Shirts of Steel: an Anatomy of the Turkish Armed Forces
Mehmet Ali Birand
IB Tauris
The Turkish armed forces, over 800,000 strong, occupy a very special position in Turkish society. One of the largest armies in NATO, it is accorded a status enjoyed by no other European army. Its influence on the political life of the Republic runs deep. Three times-in 1961, 1971 and 1980 - the army has intervened in politics, on the third occasion to undertake wholesale constitutional and legal restructuring.
Shirts of Steel is a unique study of the Turkish army from the inside by one of Turkey’s most distinguished journalists. Although the army is seen by many as guardian of the nation, the principles that guide and motivate the officer corps are barely understood and rarely discussed, even in Turkey. In an unprecedented break with convention, Mehmet Ali Birand was given permission to talk and live with officers and to write frankly about his experience. By allowing the people he interviewed to speak for themselves, and by following through the career of a typical officer from his initiation into the army at 14 to his final retirement, Birand gives his account a special liveliness and directness. The result is a fascinating insight into an institution which plays a central role in Turkish society.
Mehmet Ali Birand is a well-known journalist and specialist on Turkey, and the author of numerous books. His most recent book was The General’s Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of 12 September (London 1987).
FOREWORD
Over the past twenty years or so, a number of books have appeared attempting to explain the political role of the military in Middle Eastern as well as African, Asian and Latin American countries. They have given us invaluable information, as well as fascinating perspectives on a social and political institution which still dominates the politics of a large number of Third World states. However, they are mostly the work of scholars in North American or European universities who are not direct participants in the societies they are describing, addressing a limited and mostly academic audience, and sometimes overburdened with elaborate conceptual frameworks.
Mehmet Ali Birand’s book is different. The author is one of Turkey’s most influential and respected political journalists. He has previous books on the Cyprus problem and Turkey’s relations with the European Community to his credit, as well as a fascinating study of the events leading to the military coup of 12 September 1980 which has also been published in English (as The Generals Coup in Turkey: An Inside Story of 12 September 1980, London, Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1987). In Turkey, he is best known for his work as chief European correspondent for the popular liberal daily Milliyet, for which he also writes a regular column on foreign affairs, and as presenter of the monthly TV current affairs programme Thirty-second Day. In its original Turkish edition, which was published in 1986, this book went through no less than 15 reprints, selling a total of 75 000 copies.
The reason is not hard to find. Although virtually all adult male Turks go through a period of eighteen months of military service, and the Armed Forces have played a central part in the nation’s political life, critical analysis of their performance and functions has been regarded as taboo. By breaking this convention, Mehmet Ali Birand excited the interest of a very wide audience. Moreover, by allowing the officers whom he interviewed to speak for themselves, and by following through the career of a typical officer, from his initiation into the army at the age of 14 to his final retirement, he gives his account a liveliness and directness which is lacking in most academic studies. Shirts of Steel gives insights into a hidden world, as unknown to most Turks as it is to foreigners. Turkey’s history, and its strategic position in the borderland between Europe and the Middle East, heightens the importance of his study. For those concerned with analysing the role of the military in politics in other parts of the world, the Turkish story is also an important test case.
As the book makes clear, the Turkish Army’s historic role in the Ottoman Empire plays an important part in the education programme for fledgeling Turkish officers. In more recent years, its position as a political actor has been shaped by the three incursions into the political system which it made in 1960, 1971 and 1980. Knowledge of these events is second nature to most Turks, so they are referred to only in passing in this book. However, they will be less familiar to most foreign readers. Hence, a brief historical summary seems in order.
In the Ottoman Empire there was an almost complete identification of the army with the state, whose servants were in many cases both soldiers and administrators. The Janissaries, the trained regiments of professional infantry who formed the core of the army, were officially ‘slaves of the Sultan’. They were originally recruited from the Christian minorities by a system of conscription known as devshirme, in which young men were taken from their distant homes in the Balkans, and inducted into a new world - a Muslim, military world - in which the Ottoman state became their family as well as their master. The process has striking parallels with the modern pattern, in which the Turkish Army still draws in a substantial proportion of its future officers at a tender age, and provides them not just with a profession, but also a separate social milieu which lasts for the rest of their lives. From the Ottoman Empire’s now distant past, they inherit an elite status, but they are now faced with the task of reconciling it with a modern industrializing society which has thrown up new elites and new challenges. Cast aside from the social as well as professional nexus of the army, officers are like fish out of water, as Birand’s final chapter poignantly illustrates.
During the nineteenth century, the army was the first arm of the state to be affected by the programme of modernization, by which the later Sultans sought to stave off the challenge of the advancing European powers. Hence, the officers of a new army were projected into the vanguard of the campaign for change, playing a crucial part in the introduction of Turkey’s first constitution in 1876, as well as the Young Turk revolution of 1908. However, the second of these was to lead to disaster. After 1908, the Young Turks became became hopelessly divided, and both the army and state structure collapsed with them. The political partisanship which divided the officers corps and led to the humiliating defeats of the Balkan War of 1912-13 is a lesson which is still impressed on Turkish officer cadets, and formed the prelude to the greater tragedy of 1914-18.
The turning point came with the dramatic events which succeeded the Great War, in which a new Turkish state was built on the ruins of defeat. In Ataturk’s vision, the new Turkey was to be a national republic, divorced from its Ottoman past, and basing its legitimacy on the concept of popular sovereignty in place of Islamic tradition. The defeat of the occupying entente powers in 1920-2 also gave the army an heroic stature as defender of the nation. Once the victory was secured, however, the Armed Forces were left in an ambiguous position. On the one hand, Ataturk was determined to keep the army out of the political system, to make sure that the army itself was not divided by politics, and that ambitious officers could not challenge his leadership. On the other hand, he continued to look to the army as the ultimate guardian of his achievements. As Mehmet Ali Birand makes clear, Ataturkism is instilled almost as a religion among army officers. However, its exact implications - whether, for instance, the concept of guardianship takes precedence over that of non-involvement in politics - raise questions which today’s officers still find it hard to answer.
In the years after 1945, there was a transformation of Turkey’s internal political regime, as Ismet Inonu, Ataturk’s successor as President, oversaw the transition to a multi-party regime. The test of the army’s adherence to the principles of political liberalism came in 1960 when a group of officers, convinced that Prime Minister Adnan Menderes was undermining Ataturkism, overthrew the government in Turkey’s first post-war coup d’Etat. The military junta which ruled Turkey during 1960-1 was riven by a division between those officers - mostly at the upper end of the age/rank scale - who favoured a return to elected civilian government, and a group of younger radicals, who wished to set up a long-term authoritarian reformist regime. The victory of the first group, with the return to civilian politics in 1961, can be attributed to two of the factors in the army’s structure and culture to which Birand draws attention, that is, its strong sense of hierarchical discipline, and the conviction, inherited from Ataturk, that long-term direct involvement in politics would have fatal effects on its homegeneity, by dividing the officers on partisan lines. This point was underlined by the abject failure of two attempted counter-coups by one of the radicals, Colonel Talat Aydemir, in February 1962 and May 1963. The fact that, on the second occasion, Aydemir had drawn virtually his sole support from the cadets of the Ankara Military Academy led to some major upheavals in the military training system, as Birand relates.
After 1963, the Generals and politicians settled back into a state of sometimes uneasy cohabitation which lasted until 1971. By this stage, a new group of reformist officers had become convinced that Suleyman Demirel’s government was intentionally obstructing the implementation of social and economic reforms which had been outlined in the constitution of 1961, but had remained a dead letter. Other, more conservative Generals were alarmed by the government’s failure to curb rising violence by urban guerrillas, mostly of the left, which undermined law and order after 1968. The two groups compromised by issuing a pronunciamento which forced Demirel’s government to resign, putting in its place a supposedly supra-party administration, which followed the off-stage directions of the military chiefs. By 1973, however, the Generals had realized that this kind of quasi-military regime was an unworkable alternative to either outright military rule, or freely elected civilian government. Unwilling to take over power openly, they retired to their barracks in October 1973, to give way to a series of weak, but at least elected, coalition governments.
The problems which led to the third military intervention, that of 12 September 1980, were far more acute, and the legitimacy of the coup was far more widely accepted. By 1980, civilian government had almost completely broken down, as a renewed surge of politically inspired violence threatened to drag Turkey down into a Lebanese-style collapse of the state. During the first seven months of 1980, over 1,250 people were killed by politically inspired desperadoes of either right or left. The economy was in chaos, with treble-digit inflation, a huge foreign trade deficit, and a rampant black market in essential commodities. The civilian political leaders had failed to heed repeated warnings by the military to sink their mutual rivalries by forming a national unity government. As a result, when the army struck, the coup was greeted with general relief.
Under General Kenan Evren, the army established a five-man junta which restored law and order and successfully tackled the country’s economic problems by bringing down inflation and the foreign trade deficit. Besides the thousands of terrorists who were rounded up, there were large-scale arrests and trials of those who had done no more than express oppositional views.
Before returning power to the civilians, the military regime also drew up a new constitution which, by restricting civil liberties, aimed to install a more restricted version of democracy than had been sanctioned since 1961. This commitment reflected the tensions within the political culture of the military to which Birand refers - that is, the official endorsement of democracy, combined with the solidarist ideal of a disciplined, mutually cooperative society.
These developments left Turkey with a host of unanswered questions. Would the return to a civilian government under Prime Minister Turgut Ozal in 1983 be a genuine one, or would the military continue to control the country’s political destinies from behind the scenes? Would civilian governments achieve proper control over the Armed Forces, as in the Western democracies, or would they continue to act as a semi-autonomous arm of the state? Above all would the ten year cycle of intervention, withdrawal, political breakdown and re-intervention, which had been repeated three times since 1960, be finally broken?
Tentative answers to some of these questions are suggested by changes which have occurred since 1983 - in many cases, since 1986, when this book was first published. During this time, the army has steadily withdrawn from the political scene. The military regime’s attempt to encourage the establishment of a civilian government in its own image proved a failure, as the party supported by the military was roundly defeated in the 1983 elections. The pre-1980 political leaders, whom the army had tried to exclude from the system, regained their political rights in 1987, following a national referendum. Finally, in 1989, when ex-General Kenan Evren retired from the Presidency, he was duly succeeded by Turgut Ozal, Turkey’s first fully civilian head of state since 1960. Most importantly, all of these changes were accomplished without any overt protest from the military -in fact, apparently with its full support. Whether this trend will be a permanent one is still far from certain. The outcome will probably depend as much on the actions of the politicians as on those of the Generals. It will also require far more openness in the relations between the two sides than has obtained in the past. By opening up the Turkish Army to the outside world, Mehmet Ali Birand’s book marks an important advance in this process.
William Hale,
School of Oriental and African Studies, London.
Preface
The Turkish Armed Forces, 800,000-strong and absorbing 25 per cent of the national budget in 1986, constitute the best-organized, best-disciplined and longest surviving establishment in the country. They are, moreover, one of the largest armies in* any NATO country.
The Armed Forces are a force that has influenced the Turkish people’s political and daily life by a number of interventions, and they will make their weight felt in the future too. In Turkey, the question, ‘What does the army say?’, crops up constantly in private conversation and political argument and requires a response. Episodes of political intervention and how they came about are a major topic in newspapers, magazines and books.
The Turkish people as a whole are proud of their army, want it to be strong, and accord it a status which no army enjoys in any other NATO country. In Turkey, the army is always praised, never criticized, and, in an emergency, it is seen as the nation’s saviour. The truth is, however, that the Turkish public knows very little about the guiding force of this gigantic body - the 35,000-strong officer corps. In no other civilized country in the world is the army so little known and yet so close to the hearts of the people. There is a great deal of ignorance of the background of those who affect the daily lives and security of the Turkish people so closely, of their training, the ideas they grow up with, their routine, their priorities -in a nutshell, what an ‘officer’s world’ is like. Nor do those who do their one-and-a-half years of conscript service, in the ranks or as reserve officers, have any adequate picture of this ‘world’. My leason for writing this book was to attempt to shed some light on the subject and fill this gap in our knowledge.
I did not set out on the quest, which eventually took five years, with high hopes. To begin with I studied how Western armies trained their officers and then, over the last two years, I focused my attention on the Turkish Armed Forces. Close friends warned me that I was ‘on a fool’s errand’, and that ‘Turkey was not ready for this yet’, stressing that the army was a taboo subject. So I put the matter to the direct test and wrote to the General Staff, requesting information and assistance for the study I had in mind. The answer confirmed my belief that the army did not want to be a taboo subject. It was the civilian population who had chosen the easy option of setting up the army as sacrosanct.
I began to gather the kind of information that had been dealt with in hundreds of books and articles in every civilized country except Turkey. I visited Military Academies, ate at their tables, had long discussions with the officers and military students. In short, I shared their life in the barracks, and that is how this book came to be written. You will see the Turkish Army through the eyes of the officers themselves. It was of course impossible to talk to everyone individually.
What I did was to present the views that ‘lent themselves best to generalization’, and among them you may encounter a whole range of opinions, for the members of the forces are as different from each other as the fingers of your hand. It is, nevertheless, quite possible that I have occasionally gone too far in generalizing and have failed to present minority views sufficiently.
I have purposely left out the names of the people I interviewed, one reason being the promise I made to the individuals concerned and another the reluctance of officers to have their names bandied about ‘as if they were seeking publicity’.
Once completed, the book came under no official scrutiny (nor was there any request to that end by the General Staff). But I did have the manuscript cross-read by certain intimate friends, both retired and still serving, whose views and opinions I value highly, ‘to check the book for errors and go over its technical aspects’.
I wrote this book neither to praise nor to run down the Turkish Armed Forces. The army is essential to national security and it is obvious that unnecessary strictures will get us nowhere. My aim in writing it has been to make one of Turkey’s most important establishments better known, and to draw attention to a number of questions each important enough to merit a whole book to itself.
The Turkish Army is part of the Turkish people and its mirror image. As a result, the contradictions, the maladies and the backwardness that afflict Turkish society afflict the army too. My aim has been to present the most accurate picture possible of the Turkish Armed Forces, the facts as distinct from the daily hymn of praise, and thus help the reader to arrive at a realistic assessment. It is quite possible that this book may lead you to think, ‘I never knew the Turkish Army had so many problems’. That would be a misguided comment; all armies have similar problems. The only difference lies in whether these problems are open to discussion.
I owe a great debt of gratitude to a whole range of people who helped me with this book. They include those who trusted me with their personal views, from the students at the Military Academy to their commanders, from second-lieutenants to top generals, from retired officers to ex-Ministers of Defence. They also include officials of the US Defence Department, and of the British, Belgian, German and French Ministries of Defence, who let me carry out research in their own military schools, provided me with observations on their own armed forces and on the Turkish Army, and supported me with documents and research facilities. I am indebted to Hikmet Bila who gave unstinting support during the preparation of the book, to Ahmet Baydar whose untiring research enabled me to write certain sections, and to Fehiman Cebeci for his meticulous research.
Part One
The Making of an Officer
Preamble
Birth of a Commander
You have entered a great academy of discipline: we should all be congratulated. From now on your lives will change... If you work according to the discipline, obeying orders and proving yourselves worthy, we will provide you with a profession superior to any other… one which cannot be acquired through money or possessions… You will be performing the most illustrious duties in the world…
The Commander of the Academy was speaking. There was utter silence. Everyone listened with concentrated attention. The successful candidates gathered in the conference hall were looking at this imposing personage whose position they had not yet quite understood. A row of flags was ranged behind him of which they recognized only the Turkish. The other officers, in immaculate uniforms, were standing at respectful attention behind the commander. He continued:
Your flag will be the great Ataturk. Your ideology will be his principles, your aim will be the direction he showed us. You will follow unswervingly in Ataturk’s footsteps.
The new cadet looked around. He knew about Ataturk but not much about his principles and he wondered if they would be questioned immediately on the subject. From the expressions of those about him he concluded with relief that the majority did not know much either.
…..
