#dnaEdit: Failed coup in Turkey

There were moments of tension. Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip  Erdogan was away on a holiday. There was a takeover of the government television station, and the bridge connecting Europe and Asia in Istanbul was blocked. The coup-makers also used F16 jets to bomb near the Presidential Palace and the tanks rolled into the streets. But it had ended without too much of resistance, with around 6000 officers and soldiers arrested. In the meanwhile, Erdogan, the populist politician that he is, asked people to go out on the street and take on the armed forces. People did pour out, and it seems to have had its impact as well. But the real fight was carried out by the police which has been trained and equipped in the last few years. The coupists were overpowered without much difficulty.

It will be sometime before the full picture as to why the coup was attempted in the first place will emerge. While some Western analysts seem to believe that it was an attempt by a discontented group in the Turkish armed forces, which considered themselves guardians of the secular traditions of  the modern Turkish State set up by Kemal Atatürk at the end of the First World War. But in the last 30 years, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Islamist political force, had won a hard-fought battle against the secularists and the army that had presided over the State. It seems on the face of it that it is not secular elements in the armed forces which had attempted the coup. The army did not back the coup, which seems to be the handiwork of a small group in the air force. One of the reasons that the coup was short-lived was because of the fact that the army did not come out to support it. If the army had entered the fray on the side of the coup leaders, then it would have been a civil war in Turkey. Erdogan too seems to have initially suspected that it was the army, and he had asked the people to resist it in desperation.

It is interesting that the army, the secular opposition parties and the clerics had condemned the coup. The army seems to be disinterested in the attempted coup. The opposition parties, though they are resentful of Erdogan’s strong-arm tactics, were not willing to go for the loss of democratic freedoms. The support of the clerics was expected because it was the survival of an Islamist government that was at stake. Erdogan had not blamed the army or the secular opposition. He straightaway pointed a finger at the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, living in exile in the United States. The US government was asked to extradite him immediately to stand trial for the attempted coup.  In the last few years, the Erdogan government seems to have been daggers drawn with the followers of Gulen. It has been suspected that the Gulenists had been infiltrating the army, the bureaucracy including the judiciary. It is for this reason that more than 200 judicial officers were moved out of key positions. But it is yet to be established that all the coupists are indeed Gulenists though the media supporting the Erdogan government is already describing it as Gulenist coup. 

The intriguing question is why does an Islamist party in power fear the influence and muscle of a preacher like Gulen. It is then a fight for power between two groups within the Islamist camp.