While theoreticians, who analyze world politics through media continue to guess what will happen throughout the year by looking at the New Year’s cover of The Economist, another magazine has been clearly conveying the developments to its readers without any encoded messages by events and people put on the cover. Considering the closest ones to home, this magazine covered many topics ranging from the headscarf discussions to Naim Süleymanoğlu’s success at the Olympic Games after filtering them through an American and Western perspective.

The New York-based magazine registered as TIME started to be published weekly in 1923, later spreading to Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, South Pacific and South America over the years. The only constants of the magazine were its publication language being English and foretelling the future through local and international events or figures that were put on to the cover.

While Charlie Chaplin who made it to the cover in 1925 became a leading force in cinema, Mahatma Gandhi who was on a 1931 cover of the magazine became a world-renowned figure in the following years. Similarly, TIME had put Nazi Germany’s Commander of the Naval Forces Erich Raeder on its cover in 1942 and touched on his passive nature and military blunders. Raeder resigned from his post the following year; “he had no idea about submarine warfare. He never cared about it. He was obsessed with ships; yet, he failed to equip them with a substantial air force. He probably was the weakest link of the Nazi Army” were some of the comments that continued to haunt Raeder for many more years. Talking about the future of computers in 1983 and covering the internet in 1990s, the magazine was the most prominent conveyor of political developments.

Leaders deemed authoritarian by TIME were deposed via coups

Putting coups carried out in many countries to its cover, the magazine came to be known as a “coup-loving” publication because of its disposition towards the events. The 1953 Iran, 1954 Panama and 1973 Chile coups were all narrated as the fall of a dictator and the victory of the public.

TIME never skipped the coups in Turkey, as well. While the magazine is mostly known for its cover with Kenan Evren and the caption “Holding Turkey Together,” this wasn’t the first such incident at TIME.

In 1958, Adnan Menderes was put on the cover with the caption “Turkey’s Premier Menderes.” The magazine wrote the following about Menderes: “With his every year in office, Menderes has become more autocratic, more sensitive to criticism. Striking out in fury at anyone questioning his policies, he has half smothered both the press and opposition political parties under a blanket of repressive legislation.” Analogous to Menderes, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh prior to the 1953 coup, Guatemala’s President Jacobo Arbenz prior to the 1954 coup and Chile’s President Salvador Allende prior to the 1973 coup were all put on the cover of TIME, while being mentioned in news pieces as “once democrats who resorted to authoritarianism.”

The Army is responsible for upholding the constitution

While it was not on the covers, the coup of May 27 1960 found itself a place in the magazine. Using a photograph which had a group of people celebrating the coup, TIME was justifying the coup with the following passage: “The Turkish army has long scrupulously observed the admonition of the late great Kemal Ataturk that the army should stay out of partisan politics. But it also remembered that Ataturk charged it with guarding the constitution.”

Kenan Evren: Holding Turkey Together

The coup of September 12 1980 was welcomed in the US with the exclamatory expression “our boys did it.” On the covers of TIME‘s Europe, Asia and South Pacific editions of September 29 1980 issue, there was the photograph of Kenan Evren. On the eight page, in a long feature article titled “Holding Turkey Together”, the events leading to the coup and Kenan Evren himself were extracted. The coup was mentioned in the following way:

“After months of rising terrorism by both the extreme left and extreme right, the country allowed itself to settle into a state of unaccustomed relaxation. Civilians waved at tanks rumbling through the streets of Istanbul. Automobile drivers shook hands with soldiers who manned the roadblocks. Storekeepers raised their bombproof shutters for the first time in months, and restaurants began to fill up again in the evenings. Some city dwellers looked far trimmer than usual, simply because they no longer packed pistols inside their coats or waistbands.”

February 28: “Military Sacked Erbakan”

TIME had signaled the postmodern coup of February 28 1997 from the very first days of the Welfare Party. Publishing an article titled “Secular State Suspended?” when the party came into power, the magazine was almost conveying the message “how could you allow such a government” as Necmettin Erbakan’s to the Turkish army. “He [Erbakan] is a populist, pro-Islamic politician whose party did not field a single female candidate in the last elections […] Last week Erbakan became the head of the first Islamist-majority coalition government in Turkey since Kemal Ataturk declared it a secular state in 1923,” wrote TIME.

Not pondering on the decisions of February 28, TIME had praised Mesut Yılmaz who became the prime minister after Welfare Party’s coalition was deposed by the military with an article titled “Mr. Secular”: “Turkish military believes that it is better to be sad than sorry in terms of Turkey’s secular future. President Süleyman Demirel becoming the chair of NATO member countries and Mesut Yılmaz, the leader of the lesser opposition party with 129 seats in a parliament of 550, becoming the prime minister verifies the military’s approach. While some argue that Yılmaz lacks the political mediation skills to form a sustainable government, his decision to withdraw from Libya and his stance against the rise of Islamic fundamentalism dissipate the suspicions. After all, the military sacked Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan for doing the opposite of the said decisions. Moreover, NATO will also love Yılmaz for taking these decisions.”

Perspective on April 27 E-Memorandum: “AK Party is a threat to the public”

TIME‘s comment on the e-memorandum of April 27 2007 was the following: “Military has always been a strong political actor in Turkey and it has carried out four coups against those threatening the country’s secular system since 1950. In 2007, the military published a concealed threat which led to snap elections. Practices like singing hymns in schools instead of mosques and organizing Holy Quran recitation competitions on April 23 which were introduced by the AK Party government were always seen as a threat to the very existence of the republic by the military.

Expediting the crisis by writing a condemning declaration against the ruling party electing the president, the military expected the Turkish voters agree with the generals’ view that pro-Islamic AK Party is a threat to the nation. With the coup attempt that will go down in history as e-memorandum, they hoped to sway the minds of the people as they did before. They aimed to force the AK Party to form a coalition, causing them to share the power.”

On July 15: Cemal Gürsel brought democracy

The coup attempt of July 15 was also covered by TIME and articles praising the previous coups in Turkey were being published on the magazine’s website while the coup was still going on. The article written by Lily Rothman was adding insult to injury even before the people were able to thwart the coup: “In that 1960 coup, General Cemal Gursel was named President, Premier and Defense Minister, leaving the world with hopes that the nation was on its way back to true democracy. It would only be eleven years, however, before a group of military leaders handed a radio newscaster a memorandum to read out loud, telling the people of Turkey that the government had once again ‘pushed our country into anarchy, fratricide and social and economic unrest’ and thus ‘the Turkish armed forces, fulfilling their legal duty to protect the republic, will take power.'”

“The country resists an attempted coup, but the worst could be yet to come”

Even before the coup was over, the magazine was praising the perpetrators and the coup itself. When the coup was thwarted, the first issue of TIME published after the coup included a photograph of Turkish people resisting the coup accompanied by the title “Turkey’s Longest Night”. In the subtitle, however, it was noted that “The country resists an attempted coup, but the worst could be yet to come.” The magazine referred to the coup as an “amateurish attempt.”

While President Erdoğan was described as oppressive, the magazine also argued that there were people in Turkey who wanted the army, the protector of the republic, to take action. The subtitle “the worst could be yet to come” was interpreted as Turkey entering a political deadlock and hinting that increasing polarization might create an armed conflict among the people.

Yet once again, TIME had sided itself with a coup. After all, Erdoğan had made it to the cover of the magazine even two years before the December 17-25 incidents, which acted as a precursor to the coup, and was criticized for allegedly becoming an autocrat.

TIME, praising all the military coups that happened since May 14 1950, Turkey’s transition into multiparty system, seized the opportunity to celebrate the July 15 coup perpetrated by FETÖ, not breaking with its tradition. Even after the coup attempt was thwarted by the people, the magazine continued to publish many articles that implied if the coup was successful, it would be better for Turkey, consolidating its putschist position.

Was it a spontaneous call and a spontaneous mass response? I believe and will argue that while the timing and brutality of the coup attempt was unexpected, the possibility of a coup itself was not. It is an unfortunate tradition, or rather a curse that Turkey could never fully break, for Turkey’s right and center-right incumbent parties to be forced out of power by the military.The military in Turkey has a tradition of toppling down the democratically elected governments. The reasons vary but in general, the military elites tend to think that the public keep making the mistake of voting for the wrong guys. According to this ill opinion, politicians are nothing more than populist rhetoricians and do not care about the long-term interests of the country. Further, politicians do anything for reelection such as responding to the demands of the ordinary man on the street (a.k.a. democracy) rather than asking wisdom from the military which “only cares about the true interests of the nation”.

Accordingly, the military knows the true interests of the country but the elected politicians and voters just don’t get it. For such a viewpoint, the republic comes before democracy. The military is the defender of the republic and, when necessary, feels obliged to defend it against the people who elect the politicians. Until recently, such an understanding had a solid popular base in the society as well, not big enough to win the elections though. The supporters of the military tutelage especially in the bureaucracy, judiciary, and academia saw nothing wrong with the military hijacking democracy. Even today, some people shy away from calling the 1960 military intervention as a coup (darbe), but prefer to call it a revolution (ihtilal or devrim) instead.After all, the commonly heard phrase, “We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal [Mustafa Kemal’in askerleriyiz]” indicated that the military is under the command of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk rather than the current president or prime minister of the time. A coup plotter major and a judge associated with the coup arrested for being involved in the Gülenist coup attempt of July 15 both repeated the slogan “We are the soldiers of Mustafa Kemal.” Regardless of whether it was a genuine call or just a lip service to cover their Gülenist side, this slogan has always been in the back of coup plotters’ mind in the past and present. The military simply did not care about the higher civilian authorities who are alive and currently in office but chose to follow a ghost they created in their imagination.A former chief of the general staff had delicately summarized the military’s autonomy from the elected politicians, government, and any other higher authority in his secretly recorded tape in 2011. (Gulenists are argued to be behind the release and share of this voice recording, which is another proof that the coup is not a temporary problem, nor is it the problem of one single faction in the military. Rather it is a systematic problem of the Turkish military, which needs to be handled for once and for all.) The general, referring to the Article 35 of the Armed Forces Regulation which had been codified in order to justify the coups, stated “They talk about removing the article 35 or something of this sort. Remove it or not, we, as armed forces, exist for this. This is our natural historical mission. Nobody can give us advice on this. Nobody can tell us the opposite of it.”

I have made this long intro just to make one point clear. The Turkish armed forces have traditionally thought that, when it deems it necessary, it has the right to punish the politicians by crashing the democracy with a coup. But in fact, the military enforced all the previous coups (in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997) not because it had the right, but it had the might to do so. They had the tanks and civilians did not, this simple. As of 2016, the military still has the tanks and the civilians still don’t. Everybody knew this, so did President Erdoğan. And Erdoğan also knew that the military continues to be the same old military. Despite all the changes it went through, there was one untouched characteristic: they saw plotting a coup as a natural right of theirs.

Since his party came to power in 2002, Erdoğan has long been worried about a coup against his party, Justice and Development Party (AK Party). The AK Party has won five consecutive elections (a record in Turkish history) and received over 49 percent of the overall votes in the most recent one. However, the curse was still out there. Erdoğan and AK Party politicians kept their eyes open for the tanks in the streets of Ankara. For many, a coup was an inevitable end for the AK Party, which did not give up winning the democratic elections one after another. Erdoğan himself had lost his seat as the mayor of Istanbul in the aftermath of the 1997 coup and spent 4 months 10 days in prison. He was seriously warned a decade later in 2007 with a military memorandum and his party narrowly escaped from being closed by just one vote in the constitutional court in 2008.

Hence, Erdoğan and his followers long expected a coup and probably gave some thought to what to do if/when the day comes. Nobody did anything for the PM Menderes when he was arrested by a colonel in 1960 and was sent to death row in a year. Nobody came to the help of Demirel, Erbakan and all the other politicians in times of coups. But this time the story would be different. Erdoğan has long stressed that he did and will stand firm against any undemocratic intervention. He asked his followers to do the same and his followers had long promised to be ready. It was a matter of humor for the Turkish public opinion to see Erdoğan being greeted by his fans in shrouds (the cloth in which Muslims are buried upon death) in 2013. But the message was serious and clear: we are behind you ‘to death.’

In short, people did not flood into the streets to defend their PM Menderes in 1960 partly because they had no clue about how Menderes’ life would be brutally concluded by the junta and partly because they had no clue about what they could do to prevent or reverse the coup. The same went for the following coups of Turkey up until the one in 2016. This time, people were ready. They had been reminded of the bitter end of earlier politicians and were motivated to defend their votes and elected politicians against a coup. In other words, both Erdoğan and millions of his followers (plus, even greater millions of the entire Turkish electorate) were ready for a coup to occur.

The only error was, they long waited for a Kemalist coup to attempt to crash the Turkish democracy. However, the address was different this time as Gülenists were behind the coup. Nor was the brutality of the coup expected, as it was the most brutal attempt in Turkey ever, with 240 lost lives to defend the democratic regime. Nevertheless, Erdoğan and AK Party were clear on what to do against a coup and with this expectation, they transformed the Turkish electorate on what to do in case a junta tries to crash the democratic process in Turkey. Hence, Turkish voters had learnt their lesson, were ready and waiting for the coup even if they did not know when or from where exactly it would show up. I hope the Turkish military can also learn its lesson and eventually understand that it is not their job to teach people how not to vote. If there is one lesson the failed Gulenist coup attempt of July 15 can teach to the rest of the military, it is the unquestionable stupidity and extreme danger of plotting a coup in 21st century Turkey.

Note: The article picture at the top is a famous AK Party banner from 2013. Photos (from left): Former PM Menderes (text: you hanged him!), former PM and President Özal (text: you poisoned him!), and Erdoğan (text: we won’t feed him to you)