New APPS

Unfortunately various pressures on my time, including the flow of news about the struggle with the government block on Twitter in Turkey, led me to miss Catherine Dutilh Novaes very useful post The night twitter went down, and miss the opportunity to comment in a timely manner. As I am in Istanbul, teaching at Istanbul Technical University, a full length post on the complex changing situation here is probably the best response to make in any case. What follows is even a double post, the first part deals with the immediate situation. Those who wish to have more background can then go on to the second part of this post, or even go to it first as a basis for following the more immediate issues.

The Twitter block was followed by an enormous growth of activity on Twitter as those interested in social media found very easy evasive methods, drawing on previous experience with a YouTube block. I was even able to use Twitter without any tricks as the block was not applied in my university campus where I live as well as work. The government then introduced more aggressive blocking to precude the more simple switches in DNS used at first and started working on VPN networks, and the apps using them like Hotshield. Nevertheless, I have been able to stay constantly on Twitter with minimum effort, using Opera mobile browser, which uses servers in Iceland on my smart phone, and the Google Chrome app ZenMate on my personal computer. Yesterday (24th March) evening normal twitter access strangely resumed at my university campus and some others, while still otherwise remaining in force. During the blockage conflicting reports have circulated on whether a critical article in The Guardian had been blocked, and whether that might be a sign of a very deep crackdown on the Internet, along with all the other indications for and against a deepening attack on freedom of communication.

The block was preceded by blustering angry denunciations of social media by Erdoğan going back to the Gezi Park protests.  Twitter has been used to disseminate tweets which appear to be from an anonymous governement insider, showing the prevailing brutal abuse of power inside te government, along with tapes of Erdoğan and others in telephone conversations sıuggesting both corruption and links with Islamist violence outside Turkey. The tapes have first been posted on YouTube, and then Tweeted. The immediate pretext used for closing Twitter is a bit variable, but seems to focus on the case of a woman who was the victim of a stolen identity porn account on Twitter, which she was unable to persuade Twitter to close, or she was simply unable to navigate a Twitter complaint procedure that is not available in Turkish. Some of Erdoğan's rhetoric and messages circulating within the AKP are a blunt cynical pronouncement that Twitter has been closed by the government, because it wants to in a war with subsersive opponents. 

The real reason is widely believed to be the threat of much more embarrassing tapes than before to be released in the evening of 25th March, in time for local elections on the 30th. There will be a Predential election later this year, and National Assembly elections next year. Given the failure of the government to efectively block Twitter, there is a now a fear that announced routine local interruptions to Turk Telekom Net will become a complete Internet shut down for at least that day (today as I write). There are also fears of Facebook and YouTube blocks, due to Erdoğan's continuing extreme rhetoric against them.  

I presume the government's actions, which almosr entirely means actions commanded by Erdoğan are the result of fear and panic at losing control of Turkey, and the possible legal consequences of losing power. There is quite a large, but declining, body of thought amongst bloggers and commentators, that Erdoğan's extreme reactions are the smoothly exectured moves of a political genius guranteeing his continuation in power through polarising tactics which keep his grip on the AKP base.

The trouble with the Bismarkian genius at work claim is that Erdoğan has completely alienated not only all the secular parts of society, and all those with any claim to be liberals or constitutional democrats, in completely unnecesary ways, he has also alienated the largest religious brotherhood in Turkey, the followers of Fetullah Gülen who have largely provided the intellectual and bureaucratic elite of AKP governments, and its whole movement into power.

It  is 'Gülenci' members of the secuity forces, past or present, who are very probably the source of damaging material on Twitter and YouTube. They have their own media empire and a very large network in many fields of Turkish society. People who would not previouly have considered voting for the main opposition party CHP (Turish acronym fpr Republican People's Party) becaıse of its association with one party poer in the early republic, and later association with rigid statist laicism, are now willing to do so.

The Turkish electoral system is very baised towards the party with the largest vote even if it is some way short of an overall majoirt, and the whole state structure is very baised towards executive power for the election winner, but about 35% is still necessary, and Erdoğan is behaving in such a way as to rely on a core that is not likely to reach that number. 

At the moment I write this, I wait to see if the government does indeed go to the extreme with Internet blocks, and then I will be waiting for the election results. There are anxieties that the government will rig those elections, but large scale rigging has not been a feature of Turksh elections in the past, despite all the other problems, and most people are not seriously worried about this. However, given the unpredictability and generally increasing extremism of government actions, there is no room for complaceny on any of these issues.

Erdoğan has shown that he he will ignore any court decision that restricts him, that he will treat the state as a crude instrument of government party power in a much more extreme way than that practised by previous governments. The last barrier to that power is now elections, if the elections are rigged or Erdoğan can persuade 35% that corruption and abuse of power do not exist, or somehow do not matter when undertaken by 'our' people, then democracy, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and individual rights are going to be reduced to a Putinist hollow shell,.  Turkey will be faced with a long term de facto dictatorship and one party state system. 

Some background

The deep roots of the current crisis and attacks on freedom of communication go back to the 2002 General Election in which AKP (acronym in Turkish for Justice and Development Party) started a long auto-coup, or march trhough the institutions, under a leader, Recep Tayyıp Erdoğan, who had previously proclaimed that democracy is a street car from which one can descend after reaching one's destination, and read a poem at a rally which proclaimed that the faithful are our army, the mosques are our barracks, and so on.

Given this evidence of authoritarianism and Islamist politics, It looks strange that the AKP should have been able to come to power in 2002 with the inclusion, good wishes, or at least benevolent neutrality, of a wide range of secular democratic thinking, including radical leftists, social democrats, Kurdish rights, adovates, classical liberals , and libertarians.  It is now clearly a party dominated by authoritarian Islamists, and most importantly Islamonationalists. The reason for that success is the characteristics of the system the AKP apparently contested,  the very statist and conformist kind of secularism, or more properly laicism, embedded in intolerant nationalism, focused on the guardianship role of the army, all preserving attitudes left over from the violent fragmentation of the Ottoman Empire and the equally violent formation of the Republic of Turkey.

AKP was able to learn from the self-destructive behaviour of earlier Islamist parties and position itself as the reformist party in Turkey, opposed to the political backwardness described, allied with secular forces, wishing for reform, and managaing to convince many that just about any complaint they had would be resolved by a new kind of Turkish politics. The AKP was also able to benefit from deep economic crisis along with the  inept, and sometimes highly corrupt,  leadership of the pro-secular regime centre right and centre left parties. Difficult decisions to resolve the crisis were taken before the AKP came to power, along with a cautious democratisation package. The short distance of time between those reforms and the AKP's ascent to power helped them confuse understanding of where reforms had come from and claim the reformst mantle. Economic growth has only been slightly above pevious trends and has not include a down turn period in the economic cycle, so is not really a great success story compared with previous governments, but has been successfully presented as if it was. 

The AKP rise to power included a lavishly funded election campaign which created a dominating presence even in the strong holds of other parties, and the beginning of negotations with big economic players to arrange trade offs between poltical obedience and financial rewards. The AKP was then able to establish a hegemony in which cautious EU oriented reforms, unlikely to be much greater in scope than anything any other governemnt would have introduced, were estabished along with ambitious inclusive sounding reformist rhetoric.

Behind the scenes, but hardly disguised at all, Erdoğan, his family, other AKP power brokers, and various business associates turned the govenrment into a gigantic machine for extracting private benefits and privileges  from public power, centred on a hyperactive construction sector, the classic centre of political corruption in many countries. In general the state sector and all private enterprises large and small, which depend on government permits and contracts have been affected by the desire of the AKP to absorb everything into its system of top down power. 

The greatest AKP reform success has been to evict the previously domineering army from politics and control of the state. However, exactly the same authoritarian attitudes as before have continue, including attitıudes with regard to politcal protest and political communication outside the presumed poitical mainstream. In some ways the situation has become worse, because though the institutionalised power of the army was anti-democratic, it provided the biggest counter to the enormous privileges of the executive in Turkey, so that essentially now there is no meaningful check.

Though the government had some success in convincing Kurds and liberals (broadly speaking) it would end the state confict with armed Kurdish militants, reforms in that field have not been faster than previously, and still leave journaists in prison in large numbers because of the abrurdly broad anti-terrorist laws, also used against political demonstrations of all kinds. The government has also perpetrated the greatest single attack on Kurdish civilian for a very long time, in a drone strike on Kurdish smugglers.

So in general, the apparent reformist wave has led to an unprecedented locking together of unacountable state and economic power, based on intolerance of those who are not observant Sunni Muslisms and on a bombastic nationalism with Neo-Ottoman and Pan-Islamic overtones.