The Erdoğan-Rodrik marriage of convenience

Joost Lagendijk

Under pressure and in extraordinary circumstances, people who are otherwise absolutely unsuited and unwilling to work together enter into unexpected partnerships. These days we can witness a stunning example of this historic pattern: the marriage of convenience between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and professor Dani Rodrik.

Instead of coming up with a credible response to a continuous stream of leaked voice recordings and other incriminating evidence of corruption, fake or real, Erdoğan has obviously opted for another escape route from his current distressed position: criminalize the messenger and discredit proof of wrongdoing. In order to convince the outside world that he is doing the right thing, there are few people better suited to help the Justice and Development Party (AKP) leader than Rodrik, an internationally renowned economist with a huge network in Western media and among opinion leaders.

Rodrik is also the son-in-law of Çetin Doğan, a retired general who last year was sentenced to 20 years in prison, accused of being the mastermind behind the 2003 "Sledgehammer" coup plan. Doğan is also one of the prime suspects in the "Feb. 28" process that started in late December of 1997, which dealt with the so-called "post-modern coup" that unseated the government of Necmettin Erbakan. Since Doğan was arrested in 2010, Rodrik has argued in numerous articles that his father-in-law has been framed by Gülenists in the police and the judiciary. According to Rodrik, CDs that were used as evidence against Doğan and other suspects in the Sledgehammer case were tampered with, and therefore the entire court case should be considered a sham.

As I wrote before, the problem is that Rodrik is probably right about the CDs, but always tries to trivialize other pieces of evidence that show Doğan's willingness, in 2003 as well as in 1997, to undermine a democratically elected government: a voice recording -- the authenticity of which is not challenged by anyone -- and statements by Hilmi Özkök, the chief of General Staff at the time.

This proof of Doğan's anti-democratic views and intentions notwithstanding, Rodrik has been very successful in convincing leading American and European commentators and respected media outlets that his father-in-law is the innocent victim of malicious Gülenist manipulations. It is exactly this achievement that Erdoğan has decided to exploit. Since Dec. 17, the AKP leader and his advisers have started to assert that Rodrik was probably right after all and that what we are seeing now, with the allegations of corruption against the AKP government, is a repetition of the same dirty tricks by the same unscrupulous operators directed by the same puppet master.

In other words: In this hour of need, Erdoğan is using Rodrik to delegitimize the graft accusations in an effort to save his political life.

On the other hand, Rodrik does not mind being instrumentalized, because he needs Erdoğan as well -- at least for now.

First, he needs Erdoğan to get his father-in-law off the hook and out of jail. He knows the government is preparing to re-open the Sledgehammer and Ergenekon trials, this time orchestrated by prosecutors and judges directly appointed by the government after the recent adoption of a new Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors (HSYK) law. Second, he needs him in order to finish off the Gülen movement. It is clear from all his writings that Rodrik wholeheartedly dislikes the AKP leader but considers him to be the lesser evil compared to the Gülen movement that he obsessively hates.

Rodrik hopes that a reassessment of the Sledgehammer case will be the stone with which he can kill two birds. It will taint Erdoğan's record because the AKP leader originally -- and according to Rodrik, knowingly -- supported the flawed trial. That would be more proof that Rodrik was always right in claiming that under AKP rule, no democratic progress took place at all and that everybody who claims otherwise is a “useful idiot,” a label Rodrik loves to put on liberals who supported the AKP in its first years.

Even more importantly, exposing the mistakes and shortcomings of the first Sledgehammer trial and blaming them exclusively on the Gülen movement will be the most effective way to get rid of what Rodrik, months before Erdoğan started referring to a “parallel state,” called “a state within the Turkish state.”

Adversity indeed makes strange bedfellows.

Published on Today's Zaman, 01 March 2014, Saturday