Failed coup lays bare Turkey's deep political divisions

ISTANBUL — Deep political divisions have been emerging here since President Recep Erdogan first rose to power 13 years ago.

Those divisions burst into the open in the wake of the failed coup and Erdogan's arrival here to the cheers of supporters.

“Our country is injured,” said Recep Senturk, the director of the Alliance of Civilizations Institute at Fatih Sultan Mehmet University in Istanbul and an Erdogan supporter.  “We have to heal the wounds. So many people who sacrificed their lives, so many buildings were destroyed, it is unbelievable.”

Violent scenes of the coup attempt, which saw jets and helicopters bombing parliament and protesters and mobs lynching surrendering soldiers, threaten to create an even wider gap between Erdogan's backers who are passionate about him and detractors who fear he is trying to become an anti-democratic strongman.

Many of Erdogan’s critics fear that in prevailing over the military faction that tried to overthrow him, the president will unleash a more aggressive crackdown, not only against the coup plotters but anyone he deems an enemy of the state. Erdogan has come under fire for undermining civil liberties, imprisoning journalists and promoting Islam in the traditionally secular country.

“This is the ultimate power grab,” said Gurkan Ozturan, a prominent democracy activist and former parliamentary candidate from the small Liberal Democratic Party. “When it started (the crackdown), I thought it would turn into a kind of witch hunt, and they would use it as a pretext to arrest opposition leaders or shut down critical media, but they directly started with the judges and prosecutors.”

About 2,700  judges and prosecutors were dismissed Saturday while a similar number of soldiers were arrested, sparking fears of purges, according to The Hurriyet Daily News, a leading Turkish newspaper.

Mustafa Aslan, 32, a tobacco shop owner near the first bridge over the Bosphorus Strait, where tanks had assembled Friday, said the coup came suspiciously just before Erdogan’s allies in parliament are preparing to debate legislation that would dramatically expand the authority of his currently ceremonial office.

“I don’t believe that was a real coup at all,” he said. “If the military wanted to take power in the country, the military is so powerful it can do so easily. I think this last night was a ploy by Erdogan to take even more power and to change the constitution to a (powerful) presidential system.”

Many Turks expressed skepticism about the government’s assertion that a small faction of officers belonging to a moderate Islamic movement headed by Fethullah Gulen, an Islamist scholar living in exile in Pennsylvania, launched the coup.

“Some say Fethullah Gulen supporters in the army tried to take control of the country,” said Hakan Bulut, 31, a chemical engineer who lives in Istanbul. “I don’t know what I should believe.”

For Bulut, the attempted coup raises serious questions about the stability of democracy in Turkey, a key NATO member and traditionally an island of stability in a tumultuous Middle East region where wars and violence are occurring across Turkey's borders in Syria and Iraq.

"First I heard about news from a WhatsApp friend group, and I thought that it was a bad joke, that it is impossible to make a coup in this day and age in modern Turkey,” he said. “Then I realized it is a serious situation.”

Senturk agreed with Bulut but took a different lesson from the foiled coup.

“This was a test for Turkish democracy, and Turkish democracy survived it, and it demonstrated that it’s very strong, that no one can play with it, no one can defeat it,” Senturk said.

Dyer reported from New York.