possibility is that the years constitute a collective trauma in the lives of many who lived through them, their excesses perceptually overwhelming and therefore difficult to comprehend. In his introduction to The Making of Modern Turkey Feroz Ahmad notes in a single terse paragraph on the 1970s that “political violence and terrorism, which have yet to be adequately explained, made the lives of most Turks unbearable” (1993: 13). Similarly, in her recent book Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, Jenny White summarizes the decade in three brief paragraphs, relating how “violence and ideological extremism were inescapable.” She finishes by recounting her relieved escape from the situation: “Having lived through three years of street violence in Ankara, where I was studying at Hacettepe University, I pocketed my master’s degree and left the country in 1978” (2013: 34, 35).
Reflections upon my fieldwork and interviews with ex-activists add something critical to Ahmad and White’s brief “outsider” comments on urban life. True, militants’ accounts of activism in the years before 12 Eylül document their participation in acts of violent militancy, in what Samim described as their “‘liquidation’ of the felt validity of the revolutionary experience of others” (1981: 84). Yet unlike the characters in novels described by Irzık (2010) in her analysis of 1971 coup d’état fiction, who are invariably depicted as persecuted by the State despite their innocence, the activists interviewed for this research did not protest that their victimization as leftists was mutually incompatible with the experiential realities of engaging in democratic and sometimes revolutionary action, including their own acts of violence. Indeed, the interviews revealed something different—the capacity of ex-activists not just to remember their status as combatants in a civil war or as victims of horrifying human rights abuses post coup but also to acknowledge their own flawed agency as political actors.
Perhaps differences in accounts of those years disclose not only insider or outsider perspectives but also contrary existential perceptions? Ahmad and White’s brief comments express a discomforting experience of passivity in the face of the actions and activities of others. By contrast, activists recollect their own sense of social efficacy extended against the friction of other actors. Activism by definition is a mode of embodied agency, and activists felt and hoped that they were remaking the world. Three years of martial law in Istanbul re-tuned the mood of residents in the city, enacting a perception of helplessness, and traumatizing activists and residents alike in the name of Atatürk.
Justifying the Coup d’État
There is more involved in this public and intellectual disengagement from the critical years before and after the coup, alongside any guilt, anger, or fear felt by militants or Istanbul’s inhabitants about what they did or about what was done to them. The minimal comprehension of that period and the lack of public memory about it are demonstrated in the near complete absence of any officially sanctioned visual monuments to its most striking events. There is one moving, albeit unofficial, memorial to Metin Yüksel in the courtyard of Fatih mosque, leading member of the Muslim youth group Akıncılar, who in 1979 was murdered by MHP commandos after attending Friday prayers. His fallen body shape is etched into the paving stones of the mosque courtyard where he was slain. Prayers are still held there annually in his memory. The lack of sites of memory testifies to a suppression of militants’ voices and perceptions and to an ongoing project by Turkish state institutions to obscure or depreciate the full gamut of acivists’ political and social activities.
Most active in this project is the Turkish Armed Forces, which attributes responsibility for the military intervention to the collective anarchism, terrorism, and class separatism of the militants themselves. In his speech broadcast on State TV and Radio on the morning of the coup, General Kenan Evren drew attention to the “perverted ideologies” that made some people sing the “Internationale” in place of the Turkish national anthem. It is plausible to suggest that denigrating the activists of those years comprised a key policy through which the Turkish military legitimized its preeminent role in post-coup politics. This campaign also ensured the immunity from prosecution of the military personnel responsible for the gross human rights abuses carried out as a matter of regime policy after the coup. It was only thirty years after the intervention, with the junta leaders nearly all deceased, that the Turkish parliament abrogated the constitutional clause granting coup leaders amnesty from prosecution (see chapter 8). At the time of writing, tens of civil court cases have been launched against military personnel. The outcomes of these are uncertain.
In brief, a dominant discourse invokes the increasingly violent polity in the years before the coup as its very justification, binding for better or worse militants and coup-makers to each other. That narrative positions the activists of the late 1970s as the city’s fulcrum generation, negatively but causally linked to the restructuring of Istanbul and of Turkey itself. Activists themselves live with that status, rejecting the implication that they deserved their arrest and torture while reflecting upon the failure of their struggle to transform urban society.6 Indeed my interviews with ex-activists reveal how in retrospect they are intensely critical of the faults and shortcomings of their own groups and factions in the years before the coup (see chapters 2, 4, and 5), a critique, in short, of themselves, as well as an imagining of their own partial responsibility for the present flawed development and state of the city. This sober self-examination informs many ex-activists’ identities and practices in the present.
Reference above to a “dominant” discourse suggests that it is insufficient to say that the 1970s have not been written about or analyzed. More precisely, it is the complex and varied modes of activism, including consideration of the diverse practices, motivations, experiences, intentions, and ethics of militants in the urban environment that have been simplified or ignored. By contrast, there is a large literature listing and explaining the context of events leading up to the coup. The best-disseminated account has been the discourse of the junta, broadcast (for years) after the coup in censored media space. Book chapters in general histories of “modern Turkey,” often referencing the picture of the 1970s sketched out by the junta, comprise a second literature, while work oriented to dependency and world-systems theory is a third, analyzing the struggle over the political economy as a significant reason for social conflict.
The junta’s narrative justifying the intervention was repetitive and clear, consistently made in speeches or interviews given by members of the National Security Council in the months after the coup and published in the strictly controlled press. It included the following claims: the armed forces are a disinterested institution sitting above the grubby affairs of politicians, political parties, and partisan civil society, called upon to act for the benefit of the neutral citizens who are disadvantaged by the politicization of state services; indeed the intervention was an obligation forced upon the military as a result of the conditions of its existence, given the duty bestowed upon it by Atatürk to protect and guard the Turkish Republic; it had warned the government and the opposition numerous times to get their house in order, but they had refused to act to solve the biggest “regime crisis” in the history of the Republic; the country was in peril on a number of fronts, particularly from the politicians’ inability or refusal to protect the constitutional and democratic institutions of the state and regime; further, a grave threat was posed by the actions of inside and outside powers who armed, brainwashed, and released militants into the environment, leading to anarchy, terror, and separatism, and to the needless deaths of twenty or more young people each day.
Single chapters in general political histories of modern Turkey comprise a second literature describing the 1970s (see for example Zürcher 1995; Ahmad 1993, 2003; Pope and Pope 1997; Davison 1998; Howard 2001; Kalaycıoğlu 2005; Akşin 2007; Waldman and Calışkan 2017; Ter-Matevosyan 2019). Although they usefully chronologize an incredible array of events—elections, coalitions, prime ministers, galloping inflation, price-hikes for food and oil, balance-of-payment deficits, Cyprus tensions, strikes, acts of violence and assassination, notorious massacres—in the main these chapters lack, paradoxically, both theoretical analysis and description of actors’
