The Turks are very simple people. You speak three words in Turkish, and you can conquer their hearts. General Musharraf conquered Turkish hearts the day he spoke fluent Turkish, after staging the 1999 coup. I was living in the Turkish world then, and remember the images the Turks saw on their TV screens about a Pakistani coup leader explaining in their language to his Turkish “brothers” why he had deposed the elected political regime of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. I also remember the unusually happy and enthusiastic response that Turkish people gave to that coup, as if one of their own leaders had become the leader of “brotherly” Pakistan.
So, there was nothing unusual about the recently elected President of Turkey, Abdullah Gul—an election that itself involved some controversy—visiting Islamabad this week to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Pervez Musharraf, the “Turkish man” in Pakistan, whose power base in Pakistan has been waning under growing pressure from civil society, political opposition and international community.
Reality versus Perception
The reality is that after surrendering his army uniform, Musharraf has been “elected” as a civilian head of state with arbitrary powers to dismiss any future elected government. The perception, however, is that he is no more as powerful as he was in uniform, and that it is uncertain when the remaining power he has as a civilian President is permanent.
If perception is more important than reality, which is generally the case, then this must worry the “friends” of Musharraf, whether the Turkish, who love him for his Turkish linguistic identity, or the Americans, who have relied upon him all these years for his “frontline” role in the War on Terror.
Abdullah Gul’s surprise, debut visit was preceded by US Deputy Secretary of State John Negorponte’s hurried trip in the previous week, during which he essentially attempted to put the so-called deal between Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto back on track, a deal whose future looked uncertain after Musharraf’s Nov 3 decision to impose emergency.
The Bush administration’s political script for Pakistan, which is hardly a secret anymore, is to have Musharraf continue as a civilian president to represent continuity of Pakistan’s counter-terrorism effort and let Ms Bhutto become the country’s third time prime minister in the forthcoming elections to “deliver more” in this effort. That is why Mr Negroponte, during his visit, essentially urged the political leadership (meaning Ms Bhutto) to pursue “reconciliation” and stay away from “brinkmanship” to avoid political turmoil in the country amid growing extremist/terrorist problem. He met only Musharraf and others members of the ruling junta.
Abdullah Gul’s Message
Abdullah Gul has gone a step further by not only showing the strongest ever political support to Musharraf after his “re-election as civilian president by any foreign leader but also meeting all of the main opposition leaders, including Nawaz Sharif, Benazir Bhutto, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Imran Khan and Maulana Fazalur Rehman.
In the presidency, he stood besides Musharraf, telling the press corps, “They (political parties) should look at the big picture and behave constructively. It is good for Pakistan.” He continued, “democracy is essential for sustainability of states, but at the same time the realities of a country should be taken into consideration.” Pakistan, he said, was “passing through a critical time... therefore, in this kind of critical period, all the leading teams should focus on the future of Pakistan.”
His message for the international community was the same: that it should remain committed to a “constructive approach” towards Pakistan, keeping in view its pivotal role against global terrorism. “Pakistan is important here ... (its) future in this difficult geography ... region. Therefore, constructive approach is important.
Responding to President Gul’s assertion that all political and personal issues must be subservient to the interests of Pakistan, Musharraf said, “my brother’s (President Gul’s) interests lie in Pakistan and not in any individual or political party.”
Musharraf’s Fame in Turkey
There is an element of irony—in fact, dichotomy—in what Abdullah Gul has said, but before I mention that let me say a few words more on Musharraf’s Turkish connection. Turkey was among the three Muslim countries General Musharraf had visited a month after staging the 1999 coup. I am privy to the discussions he then had with the Turkish leaders, President Suleyman Demirel and late Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit. Both had urged him to treat with leniency the three Pakistani leaders who were arrested at the time of the coup; namely, Nawaz Sharif, his brother Shahbaz Sharif and Mushahid Hussain Sayed.
There was nothing wrong in Turkish leadership making such a request to rescue Pakistani leaders who had built a close rapport with their Turkish counterparts. General Kenan Evern had made a similar request to General Ziaul Haq back in late seventies, after staging the Turkish coup, to save the life of Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto—a fact reiterated by President Gul en route to Pakistan to a correspondent of Turkish Daily Zaman by disclosing that the then Turkish leadership had even offered to let Mr Bhutto to come to Turkey and stay there “for the rest of his life”.
It would not be surprising, therefore, for the Turks to make the same offer to Musharraf, if any time in future he is left with no chance for political survival in Pakistan. The AK Party, of which Mr Gul is a key leader after Prime Minister Recep Tayyep Erdogan, came to power in the November 2002 election as a populist party.
Prior to the AK Party government, Turkey was being led by late Prime Minister Ecevit, who was not that close to Musharraf. In fact, in the year 2000, he had annoyed the Pakistani leadership by visiting India first before coming to Islamabad, thereby breaking a longtime Turkish tradition. The AK Party regime is considered a close ally of the Bush administration, so has been the Musharraf regime.
But much more important than the American factor is the bilateral nature of Pakistan-Turkish relationship, in which ideological and political changes either in Turkey or Pakistan do not impact the essence of mutual ties, which stand on very solid foundations. These ties are, in fact, rooted in almost a millennium old history of Turkic-Subcontinent Muslim contact, including the fact that the introduction of Islam into the Subcontinent was also through the Turkic regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus rather than from the Arabian peninsula.
Gul’s Dichotomous Stance
Leaving aside history, the fact of the matter is that the presidency of Mr Gul is essentially an outcome of Turkey’s consistent democratic transition in the past nearly three decades in general, after the last full-fledged military coup of 1979, and the past over ten years in particular, after the last indirect military intervention against the elected leadership of Rehaf party leader Necmettin Erbakan.
Since the pro-Islamist AK Party, a successor of Refah Party, formed government in 2002, the Turkish army, which is staunchly secular, has been unhappy with the way politics in the country has evolved. I was in the Turkish world at the time of the last general elections in July this year. More Turks voted for the AK Party in these elections than they did in 2002, and for an obvious reason. The regime led by Prime Minister Erdogan has made a hell of a difference in the life of an average Turk, who is freer and prosperous.
But just as Pakistan has many faces, the Turks have essentially two: On the one hand, you have this staunchly nationalist and secularist portion of the population, which includes the traditional civil-military-political elites; on the other, you have a mass of the population, which is religiously conservative, however, at the same time, nationalist. The former, in millions, had come to the streets in Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir, when back in spring this year, the Grand National Assembly nominated Abdullah Gul as President. The office of the Chief of General Staff, equivalent of our army chief, had then issued a warning to the AK Party leadership not to capture the Presidency. But the Party leadership made a real-politic move to hold early elections.
It is after these elections that Mr Gul has been able to secure the office of the Presidency only with a simple parliamentary majority after third successive vote in the Grand National Assembly. The Generals even boycotted his oath-taking ceremony in August. Mr Gul’s wife Hayrünnisa wears a headscarf, which is a politically sensitive issue for Turkey’s army-led secular establishment.
What I mean to say here is that AK Party, despite its manifold political and economic achievements, will remain a suspect in the eyes of the secularist people and elites, which have mostly called the shots in the Turkish Republication history as representatives of the secular legacy of the great leader, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
I have mentioned all of these details to make an important point, which is as follows: Abdullah Gul is himself a production of Turkey’s democratic transition, in which his Islamist-nationalist party’s struggle for power vis-à-vis the secular nationalist army has played an important. In Pakistan, however, he happens to defend a leader whose principal power base has been the army and whose political legitimacy and personal credibility—even the power base—in public perception has significantly eroded.
Momentum for Democratic Change
Pakistani people respect and honour the tremendous Turkish help in their hour of need, especially in the aftermath of the 2005 earthquake—so do the Turks, particular the help Muslims of the Subcontinent rendered during the Khilafat movement days for safeguarding the great Turkish Ottoman empire from European onslaught.
But Pakistani people may dislike any attempt by the Turkish leadership to act as a support system for a Turkish-speaking Pakistani leader who seems to have annoyed a large segment of the country’s population by deposing the mass of judiciary, scuttling the people’s right to free information, and jailing thousands of lawyers and political opponents in the guise of emergency.
Pakistan and Turkey are both great countries, lived by great people. That is why they have historically been so close to each other. Pakistan, in fact all Muslim countries, have a lot to learn from Turkey—whether it is secularism, nationalism, democracy and modernity. Politically, General Musharraf indeed attempted to copy the Turkish model, by, for instance, creating the National Security Council.
What, however, he ignored in the process is that in the past nearly three decades, Turkey has succeeded in building the necessary constitutional structure, inclusive of this Council, whereby military and civilian leaders have evolved a smooth working relationship. The institution itself has seen an increasing hold of the civilian leadership has part of the country’s democratic transition. Musharraf’s legacy, however, is that of a single man used to calling all the shots in a most arbitrary manner.
It is only that Musharraf has weakened him so much by making one strategic mistake after another, the deposition of higher judiciary being the foremost—and because of which he may be feeling so insecure—that he is making tactical maneuvers such as inviting a Turkish leader for his rescue. This won’t help, and that is something that our Turkish friends and even mainstream politicians, primarily Ms Bhutto, need to understand. The civil society-led public push for democratic change minus Musharraf is so great that nothing, what to speak of the goodwill of Turkish leadership, may stand in its way.
