Then, suddenly, as if on cue from some internal coup-recognition instinct, the Turks started walking quickly, to get inside. I did as well, though I of course had only read about the Turkish coups: 1960, the tanks in the streets and a prime minister executed; 1971, torture in the prisons; 1980, pure terror, a country forever transformed; 1997, the charismatic Islamist mayor of Istanbul sent to jail and turned into a national hero. Was this Erdo?an’s fate? The leader born from a coup would be brought down by a coup?
Erdo?an had long warned that a coup against him was in the works, but the idea of a military coup happening in Erdo?an’s Turkey, in which he seemed to control every aspect of state power, was actually so ludicrous that for a long time that evening few of us believed it was real. When I first saw on TV the handful of Turkish soldiers standing on the Bosphorus Bridge, I said, “What is this? This isn’t a coup. Come on, this is Erdo?an.” Just minutes later, when I saw those soldiers actually shooting Turkish people, I said, “Where is Erdo?an? Can someone get him back here so he can save the country?” I was terrified, and irrational. But that response captures how many of us had seen Erdo?an over the last decade: as either Satan or Superman, and rarely anything in between.
The night went on in its surreal way. A military jet bombed the Parliament building in Ankara. Taksim Square, up the street from my house, was occupied by tanks. Istanbul shook with tremendous booms that tweeters in Istanbul identified as bombs. I ran into my bathroom. It turned out, the booms were the putschists’ fighter jets, flying so low and fast, they broke the speed of sound. In my neighborhood, windows shattered. But the coup failed.
The coup plotters, allegedly, were members of the Gülen movement, the one that had so tenderly inducted me into the world of Istanbul journalism in 2007, the one that wiretapped my journalist friends’ phones, the ones whose schools I visited all over the world, from Kabul to Houston. By then Erdo?an had subsumed almost all of the institutions in the country; his only remaining enemy, it turned out, was the one from within. Neither Erdo?an nor the Gülenists, those who felt they couldn’t control the military that once oppressed them, ever truly got over their obsession with dominating the Kemalist state. Its own violence and impenetrability had long ago created in both of them a natural and, apparently, pathological desire to capture it.
The attempted military coup of 2016 was a fracturing of Islamist power, rooted in a long history, and likely one that would emerge ever more important to understand in the years to come. It took me ten years to correct the crude categories I had once imposed on this country; that the so-called Islamists were a group of diverse longings, politics, and histories; and that the so-called secularists were not one monolithic group, either, but Alevis, Armenians, liberals, atheists, devout people, gays, Kurds, leftists, feminists, nationalists, and people who didn’t care about politics or religion at all. The question now was whether in Turkey any such diversity would survive.
*
TURKEY BY THEN had already become a different place. By 2016, either ISIS or Kurdish militant groups had bombed Istanbul, and greater Turkey, some thirty times, including at the Istanbul airport, which I had observed on my first day as the airport of a stable country. The Turkish state had gone to war with the PKK again, and the cities of southeast Turkey looked like parts of Aleppo, blocks of buildings completely collapsed, rubble for miles. In Istanbul, raids against ISIS, or the PKK, or drug barons, seemed to occur every night, with police helicopters constantly circling the sky. Young people who were excited about Istanbul four years ago talked about relocating. “I don’t want to raise my children here” was a common refrain among the half of the population who didn’t vote for Erdo?an. The gaggles of foreigners walking down Istiklal Caddesi, their necks craning in delight as mine once had at Istanbul’s many treasures, stopped coming.
Three million Syrian refugees now lived in Turkey. Housing projects Erdo?an had built on top of old Roma encampments, or had begun in run-down Kurdish neighborhoods, became largely occupied by families from Damascus and Aleppo. It would have been strange ten, even five years ago, to hear men arguing in Arabic in the street, but Arabic was everywhere now, even back on shop signs in Beyo?lu, like it was a century ago, before Atatürk made the shopkeepers and schools take down that beautiful script that to him was backward in every way. It wasn’t just Turkey; Athens, which I visited twice again in 2015, had become similarly deluged with refugees. Turkey and Greece, the two countries where the post-1945 world order began, had become the dumping grounds for all the broken products of that century: the war refugees and economic migrants, the terrorists and their hangers-on, the collapse of Europe and the collapse of the Middle East. The migrant and refugee phenomenon—the refusal of humans to accept the circumstances dealt to them—had begun to seem like the worldwide revolution so many had once predicted. They protested with their feet, they rebelled against borders, against passports, and against the absence of cooperation among nations, and they defied regional categories that kept them living in a disintegrating Middle East. Refugees rebelled against the superficial idea of East and West, for which Turkey had not been the bridge, I realized, but the wall that had once kept the two apart.
After the failed coup, Erdo?an’s purge began. It is difficult to keep count of how many people he has purged from government, military, financial, educational, media, and corporate institutions, but estimates range around one hundred and twenty thousand. Ahmet Altan, whom I interviewed in 2007, was among the hundreds of journalists who went to jail. Members of the democratically elected Kurdish party went to jail, too. One of the last remaining opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet, where one of my closest Turkish friends worked, was nearly shut down. Theater directors were detained for staging Bertolt Brecht. Thousands of teachers belonging to the same union were fired. Stories of torture, even rape, began slowly drifting from Turkish jails. Erdo?an began talking about reinstating the death penalty. The period felt like the time after the 1980 coup, when the Turkish military had gotten rid of the entire left and allowed for Islamic conservatism to fill the vacuum. I don’t know what will someday fill this one.