The sentences of life imprisonment handed down two weeks ago to generals who had once been the object of national acclaim stunned a broad segment of Turkish public opinion. In spite of the deliberate media downplay of the rulings in the Ergenekon case, in accordance with direct and implicit directives issued to the Turkish press, the rulings remain a main topic of whispered conversation among the people. The worry extends beyond domestic opinion. Ankara's allies, chief among which is the United States, found it difficult to conceal their surprise at the judicial process and the dubiousness of the “evidence” on which the judges based their findings. Still, Washington's criticism was reserved and its reproach mild, perhaps in the hope that an appeal process would end this farce — not that the White House spokesman would ever venture to call it such. Considerably less muted was the censure from the European press, some quarters of which lashed out at what they described as the Erdogan government's campaign of vengeance against the army, using its near total influence over the judiciary towards this end. In fact, commenting on the “draconian sentences” issued by the special Turkish court, Britain's The Times newspaper columnist Rosemary Righter observed: “Erdogan's scandalously unjust trials are a sinister sign of his brand of Islamo-fascism.” Not long before this, the leader of Turkey's ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) flew into a rage after around 30 internationally prominent intellectual and cultural figures published an open letter in The Times condemning his government's brutal crackdown on peaceful protesters and its repression of freedom of opinion and the press. Erdogan lashed back at the newspaper, accusing it of renting out its pages for money and threatening to sue it. In the face of such criticism, which would strengthen the hand of his political adversaries, Erdogan needed a diversion tactic. He found his solution in the Egyptian crisis, with regard to which he initiated, a month ago, a fierce campaign against Egypt following the overthrow of his friend, the first elected civilian president (with an emphasis on “civilian”), Mohamed Morsi. He vowed to continue to battle to reinstate Morsi and to dispatch the millions of Morsi opponents to hell. In keeping with this vow, Erdogan has sustained a steady stream of vitriol on the situation in Egypt, the latest being his prediction, on Saturday, that “Moses will return soon to pass judgement on the Pharaoh!” The message was simultaneously aimed for domestic consumption as it contained an implicit warning to those segments of the Turkish people that might still be looking to the army as a potential saviour. Against a media backdrop that portrays Egypt as a battlefield, President Abdullah Gül and Premier Erdogan huddled in the latter's summer residence in Istanbul to deliberate and coordinate responses to the massacres that have swept the whole of Egypt. Prior to this, Erdogan issued an impassioned plea to world leaders, primarily his ally Obama, to urge them to take a firm stance against the “military coup” in Egypt. In tandem and towards the same end, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu conducted a feverish spate of phone calls to his counterparts in France, Germany and the UK. The new interim leaders in Egypt were not the only targets reserved for Erdogan's fire. For example, Yeni Safak, a mouthpiece for the government, proclaimed on 1 August that the success of democracy in the countries of the Arab Spring posed a threat to countries in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. A successful democracy in the region would inspire peoples in the Gulf to demand their kings and emirs establish a system of government along the lines of the Turkish model, which blends Islam with democracy. However, the newspaper argues, since those monarchs are averse to aspirations that conflict with their dictatorial regimes and that might shake their thrones, they needed to prevent the spread of the winds of freedom. Therefore, they set Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood in their crosshairs, because it was proceeding down the path to democracy under president Morsi. Then, no sooner did the military coup occur than they breathed a sigh of relief and rushed to bless the coup with hand-outs of money to the new rulers. Naturally, the newspaper exempted the Qatari monarchy from its criticism because Qatar is as keen as Turkey on the continuation of the unique Muslim Brotherhood experience. As for the unprecedented millions of Egyptians that filled the streets and squares of the country on 30 June to call for the downfall of Muslim Brotherhood rule, the newspaper dismisses them as insignificant and the images of them as “photoshopped”. Clearly, in his feigned democratic ardour and impassioned attacks against the “coup” in Egypt, Erdogan does not have the welfare of the Egyptian people on his mind, but rather his own. He has been building his image as Ottoman Padishah in third millennium garb for some time, and he is determined that nothing shakes this. Part of this image rested on the economic success of his government, which he touts whenever he feels the heat of criticism. This is also where the current “Egyptian peril” comes in handy, for it is a convenient way to distract public opinion from controversial domestic issues. In this task he has been quite successful. Acting on instructions from the JDP government and with its support, Turkey's religious parties — all of which failed to enter parliament because they could not meet the minimum 10 per cent quota of votes needed to gain a seat — rallied hundreds of their supporters in angry demonstrations in front of the Egyptian embassy in Ankara and the Egyptian consulate in Istanbul. Protesters carried Egyptian flags and pictures of Morsi. Oddly, these demonstrators did not meet the same fate as anti-government protesters who, whenever they assemble peacefully in their hundreds or thousands, are treated to water cannons, floods of teargas and the merciless truncheons of the riot police. A considerable segment of Turkish public opinion is not so easily diverted from problems at home. Therefore, with the advent of autumn and the beginning of the academic year, we can anticipate a resumption of anti-JDP demonstrations in greater intensity than the Gezi Park protests in the spring. The forthcoming wave promises to display a renewed resolve to peacefully resist the erosion of the Kemalist secular state and the JDP government's steadily increasing encroachment into the personal lives of others.
