The history of modern Turkish politics is rife with military intervention–the army has toppled elected governments four times since Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the modern Turkish state in 1923, and has strong-armed them into submission countless other times. One of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s greatest accomplishments has been returning the military to the barracks and diminishing its influence in public life. But last year, on July 15, a rogue segment of the Turkish Armed Forces tried and failed to overthrow the government of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Parties from across Turkey’s political spectrum condemned the treacherous act. Even the fiercest critics of the AKP defended the elected government. For a brief time at least, Turkey was a country united. A grand rally in Istanbul, attended by many political parties, gave those who attended hope that the coup attempt, traumatic as it was, might have brought a polarized country together. That hope was soon dashed.
Having lived through similar experiences, Turks know what to expect after a coup d’état or an attempted coup: limitations on rights and freedoms; government control of the news media; an extended state of emergency; mass arrests; courts, laws, and decrees to legalize the government’s directives; nationalist rhetoric conflating criticism with treason; fear.
The past year has been no exception. At the end of last year, Turkey jailed more journalists than any other country had in any year since the Committee to Protect Journalists began keeping records in the early 1990s. The government purged the police, the judiciary, academic, and government institutions. The Turkish news media were hollowed out. More than 100 outlets were closed. Journalists were jailed or pushed into exile to avoid retaliation for their work. Hundreds of media workers were left unemployed. Pro-Kurdish media was almost entirely decimated. Any media outlet accused of any affiliation with the movement of exiled preacher Fethullah Gülen–whom the Turkish government accuses of being the mastermind of the coup attempt–was closed. Small leftist publications were closed.