Washington Kurdish Institute
August 3, 2020
Since their establishment, neither Iraq nor Turkey have experienced true democracy. While the level of state repression in each of these relatively young countries has ebbed and flowed since their founding, both have experienced specific periods of darkness and bloodshed under certain absolutist dictators. In Iraq, the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein from 1979 to 2003 was a period of large scale persecution of Iraqis of all different religious affiliations and ethnicities, including mass forced displacement and genocide, along with disastrous wars of choice, and a wholesale looting of national resources by the ruling tyrant and his family. Turkey, on the other hand, is currently entering a new stage of repressive one-man rule under current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. As Turkey’s economy collapses and support for Erdogan wanes, he has consolidated his control of the country’s decision-making bodies and used the country’s security forces and judiciary to prevent any expression of dissent or threat to his iron-fisted rule.
Just days after formally becoming the president of Iraq in July 1979, Saddam Hussein convened an assembly of the members of his ruling party, the Ba’ath Party, and initiated a blood purge of party members, eliminating many members of the old guard who could have potentially represented a threat to his unchecked rule. Similarly, though in a less overtly bloody fashion, Erdogan has, time and time again purged those who refused to back his moves to transition Turkey to an executive presidency system, granting him unquestioned authority and decision-making abilities. Those purged from his own Justice and Development Party (AKP) include a number of the party’s co-founders. Outside of the AKP, the military and judiciary have weathered waves of purges as well. Like Saddam, Erdogan built a measure of support among citizens during more prosperous economic times in concert with the use of aggressive measures against opposition forces, and now uses increasingly authoritarian measures to stamp down on dissent now that the economy is deteriorating due incompetent foreign and domestic policy and to expensive military misadventures.
Saddam’s two sons, Uday and Qusay, were vicious tools of the Iraqi regime. Both sons were involved in all sorts of crimes against humanity and illegal money-making schemes which kept the ruling family wealthy while the Iraqi people struggled under the weight of both UN sanctions and the ruling kleptocracy, and they were killed together when resisting detention by US forces in Mosul a few months after the fall of the Saddam regime. The news of their demise was celebrated by Iraqis for days to come. In today’s Turkey, Erdogan’s sons, both described as businessmen, have faced numerous accusations of money laundering and other financial crimes, while his son–in–law Selcuk Bayraktar is the chief technology officer of Baykar, a company developing and manufacturing military drones to support his father–in–law’s various wars. Like Saddam, the corruption perpetrated by Erdogan’s family network takes place in the open while the country undergoes an ongoing economic crisis.
Saddam’s military aggression inside and outside of Iraq have decimated Iraq as a state. After Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 and declared its annexation, a deadly embargo was imposed on Iraq which lasted until the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. This embargo, and Saddam’s prioritization of his own power and wealth over the welfare of Iraqis, destroyed the country’s middle class and plunged Iraqis into poverty. Prior to the invasion and short-lived occupation of Kuwait, Iraq fought Iran for eight years, with hundreds of thousands killed on both sides and Iraq saddled with severe debt. At present, Erdogan is also finding himself entangled in wars of choice, with the Turkish military now directly involved in civil wars in Syria and Libya, attempting to expand a zone of occupation in Iraq, and interfering in Yemen and the Mediterranean. However, unlike Saddam in his later years of power, Erdogan’s military aggression enjoys the tacit blessing of major Western expansion and occupation instincts are blessed by the west since Turkey is a NATO member – one that is nonetheless coordinating with Russia and various jihadist militant groups.
Erdogan and Saddam share many traits. As nationalist dictators, they were both driven by an intense hatred for the Kurdish people that has manifested itself in sustained and bloody campaigns of aggression. The final years of the bloody Iran-Iraq war coincided with Saddam’s Anfal Campaign, a genocide perpetrated by Iraq’s armed forces against the Kurds of Iraq that resulted in the deaths of over 180,000 Kurds, the destruction of thousands of villages, and the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands. Like Saddam, Erdogan targets Kurdish opposition groups and Kurdish civilians as a priority both within Turkey’s borders and beyond in Iraq and Syria. Throughout Turkey, the elected representatives of the Kurds face dismissal and prison time and, outside of Turkey’s borders, Turkey uses air strikes and coordinates with various jihadist militant groups to kill and displace Kurds. The Turkish military invasion of the once peaceful Kurdish majority region of Afrin in 2018 killed over 600 civilians and displaced over 200,000. In October of last year, the Turkish military invaded additional areas in northern Syria, resulting in further death and displacement of locals and expanding Turkey’s zone of occupation in the country.
Today, most of the Turkey’s population feel the far-reaching impact of the ongoing economic crisis, and those who dare to criticize Erdogan face dismissal from their jobs and even jail time. In an attempt to further control the flow of information in the country, Erdogan has once again targeted social media, placing harsh regulations on foreign social media companies with over 1 million users in Turkey, which would include both Facebook and Twitter.
Like Saddam, Erdogan is building a support network which includes many of the world’s most infamous dictatorships such as Iran and Venezuela, and similar to Saddam in his later years, Erdogan promotes religious fanaticism and sectarian hatred, portraying himself as a religiously-motivated leader. As Erdogan faced increasing criticism and international isolation, he forced the conversion of Istanbul’s famous Hagia Sophia (which was formerly a church, then a mosque, and then a historical museum since 1935) back into a mosque, and fans the flames of sectarian hatred. As Saddam coped with the disastrous consequences of his ill fated invasion of Kuwait, he launched the so-called Faith Campaign in 1993, pursuing a Islamist social agenda, introducing more religion into the national educational curriculum, and building elaborate mosques as sanctions took their toll on society.
It can be expected that Erdogan’s fate will, to some extent, track that of Saddam, though, like in Iraq, the citizenry will bear much more pain before any change occurs, and will likely live the consequences of disastrous, militarized, dictatorial rule long after the tyrant is gone. Those western powers now grappling with their guilt in supporting Saddam’s regime prior to the invasion of Kuwait could benefit from reevaluating their ongoing relationship with Erdogan and acquiescence to his persecution of Turkey’s citizens, military aggression, and war crimes.