evidence presented to it, a court has jailed Mr. Yalçın pending trial. I am sure that within a few months we will able to read the indictment and evaluate for ourselves if he is in prison for his journalistic activities or if journalism was a cover for his illegal activities. But some in Turkey, including the US ambassador, have been quick to claim that Mr. Yalçın is innocent and that the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and the Gülen movement have been unjustly trying to silence the opposition.

I agree that this is a very complicated case that will take at least a few years to resolve. But common sense tells us that neither the Gülen movement nor the AK Party need to silence their opponents. Based on several surveys, it seems that the AK Party is likely to win a third consecutive election this June with an expected landslide of around 50 percent of the vote, while the main opposition party may only get 25-30 percent. And this will happen despite the activities of the opposition of these so-called journalists. Because of their provocative journalism, such as claims that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül are secretly pushing an Islamist agenda and the Gülen movement is a CIA organization, the people have been increasingly supportive of the party and the movement. Why would they risk their international reputation by trying to silence this already ineffective and ironically “supportive” opposition? The claims about the movement especially are simply funny. The movement operates in more than 130 countries with a discourse of tolerance and it is well aware that in the global village, everybody will learn about their alleged “intolerant” and “oppressive” activities. A case in point is an Oxford Analytica report on Feb. 4 titled “Gülen movement faces more global scrutiny.”

Oxford Analytica claims that the movement’s “image in Turkey, its country of origin, differs from the one it presents to the outside world.” But, first of all, whose image projection is this? Not only the movement but an overwhelming majority in Turkey see the Ergenekon case as part of democratization and, in the Ergenekon indictments, there are countless pieces of evidence showing that many of those being tried by the court were involved in anti-democratic terrorist activities. Instead of looking at these details and the whole picture, the defenders of the imprisoned want us to look at a few mistakes in the tens of thousands of indictment pages as if these mistakes would simply eradicate the substantial evidence against the coup-plotters and assassins.

Instead of giving Ergenekon suspects a carte blanche and saying that the movement’s support of “the proceedings of the Ergenekon trials, in spite of flaws and inconsistencies in the indictments, has raised doubts about the movement’s attachment to the rule of law,” why doesn’t the Oxford Analytica give us a balanced picture of what really is going on in Turkey and inform its readers that not only the AK Party or the movement but also many non-Muslim Turks, socialists, liberals in Turkey, Eurocrats, many European politicians and so on also support the Ergenekon case? Are these all secret movement participants or naïve AK Party supporters? It seems that Oxford Analytica has a final verdict on the Ergenekon case and knows very well that it is against the law and sees that supporting the case makes one’s attachment to the rule of law dubious.

Second, I do not see why being involved in one’s home country in a democratization fight against some powers that in the past have staged several coups, tortured tens of thousands of people and imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people should contradict one’s intercultural dialogue activities. Do dialogue and tolerance simply mean that one should turn a blind eye to one’s prospective murderers? Instead of talking about rumors, Oxford Analytica should tell us what kind of illegal activities these movement participants, its media outlets and so on have been perpetrating. Instead, what we read is that the movement’s schools have been closed down in Uzbekistan and Russia, as if this proves the so-called controversial nature of the movement.

Moreover, on reading the Oxford Analytica piece on the Dutch case, one would think that the Dutch authorities caught the movement red-handed. The movement has been a victim of the fight between the government and increasingly Islamophobic opposition in the Netherlands. But a recent parliamentary report about the movement underlined that there is nothing wrong with the movement. This is a major incident; however, Oxford Analytica curiously does not mention the report, giving only one side of the story, as it does in the Turkish case.

Oxford Analytica also puts that “Like Opus Dei and the freemasons, the movement does not publish membership rolls or a budget. Nor does it list its activities in the two main fields where it is engaged -- education and the media.” But this is an unjustified attack against the movement. First of all, it does not have a central body or hierarchical organization; it is composed of informal loose networks. Second, the affiliated organizations of the movement never hide themselves. Several academic studies simply provide names of the organizations. The content of their websites simply resemble each other and anyone can spot that they are affiliated with the movement.

The UK has been ostensibly supportive of Turkey’s entry into the EU, but so far I have not observed the same enthusiasm from the British authorities and politicians with regards to democratization in Turkey. They simply followed a sort of neocon or Pentagonian, militaristic friendly line on this, maybe hoping that one day authoritarian Kemalists with whom doing business was simpler will return to power. Sweet dreams. One would expect stronger support for Turkish democracy, but instead we read confusing and fictitious narratives from British think tanks. The majority of Turks would not be surprised.

Published on Today's Zaman on 19 February 2011, Saturday