Starting Position/Historical Context
by Nathalie Borgers
2025 marks the 45th anniversary of the military putsch in Turkey on 12 September 1980. Only a few newspapers have so far taken an interest in its importance. Yet, this event is an essential key to understanding Turkey’s drifting away today. The military putsch marked a break with the country’s contemporary history and fundamentally changed the Turkish state apparatus. It introduced a new political, economic, and social era which continues to persist four decades later.
With extraordinary violence, the military junta shut down opposition parties and media companies, outlawed unions, imprisoned hundreds of thousands of people, and systematically tortured leftist activists. This suffocated the infrastructure that could ultimately have led to a social democracy on the European model. General Kenan Evren was freed by this opposition and worked on a new constitution which he labelled democratic, but which in reality founded an authoritarian and autocratic regime. The ostensible fundamental freedoms were dependent upon the condition of not endangering the state – a status that, once again, the state alone could judge.
Today, this constitution remains the foundation of the Turkish government. President Erdogan can thus label any criticism of his policies as an attack on the integrity of the state and throw suspects in jail without trial. In this regard, the country’s situation is dramatic: All the leaders and representatives of the only opposition party, the HDP, currently finds themselves in jail or in exile despite democratic elections. The same goes for all critical voices, be they academics, journalists, lawyers, spokespeople from chambers of commerce, or unionists.
At that time, the Turkish army, which held power from 1980 to 1983, not only eliminated the opposition, it also ensured the liberalisation of the country’s economy as well as the Islamisation of society. After bloody repression threw the country into a state of terror, the junta was able to implement the measures for “neo-liberalisation” the International Monetary Fund had wanted for decades. These measures consisted in massive privatisation, wage cuts, the elimination of workers’ rights, cuts in public funding for education and health, etc. To achieve this goal, the junta sought out support amongst the most conservative forces in the country, including religious brotherhoods, which were even legalised as a result. Furthermore, an obligation for a Sunni Islam religious education in primary schools was embedded in the new constitution. This was in harmony with America’s Green Belt Policy to combat communism by supporting political Islam in the border regions of the USSR.
It is worth noting the fact that back then there was little discussion about the true reasons behind the putsch and its consequences. Actually, Western countries were happy with the putsch. Meanwhile, the taking of power by an authoritarian and pro-American regime in Turkey, which guaranteed the protection of Western interests from turbulence, could only calm alliances in the very tense international context. The putsch was even prepared with NATO’s help. Publicly, this meant: only the army can liberate the country from the violence between ‘radical leftists and extremist, right-wing militias’ who also butted heads in street fights. The coup on 12 September 1980 was justified in this way and the army was portrayed as the sole guarantor of the Republic.
The official discourse, including all literature and articles in the press about the putsch, portrayed the different opposing groups on the same level. But nothing is further from the truth. If the situation at the origin of the junta’s intervention actually deteriorated into a “street war” between opposing fractions, this is because the extremist, right-wing militias the authorities had begun instrumentalising in 1975 systematically attempted to kill leftist opponents of the regime. Only in the last few decades has research been done into how these events actually occurred. This research now confirms their accuracy. The book La violence politique en Turquie: L’État en jeu 1975-1980 (Political Violence in Turkey: The State in Action, 1975–1980) by political scientist Benjamin Gourisse provides evidence to prove that both participating groups did not have access to the same resources or measures. The one group was supported and coordinated by the MHP, an ultra-nationalist party in power at the time, while the other saw its access to government and state authorities revoked. This major difference questions both the kind and nature of the violence which led to the putsch as well as the putsch itself – above all, the ideological connectivity between the extremist, right-wing militias and the officers behind the putsch is now beyond doubt.
It is also surprising that Turkey has never undertaken any work of collectively recalling its authoritarian past, as has been and still is the case in Argentina, Chile, and Poland, or even closer, in Germany.
Nevertheless, even if the approach remains very marginal, a few people today are trying to document the 1980s.
For example, Turkish-German sociologist Elifcan Karacan, the daughter of leftist activists who had to flee the country at the time, gathered recollections of victims of the putsch of their years in prison or under torture. She published her study in 2018. (Erinnerung an den türkischen Militärputsch von 1980: Erinnerung, Gewalt und Trauma [Recollections of the Turkisch Military Putsch of 1980: Recollection, Violence, and Trauma]).
SCARS OF A PUTSCH comes out of a context of working on memory and in a time period when the upswing in repression and the increasingly glaring Islamisation of Turkey forces us to look at the past in order to understand the present situation.
Because the consequences of the putsch – especially the country’s ‘re-Islamisation’ and the strengthening of nationalist ideology, which started on the first day of the military junta’s taking of power in 1980 – has led to a social dichotomy between ultra-nationalists and supporters of democracy, which is even being played out today in Turkish communities across the European territory.
