Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
power. Nevertheless, Ozal's genius in the later years of the Cold War was to stay politic-
ally anchored to the West, even as he softened the arch-secularist tendency of Kemalism to
give religious Muslims a larger stake in the system. Turkey became at once more Islamist
and more pro-American. Ozal's Islamism allowed him to reach out to the Kurds, who were
united with the Turks in religion but divided by ethnicity. The Turkish generals, supremely
uncomfortable with Ozal's religiosity, stayed in control of national security policy, which
Ozal did not challenge, because he and the generals were in broad agreement about Turkey
as a NATO bulwark on Spykman's Rimland of Eurasia facing off against the Soviet Union.
Ozal died suddenly in 1993 at age sixty-five, after ten years as prime minister and pres-
ident. This had profound repercussions for the future of Turkey, another instance about
how the lives and deaths of individual men and women affect the destiny of geopolitics as
much as geography, which retains its primacy mainly because it is permanent. Because Oz-
al in his own person held together apparent contradictions—pro-Islamism and pro-Amer-
icanism—his death shattered a tenuous national consensus, though this took some years to
unfold. For a decade after Ozal's death, Turkey had uninspiring secularist leaders, even as
economic power and Islamic devoutness continued to burgeon in the Anatolian heartland.
By late 2002, the whiskey-sipping secular elite was discredited, and an election delivered
an absolute parliamentary majority to the Islamist Justice and Development Party led by
Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the former mayor of Istanbul. Istanbul, while the home of the secu-
lar elite, was also the home of millions of poor devout Turks who had migrated in from the
Anatolian countryside in search of jobs to pry their way into the lower middle class; it was
these millions to whom Erdogan had given a voice.
When Erdogan assumed control, he gave power to a wave of Islamism, strengthened by
Ozal, that had been creeping back into Turkish life under the radar screen of official Kem-
alism. In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has
since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population. According to some studies, almost
two-thirds of urban working-class Turks prayed daily, as well as most rural Turks, percent-
with the secular ideologies of the right (fascism) and the left (Marxism) “as a savior of the
disillusioned urban youth,” for whom Kemalism was not a “socio-ethical system” to guide
daily life, writes the London-based author and journalist Dilip Hiro. Once a normal nation-
alism tied to Islam took root, Kemalism gradually lost its “raison d'être.”
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Yet when the Turkish Parliament voted in March 2003 against allowing U.S. troops
to stage in Turkey for an invasion of Iraq, it was not really the Islamist Justice Party
that undermined the American position, but the secularists, who, by this point, had joined
Europeans in their anti-Americanism as a reaction to the unsubtle post-9/11 rhetoric and
deportment of the George W. Bush administration. The disastrous outcome of the Iraq in-
vasion, which led to sectarian warfare inside Iraq, even as no weapons of mass destruction
