Most Turks believe a secretive Muslim sect was behind the failed coup
President Erdogan blames Gulenists for the putsch, and has launched massive purges
UNTIL recently, most Turks remembered Hakan Sukur as the man who scored the fastest goal in World Cup history, leading the national team to a third-place finish in 2002. Today many of them see him as an unwitting accomplice to the failed coup in which 270 people were killed earlier this month. Mr Sukur belongs to the Gulen community, or cemaat, a secretive Islamic movement. Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, blames the Gulenists for organising the coup. Most Turks agree.
The cemaat presents itself internationally as the face of enlightened Islam. Led by a reclusive Turkish-born, American-based cleric, Fethullah Gulen, the sect preaches democracy, interfaith dialogue and education. It runs a sprawling network of charities, banks, media outlets and business groups, as well as thousands of schools, both at home and abroad. Its supporters include journalists, politicians and public figures, including one of the country’s best basketball players and, in Mr Sukur, its most accomplished footballer.
Yet the cemaat is also known to have a clandestine arm—a network of sympathisers who have colonised Turkey’s judiciary, police and army. Graduates of the movement’s schools began entering the bureaucracy in the 1980s. In the 2000s, under Mr Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, they poured in by the thousands. Inside the security forces, says Hanefi Avci, a former police chief, Gulenist officials formed a parallel hierarchy that looked after its own interests. State employees loyal to the cemaat leaked university and civil-service entrance exams to young adepts. Many followers paid tithes. Businesses run by Gulenists advertised in Gulenist newspapers, which ran puff pieces on Gulenist charities, and so on.
In the past, those who tried to expose the group’s network often found themselves in hot water. Two journalists who penned books on the subject, as well as a public prosecutor who investigated the group, were jailed on terror charges in the early 2010s. Mr Avci, who wrote a book of his own on the cemaat’s power structure inside the police, was sentenced to 15 years in prison. All have since been released. For a while, says Asli Aydintasbas, a former journalist now with the European Council on Foreign Relations, “you were better off burning an effigy of Erdogan in the middle of Istanbul than investigating the Gulenists.”
According to Turkish officials, it was Gulen followers in the armed forces, faced with an imminent purge, who masterminded the coup on July 15th. The chief of the general staff, Hulusi Akar, who was held hostage by the coup plotters, has testified that one of his captors offered to put him on the phone with Mr Gulen. One of his aides allegedly confessed to being a cemaat member. Others have denied any links to the group. Amnesty International, a human-rights watchdog, has cast doubt over the investigation, citing “credible evidence” that the suspected coup plotters, many of whom sported bruises and cuts while being paraded in front of the cameras, were beaten and tortured. (Turkish officials reject the charges.)
Mr Gulen himself denies any involvement, suggesting that Mr Erdogan may have choreographed the coup to further his own political interests. “I don’t believe that Mr Gulen would ever ask people to perpetrate such acts of horror,” says Sevgi Akarcesme, a former editor of a Gulenist daily. Ms Akarcesme fled to Belgium earlier this year, after government trustees took over her paper. She cannot exclude that some of the plotters were Gulenists, she adds, but accuses Mr Erdogan of using the coup to mount a witchhunt. In the past two weeks 60,000 people have lost their jobs, and 10,000 soldiers have been jailed. Some 150 generals and admirals, more than a third of the armed forces’ total, have been detained.
Analysts in Turkey, even those opposed to Mr Erdogan’s government, generally agree that the Gulenists played a large role in the putsch. Many suspect that cemaat loyalists teamed up with a disaffected secularist faction. Popular outrage, however, has honed in on the Gulenists. According to one poll, 64% of Turks hold the group responsible for the coup. Both Mr Erdogan and the leader of the main opposition party have called on America to extradite Mr Gulen. Even the Turkish strongman’s detractors seem to prefer the evil they know to the alternative offered by the coup: what Atilla Yesilada, an analyst at Global Source Partners, calls “a Turkey run by rogue generals beholden to a half-mad pastor”.
Mr Erdogan is livid with America and Europe for their reluctance to acknowledge the Gulenists’ role. Yet the fault is partially his. For the past three years Turkey’s government has blamed nearly all its problems on the cemaat—including a wave of anti-government protests, evidence of corruption in its own ranks and even a leadership contest in a rival nationalist party. “AK shamelessly used the parallel-state threat to hide its own wrongdoings,” says Mustafa Akyol, a commentator once close to the Gulenists. He too blames the cemaat for the coup. “I don’t know of any other religious group that has been as successful in achieving its political objectives in such a stealthy way,” he says.
It was Mr Erdogan who brought the Gulenists on board. Thin on qualified cadres of its own, AK relied on the cemaat and its schools to churn out polished, devout candidates for government jobs, pushing out old-guard secularists. A number of Gulen followers, including Mr Sukur, entered parliament on the AK’s ticket. With the government’s blessing, prosecutors linked to the movement staged a series of show trials to purge the army of suspected coup plotters. They were, in fact, simply clearing the way for their own, says Mr Avci. “I was telling people in the late 2000s how dangerous they were,” he says. “No one listened.” Mr Erdogan broke with the movement once and for all when its bureaucrats launched a sweeping corruption investigation against his associates in late 2013.
With public outrage whipped up by relentless television coverage of the coup’s violence against civilians, Mr Erdogan now has a mandate to weed out the cemaat from public life. Yet the purge he has unleashed does not confine itself to Gulenist bureaucrats: many who merely sympathised with the movement, as well as academics, schoolteachers and others with tenuous links (or none at all), are being rolled up. On July 23rd, in his first decree since declaring a state of emergency, Mr Erdogan ordered the closure of over 2,300 schools, foundations, hospitals and trade unions. Days later, arrest warrants were issued for about 90 journalists, some of whom appear to be simply critics of the government. “I was in the streets protesting against those people,” seethed Bulent Mumay, a veteran journalist, early this week, referring to the Gulenists. “And now the government accuses me of being one of them—that is bullshit.” He was detained hours later.
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