Recommended reading (but pour yourself a cuppa first, it's another long one).
At nine o’clock on the night of July 15th, General Hulusi Akar, the chief of the Turkish Army’s general staff, heard a knock on his office door in Ankara, the nation’s capital. It was one of his subordinates, General Mehmet Dişli, and he was there to report that a military coup had begun. “We will get everybody,” Dişli said. “Battalions and brigades are on their way. You will soon see.”
Akar was aghast. “What the hell are you saying?” he asked.
In other cities, officers involved in the coup had ordered their units to detain senior military leaders, block major roads, and seize crucial institutions like Istanbul Atatürk Airport. Two dozen F-16 fighters took to the air. According to statements from some of the officers involved, the plotters asked Akar to join them. When he refused, they handcuffed him and flew him by helicopter to an airbase where other generals were being held; at one point, one of the rebels pointed a gun at Akar and threatened to shoot.
After midnight, a news anchor for Turkish Radio and Television was forced to read a statement by the plotters, who called themselves the Peace at Home Committee, a reference to one of the country’s founding ideals. Without mentioning the President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, by name, the statement said that his government had destroyed the country’s institutions, engaged in corruption, supported terrorism, and ignored human rights: “The secular and democratic rule of law has been virtually eliminated.”
For a time, the rebels seemed to have the upper hand. Provincial governors and community leaders surrendered or joined in, along with police squads. In a series of text messages discovered after the coup, a Major Murat Çelebioğlu told his group, “The deputies of the Istanbul police chief have been called, informed, and the vast majority have complied.”
A Colonel Uzan Şahin replied, “Tell our police friends: I kiss their eyes.”
But the plot seemed haphazard. A helicopter team sent to locate Erdoğan in Marmaris, the resort town where he was vacationing, failed to capture the President, despite a shootout with guards at his hotel. The rebels took control of only one television station, and left cellular-phone networks untouched. Erdoğan was able to record a video message, played on CNN Turk, in which he called on Turkish citizens to “take to the streets.” They did, in huge numbers. Faced with overwhelming popular resistance, the troops had to decide between shooting large groups of demonstrators and giving up. By morning, the uprising had been broken.
Erdoğan declared a national emergency and, in the weeks that followed, made a series of appearances to remind the nation of the cost of the coup. Some of the plotters had brutally shot demonstrators and comrades who opposed them. One rebel major, faced with resistance, had texted his soldiers, “Crush them, burn them, no compromise.” More than two hundred and sixty people were killed and thousands wounded. The F-16s had bombed the parliament building, blasting holes in the façade and scattering chunks of concrete in the hallways.
In Erdoğan’s telling, the coup was not a legitimate sign of civic unrest. In fact, it did not even originate in Turkey; the rebels “were being told what to do from Pennsylvania.” For Turks, the coded message was clear: Erdoğan meant that the mastermind of the coup was Fethullah Gülen, a seventy-eight-year-old cleric, who had been living in exile for two decades in the Poconos, between Allentown and Scranton.
Gülen, a dour, balding proselytizer with a scratchy voice, had fled Turkey in 1999, fearing arrest by the country’s military rulers. From afar, though, he had served as a spiritual guide for millions and overseen a worldwide network of charter schools, known for offering scholarships to the poor. Gülen’s sermons and writings emphasized reconciling Islam with contemporary science, and promoted charity; his movement is called Hizmet, or “service.” For many in the West, it represented a hopeful trend in Islam. Gülen met with Pope John Paul II and the leaders of major Jewish organizations, and was fêted by President Bill Clinton, who saluted his “ideas of tolerance and interfaith dialogue.”
To many outside observers, Erdoğan’s accusation sounded like something out of an airport thriller: a secret cabal burrowing into a modern state and awaiting orders from its elderly leader on a hilltop half a world away. For Erdoğan, though, it was a statement of political reality. Gülen, once a crucial ally, had become the leader of a shadow state, determined to bring down the Administration. In the following weeks, Erdoğan’s forces detained tens of thousands of people who he claimed were loyal to Gülen. In outraged statements to the United States government, he demanded that Gülen be extradited, so that he could be made to face justice in a Turkish court.
[...]
The irony of the attempted coup is that Erdoğan has emerged stronger than ever. The popular uprising that stopped the plot was led in many cases by people who disliked Erdoğan only marginally less than they disliked the prospect of a military regime. But the result has been to set up Erdoğan and his party to rule, with nearly absolute authority, for as long as he wants. “Even before the coup attempt, we had concerns that the government and the President were approaching politics and governance in ways that were designed to lock in a competitive advantage—to insure you would have perpetual one-party rule,” the second Western diplomat said.
Erdoğan has solidified his power, but he has also put himself in the awkward position of denouncing a man who enabled his rise. Talking about Gülen and his movement, he can seem almost to be in pain. “They came asking for seventeen universities, and I approved all of them,” he told a crowd in 2014. “He asked for land for schools, we gave it to him,” he added. “We gave them all kinds of support.” Erdoğan rarely spoke Gülen’s name in these speeches, but this time he addressed him and his followers directly. “So this is treason?” he asked, sounding dismayed. “What did you ask for that you couldn’t get?”
The day after the coup, Gülen emerged from seclusion, summoning reporters to his compound for a press conference, at which he denied any involvement. As he watched his followers being arrested en masse—and as he became a national pariah—an edge crept into his voice. He told his followers that Erdoğan had staged the coup, and that no one outside Turkey believed that Gülen was responsible. In a sermon recorded a few days later, he said, “Let a bunch of idiots think they have succeeded, let them celebrate, let them declare their ridiculous situation a celebration, but the world is making fun of this situation, and that is how it is going to go down in the history books.
“Be patient,” he told his followers. “Victory will come.”
Gülen is old and ailing; it seems unlikely that he will be able to keep up the fight for much longer. Listening to his sermon, I thought back to my meeting with him last year. Even then, his movement was being dismantled, his followers on the run. I asked how he thought he would be remembered, and he gave me an answer the like of which I’ve never heard from another leader in politics or religion. “It may sound strange to you, but I wish to be forgotten when I die,” he said. “I wish my grave not to be known. I wish to die in solitude, with nobody actually becoming aware of my death and hence nobody conducting my funeral prayer. I wish that nobody remember me.”
tl;dr: There's reason to believe the coup actually was a Gülenist plot, but that doesn't mean that Erdoğan isn't using it as an excuse to sweep aside all oppostion within the state.
