Customs official is unlikely hero for polarised Turkey

An unlikely hero has won the praise of many Turks, a rare moment of unity in an increasingly polarised society.

According to a leaked police report into a corruption scandal, customs official Teoman Dudak refused to accept the bribes offered to him, keeping an aircraft laden with gold stuck on the Istanbul tarmac and frustrating a smuggling ring that, the report said, had cabinet ministers on its pay-off list.

Ultimately Mr Dudak was overruled by an order from Ankara and shifted to the southern city of Gaziantep, close to the border with Syria. But, since the report emerged on the internet last week, he has been feted by opposition newspapers, social media users – and even the government.

“He did his job,” said Hayati Yazici, the country’s customs minister. “I am expecting the same from everybody.”

The general acclaim for Mr Dudak stands out as the exception in a country where divisions seem deeper than ever ahead of local elections this month.

On Thursday, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister, threatened to “root out” Twitter – which has been used to diffuse apparently incriminating voice recordings of himself, other leading officials and figures in the corruption scandal. He added he was motivated by national security. He has previously suggested that Turkey could block access to Facebook and YouTube after this month’s elections.

Turkey’s ruling AK party effectively stopped the country’s opposition from officially disclosing the police report in parliament this week, freezing moves against four former ministers caught up in the scandal. All deny wrongdoing. Mr Erdogan depicts the corruption probe as a plot by the movement of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic cleric and former ally with whom he is embroiled, who has many followers in the police, prosecution service and judiciary.

In what his critics term hate speech, the Sunni Muslim Mr Erdogan recently attacked the movement of Mr Gulen – also a Sunni – as “far ahead of Shiites” when it comes to lies and slander.

He also suggested recently that retribution may be wreaked on large numbers of people associated with Mr Gulen – possibly through a criminal case – in the elections’ aftermath. “There are businessmen, artists and journalists supporting them: they assume they will not be harmed,” the prime minister said.

But the most remarked-on rupture concerned the death of Berkin Elvan, a 15-year-old boy who died last week, nine months after being hit by a tear gas canister fired by Turkish police. Mr Erdogan pointedly declined to issued his condolences for Elvan, whose family said had gone to buy bread on the day he was hit. The prime minister later accused the boy in a campaign speech of having links to terrorism.

In response, the Turkish Medical Association, a body traditionally associated with secularists alarmed by the power of Mr Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted AK party, said it was “extremely worried” about the prime minister’s emotional state.

“Normally, no one would make a crowd at an election rally jeer at a mother who lost her child only two days before,” the medical association said in a statement, in reference to Mr Erdogan’s remarks about Elvan’s family.

Elvan, like the other six protesters killed in the Gezi Park demonstrations, was a member of Turkey’s Alevi Muslim minority, and some critics suggest Mr Erdogan is exploiting social and religious differences as a way of maximising the vote from Turkey’s Sunni heartlands ahead of this month’s vote.

“The Turkish nation was never a homogeneous entity – we have three major antagonisms, between Turks and Kurds, between Alevis and Sunnis, and between hardcore secularists and pious people,” said Cengiz Aktar, of the Istanbul Policy Centre think-tank, who is also a columnist for a Gulenist newspaper. “Now we should add a new dividing line between the AK party and the [Gulenist] community followers.”

Mr Aktar noted that, in contrast to his response to the death of Elvan, Mr Erdogan immediately spoke out to mourn Burak Can Karamonoglu, a young man apparently killed by a leftist group last week.

Both bereaved fathers have called for calm and mourning rather than confrontation.

Mr Erdogan’s supporters say the vilification of the prime minister is ill-judged, arguing that, far from seeking to stir up divisions in society, he is trying to heal the country’s most important divide – between Kurds and ethnic Turks, a conflict in which some 40,000 people have died over three decades.

A senior government official argues that Mr Erdogan has taken far more steps on Kurdish rights than any previous Turkish administration.

But tensions have increased since the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, halted a withdrawal from Turkish territory in September, with Kurdish militants declaring they no longer recognise the government as an interlocutor.

On the Kurdish issue, as with others, many Turks are steeling themselves for further confrontations after this month’s elections.

In a mysterious incident on Thursday, three people, including two members of the security forces, were shot dead by unknown gunmen in the central Anatolian province of Nigde. However, the interior ministry said the gunmen were “western nationals”.

“I am tempted to write it off as just Erdogan,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a leading Turkish commentator, of the heightened sense of polarisation. “[But] I think he knows these divisions in Turkish society are something he can capitalise on and he is willing to play with fire.”