Regime Change Is Coming to Turkey

Start Preparing Turkey’s Truth and Reconciliation Committee: President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu should end any pretense in the State Department that Turkey is a democracy or that Erdoğan plans to step down when his presidential term theoretically ends. Erdoğan plans to rule for life.

İmamoğlu now joins fellow politicians like Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, whose Kurdish party refused to accept Erdoğan’s diktats and had the temerity to criticize Erdoğan’s more outrageous positions. Like all dictators, Erdoğan will eviscerate any challengers who dare to oppose him or even show competence enabling their rise. He will rule until his death and expects one of his sons or son-in-law will take his place, effectively transforming Turkey into a sultanate.

He is wrong, of course. The next Turkish president will emerge from among the thousands of political prisoners that Turkish prisons today hold.

There is a conceit in Washington, Brussels, and London that even if Erdoğan is a problem, Turkey can revert to normalcy following the president’s death, whether that is from natural causes, an assassin’s bullet, or on the gallows after a popular uprising. Such a return to the status quo ante is easier said than done, however: More than 35 million Turks have gone through the Turkish education system under Erdogan.

He has reformed the army in his own image, and much of the state bureaucracy as well. Turkey’s once professional foreign service is today an embarrassment. Turkish banks are complicit in corruption, its business leaders funnel kickbacks to Erdoğan, his family, or their shell companies. Turkey’s only professional journalists are in jail, exile, or quiet retirement.

Nor could Erdoğan alone have so decisively transformed Turkey. For this reason and if Turkey is to heal, it will be necessary to establish a truth and reconciliation commission to identify the fraud, corruption, dishonesty, and repression at the heart of Erdoğanism, unravel it, and enable rehabilitation for those whose lives Erdogan ruined. Simply put, Erdogan has done more to abuse democracy in Turkey than Colonel Alparslan Türkeş or General Kenan Evren who respectively led the 1960 and 1980 coups.

Erdoğan had willing collaborators at every pivotal moment of his career, some motivated by ideology but many others motivated by greed. Nor were all Turks. In his first years as prime minister while the West still celebrated the Turkish leader as a technocrat who had cast ideology aside, Erdoğan benefited from influxes of Qatari cash according to Turkish officials at the time.

There were other collaborators. Long before Erdoğan turned on the late theologian Fethullah Gülen, they worked in tandem; Erdoğan even embraced the Gülenist foreign minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. There are other unknowns. In 2007, allegedly Erdoğan held a secret one-on-one meeting with Turkey’s top general, Yaşar Büyükanıt. Allegations of blackmail and extortion surround the meeting. The family members of either Erdoğan or Büyükanıt might shed light on the secret deals made at the time and explain why Büyükanıt had the army stand down to allow Erdoğan to run roughshod over the constitution.

There are other questions a Truth and Reconciliation must answer. Who bribed the supreme court to prevent dissolution of Erdoğan’s political party? Who was responsible for the forgery of his college degree and records? After all, the biggest irony behind his revocation of İmamoğlu’s college degree to disqualify his presidential run, Erdoğan’s degree belongs to a department that did not exist at the time he said he graduated.

Then there is the 2016 “Reichstag Fire” Coup: What was the true story behind the episode that Erdoğan called a “gift from God” and used to consolidate power and imprison hundreds of thousands of opponents?

Not every prisoner behaved honorably. Which prisoners sought leniency by informing upon others, truthfully or not? What properties did Erdoğan and his cronies confiscate on the basis of false accusations? How will compensation be paid to these victims of what essentially were mafia tactics. Nor were Turks the only ones involved in such commercial dishonesty. How did Turkey allegedly compromise American ambassadors and at least one former defense attaché? Did American think tankers act as unregistered foreign agents by trading introductions and access to Erdoğan in exchange for the donations of businessmen? What backroom deals corrupted the policy process in Washington? Where are the billions of embezzled dollars? It is not just in Erdoğan’s son’s basement anymore.

Other aspects of Erdoğan’s tyranny deserve to come to light: What was the decision process behind the razing of Kurdish towns like Cizre and Mardin a decade ago and the arrests of senior Kurdish leaders? Who falsified dossiers on Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) members and how much did cynical racism guide Turkey’s policy? Who was behind the murders of PKK members in Paris?

Then there is the question of the Islamic State: Who within the Turkish intelligence service was behind the arming of Al Qaeda factions? Who in Erdoğan’s inner circle profited from the Islamic State as the militant group Turkey sponsored burned chained, Turkish prisoners alive?

Regime change is coming to Turkey. Europeans must begin doing what Turks today cannot and what the current Trump administration has no interest in pursuing. They must help Turks plan for the day after Erdogan. Two decades of Erdoğanism has traumatized those within Turkey whom it has not corrupted. Absent a South Africa- or Morocco-style process, there will be societal upheaval as Turks and Kurds seek revenge on their tormentors.

Peace requires justice. Both require truth.