Fifty Shades of the Ülkücü Movement (2)

After 1970, as the Cold War gathered pace, the MHP’s “Turkish-Islamic Ideal” began to bear fruit in Turkey, an important NATO member. The ülkücü (“idealist”) movement spread rapidly, especially among devout, conservative young people from the provinces. In commando camps set up on Alparslan Türkeş’s personal instructions under the supervision of Dündar Taşer, thousands of young people received military training from officers. Before 1980, the ülkü ocakları (“idealist hearths”) had turned into a paramilitary structure in which, alongside sincere idealists, violence-prone lumpen groups and criminals with close ties to the mafia and the intelligence services ran rampant. Thousands of people lost their lives in the clashes between idealists and revolutionaries in this period. Massacres backed by the deep state in which idealists were involved, such as the Maraş and Çorum events, also left wounds in society’s memory that have never healed.

Because I think it sheds light on the clashes between idealists and revolutionaries before 1980, I would like to open a parenthesis and draw attention to a name from the Fourteen (Ondörtler) group. When the lives of the officers in the Fourteen are examined, although most embraced a Turkism that drifted to the right, the name of General Staff Captain İrfan Solmazer is mentioned together with Doğan Avcıoğlu, the ideologue of Kemalist socialism. In his book “Kimse Kızmasın Kendimi Yazdım” (Let No One Be Angry, I Wrote About Myself), Hasan Cemal explains that İrfan Solmazer was active in left-wing groups before the 1971 memorandum in these words:

“In the days when Turkey was heading for the coup of 12 March (1971), revolutionary youths close to us threw dynamite into the garden of the Freemasons’ Association right next to the office of Devrim magazine in Kızılay, where I worked. Those sticks of dynamite had been brought in the boot of İrfan Solmazer’s car.

Retired naval officer Erol Bilbilik, who had taken part in the junta activities before 12 March and was close to our group at the time, describes İrfan Solmazer as follows: One day we gathered at Orhan Kabibay’s house. Hidayet Ilgar, Talat Turan, İrfan Solmazer and many others were there. At one point İrfan Solmazer said to me, ‘Erol, you’ve neglected the navy men.’ When I asked whom I had neglected, he said, ‘You’ve neglected Sarp Kuray and Deniz Gezmiş, you’ve never made contact. But I’m having them set off bombs in Istanbul and Ankara like popping corn.’ When I asked what else they were doing, İrfan Solmazer replied: ‘We sit down with Deniz Gezmiş, Sarp Kuray and the like and democratically decide to spray the front door of the American Embassy with bullets. I give the order. I say, (Deniz Gezmiş, rake the US Embassy and vanish!). I give Sarp Kuray the order, (Go and bomb that place!).’ Orhan Kabibay certainly knew about these things. So they used Deniz Gezmiş and Sarp Kuray. İrfan Solmazer was flown to Germany 24 hours before 12 March.”

Dündar Taşer and İrfan Solmazer, once comrades in the junta group, years later train young Turks who will kill each other in the fight between right and left. Isn’t that interesting?

I would like to close the parenthesis by adding that İrfan Solmazer, together with Turhan Feyzioğlu, father of Metin Feyzioğlu, left the CHP and founded the Reliance Party (Güven Partisi).

The 12 September Coup: The Great Rupture

12 September deeply affected the idealist movement, as it did all political formations. Many idealists, including the movement’s leader Alparslan Türkeş, were arrested. Idealists who were tried, imprisoned and tortured began to question the state for the first time. In the view of the idealist base, the movement had “fought” communism with all its might and had given “thousands of martyrs” for this cause. Moreover, during this struggle it had received serious support from the state’s intelligence and security forces. But the anti-12 September and anti-state mood that formed among the idealist base did not exist in Türkeş and the party’s top leadership. While the top echelon did not abandon its traditional loyalty to the state, it tried to get along with the 12 September administration. This attitude of Türkeş and the leadership was seen as unacceptable, especially by idealists in prison.

As the idealist movement’s unshakeable motto, the trinity of “leader, organisation, doctrine”, wore thin as a result of these developments, a new outlook with strong Islamic sensitivities, which would later become the Great Unity Party (BBP), began to organise independently of Türkeş.

What delayed the breakaways in this period was the emergence of the PKK. When the development of the idealist movement is examined, it can be seen that in periods without an enemy the base struggles to stay together. In a sense, therefore, the new enemy, the Marxist separatist terrorist organisation PKK, breathed new life into an idealist ideology split into different factions and delayed breakaways that might have created alternatives. After 1990, alongside PKK terrorism, we see an explosion in crimes involving “idealists” wearing state uniforms. The Susurluk crash in 1996, Alparslan Türkeş’s death in 1997 and the 28 February decisions shook the idealist movement. The MHP entered parliament in the 1999 election with around 18 per cent of the vote and became a coalition partner. But in the 2002 election, held after the 2001 economic crisis, it fell below the threshold, and the idealists, spread across the MHP and the centre right, ended up outside parliament.

In this period, deep-state apparatuses that had infiltrated the Turkish Armed Forces, the police and MİT also began to be pressed back by democratic forces. This pressure gave the AKP, which came to power in 2002, great advantages in terms of democratisation. In this period we also saw that the ulusalcı (secular-nationalists), who fiercely opposed the AKP’s coming to power, were not sufficiently supported by the idealist base. It could even be said that this was one reason why their attempt to prepare a coup through their extensions in the armed forces came to nothing.

The Ergenekon Trials

With the Ergenekon trials, for the first time in the history of the Republic of Turkey, people were prosecuted before a coup had taken place. As the links between the defendants came to light through the evidence obtained, new operations were carried out, and each new operation brought new debates. That almost all those who appeared to be in leading or guiding positions were figures emphasising Turkish nationalism and Kemalism inevitably drew attention to the traditional channel of Turkish nationalism, the MHP. But the MHP and the ülkü ocakları were not subject to any investigation in the Ergenekon trials. Devlet Bahçeli, who at first remained unresponsive and watched, took an opposing position in the later stages of the case. He began to criticise the case and the AKP harshly. But these criticisms did not satisfy those on trial. The political pressure of the MHP and the CHP was not enough. At this stage, those tried in the Ergenekon cases understood that their salvation lay in coming to terms with Erdoğan. (Update: in April 2016 the Court of Cassation overturned the convictions in the main Ergenekon case.)

They came to terms with the AKP regime, which had reached a peak of corruption and incompetence at the cost of destroying the Republic’s achievements. Making a U-turn, the MHP became the AKP’s most important partner. Doğu Perinçek, the revolutionary who has been a controversial figure in every era, also joined the MHP-AKP partnership. The new consensus unsettled the idealist base. The party leadership’s siding with the AKP sparked debate among the base. The intra-party opposition led by Meral Akşener resulted in the founding of the İYİ Party, where disaffected idealists gathered.

Later on, because of its policies towards the AKP-MHP partnership that carried the country to one-man rule, claims began to be voiced loudly that the İYİ Party had been set up to consolidate the idealist base. After 15 July, the MHP-AKP consensus, having achieved its aim, placed people from its own base in the posts of the civil servants it had purged. The police were shared between the political Islamists and the criminal idealists who had lost power after the Susurluk scandal of 1996. At Devlet Bahçeli’s request, mafia leaders in prison were released. In the armed forces, the ulusalcı structures, which thought the field would be left to them with the expulsion of thousands of soldiers, were largely neutralised. People committed to the government were given advantages in admission to the military academies. Turkey’s hundred-year balances changed completely.

To sum up, the historical development of the idealist movement, back on the agenda with the assassination of former Ülkü Ocakları president Sinan Ateş, is full of question marks. However you look at it, it is strange that a party whose political support is around ten per cent has been among the key actors determining the country’s fate for 70 years. Nor can we say “it stepped in and saved the country from an impasse”, because every time the MHP and the structure it represents stepped in, the country regressed in every sense.