When I talked with Turkish photographer Attila Durak back in 2007, he was just finishing up a project documenting the country’s many ethnic groups.
“Ask any intellectual here, ‘How many ethnic groups are living in Turkey?’ and they can’t list more than 12,” he told me. “Lots of photographers take photos of Anatolian people. But they never say who they are, just that they are beautiful people. But I photograph them and ask them who they are.”
Durak documented more than 40 distinct ethnic groups in the country. What might seem like a rather innocuous exercise in cultural anthropology was, in fact, quite a radical act.
Turkey, since the time of Ataturk, has been engaged in a nation-building enterprise, much like France in the 19th century, that’s emphasized a secular, civic identity. The fragmentation and collapse of the multiethnic Ottoman Empire was much on the minds of modern Turkey’s leaders, and they retained a paranoid fear that the country’s major ethnic groups might unravel the Ottoman’s successor state. This was one of the motivations behind the “dirty war” against the Kurds in the 1970s and 1980s.
The ruling Justice and Development party (AKP), which came to power in 2002, generally took a more relaxed attitude toward ethnic minorities. The cultural and even political expression of Kurdish identity, for instance, became more acceptable with the development of Kurdish-language TV shows and college programs.
The AKP’s embrace of a mild multiculturalism, as well its push for greater tolerance for the expression of religious identity, gained it support in those early years from various minority groups.
The AKP effectively brought Turkey into the 21st century. It overhauled the economy, forged a new vision of Islam and politics, revolutionized the country’s previously paranoid foreign policy, and challenged the stranglehold that the military had maintained over the political establishment.
At the beginning of its ascendancy, the AKP was very interested in accelerating the pace of accession to the European Union, a process already several decades in the making. Fears of a military coup, which had taken place every decade from 1960 into the 1990s, receded.
In three elections over 10 years, the AKP steadily increased its parliamentary share: 34 percent in 2002, 47 percent in 2007, and nearly 50 percent in 2011. In the 2014 presidential election, AKP candidate and former Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received over 51 percent of the vote.
It’s rare for such a profound transformation to remain popular at the polls, and it looked as though Turkey would be a major inspiration for countries in a similar developmental predicament.
In 2010, I wrote in TomDispatch, “In the twenty-first century, the Turkish model of transitioning out of authoritarian rule while focusing on economic growth and conservative social values has considerable appeal to countries in the developing world. This ‘Ankara consensus’ could someday compete favorably with Beijing’s and Washington’s versions of political and economic development.”
Over the last few years, however, Erdogan has shown signs of overreaching ambition tinged with paranoia. He has cracked down on protesters and journalists, at one point jailing more reporters than any country in the world.
