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31 August 2016,
SOAS
The Centre for Turkey Studies was glad to welcome Dr Ciddi to London for a talk on the post-coup consensus in Turkey, now that well over a month has elapsed since that event. The event was kindly chaired by Bill Park of King’s College.
Dr Ciddi began by presenting the coup within its Turkish context, and framed it outrightly as a ‘national trauma’. As it was still an unfolding event, its full repercussions could not be ascertained; but the significance of it in the minds of all Turks and in contemporary Turkish political history should not be underestimated.
He proceeded to respond to most of the frequently asked questions on the issue of the coup. What exactly had happened? Why had it failed? What were its implications, in both the short term and the long term?
Dr Ciddi explained that while it was clear that factions of the armed forces had indeed engaged in the coup, there was no clear consensus as to who or what organised it. None had yet owned up to it, unlike the Turkish coup of 1980 – but Ciddi did entertain the notion of some degree of involvement on the part of the Fethullah Gulen movement.
He went on to suggest that the coup had failed because Erdogan broke the attempted media blockade and addressed the public through FaceTime, mobilising them to get out into the streets and ‘resist’ the occupiers. Yet there were other issues with the failed coup that raised doubts; the fact that only around 5000 soldiers took to the streets in a country of over 70 million should be enough to arouse suspicion.
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