Turkey’s Hidden Revolution

On Aug. 5 a court in western Turkey handed down life sentences to a score of retired military officers, including the former chief of the general staff, as well as politicians and media figures, for plotting attacks that would have hurled the country into chaos in preparation for a military coup. The trial was widely regarded as flawed, but the verdicts did not provoke big protests in a nation that until a few years ago held the Army in higher esteem than any other institution. A few days later, at the end of Ramadan, the cities emptied as usual and the resorts were packed. Amid the festivities, the decapitation of the country’s former ruling establishment was largely forgotten.

To an outsider it might seem as though the Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has achieved what his former counterpart in Egypt, Mohammed Morsi, failed to do: boot the generals into irrelevance and impress on his opponents the fullness of their defeat. But that impression is incomplete. Over the past decade, emboldened by impressive mandates from the electorate, Erdoğan has indeed done much to subordinate the Army to the civilian authorities, but he has had help from an unlikely quarter: a generation of Turks who, although secular and deeply opposed to political Islam, no longer want the generals to fight their battles for them. These Turks are young (or youngish), and what they know of modern countries tells them that it’s not a good idea to have the Army running things behind the scenes. Nor has the military always contented itself with remaining behind the scenes; since 1960 the generals have staged three coups (four if you include the “soft” coup of 1997), befriended gangsters and neofascists, and sabotaged efforts to end a decades-old war against Kurdish insurgents. So, the silence of these younger, secular Turks after Aug. 5 was meaningful. It was a silence of disassociation.