The perils of polarisation

“Turkey is a polarised society” is a political truism which has lingered so long that it is in danger of becoming a platitude. This in turn brings the even greater danger that Turkish society takes for granted a dangerous addiction to self-harm. Where there is polarisation there is no dialogue and where there is no dialogue, there is no consensus, no democracy and no possibility of a citizenry plotting a rational course ahead.
 
“When we used to go out on the streets, our supporters would love us very much and our opponents would respect us. Now I detect looks filled with hatred,” said Turkey’s deputy prime minister, Bülent Arınç. He is describing Turkey where half the population votes for the government and the other looks  at its members with loathing.
 
This should have been a warning to his own Justice and Development Party (AKP), but it is one which it refuses to hear. Not long after he spoke, a brawl broke out in parliament – if that is an accurate description of MPs hitting each other over the head with metal chairs. The fight appears to have been started by government MPs trying to prevent the opposition using stalling tactics against a bill which among other things gives security forces a licence to kill demonstrators damaging property.
 
This is all of relevance to Turkey’s journalistic community who are often all too guilty stoking the fires of social division. It is one thing to have a pro-government press prepared to take the official side of every story – another to have a sycophantic media that refuses to proffer the honest words of advice any government needs to hear.  Rather than consider the implications of Arınç’s warning, much of the loyalist press prefers to stick its head in the sand.
 
In the aftermath of the battle on the floor of parliament, many papers did print photos of the opposition MPs battered and bruised on the assembly floor. But what was going through the heads of the editors of Star and Sabah newspapers who published pictures of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan…kissing a baby?
 
There are even more disgraceful recent examples. Even the sexual assault and murder of a Mersin student, Özgecan Arslan could not unite the nation in collective grief. Yes, both sides condemned the brutality but each accused the other of exploiting the incident to its own political advantage. Again, the Turkish president whose job it is to bring people together could not resist the temptation of pushing them apart. He condemned the women’s movement “dance against violence” as unseemly and contrary to Turkish traditions. He told them to recite a prayer for the dead instead.
 
There is an engrained suspicion among Turkey’s rulers that any social movement they can not control must somehow be directed against themselves. And yet its own methods of controlling those whom they do not like have set a terrible precedent. The president’s injunction last November to his nation’s shopkeepers to be police,  judge and adjudicate the social order resulted in a  store owner stabbing a 49 man to death after a stray snowball hit his window. It is all too symbolic that the man who died, Nuh Köklü, was not just a journalist but an honourable one. 
 
Under the circumstances, it is hard not to reach the conclusion that polarisation in Turkish society is not accidental but deliberately cultivated.  The compulsion of politicians and the president in particular to portray themselves as a victim of infinite plots and conspiracies, is part of a well-rehearsed strategy  With everyone from the CIA to the Gülenists determined to pull the president down, who could blame Turkey for its “turn to authoritarianism,” writes Phillip Stephens in the Financial Times.
 
It is the well-known obligation of the media to call its politicians’ bluff.  This does not interfere with its privilege to weigh the evidence and lean in its editorial columns to one party rather than another. Yet to be complicit in the erosion of its own freedoms, to shout down the debate its society craves,  has nothing to do with journalism.