Even by the high standards of its recent history, Turkey has witnessed a dramatic two-step of spectacle and securitization this summer. Locals have become accustomed to the militarization of public space in Istanbul, as the police seize on any occasion – from May Day to Gay Pride – to erect barriers and huddle ominously around armoured vehicles. At the NATO summit in Ankara, diplomatic pageantry was complemented by tear gas and batons, as hordes of security forces quelled courageous protests by the country’s left. Following the conference, President Erdoğan endowed each visiting head-of-state with a pair of engraved revolvers and six rounds of live ammunition – several recipients expressed bemusement and unease over this eccentric parting gift, which uncomfortably literalized the political economy of violence that binds them together.
Last week saw another such jubilee: the tenth anniversary of the thwarted coup attempt of 15 July 2016. The events of that night – regularly described as a ‘saga’ by the media – have ascended to the status of national myth in the intervening decade. A cadre of mutinous officers attempted to seize the organs of the state. They commandeered jet fighters and bombed the Turkish Parliament in Ankara, deployed tanks to occupy the first bridge over the Bosporus in Istanbul and unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Erdoğan, then vacationing at the Aegean beach town of Marmaris. After initial confusion, a groundswell of resistance by the police, non-putschist soldiers and civilians thwarted the coup. The 253 resisters who died that night were summarily anointed as patriotic martyrs. Blame was laid at the feet of the exiled Muslim theologian Fethullah Gülen and his global network of devotees, though the exact relationship of the would-be golpistas to what the government calls ‘FETÖ’ (the Fethullahist Terror Organisation) remained murky.
Since then, FETÖ has become a national bugbear. According to the Cumhuriyet – one of Turkey’s few remaining opposition newspapers – some 720,580 people have been detained in operations against it. Any whiff of affiliation with Gülenist institutions or businesses is sufficient cause for dismissal from one’s job or worse; the number of those affected by the state’s witch hunt is difficult to estimate. Gülen himself died in October 2024 in Pennsylvania, where he had resided in exile since 1999, but his network – though fragmented – persists and the AKP continues to designate FETÖ as the state’s principal antagonist. In his anniversary speech, Erdoğan mused darkly that although ‘the threat originating in FETÖ has been quarantined, the danger persists’.
Despite the Gülenist spectre that still haunts the nation, the ‘Democracy and National Unity Day’ celebrations were festive and gargantuan. 253 boats – each representing one of the night’s ‘martyrs’ – sailed in a flotilla down the Bosporus. A massive parade traversed the crossing between Ortaköy and Beylerbeyi, officially renamed the Bridge of the Martyrs of July 15th in 2016. The marchers donned matching t-shirts in the national colours sporting the anniversary’s slogan: ‘Willpower is ours, victory is ours’. Commemorative events simultaneously occurred in each of the country’s eighty-one provinces, ensuring that the observance was nation-wide.
Erdoğan’s remarks encapsulated the feverish paranoia that saturates Turkish nationalism today. He insisted that the coup attempt was not merely a domestic conflict between factions within the Turkish state and society. Instead he drew a comparison with the turbulent period following World War I, when Atatürk’s triumph over the Greek Army in western Anatolia partially reversed the capitulation and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and laid the groundwork for the modern Turkish Republic: ‘Just as, a century ago, the National Assembly resisted and defeated the occupiers, on this occasion, during the treachery of 15 July, it refused passage to the pincers of imperialism.’ The analogy hinged on the abrogated 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, which envisioned a rump Ottoman state in central Anatolia, with substantial territories ceded to Greece, Armenia and a Kurdish polity, as well as the internationalization of Istanbul and the straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. As in the 1910s, so too a century later: ‘15 July was an updated imperialist project, carried out by domestic centres of power in collaboration with foreign allies, which aimed to revive the Treaty of Sèvres and transform Turkey into a colonial country.’
Paranoid nationalism is by no means new in Turkey, but it now comes cloaked in faddish discursive costume. Erdoğan’s address was filled with references to imperialism and colonialism, understood simply as external plots against Turkey’s sovereignty. As in Putin’s Russia, the angst of a beleaguered postimperial power finds expression in a vocabulary of counterhegemonic resistance to oppression and ‘the West’.
This rhetoric is more than mere ideological window dressing. Civil society organizations aligned with the government have recently cultivated leading lights of decolonial studies. In May, Istanbul’s Atatürk Cultural Centre hosted the annual gala conference for the World Decolonization Forum. Keynote speakers included Walter Mignolo, doyen of decoloniality, and Mireille Fanon Mendès-France, Frantz Fanon’s daughter; an appearance by Yusuf Islam (aka Cat Stevens) added some celebrity dazzle. The chief organizer of the forum was an Istanbul-based think tank by the name of ‘Institute Social’, which maintains a cozy relationship with the AKP; its general coordinator, İpek Coşkun Armağan, was an adviser to the Minister of National Education from 2017 to 2021 and currently serves as a member of the Presidential Board for Social and Youth Policies.
Nowhere is this discursive turn illustrated more graphically than at the Memory 15 July Museum, located at the Asian terminus of the rechristened Bosporus Bridge. The entry-level floor of the museum presents the background to the coup attempt and the chronology of the night’s violence, with a focus on the duplicity and malevolence of Gülen and FETÖ. While lurid, this display is predictable, even though certain elements, such as the collection of martyrs’ shoes – a clear nod to the iconography of Holocaust memorials – raise eyebrows. The lower floor, by contrast, is an anomaly. The specifics of the coup give way to a curated history of ‘hegemony and colonialism’. Panels depict a selection of key historical events: the Crusades; colonial conquests of the British and French Empires; the North Atlantic slave trade; the extermination of Native Americans; the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the post-World War I division of the Middle East, with an emphasis on Palestine. The opposite wall features a gallery of heroes who have ‘stood firm against exploitation and injustice’, a potpourri of political leaders and military men: Simón Bolivar, Sultan Abdülhamid II, Atatürk, Omar al-Mukhtar (the ‘Lion of the Desert’), Mahatma Gandhi, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, Alija Izetbegović, Nelson Mandela. Another series of panels establishes the connection with 15 July, proclaiming the current period ‘the era of coups’ and enumerating all of the military putsches that have occurred since World War II (531 by curatorial count).
Such historical bricolage is pressed into the service of a Manichean political vision: the insidious West oppresses the virtuous rest. This undergirds the museum’s most shocking exhibit: the centrepiece of the ‘hegemony and colonialism’ display is a life-size statue of an African slave in shackles. He kneels facing the viewer. Two large chains descend from his manacled hands, pinned behind his back, while a third attaches to a brutal iron collar around his neck. In the background, a video plays on a loop, detailing the origins of the North Atlantic Slave Trade with Columbus’s 1492 voyage and inter-imperial rivalry among the Spanish, Portuguese, British and French.
Just before one exits through the gift shop, a valedictory injunction beside a massive collage of photographs from the night of 15 July 2016 reminds the visitor not to forget: ‘These images, which we are unable to forget, have been recorded in our memories with our own eyes.’ But what, exactly, is one being enjoined to remember? The coup attempt is unlikely to suffer from collective amnesia in Turkey anytime soon – it has become a political catechism for Erdoğan, his government and its supporters. Rather, the Memory 15 July Museum would like its visitors to ‘remember’ that threats to Turkish state sovereignty are equivalent to the worst crimes and atrocities of imperialism and colonialism. For this delirious decolonial imagination, a statue of an African slave is a fitting avatar for a repressive, militaristic state; revolvers are appropriate diplomatic gifts; and memory is a weapon against those who would dissent from the national saga.
Read on: Cihan Tuğal, ‘Turkey at the Crossroads?’, NLR 127.