Stakeholders of (De-) Radicalisation in Turkey

D3.1 Country Report April 2021

Abstract

This report aims to depict and analyze the context of radicalisation in Turkey in the period from 2001 to 2021 as part of the Work Package “Mapping Stakeholders and Situations of Radicalisation” of the D.Rad project. It focuses on the major violent events that can be considered as milestones for the trends of radicalisation and deradicalisation; analyzes how the political elite and the public opinion perceive radicalisation and violent threats; and maps out the agents and channels of radicalisation and de-radicalisation.

Turkey, as a country with increasing polarisation in its highly complex cleavage structure, has witnessed violent attacks by all four types of radicalised groups, namely ethnonationalist/separatist, jihadist, right-wing, and left-wing since 2001. Due to the lack of detailed and systemic publicly available data on political violence from the national resources, the report relies mainly on the Global Terrorism Database, which provides information on Turkey from 2000 to 2018. The analysis of GTE shows that the biggest threat is posed by separatist radicalisation, which is followed by the jihadist attacks, which peaked in 2015 and 2016. It is noteworthy that no right-wing groups either in the GTD or in any official document of Turkey exist. As there are incidents in which attacks on the minority and oppositional groups are officially downplayed and the perpetrators remain unprosecuted, this raises doubts over the penetration of rightwing radicalisation to law enforcement and party politics.

The Turkish political parties converge in their prioritization of the separatist threat over the other types. AKP (Justice and Development Party) and MHP (Nationalist Movement Party) also emphasize the potential threat from FETÖ (Gülen Terrorist Organisation) in the aftermath of 15 July 2016 coup attempt. These two parties also incriminate the opposition parties, CHP (Republican Peoples' Party) and HDP (Peoples' Democratic Party) for affiliation with the separatist and FETÖ radicalisation. The CHP, as the main opposition party, defines PKK and ISIS as terrorist organisations and warns about state-led radicalisation through the arbitrary abuse of the laws on terror in an attempt to incriminate the peaceful opposition. The HDP emphasizes the need for democratic reforms and the resolution of the social and economic problems for de-radicalisation. Public opinion resonates largely with voting preferences.

Regarding de-radicalisation, all main political parties have a consensus on condemning violent incidents regardless of the ideological leaning of the organisation. However, we do not observe specialized party or civil society organisation activities specifically focusing on de-radicalisation. This may be related to several issues such as polarisation in the political space, the intensity of political struggle at the macrolevel, and the incrimination of opposition parties' activities to reach out to vulnerable social groups. Thus, de-radicalisation programmes are held by state institutions. Among these, prison programmes appear as the most common initiatives. The Presidency of Religious Affairs in cooperation with the Ministry of Justice and Police Force conducts some programmes in the field of jihadist radicalisation in the form of disseminating peaceful and tolerant messages of Islam. In the context of separatist radicalisation, the most important de-radicalisation programme is the "Return to Village and Rehabilitation Project" which was active between 1999 and 2015. The programme accelerated under the AKP government's National Unity and Brotherhood programme, commonly known as the Peace Process, which was terminated in 2015.

The report identifies the tendency to downplay the right-wing radicalisation and increasing state-led radicalisation as the most important challenges for correctly assessing the dynamics of radicalisation and developing programmes for deradicalisation.