Mick Hartley

Normally, of course, any military coup is to be deplored - especially against a democratically elected government like that of President Erdogan. But this is Turkey:

The Turkish military sees itself as the guardian of Kemalism, and has overthrown four Turkish governments since 1960 in the name of protecting Turkey’s democracy from chaos and Islamic influence. Each time afterwards, the military has returned the country to democracy — though in a degraded form.

Erdogan is clearly a threat to Turkish democracy and secularism. He leads the AKP, a moderate Islamist party that has "reformed" Turkish schools along Islamist lines. He’s cracked down on Turkey’s freedom of the press and pushed constitutional changes that would consolidate dangerous amounts of power in the president’s hands.

The military had been shockingly quiet about these developments in recent years, leading many to believe that Erdogan had successfully cowed them into submission. But this coup attempt suggests — given the stated rationale of the coup-launchers — that some in the military are taking up its traditional role as enforcers of Kemalist orthodoxy.

But they've failed. And now the backlash begins. Not just against those elements of the army that hadn't already been cowed or imprisoned as part of some byzantine conspiracy theory or other. Erdogan's bogeyman Gülen is now being accused – without a shred of evidence:

In the chaos of the attempted coup apparently perpetrated by elements of the Turkish military on Friday, the nation’s president and incipient strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pointed the finger squarely at one source: the Gülen Movement.

In an address to the nation via web video stream, Erdoğan explained that the coup attempt came from "a faction in the military, the parallels," which Turkey observers understood as a reference to followers of Fethullah Gülen, a moderate Sunni cleric whose movement claims millions of followers in Turkey and around the world. Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag repeated the accusations in a TV interview, claiming the coup plotters were tied to Gülen….

[T]he Gülen movement was for many years a crucial ally of Erdoğan and the AK Party — acting as a grassroots arm with significant funding that could support Erdogan’s attempts to fight back secularists and, in the eyes of critics, suppress dissent. Once Erdoğan had more or less secured his hold on power, however, the relationship started to break down. "Once the old establishment was decisively defeated, sometime around 2010 to 2011, disagreements emerged between the AKP and the Gulen movement," Al-Monitor's Mustafa Akyol explains. It started when a "power struggle between pro-Gulen police/judiciary and the AKP" erupted over an investigation into the country’s top intelligence agency that pitted pro-Erdoğan intelligence officials against pro-Gülen police and prosecutors.

Then, in November 2013, Erdoğan announced he planned to shut down prep schools (weekend classes for university exam preparation), about a quarter of which are run by the Gülen movement.

A month later, Akyol continues, "the real bomb went off: Zekeriya Oz, an Istanbul prosecutor who is widely believed to be a member of the Gulen movement, initiated an early morning raid on dozens of individuals, including the sons of three ministers, an AKP mayor, businessmen and bureaucrats." It was a massive corruption scandal, which alleged that the government illicitly traded gold with Iran in exchange for oil, undermining the international sanctions regime then in place.

The Gülenists argued this proved the government was fundamentally corrupt and in bed with Turkey’s Iranian enemies. Erdoğan and the AKP in turn accused the Gülenists of attempting a takeover through the corruption investigation, and of being in bed with Israel (which would naturally oppose Turkish cooperation with Iran). "An increasingly paranoid prime minister is said to believe that a ‘Gülen-Israel axis’ is bent on unseating him," the Economist wrote of Erdoğan at the time.

Since then, Gülen has been considered an enemy of the Turkish state, culminating in Erdoğan's cabinet designating his movement a terrorist organization in May of this year.

For the increasingly paranoid Erdogan, yesterday's events will be a huge boost. Yes, he was right, you see – they really are out to get him. If I were prone to conspiracy theorising – which of course I'm not – I might even suggest that the whole thing was staged by Erdogan to consolidate his grip on power once and for all. The whole business, looking back, was doomed from the outset. Before this, Erdogan was looking shaky: now he's secure. The purging of the army will continue apace, as will the increasing intimidation of the press.

Was this the last gasp of Kemalism, before Erdogan finally destroys every last trace of Ataturk's legacy? The extraordinary hundred-year-old experiment to prove that Islam could co-exist with secularism and the modern world now appears to be on its last legs.