This is the story of the first of modern Turkey’s coups, which took place in 1960 and has proved the template, and often the inspiration, for the coups which have punctuated the national story ever since, including the failed one of July 2016. These defining events continue to fuel the ongoing feud which rages in a society riven between west and east, secularism and Islamic traditionalism, democracy and populist autocracy.
A dramatic account, told by a veteran of the Turkish scene, of the events leading up to that coup as well as the even more dramatic trials and executions which followed, the book includes reports from first-hand witnesses encountered in Istanbul, Ankara and elsewhere in Turkey, and unfolds against the backdrop of the author’s investigations which by chance took place in the months leading up to the attempted coup of 2016. It is a narrative rich in contemporary context, but also a powerful story of political subterfuge and score-settling, courtroom drama, state execution and ideological division.
It’s also about the importance in Turkey of the personality cult, with founder and liberator Ataturk pitted against Prime Minister Adnan Menderes – since his execution in 1961 a martyr in the eyes of many Turks and the man on whom the current autocrat, President Erdogan, likes to model himself. This is the book, then, that makes sense of the predicament in which Turkey finds herself today – torn between the western and secular ambitions of a minority elite and the religious and conservative instincts of the rural majority.
