Turgut Özal and the Gates of Desire

Abstract

A conservative spirit animated Turkey’s third military coup. The generals who carried it out sought only to restore stability to a Republican order that had come under unprecedented pressure by the reassertion of long-suppressed societal identities and interests — as, for example, economic stagnation and class conflict gave rise to spiraling violence between leftist revolutionaries and rightist militants during the late 1970s; as Necmettin Erbakan’s Islamist MSP routinely won around 10 per cent of the vote in local and national elections; and as the renewed stirrings of Kurdish discontent prompted the extension of martial law to six southeastern provinces in April 1979. All at a time when mainstream politicians seemed incapable of forming governments stable enough to address the intensifying class, sectarian, and ethnic challenges that together called into question the entire Republican paradigm. Externally, the generals worried that the new ‘National Security Doctrine’ Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit unveiled on 13 February 1978 heralded a move toward non-alignment, depriving Turkey of the Western security umbrella that had protected it since the mid-1940s.¹ As one regional shock followed another — the Iranian revolution in February 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran War in April 1980 — the TAF command’s confidence in elected politicians steadily eroded. Finally, on 12 September 1980, it carried out a plan it had been devising for two years at least, overthrowing the elected government (led at the time by Süleyman Demirel) and imposing military rule.