Understanding Turkish Politics

Recently a full-page advertisement appeared in several major Turkish daily newspapers. The ad featured three Turkish Prime Ministers, past and present, under the banner heading: ‘Demokrasinin Yıldizları’ -  ‘Stars of Democracy’.

Well, Turkey is a democratic country – and democracy requires that citizens can, within reason, say, and even publish full-page newspaper ads about, pretty much anything they want. However, the fact that someone (or a group of ‘someones’) felt the need to fund such an ad suggests that democracy itself, and those who uphold it, are not outside the realm of debate in this country. The matter of who these ‘someones’ are, is a question I will return to later.

Turkey is a young democracy. In 2010 it is celebrating its 87^th year. Not so young in terms of a human lifespan perhaps, but short enough in relation to the span of human history. The Republic of Turkey was founded in 1923, and the first open national election was held in 1946. In 1950 a rival party was elected to power for the first time. There will be people in their 70s and 80s in Turkey today who may have seen Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the flesh – and the occasional nonagenarian who was around at the actual foundation of the Republic.

Compare the time-frame with that of France, for example, or the United States, great early leaders in the establishment of republican democracy. A five-year-old French child who witnessed the storming of the Bastille would have turned 100 in 1889 – when Atatürk himself was only eight years old. An American five-year-old present at the funeral of George Washington would have celebrated her 100^th birthday in 1894.

85 years after the US Declaration of Independence, the young republic fought a terrible civil war in which 620,000 combatants and an unknown number of civilians lost their lives. Its territorial borders were still expanding, in theory, until 1959, when Alaska and Hawaii were added to the list of States. In practice, the US Government was still adding to its territory by means of war against foreign nations until 1898, or perhaps even 1945 if you count territories seized from the Japanese after World War II. The Philippines never actually achieved State-hood, but, in fact, only gained independence from the US in 1946. Slavery was finally abolished nearly 70 years after the Constitution set out to ‘establish justice . . . and promote the general Welfare’, but institutionalized segregation and disenfranchisement continued into the second half of the twentieth century, accompanied by exploitation of, and violence against African Americans.

Check out the record of France in the years after the foundation of the Republic. A scant twelve years on, Napoleon had overthrown it and declared himself Emperor. After the rest of Europe ganged up and got rid of him in 1814, the French decided to restore their monarchy. That lasted, in one form or another, until it was thrown out in favour of the Second Republic in 1848. French partiality for absolutism and guys called Napoleon Bonaparte resulted in a Second Empire, which lasted from 1852 until the disastrous war with Prussia in 1870. The Third Republic seems to have come into being at this point largely by default, for want of a monarch willing to be restored, rather than from any major desire in France for democratic government. The French are currently into their Fourth Republic, which came into being after the dubious doings of the wartime Vichy regime.

Clearly getting a modern-style democracy up and running is not an easy matter, despite the simplistic beliefs of guys called George Bush (even well-established democracies seem to have a hankering for dynasties, have you noticed?). Turkey’s founder, Atatürk, himself recognized that force of arms might create a nation, but consolidating, developing and maintaining it was a more difficult and ongoing task. Perhaps farsightedly, he avoided siring any children who might have been a temptation to Turkish dynasticists.

Anyway, to return to the advertisement that began this article. The first matter that aroused controversy in Turkey was the fact that the third member of the democratic triumvirate was the current Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – a man who served prison time a few years ago for supposedly threatening the Kemalist nature of Turkey; whose wife infuriates secular Turks for her insistence on wearing a head-scarf; and who is often suspected of harbouring a secret agenda to return the country to a state of Islamic Sheriat rule.

Well, I’m not party to the machinations of high-level Turkish politicians - but I have been around long enough to be able to make certain observations. From 1995 to January 1999, Turkey had no fewer than five Prime Ministers who were either pretty corrupt, pretty self-seeking or pretty old (or some combination of the three). When RT Erdoğan’s party took the reins of power in November 2002, the Turkish Lira was valued at around 1,500,000 to the US dollar, down from a high of 1.7 million in 2001. One consolation for investors for the 80%+ inflation rate was that interest rates on bank term deposits were that much or higher. Within two years, the rate of inflation had fallen to manageable single figures, allowing Erdoğan’s government to delete six zeroes from the Turkish Lira, which is currently hovering around a respectable 1.50 to the US dollar.

In March 2003, GW Bush led an anti-terrorist alliance into Iraq, to unearth weapons of mass destruction that the United Nations, in their namby-pamby, liberal wetness, had been unable to find. Leaders of the Western world, for the most part, threw their various weights behind him. ‘Crusade’ was a word Bush used early on, but realizing his mistake, he became extremely eager to have Turkey’s 99% Muslim population with him. There was talk of an $18 billion aid package to reward such loyalty and support. In the end, the Turks didn’t go – and there are no doubt many patriotic citizens of the UK who would wish that their own PM at the time had been of such an independent mind.

But what about the other PMs in the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad? The gentleman on the left of the picture is Adnan Menderes, who became, arguably, the first genuinely elected Prime Minister of Turkey, when his Democrat party won power in 1950. You might say it was a watershed event in the progress of democracy in Turkey – but was the nation ready? The Republic had been founded on principles of secularism. The Muslim religion had been seen as a hindrance to progress and modernization, as a force for reaction – and Atatürk had done his best to pull its teeth and limit its power. The great man, however, had one major advantage over those who followed him into the seat of Turkish power: he didn’t have to win elections.

Aspiring political leaders in the post-1946 era of Turkish politics have had to come to terms with the need to win the support of an overwhelmingly Muslim electorate. As a result, many of the measures instituted by Atatürk in the name of secularization, have been undone, or undermined, by subsequent governments. For example, the use of Turkish in religious ceremonies was substituted or encouraged in place of Arabic in the new republic. The stated reason was the general move towards a pure Turkish language to replace the hybrid Ottoman of the imperial elite. It may be, however, that reformers recognized that general unintelligibility, and arcane knowledge limited to those-in-the-know, are powerful factors in the maintenance of a mass religion. As an aside, it would be an interesting exercise to trace the correlation between increasing use of vernacular languages in worship, and the decline of Christianity in the West.

Whatever the reason, Menderes’s Democrat Party reinstituted the Arabic call to prayer that sounds five times a day from minarets on Turkish mosques. His government also set up special secondary schools, called İmam Hatip, for the training of imams and preachers. Apart from these sops to the religious faithful however, the Menderes Government presided over a period of rapid mechanisation, industrialisation and economic growth, and remains the only administration in Turkey to have won three consecutive elections. It’s a little surprising, then, to learn that the end came as a result of a coup by army officers in 1960; and not content with unseating the poor guy, the military leaders actually had him hanged, along with two of his ministers.

I guess it is small consolation for his family (and the man himself, wherever he may be) but his reputation was subsequently restored to such an extent that there are now city streets and parks named after ex-PM Menderes, and even the international airport in Izmir, Turkey’s third largest metropolis. It’s possible that the soldiers who staged the coup felt they were justified, since it is widely believed in Turkey that the army has the final responsibility for upholding the secular democratic republic. However, there were two further military takeovers at ten year intervals after the first. Following the last one, in 1980, the junta actually used religion to counter the perceived threat of socialists and increased the construction of Imam Hatip high schools. Turkish politics is a complex business.

The other figure in the advertisement, the guy in the middle, is Turgut Özal. Mr Özal himself was apparently quite a strong Muslim, from a pretty orthodox background. In the 1970s, he had actually stood for parliament (albeit unsuccessfully) as a candidate for the National Salvation Party, an overtly Islamicist party, led by Necmettin Erbakan (who was later ousted from the Prime Ministership, and banned from politics, by covert military intervention). Surprising, then, that Mr Özal was one of the few politicians favoured by the military leaders of the 1980 coup, despite also having been undersecretary to the deposed PM, Süleiman Demirel. He served as deputy PM to General Kenan Evren, the leader of the coup, then became PM when his Motherland party won a majority after democracy was restored in 1983. For better or worse, Özal is credited with having brought capitalism to Turkey. Under his leadership, the country was opened to a flood of imports, the process of privatisation of state assets was begun, and a 30 year period of hyper-inflation got off to a flying start - the Turkish Lira depreciated by 1400 % against the US dollar from 1980 to 1988. A chequered career, to say the least!

As all good Christians know, there are sins of commission, and sins of omission, so perhaps it may be interesting to consider which Turkish political figures are absent from the ‘Stars of Democracy’ ad. Clearly the salient absentee is Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Well, perhaps it could be argued that, whatever his credentials as military leader, reformer and statesman, he isn’t especially notable for his commitment to democratic elections, so let’s leave him aside. However, it’s also noticeable that no other leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP) got into the picture either, despite its being recognised as the heir to the Atatürk legacy. But maybe that’s debatable. The military leaders of the 1980 coup, who also saw themselves as upholders of the Atatürk ‘Way’, actually banned the CHP from participating in politics – and it stayed that way until 1992. Since its re-emergence on the political scene, CHP has been conspicuously unsuccessful – this lack of electoral success finally resulting in the internal ousting just last month, of its leader of 18 years, Deniz Baykal.

In the end, then, dazed and confused by the apparent impossibility of making sense of all this, I decided the only smart thing to do was to check out who had actually funded the insertion of that full-page ad in the Turkish dailies. Well, there at the bottom of the page was the acronym SDP, and a web address, so I checked it out. That was a month or so ago, and the website was covered with ads for various Islamic institutions and events – clearly, you’d have to think, the public face of an organization with major religious interests. Then, as I was finishing this blog, I decided to check the site again, and behold . . . not an ad to be seen, nor the slightest hint of anything religious. Weird, man! Why would you suddenly clean off all the paying ads from your website? Unless, perhaps, you were concerned that curious people like myself might think you had a secret agenda.

Well, who knows? Democracy is a word that can cover a multitude of sins. The German Democratic Republic (East Germany) was not particularly noted for upholding the freedom and rights of its citizens. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) where the Second Congo War has been raging for twelve years, 5.4 million people have allegedly died, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. The occurrence of rape and other sexual violence has been described as the worst in the world, and the DRC’s people have the world’s lowest per capita GDP, according to the IMF.

I have no intention of comparing Turkey to either of the foregoing manifestly undemocratic regimes. There is no doubt in my mind that Turkey’s present government, like most of its predecessors of the past 60 years, was democratically elected. But democracy is a fragile flower. It needs nurturing – and it can be easily poisoned. I have seen, in my own country, organizations funded by wealthy individuals, or small groups thereof, hiding behind a façade of democratic good intentions in order to push their own agenda of self-interest. Again, I have no quarrel with the choice of those three worthy gentlemen as ‘Stars of Democracy’. But something about that full-page ad made me nervous at the time – and the feeling hasn’t gone away.

Istanbul - European Capital of Culture

I’ve known for some time that Istanbul would be ‘European Capital of Culture’ in 2010. What I didn’t know was that it will, in fact, be one of three European Capitals of Culture this year, the others being Pécs and Essen.

Now I don’t wish to in any way detract from the cultural significance of Pecs and Essen. I am happy to have been given the motivation to find out where Pecs is – and I can tell you (in case you are as ignorant as I was) that it is the 5^th largest city in Hungary, and home to the country’s largest university. Of course I knew where Essen is. I can’t tell you if it is the 7^th or the 8^th largest city in Germany, but I can assure you that it was formerly one of the country’s most important coal and steel centres.

I’m not sure exactly who decides, from year to year, which cities will be designated European C of Cs. However, since the decisions are made by a committee of the European Union, I guess Turks, as non-members, should be grateful that one of their cities made the cut at all.

Nevertheless, the decision having been taken to grace Istanbul with the title, I can’t help wondering whether the honour has not been a little diluted by including it as a member of what can only be considered a fairly humble triumvirate. If you glance, as I did, down the list of previous title-holders, you will see that such relative metropolitan minnows as Cork (2005) and Patras (2006) were deemed to have no competition in their respective years; while Luxembourg (2007) was given a second bite of the cherry twelve years after its first chomp.

Well, I’m sorry. It wasn’t my intention to bitch about other culturally worthy European cities. After all, there’s a lot of culture in Europe – undoubtedly enough to provide the gnomes of Brussels with cities for their list into the foreseeable future, even at the rate of two or three a year.

Year	Population	Year	Population
330	40,000	1914	909,978
400	400,000	1927	680,857
530	550,000	1935	741,148
545	350,000	1940	793,949
715	300,000	1945	860,558
950	400,000	1950	983,041
1200	150,000	1955	1,268,771
1453	36,000	1960	1,466,535
1477	70,000	1965	1,742,978
1566	600,000	1970	2,132,407
1817	500,000	1975	2,547,364
1860	715,000	1980	2,772,708
1885	873,570	1985	5,475,982
1890	874,000	1990	6,629,431
1897	1,059,000	2000	8,803,468
1901	942,900	2007	11,372,613

In fact, the spark that ignited this particular blog was a table I came across recently in a Turkish newspaper, which I am appending for your edification. It shows the population figures for Istanbul over a period of 1,677 years. Well, of course, it hasn’t been known as ‘Istanbul’ for all of that time – only for the last 554 years. Prior to 1453, as Constantinople, it was the capital of the Roman Empire for 1,123 years – a title it shared with the actual city of Rome for a relatively brief 146 years, before that city, as is well known, was overrun by barbarians.

You’ll notice, as you look at the table, that it hasn’t been all beer and skittles for the imperial city over that millennium and a half. Periods of dramatic growth have been followed by equally dramatic periods of decline. Given the exponential growth of the population in the last 30 years, it’s not easy to graph the figures in order to convey the fluctuations that took place at various periods of the city’s history. However, it’s obvious that those numbers want to tell us a story, and so I’ve decided to help them do it.

One point that should be made at the outset is that the very existence of these figures is a statement in itself. Clearly we would like to compare them with comparable figures for other major European and world cities but we can’t. The reason is, of course, that either the figures don’t exist – or the cities themselves didn’t. Istanbul / Constantinople has been around for a very long time; and it has been capital of civilisations that have been sufficiently organized and self-aware to be able to compile reasonably accurate population statistics. Excavations currently being carried out as part of the Marmaray Metro System have found evidence of a Neolithic settlement at Yenikapı, dating back to around 8500 years ago.

The ancient city of Rome is held by some to have attained a population of up to two million at its peak in the 2^nd century CE; but declined to a tiny fraction of this after a series of disasters lasting close to a thousand years. It probably didn’t reach 100,000 again until the 17^th century. It is nigh impossible to find figures for European cities to be able to compare them with Constantinople/Istanbul. London, for example, is estimated to have had a population of 60,000 in the 2^nd century CE at the height of its Roman period – but by 500 CE, to have declined to 5,000. Estimates of its population in 1066, when the invading Normans put an arrow through the eye of English King Harold, range from 5,000 to 40,000. It perhaps hit 100,000 when it became the mercantile centre of England in the age of Chaucer, but declined again, and didn’t reach 200,000 till Guy Fawkes narrowly failed to incinerate King James I at the beginning of the 17^th century.

Paris was probably the largest city in Europe in medieval times, apparently growing to 200,000 in the 14^th century, then remaining fairly static until the 16^th century. By 1700 it had managed to top half a million for the first time.

Apart from those cities, what can we find? Undoubtedly there were cities in ancient China that were home to very large populations. Moscow is said to have reached 100,000 in the 16^th century, before being attacked and sacked by the Crimean Tatars and falling on hard times. Italian stars of the Renaissance, Venice, Naples and Milan, hovered around the magic 100,000 mark in the 16^th century, as did Hapsburg Vienna. Madrid hadn’t even become the capital of Spain at that stage – the largest city being Toledo, with an estimated population of 65,000.

So let’s return to Istanbul, or rather, to the 4^th century CE when the Roman emperor, Constantine I decided to establish a second Rome on the site of the small Greek city, Byzantium, on the triangular peninsula at the southern mouth of the Bosporus Strait. Reasons given for his decision are: the new city stood at an important point on the trade routes between east and west; the eastern parts of the empire were more urbanized and civilized than those in the west; the western empire was increasingly under threat, and the wealth of the East allowed it to buy off aggressors as well as hire mercenaries to assist in its defence. Whatever the reasons may have been, it is clear that Constantine was serious about creating a capital city: the population grew tenfold to 400,000 within 70 years of its foundation!

If you want to read a history of the Eastern Roman Empire, you will need to look elsewhere. However, historians seem to agree that there were two ‘Golden Ages’, under the Emperor Justinian I in the 6^th century, and again, after a period of decline, in the 9^th and 10^th centuries. At this latter time, the Emperor ruled what could still reasonably be considered an empire, with its western possessions stretching through the Balkans, Macedonia, Greece and southern Italy; its armies holding their own and even making ground in the east against the forces of Islam. As John Julius Norwich, noted historian of Byzantium has claimed, if not for this resistance in the east, Muslim armies would likely have swept into Europe by the shortest route, rather than having to take the longer road, via North Africa and Spain. In that case, the history and culture of Western Europe could well have been very different. It might, for example, have been Christians asking the Muslim government of Switzerland for permission to build a church, rather than the other way around.

Anyway, we can see these two peaks of success reflected in our figures for the city of Constantinople, with the city having a population of 400,000 in 950 CE. Not long after that, however, the tide turned against the eastern Romans. In 1071 the Seljuk Turks defeated the army of the Emperor Romanus Diogenes, sealing the fate of Asia Minor/Anatolia for the next millennium, and inspiring a succession of Popes to launch their crusading hordes into the east. When the zealots of the Fourth Crusade sacked and pillaged the city of their Christian brethren in 1204, the population of Constantinople had fallen to 150,000. Although the Byzantines regained their capital 50 years later, their empire was doomed. When the Ottoman Conqueror, Mehmet II hammered the final nails into its coffin in 1453, the mighty Rome of the East had fewer than 50,000 inhabitants, and the conquest was probably more symbolic than real.

But what happened next? A further slide into an under-populated, godless dark age? On the contrary, we can see from the table that, within little over a century, the population of the new Ottoman capital (whose rulers, incidentally, claimed for themselves, with some justification, the title of Roman Emperor), grew more than tenfold, to 600,000. At the peak of the Empire’s power in 1566, the ‘Magnificent’ Süleiman’s dominions stretched from the mouth of the Arabian Gulf to Algeria; from the Persian Gulf to the gates of Vienna in an arc passing the shores of the Caspian Sea, taking in the Crimea and Hungary.

After the conquest, Ottoman Sultans, from Beyazit II on, encouraged the repopulation of the imperial city, and not just with Muslim subjects. Jews and Arabs, fleeing the Inquisition in Spain, were offered safe haven. Greeks were encouraged to return, the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate being allowed to remain in the city, where it can still be found today. Armenian Christians were given the same special status to use their language and practise their religion. We may take such freedoms for granted today – but in the 16^th century, Western Europe was rather less tolerant. Apart from Spain, the French were beginning their religious purification, leading to the massacre and expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Protestants. England may have adopted a less ‘final’ solution, but Acts of Parliament prevented nonconformists (i.e. to the Church of England) from holding civil or military office, or being awarded university degrees until the Catholic emancipation of 1828. The first English immigrants to North America were, of course, fleeing religious persecution in their homeland.

But I digress. Another glance at our table shows that there was a decline in Istanbul’s population after its peak in 1566 – followed by a slow rise until it topped one million around the turn of the 19^th century. This certainly reflects the decline in the Empire’s fortunes, which resulted in Western leaders’ inventing the term ‘Sick Man of Europe’. No doubt the glee with which they employed this term was in proportion to the humiliation their predecessors had felt in earlier times when their ambassadors were obliged to learn the Ottoman language and seek the grace and favour of the Grand Turk on his home turf.

Istanbul/Constantinople was still a grand city – the British Consular building, built in 1844, is testament to this, perhaps the premier posting for a British diplomat of the day. The Dolmabahçe Palace on the European shore of the Bosporus, and a host of other lesser seaside palaces further testify to the city’s continuation as a major world city. Nevertheless, its stagnation is especially stark in contrast to the rapid growth of European cities in the throes of the Industrial Revolution. London, for example, grew from a city of one million, to 6.5 million from 1801 to 1901. New York City, still hovering around the half million mark in 1850, had increased tenfold to five million by the beginning of the First World War.

Alongside these figures of enormous growth, Istanbul’s figures are unspectacular. However, we can see that the population did increase 48% to over a million in forty years to 1897. The exact reasons for this growth can be debated, but one possible explanation has been documented: according to the historian Justin McCarthy, Muslim refugees amounting to 10% of the population flooded into the Ottoman Empire as a result of ethnic purification and state terror conducted by the Russians as they expanded into the Crimea and the Caucasus. Far from contributing to its economic growth, these homeless, penniless refugees were a drain on a government already struggling to maintain solvency.

From here, further reference to our table will show another fairly spectacular decline in numbers. In the 30 years to 1927, the population declined 36% to under 700,000. Correlating this to events in history, we see that, in 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The First Balkan War broke out, followed by a second a year later. In 1914 Europe exploded into the Great War, in which the Ottoman Empire, after fighting on at least three separate fronts, ended up on the losing side. The consequence of the harsh conditions imposed by the victorious Allies on the Ottoman Empire was the Turkish War of Independence, in which hostilities dragged on for a further three years until 1922. After ten consecutive years of war, it is not surprising that the numbers of Istanbul-dwellers declined.

After the declaration of the Turkish Republic, the city’s population began to increase slowly in time with the gradual recovery and economic development of the new nation. Istanbul passed one million inhabitants in the early 1950s, two million in the late 60s, and three million in the early 80s. Since then the growth has been exponential. The figure for 2007 includes the city proper, and doesn’t include the wider urban agglomeration. Whichever measure is used, various sources place Istanbul among the ten largest cities in the world. None of these sources, incidentally, ranked even the largest cities of Germany or Hungary in the top fifty.

Of course, size isn’t everything. But I can’t help feeling Istanbul deserved a ‘Cultural Capital’ year to itself.

Beyond Futility - Gallipoli Revisited

One of my first expeditions out of Istanbul was a school trip. I’d started working at a small private high school as a teacher of English. My English colleague and I tagged along with a coach-load of Turkish students and teachers. Our itinerary took in the small town of Çanakkale on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles, the archeological excavations of Troy, and the Aegean seaside village of Behramkale, alongside another historical site, the ancient city of Assos.

I was really looking forward to seeing the ruins of Troy, but it turned out that Çanakkale was, in fact, the most important destination for us. It was 17 March and the town was buzzing. We stayed overnight in a hotel, rose early on Saturday morning and found vantage points near the town square to watch the parade. There was music and dancing, military bands, students from dozens of local schools regaled in traditional folk costumes – all the ingredients of a major celebration. And what was the occasion? Çanakkale Victory Day.

Well, it’s possible that you may not immediately get the significance of this, so let me go on. After the parade, we crossed to the European side of the strait and were taken on a guided tour of the graveyards, museums and battle sites of what we grandsons and daughters of the British Empire know as the Gallipoli Campaign. We saw row upon row of gravestones in neatly kept cemeteries preserving the memory of the estimated quarter of a million young men who died in this tragic sideshow of World War I. We climbed to the highest point on the peninsula, Conk Bayırı in Turkish, known in English as the ridge of Chunuk Bair. There we saw the larger-than-life statue of Mustafa Kemal, the Turkish colonel whose success here began his rise to eventual founder and first president of the modern Republic of Turkey.

Nearby, on the ridge whose name is immortalised in a play by New Zealand author Maurice Shadbolt, there is another, slightly smaller monument. No statue adorns it – merely a laconic inscription in English, ‘From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth’. It commemorates the hundreds of New Zealand soldiers who died while capturing and holding, for a brief 48 hours (undoubtedly an eternity to the few who survived) this desolate peak which, it is said, held the key to the entire campaign.

Of course others died too. West Country men, from Gloucestershire and Wales fought and died alongside the New Zealanders . . . and hundreds of Ottoman soldiers fell too, urged on by their commanders who well understood the strategic importance of Conk Bayırı. They recaptured the ridge on 10 August, 1915, and Allied forces never again succeeded in getting so near to achieving their goal, though they remained four months more on the peninsula, pouring out their blood on the beaches, the slopes and in the ravines of Gallipoli, before the bitter Thracian winter convinced their commanders that the campaign was a lost cause.

Anyway, I guess you’re with me now. You’ve realised that the futile exercise in human slaughter we refer to as the Gallipoli Campaign, is known to the Turks as the War or Battle of Çanakkale. They didn’t have much to celebrate after the so-called Great War, so they are justifiably proud of their success in defending their homeland against Allied invasion. What bothered me, however, as I toured the trenches, trying to imagine the carnage that had taken place here, eighty years before, was . . . how come the Turks are celebrating their victory on March 18, when we hadn’t even got here till April 25?

My first thought was that it might have something to do with the Islamic calendar. After all, the Ottomans continued using the old lunar reckoning based on the Prophet Muhammed’s journey to Medina, right up until their final dissolution. But, no – 18 March, it seemed, was 18 March; and 25 April, by anybody’s calculation, comes five weeks later, so long as they occur in the same year, which they did, on this occasion: 1915.

What to make of that? So I did a little digging, and it turned out that the Turks, of course, have a very good reason for their choice of dates.

It’s important to understand, first of all, what exactly the ANZACs and other sons of the British Empire were doing on that desolate peninsula, some 2000 kilometres from the action on the Western Front. In fact, the situation in France and Belgium had bogged down pretty early on in the war. First Lord of the British Admiralty, Winston Churchill, came up with the idea of supporting Russia to mount a major offensive from the east. Problem was, the only realistic supply route for Russia was via the Black Sea and the Bosporus Straits, which were controlled by the Ottoman Empire, who, of course, were fighting on the German side. So, you take out the Ottomans, open up the Bosporus to Allied traffic, bolster up the Russkies and pincer the Germans and their allies by opening up a second major front in the east. Very neat. And who better to sort out the Ottomans than the Royal Navy, in those pre-air force days, the world’s premier fighting force.

Unfortunately, it didn’t work. The Ottomans had had fortifications on the Dardanelles for 500 years, and, with a little help from their German allies, had some fairly serious shore-based firepower at a point where the straits are less than two kilometres wide. They’d also had sufficient warning of the impending assault to lay mines as an extra deterrent. Nevertheless, the British, aided by the French, felt confident of their naval superiority, and sent a force of eighteen battleships plus assorted cruisers and destroyers to force their way through to Istanbul. Despite possessing such imposing names as ‘Irresistible’ and ‘Inflexible’ (and their French equivalents) three battleships were sunk and three more severely damaged. Discretion was deemed the better part of valour, and the Entente navies retired to lick their wounds. The sea approach was crossed off the list of strategies, and Allied thoughts turned to Plan B.

Plan B? You guessed it – a land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula aimed at neutralising the Ottoman shore defences so that the battleships could sail through with less discomfort, heave to in front of the Sultan’s Palace in Istanbul, and order the Grand Turk and his Sublime cohorts to come out with their hands up. Well, Europeans had been making jokes about ‘The Sick Man of Europe’ for so long that they didn’t expect much serious opposition. Perhaps a little less gung ho jingoism, and some knowledge of history might have resulted in a more realistic approach. It hadn’t been that long since the Ottoman army was feared throughout Europe; and while they were no longer threatening to overrun Christendom, they might have been expected to put up stiff resistance to an invasion of their homeland.

Carrying out an invasion from the sea is a notoriously difficult military activity. The Allied forces achieved it at Normandy in 1944, as a result of elaborate planning, enormous investment of manpower, equipment and supplies, huge naval and air force support, not to mention the participation of the United States of America. Even so, there were horrific casualties. In 1915 aerial warfare was in its infancy, and naval bombardment seems to have been as much of a curse as a blessing for the Allied troops on the ground. Nevertheless, Plan B went ahead. Regiments of young men from all parts of the British Empire were landed on Gallipoli beaches to face the machine-guns, artillery and bayonets of entrenched and determined troops fighting for the defence of their homeland.

Predictably, Plan B was a worse failure than Plan A. A two-day naval engagement was followed by a nine-month attempted invasion. Where the loss of three battleships and around 1000 sailors had been deemed unacceptable, a war of attrition was allowed to continue from April 1915 until January 1916, in which hundreds of thousands were sent to die in inhuman conditions with no realistic hope of success.

Some semblance of justice can be said to have been effected with the metaphorical rolling of heads that followed back in London after the withdrawal from Gallipoli. Winston Churchill lost his prestigious job as First Lord of the Admiralty. The British War Secretary, Lord Kitchener, kept his job, but lost his reputation, and, in fact, died the following year. General Sir Ian Hamilton, overall commander of the campaign, was nudged into retirement, as was General Sir Fredrick Stopford, who is reputed to have slept through the landings at Suvla Bay which he was, in theory, in charge of. The Liberal Government of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith lost its majority and was forced into a coalition with Conservatives led by David Lloyd George, who not long after, replaced him as Premier.

Little enough consolation for the families of the men who had died; and it is even more shocking to learn that, as far as the Turks are concerned, the war had been won before the first Allied soldier set foot on those fateful beaches.  The Royal Navy was the number one fighting force in the world at the time, and if they had succeeded in forcing a passage through the Dardanelles, the war, for the Ottomans at least, would have been pretty much over. Turning back His Majesty’s battleships reduced the threat to a land invasion, which the Ottoman military backed themselves to repel.

As, in fact, they did, despite the best efforts of the Allied soldiers who fought and suffered above and beyond the call of duty for upwards of eight months. In later years, as the truth of the horror and crass stupidity came out, one positive has been the growth of a sense of nationhood among the former colonies that sent men to fight for Britain. For the Turks, of course, the Çanakkale War threw up their one victorious commander, who subsequently went on to lead the struggle to establish the Republic of Turkey from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. Thousands of pilgrims who journey to the peninsula of Gallipoli on 25 April this year, and are welcomed by locals in a spirit of friendship, will have cause to remember his magnanimous words:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... You, the mothers, who sent your sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.

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As an epilogue to the foregoing, I would like to mention an interesting tale I came across recently while reading a novel by the Turkish author, Buket Uzuner. One detail of the Gallipoli campaign that is often mentioned in Allied reports is the fact that the first landings were made in the wrong place. Instead of coming shore on a gently sloping sandy beach, the unfortunate soldiers found themselves facing steep ravines and cliffs. Generally the mistake is attributed to the pre-dawn darkness in which the landings were made. In her 2002 novel, ‘The Long White Cloud’, Ms Uzuner has one of her characters, Ali Osman say:

. . . [A]ccording to local legend, Turkish fishermen noticed an unfamiliar buoy moored out near Kaba Tepe and grew immediately suspicious, being already in a wartime state of mind. They reported the incident to police headquarters in Gallipoli, then, that same night, with the help of a few soldiers, moved the buoy fifteen hundred metres north to Arıburnu Cove, a most unsuitable place for a military landing. At the time, there was only one Turk who believed that the enemy might land at the Arıburnu/Anzac Cove, and that was a colonel named Mustafa Kemal. Indicating that even the Turks did not take the signal buoy very seriously at the time.’

I haven’t been able to verify the story, but it’s an interesting and not implausible one, it seems to me.