Two million Turks have gathered in Istanbul to protest President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his main rival, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on trumped-up corruption and terror charges. Turks are not stupid; they see through Erdoğan’s cynicism and comment on its ironies: Erdoğan accuses İmamoğlu of corruption, but Erdoğan not only has pending corruption cases dating to his own tenure as mayor, but he has since accumulated billions of dollars in unexplained wealth. He accuses İmamoğlu of supporting terror, but Turkish journalists photographed Erdoğan’s intelligence service transporting weaponry to an Al Qaeda affiliate in Turkey.
The kicker is Erdoğan’s decision to cancel İmamoğlu’s university degree, without which he does not qualify for the presidency. Not only was Erdoğan’s own degree fraudulent, but the grounds for dismissing İmamoğlu’s degree were the illegitimacy of the university he attended in occupied northern Cyprus. As with its universities, so too is it with its entire regime.
President Donald Trump sees himself as a winner and despises losers. Whereas he may once have seen Erdoğan as a strongman, it is now clear that the would-be sultan wears no clothes. Trump and his team are correct: Turkey is important, but Turkey and Erdoğan are not synonymous. Simply put, Trump should dump Erdoğan.
Turkey’s elite soldiers swear allegiance to the state and the people of Turkey, not one man who holds the constitution and rule of law with disdain.
The Turkish protestors now fight for the soul of their nation. Every protestor on the streets of Istanbul is as consequential for the future of modern Turkey as was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Protests might matter in democracies; however, Turkey is not a democracy. To succeed, they must march on Turkey’s palaces and prisons. If Erdoğan does not helicopter to the airport and flee the country, they should detain him, pending trial, even if passions are such that those who reach him first might simply hang him and release political prisoners, ranging from İmamoğlu to detained Kurdish politician Selahattin Demirtas and philanthropist Osman Kevala.
Erdoğan, like Bashar al-Assad in Syria, may be tempted to hang on. While the United States will never say directly, the White House likely would not look askance at regional states that would offer reward to any Erdoğan bodyguard who turns their guns on the would-be despot to arrest him or, if he resists, to kill him. After all, Turkey’s elite soldiers swear allegiance to the state and the people of Turkey, not one man who holds the constitution and rule of law with disdain.
Turkey is at an inflection point. The age of Erdoğan must end. Turks can either take the next step, or they will have no one but themselves to blame for Turkey’s descent into dictatorship, state failure, and eventual civil war.
