While Turkey’s towns and cities were being wrecked by fighting, Ecevit contended with global pressures, mainly an arms embargo by the Americans for invading Cyprus, and an IMF credit squeeze during an economic period in which breadlines were common. But during that miserable year of 1979, Turkey became even more important to the Americans. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. The rise of the Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran had further imperiled America’s interests in the region. Inside NATO meetings, American generals began to complain to their Turkish counterparts about the chaos in their country: When will it end? When will you do something? The Turkish army had pulled off two military coups before, they knew what NATO was saying. When the Turkish expert at the National Security Council Paul Henze said to a Turkish general, “I hope that you will not allow things to get out of hand in Turkey,” the Turkish general replied, “Merak etmeyin” (Don’t worry).
The military coup in Turkey on September 12, 1980, was a trauma from which the country never recovered. Fifty people were hanged, three hundred died in custody, and five hundred thousand were imprisoned, many of them artists and intellectuals. “Should we not hang them?” General Evren asked crowds at public rallies. “Should we go on feeding them?” Turkey became known for its torture techniques, the most notorious of which were falaka, or the beating of the bottoms of feet, and the act of forcing prisoners to eat their own excrement. “The policy was not necessarily to kill you in jail,” said one former prisoner, the painter Orhan Taylan. “They would abuse you to the point of death, then release you so you would die soon on the outside.” Thousands more lost their jobs, often university professors and journalists, and countless leftists and rightists, accused of militancy, fled the country. D?SK, the radical labor union that would descend on Soma in the wake of the mine accident, was shut down, while Türk-??, the one to which the miners would belong, remained open, albeit with severely limited bargaining power. The day of the military coup, in the White House Situation Room, an officer had made a call to Paul Henze: “Your boys have finally done it!”
Caspar Weinberger, President Reagan’s secretary of defense, said later, “We admire the way in which order and law have been restored in Turkey,” and the United States quadrupled its aid to the military government. Some Americans and Europeans pushed for the inclusion in the new government of a man named Turgut ?zal, who would go on to become Turkey’s prime minister in the 1980s. The West, and especially the IMF, admired ?zal for one reason: he pledged to bring capitalism to Turkey, just as Sadat had done in Egypt. Turkey soon passed sweeping IMF-mandated reforms to open the country up to foreign markets.
Military coups and economic intervention abroad had profound effects on the generations that experienced them, including their growing suspicion that they were not in control of their own lives. In 1972, a year before he was killed in an American-backed military coup, the Chilean president Salvador Allende spoke at the UN about “serious aggression” from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and USAID, against the state companies of Chile—an array of forces “more subtle, more cunning and terrifyingly effective in preventing us from exercising our rights as a sovereign state,” he said. “The entire political structure of the world is being undermined.” The news video of the coup attack on Allende’s palace is worth watching, as I suspect that many Americans sometimes think that such military coups are pulled off in some gentlemanly fashion, if only to later maintain plausible deniability. During the attack, the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace on a city street almost as dense as in New York. It would be as if someone fired on the New York Public Library.
A military coup, as much as a war, is a horror. Imagine a military coup in the United States staged by China or Russia or Iran. Imagine the imposition of political and cultural ideas completely antithetical to your own. Imagine the outrage, and the paranoia one might have, forever suspecting that some incalculably arrogant force might come and upend your life forever. Imagine this as an American, for whom the definition of one’s identity is to be forever impervious to such an unimaginable fate. I met many people over my time in Turkey for whom the 1980 coup was the most formative experience in their lives. A taxi driver once held up his hands to show me where the military regime had tortured him so badly that he lost half a finger. For the young people of my generation, there were less visible scars. In 2016, the Turkish writer Kaya Gen?, who is my age, recalled the years after the coup:
We lived in a country totally isolated from the world. We lived in a continuous present—talking about history was dangerous, historians were despised. A repressive nationalism demanded from people to repress their individuality, religious and ethnic identity. The modernist coup was a big project to cleanse public life from “dirty” things like identity, individualism, religious beliefs, expressions of sexuality. With my family I used to travel to London and feel surprised about how, despite being a constitutional monarchy, Britain was a much freer society: they were okay with having a history, veiled women on the street, punks protesting the state, conservatives and leftists in the parliament, etc. Back in Istanbul, it was all clean and military-like and soulless and dead. The coup made us all self-repressors.
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