Monday July 18, 2016
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan, accompanied by his wife Emine Erdogan, greets supporters during a rally to mark the 563rd anniversary of the conquest of the city by Ottoman Turks, in Istanbul, Turkey, May 29, 2016. REUTERS/Murad Sezer
It was just a few short weeks ago that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey was cutting a swathe through Africa, with something like a swagger. President Erdoğan opened the largest Turkish Embassy in Mogadishu (Turkey now has 34 embassies in sub-Saharan Africa, compared with seven in 2009). Turkey is a geopolitical lynch-pin state, a member of NATO and a Gendarme (a body of soldiers serving as an armed police force for the maintenance of public order) in a seriously hot neighbourhood.
Interestingly, in the run-up to the attempted coup, Erdoğan had mended fences with the Russians (whose plane they had shot off the sky not too long ago), and Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and had even spoken of reconciling with Bashar Assad, whom Turkey had been plotting to overthrow for a number of years by greasing a bloody rebellion. This multi-front Foreign Policy Volte-Face was breathtaking in its speed.
Erdoğan and his A.K Party have presided over a “remarkable economic and geopolitical ascent since 2002”. GDP has doubled, and as Erdoğan himself said: “With the A.K. Party, the whole world hears Turkey’s words.”
Therefore the “Inspector Clouseau-like” #TurkeyCoupAttempt captured the World's attention from Mogadishu (where Erdoğan supporters thronged the Street) as far as the US where he has fingered Fetullah Gülen (Light Academy Schools for those in Africa) as the nefarious plotter behind the coup. In my view, the purge will be a lot more lethal and surgical than the coup attempt.
You will recall Paul Virilio's words about the the street “ The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.”
President Erdoğan understood the need to own the street. He tweeted: “The President and the government are on duty; let us not leave the streets.” Erdoğan even quoted what seems to be his favourite poem by Ziya Gökalp:
The mosques are our barracks
The domes our helmets
The minarets our bayonets
And the faithful our soldiers.
The Turkish Lira fell by the most since 2008, and you will recall that the financial markets fell apart that year. Tourism has tanked and its not difficult to see why. Fostering the rebellion in Syria, stamping down on the Kurdish insurgency have drained the economy. The A.K party's popularity was always built on a rising tide of prosperity. That tide is ebbing. The purge will be brutal and Mccarthyian, but the emperor (or is it the Sultan?) might find that he has no clothes and those who gave him a free pass whilst the economy was growing and in an upturn might not be so keen to give him a free pass as things enter a downturn