Turgut Özal in Turkey was in some ways a comparable figure. He was the product (indirectly, and not the cause) of a military coup, and his problems and solutions were Pinochet’s, although the Turkish army conceded free elections quite quickly, such that octroyed solutions, as in Chile, were not, in anything other than the short term, possible. As with Pinochet, the intelligentsia were very hostile, and with the two films Midnight Express and Yol they produced damning, superbly made and, as with most political films, mendacious evidence. But as the outcome of the Turkish coup of 1980 the country was on the map again, and a figure or two spells it out. Turkey, in 2000, counted as twentieth economic power in the world. F16s made in Kirikkale, in the middle of Anatolia, won prizes. Istanbul had become an important financial centre, and the standard of living, overall, was such that Russians migrated to Turkey. At home, they died at sixty; Turks died at seventy. Back in 1923, when Turkey started off, she had been very backward. In the 1970s, the country was still in large part backward, and almost torn by civil war. By 1990 there had been a transformation, and Turkey was the only country between Athens and Singapore that attracted refugees — 2 million of them.
The repression after the Turkish coup followed Pinochet lines. The army had bided its time, and then moved massively. From 1980 to 1984 there were 180,000 arrests; 65,000 people were imprisoned, 40,000 were sentenced, and there were 326 death sentences (though in the end only twenty-seven executions). On the other hand, twenty-six rocket-launchers and 750,000 handguns were seized, and the casual killings stopped overnight. Meanwhile the politicians were kept aside — the nationalist Alparslan Türkeş with the Islamist Necmettin Erbakan on Uzunada near İzmir, the others at a village near Gallipoli. Hundreds of the politicians were banned. A new constitution was adopted, by referendum, in November 1982, and an election was held a year later; but this time the politicians were supposed to act under severe restriction. The system of proportional representation was abolished, because it had allowed small parties to make the running, and a vote of 10 per cent was needed for any representation at all in parliament. There would be State Security Courts with great powers, and order was at last restored. On previous occasions the generals, taking power, had tended to scratch their heads and drift, but now, in 1980, they had a strategy in mind: the political confusions must be stopped, and that meant coherent behaviour. There was one very significant difference with Chile: it was not a general who took power, the senior one, Kenan Evren, contenting himself with the mainly ceremonial presidency, and spending his time painting (at which he was good).
The overall idea seems to have been to collect moderates of the Demirel and Republican sides perhaps under the leadership of one of the generals’ trusted Republicans, such as the veteran Turhan Feyzioğlu. Oddly enough, the old politicians, even in internment, held to illusions, perhaps precisely because their internment was so mild; they never imagined that the National Security Council could do without them, and Demirel, especially, was constantly being telephoned by senior civil servants and politicians whom the generals consulted. One man was essential — Turgut Özal, the international money-man. He was not particularly keen to have any sort of state-oriented political team in charge. The generals, for their part, despised the politicians, and when they found they could not easily re-form a civilian government, on 18 September they simply handed full powers to the commanders of the martial law districts and nominated an admiral as prime minister. Özal was happy enough with this solution, for he could push through the economic reforms that he and his business friends wanted to see. Authority tended therefore to settle lower down in the pyramid, and Özal found it coming his way, as under-secretary of the plan.
Özal did not believe in plans — he used to laugh, as to how, coming back through the customs at Istanbul airport, he waddled, because he had worn layers of smuggled tights for his wife in thick layers, to avoid paying duty. He had worked at the World Bank and been an irrigation engineer. Turks older than him would also have been engineers or economists, but they would have been from the urban middle (or higher) classes, and secular. Özal was the product of the Turkey that they had created, in so far as education and mobility had reached far into the depths of Anatolia, and had affected places such as Malatya, where he came from. He was part Kurdish, and in religion belonged to one of the stricter orders (tarikat: the often-used ‘sect’ is a mistranslation, because the differences are in practice, not theology). An engineering training, at the Istanbul Technical University, had not dented the piety, and when he was at the World Bank he had his prayer mat at the ready. No drink, of course, but far too much to eat, and far too many cigarettes (the combination killed him almost absurdly early, in 1993: as with Atatürk, who had also died far too early, this time from cigarettes and rakı, you wonder what would have happened if he had gone on longer, for he was a great creative force). Özal was obviously the Americans’ man, and he could deliver the IMF. He might just have remained as the vital cog in the generals’ machine, but events pushed him into prominence. The generals did not, on the whole, like him: they were very firm secularists, were generally from Western-leaning Thrace or the Aegean, and were even sometimes of Alevi origin, regarding ultra-pious Islam as so much ju-jitsu. Besides, they, without complaint, worked within the State and did not in their heart of hearts see why the economy could not be run like the army, orders issued and obeyed. They even tried to run politics through a dummy party, with two others to represent a sort of emredersin (‘yessir’) opposition.
The reforms announced on 24 January 1980 had followed lines that the IMF and Washington had been recommending with increasing insistence since they had proved to be successful in Pinochet’s Chile. Price controls were at least relaxed, and the state enterprises lost less — $62m as against $290m earlier. Quota lists for imports were cut to six months, as against the earlier twelve, and the trade deficit continued, but the IMF gave a standby credit of $1.25bn — the greatest ever given to date. An essential was to stop the inflation, which meant initial pain, as it did in Chile or for that matter England. There would be serious devaluation — in effect, almost by half — and there would be reliance on an export-led recovery. This would mean freeing foreign exchange from controls — and in Turkey these had been very onerous indeed. You even paid a tax if you left the country. Taxes in general were heavy, and if you bought anything at all, you were required by law to keep the sales record. There was very widespread evasion, the black economy accounting for a good half of sales, and at some stage the system would have to be overhauled, but the budget must first of all be brought nearer to balance. Of course these things were difficult to achieve, and the civil service was deeply unsympathetic; the generals were very irritable, and the large private concerns would much have preferred to co-operate with Demirel, whom they knew (not least as a Mason) from old. Özal, in the eyes of the establishment a rough peasant, though nominated deputy prime minister, was quite isolated, and when the generals sensed his ambition, they drove him out. But he came back, for an odd reason.