Even by the depressing standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, April 2002 was a hopeless time. The peace summits of the 1990s had faded to memory and scores of Palestinians and Israelis were regularly killed in terror attacks and military operations. The United States, which had exerted so much effort in the peace process, was by then distracted by the aftermath of 9/11 and the war it was waging in Afghanistan.
In that welter of despair, in the last week of April, an unlikely duo took separate planes to the Holy Land with the intention of reinvigorating the peace project. These men were Ismail Cem (pronounced jem, it rhymes with femme) and George Papanderou, the foreign ministers of Turkey and Greece. The pair represented two countries which detested one another, but they were coming together to try and broker someone else’s peace. The symbolism of their visit wasn’t lost on either of them. Before he left Ankara for Israel, Cem told reporters: “Our visit carries a special meaning because we — Turkey and Greece — have very deep issues, but we are two nations who have managed to put these issues on the road to resolution using the path of dialogue.”
Cem and Papanderou headed to Ramallah to meet a troubled old friend. Until Just a few years ago, Yasser Arafat, Palestine’s first president, had been hobnobbing with Israelis and world leaders, cracking jokes on international media. But he was now holed up in his compound in the West Bank surrounded by Israeli forces who monitored and controlled all his movements.
The besieged president was heartened by the visit of the two diplomats whom he called his “close, dear friends.” They had something in common that gave special meaning to their meeting: They all belonged to the broad family of Socialist International (SI), the world party of social democracy. Cem was technically not a member since his Democratic Left Party (DSP, by its Turkish acronyms) had been expelled from the SI in 1992. But this was a technicality since Cem identified strongly with it and had spent most of his political life in its various Turkish member parties.
These men believed that “the internationale unites the human race” and their visit was an attempt to rise to that spirit. When Arafat’s Party, Fatah, joined the Socialist International in 1999, it became part of a global family that included Israel’s Labor and Meretz parties, then part of the governing coalition of Prime Minister Ehud Barak. For years, Israelis and Palestinians had refused to talk to each other but after 1999 they had sister parties which were part of the same global organization. In November 1999, Arafat and Barak, as well as Shimon Peres, had joined Papanderou and their fellow socialists from the world over in SI’s 21st congress in Paris. Speaking to members of the media Arafat and Barak had both sounded hopeful. Barak promised to work hard to “put an end to 100 years of conflict in the Middle East.” But two and a half years later, that hope had frittered away. Barak had been replaced by the right-wing Ariel Sharon. Arafat’s credentials were weakened by his inability to stop the Palestinian terror attacks on Israeli civilians, although most such attacks were carried out by Fatah’s rivals. Could the sight of three socialists together in Ramallah revive the spirit of 1999?
In their joint press conference at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, Papanderou and Cem tried their best. They condemned the terror attacks and called for a Palestinian state and freedom of movement for Arafat. Cem spoke in a measured and technical way but emphasized a few words in particular: “A resolute stand against terrorism.” Although he didn’t know it yet, the monumental trip was to be something of a swan song for Cem. A few weeks after returning home he got tangled in a dispute with Turkey’s prime minister, Bulent Ecevit, which culminated in Cem’s resignation. Later that year, the parties of the Turkish center-left suffered a crushing defeat in the parliamentary elections. The newly-formed party of Islamists, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), won those elections and has remained in power to this day, twenty- two years and counting.
A healthy Social democracy is a rare political phenomenon anywhere, but especially in the Middle East. Turkish social democracy is dependent upon a functioning parliamentary democracy, and hardly any such thing exists east of the Balkans and West of the Indian peninsula. There are Socialist International members in several countries in the region but the only one with any chance of contesting national power remains Turkey’s CHP.
Having been out of power for two decades, CHP itself has faded from global memory but Cem’s tenure as Turkey’s top diplomat from 1997 to 2002 is a reminder of a time when Turkish social democracy seemed to be the way of the future. In Turkey itself, Cem is far from forgotten. Mention his name today to many Turks across the political spectrum and their eyes sparkle. He was a chain smoking intellect, hardly charismatic but much esteemed for his sheer talent and integrity, the seriousness of his vision for a Turkey at peace with its history and its identity, equally at home in Europe and Asia. Today he symbolizes the path not taken.
Like many men of the left, Cem would come to face accusations of champagne socialism. They are founded. He was born into a wealthy family in 1940 in Istanbul and grew up in Nistantasi, the same swanky neighborhood immortalized by its best-known denizen, the Nobel-winning writer Orhan Pamuk (known for his opus The Museum of Innocence.) Ismail’s full last name was Cem Ipekci. The Ipekci family history is fascinating: in the seventeenth century a mystic named Sabbatai Zevi led a Jewish messianic movement in the Ottoman empire which spread across the Jewish world. The Sultan ultimately forced Zevi to convert to Islam, and to cause his followers to do the same. He complied, and the ensuing community was made up of “Donme” or Crypto-Jews, secretly practicing Judaism but publicly presenting as Muslims. Zevi was a distant relative of Ipekcis who, like him, hailed from the Ottoman city of Salonica (today’s Thessaloniki, Greece.) Today the Donme have mostly given up their Judaism but they maintain their communal ties. Throughout his life, Ismail would be subject to antisemitic conspiracy theories related to his Donme background.
Being an Ipecki also meant membership in a dynasty of Turkish filmmakers and intellectuals. His father, Ihsan, ran Ipek Film, a major film studio responsible for some of Istanbul’s best-known cinemas such as Yeni Melek and Elhamra. Nazim Hikmet, Turkey’s legendary Marxist poet, headed the dubbing section of Ipek Film. Ismael’s cousin, Abdi, eleven years his senior, edited Milliyet, a major newspaper of the center-left. Ismail thus came of age in an atmosphere thick with literature, ideas, and politics. This was the world that made him.
In 1950, when Ismail was still in primary school, the Republic of Turkey held its first-ever competitive multi-party elections. CHP, the party of the republic’s larger-than-life first president, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, lost those elections to Democratic Party which championed Turkey’s devout middle classes against the perceived excesses of the Kemalist republicans with their statist economy and secularism. Thus began the development of Turkey’s two-poled party system. Democrats became the party of the center-right while CHP, led by Ataturk’s successor, Ismet Inonu, refashioned itself as the party of “left of center” (Ortanin Solu.) As so often happened in the Cold War era, the right-wingers accused Inonu of pushing “Moskovanin Yolu” (Moscow’s path.)
Consistent with his elite background, Cem went to Istanbul’s Roberts College, a private American high school which has long nurtured Turkey’s best and brightest (Pamuk, too, is an alum.) Tacking left early on, Cem joined CHP in 1958 (when he was eighteen years old) and then led its youth branch in Istanbul’s Sisli quarter. He also spent a year on an exchange program in northern California (Piedmont High School, near Oakland) and then studied law at the University of Lausanne’s law school, from which he graduated in 1962.
Turkey’s experiment with multi-party politics is ongoing but it has been disrupted by military coups and authoritarianism. In the first few decades of Turkish democracy, the military elite often moved in to redraw the political map, either because it didn’t like the elected government or because they had tired of political bickering. The first of such interventions came in 1960 when left-leaning army officers brought down the Democratic Party’s government and then executed Adnan Menderes, Turkey’s first democratically-elected prime minister. But the rule of the bayonets didn’t last. The army had no intention of actually running the country and, in what became a trend, swiftly organized elections in 1961 and allowed the parliament to take over again.
In the 1960s Turkey’s communist movement, which had long been suppressed, launched the Workers Party of Turkey (TIP) which won fourteen seats (almost three percent of the vote) in the 1965 elections. Turkey’s leftist movements often had a Kemalist flavor, championing part of Ataturk’s legacy that rhymed with their economic development program and their anti-imperialism. In the ‘60s, the country’s leftist intellectuals found their mouthpiece in Yon (Direction) which fancied itself a successor to Kadro (Cadre), an outlet for the left-wing of CHP and left-nationalist bureaucrats of the 1930s.
This was the political reality to which Cem returned in the 1960s. Having joined NATO in 1952, Turkey had a clear side in the Cold War but also had to juggle itself as a developing nation, a bridge between Asia and Europe, a Muslim-majority country with one of the strongest secular constitutions in the world, a democracy with periodic coups. Cem spent his life trying to forge a coherent national identity despite these dichotomies. As he once said in an interview: “As Turkey, we possess a culture with which few societies can compare. We are a bridge between East and West. We are a society that can synthesize East and West.”
In 1961, he married Elcin Trak, uniting two wealthy families. Traks were bankers and Ismail’s father-in-law was the president of Istanbul’s Fenerbahce football club. He settled into marriage at the same time as he began his public life as a writer and a journalist. In Turkey, like my native Iran, journalists can rise to roles of intellectual and cultural leadership, and this is what Cem did. He soon became a regular columnist for his cousin’s Milliyet and its rival daily Cumhuriyet, whose very name, ‘Republican,’ smacked of Kemalist politics. His writings on history and politics turned him into a literary star twinkling in the galaxy of young Turkish intellectuals then in a period of particular brilliance.
The CHP, which was growing into a force for modern democratic socialism, became a hub for this cadre. CHP’s new orientation owed much to Bulent Ecevit, a young Milliyet writer who had turned to party politics early. In the mid-60s, Ecevit headed CHP’s Democratic Left faction, modeling itself after the British Labour Party. Ecevit got himself elected as the party’s secretary general in 1966 and his career ascended seamlessly thereafter. Forty-seven CHP MPs left the party in a conservative split that year and Ecevit and his comrades gained charge. He became party leader in 1972.
Cem’s best-known book, A History of Backwardness in Turkey, appeared in 1970 and it articulates the worldview he developed in those years. Like many of his contemporaries in the postcolonial world, Cem critiques the Western ways of his country’s elite. This was not symptomatic of reactionary anti-Westernism, but a call for a confident Turkey with a homegrown identity and self perception. Later, biographers argued that Cem’s advocacy for Turkey’s membership in the European Union signaled a departure from this position. They are wrong. True, the book includes some simplistic references to “Western culture” and its adoption by the Ottomans, but what Cem is calling for is overcoming underdevelopment. In other words, already in 1970, he understood Turkey’s need to build alliances in both Europe and Asia. And this is precisely the foreign policy for which he became known a few decades later. As he put it in the book: “Turkey can break the cycle of backwardness with a method suited to the structure of its people; one which does not contradict the economic realities of either the world or the country; one led by the masses.”
Cem also took direct shots at CHP, lamenting its “traditional misfortune” of being “identified in the people’s eyes with Westernization,” by which he meant distance from the masses. In line with Ecevit, he called for the party to advocate uplifting “workers and villagers” as a path forward. A public intellectual par excellence, Cem advocated for these ideas in his columns which were read by hundreds of thousands of readers. In 1971 he was elected chairman of Turkey’s journalist union, part of the burgeoning labor movement, informally linked to CHP.
If there was ever a time when the collaboration of intellectuals and politicians yielded actual dividends this was it. In October 1973, Ecevit led CHP to a historic victory in his first election as party leader. CHP came first with thirty-three percent of the vote and was able to form a coalition government with Ecevit, the writer-turned-politico serving as prime minister. Social democracy tasted power. On his first day in office, Ecevit gifted Cem an intellectual’s dream role: head of the public broadcaster TRT.
Thanks to Turkey’s rowdy parliamentary culture, Ecevit’s government lasted just short of a year. Cem’s stint at TRT’s head ended shortly thereafter. And yet, in only 500 days, Cem helped transform Turkey’s TV and radio into a behemoth of public culture. With Cem at the helm, TRT became a hub of mostly-left-leaning intellectuals and artists. The doyens of the National Cinema movement enjoyed strong support. And the creative output was magnificent: Halit Refig directed the pioneering miniseries Forbidden Love based on a late Ottoman novel which has become a memorable classic. The leftist humorist Aziz Nesin ran the children’s hour. A documentary was broadcast on the controversial Hikmet who had passed away in 1963 in his Soviet exile and whose name had barely been mentioned in public media. The first anniversary of novelist Kemal Tahir’s passing was commemorated on TV in April 1974. As poet Atila Ilhan noted, Cem had turned TRT into “people’s television.”
Today Cem is remembered for modernizing television. TRT’s live coverage of Turkey’s intervention in Cyprus was unprecedented in its professionalism. Under Cem, TRT joined the Eurovision contest – now a national pastime. He made a deal with Turkish football clubs to show live matches on TV which put the game at the center of Turkish cultural life. Although his right-wing opponents would not acknowledge it, he also brought live religious programming to TV, showing a democratic sensibility, sensitive to Turkey’s diverse masses.
Still, conservative dailies such as Tercuman incessantly attacked him, putting every act of the TV under microscopic focus. A BBC documentary on wildlife and spiders could be derided as “cultural imperialism,” while others took him to task for a negative portrayal of Nazi Germany during the Second World War, alleging that this showed communist sympathies. Not surprisingly, he also faced antisemitic attacks. A senator suggestively asked why he wasn’t using Ipekci as his last name.
After the center-right’s return to power in 1975 Cem returned to the cultural realm. He started the magazine Politika with a friend. This was a heated time in Turkish politics, during which supporters of the far-left and far-right attacked each other on university campuses. Entire neighborhoods were prohibited grounded for members of one side or the other. Kurdish guerillas started their own armed campaign, as did several Maoist groups. In these new circumstances Cem’s democratic politics did not come easily
Ecevit came back to office in 1978 and Cem was promised an appointment as Turkey’s ambassador to UNESCO – the role was never realized. On February 1, 1979, Abdi Ipekci, then serving as Milliyet’s editor-in-chief was murdered in front of his apartment in Istanbul by two members of the ultranationalist Grey Wolves movement. One of the two murderers, Mehmet Ali Agca, soon rose to global attention when he attempted to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Cem was Ipekci’s cousin as well as his comrade in arms. He shared many of the causes for which Abdi had campaigned, such as dialogue with Greece or agitating for minority rights in Turkey. On the very day of the assassination, Cem penned a column in Milliyet titled “Turkey’s experiment in social democracy.” It was clear his life was in danger.
Cem moved to Paris with his family, and took a job with UNESCO while also studying for an MA at Sciences Po. Meanwhile, the Turkish military moved in again, with a coup in September 1980 that shut down all political parties, including CHP and brought the years of instability and street violence to end. The military wrote a repressive new constitution and declared a new “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” that was to be beyond reproach. But it did not abolish parliamentary politics and this would mean that Cem had something to return to.
Cem returned to Turkey in 1983 and turned to elected politics. CHP was still banned but in the interim Turkish center-left leaders founded several parties to continue its legacy. Ecevit founded the nationalist and socialist DSP while Erdal Inonu, a celebrated physicist and son of the former president, founded the Social Democratic Popular Party (SHP), which was closer to European socialism. Cem joined SHP, on whose ticket he was elected to the parliament in 1987. A year later, he ran for leadership of SHP but lost to Inonu.
Even in office, Cem continued to write for the daily press, articulating his political vision In the 80s SHP remained the main opposition party and Cem’s writing provided its ideological backbone. In a historic move, SHP joined the Socialist International and in June 1991, Turkey hosted the SI’s council meeting for the first time. In Istanbul Inonu and Cem welcomed SI’s president Willy Brandt, the former chancellor of West Germany. Other participants included former prime ministers Bettino Craxi of Italy and Shimon Peres of Israel; Iraq’s future president Jalal Talabani and socialist representatives from around the world (from Democratic Socialists of America, long before it was taken by its current misleaders, the Yugoslav-American socialist Bogdan Denitch carried the torch.)
In 1992 CHP’s ban was lifted and the party was reestablished. Deniz Baykal, who had run against Cem and Inonu for SHP’s leadership in 1988, led the new CHP and Cem joined him as deputy leader of the new party. The pair co-wrote the book New Left in 1992. Cem’s focus was on foreign policy. He envisioned Turkey as “both a Balkan and a Middle Eastern country” and called for a good-neighborly foreign policy which matched Willy Brandt’s SI ethos and the world order emerging on the ashes of the USSR, following the end of the Cold War.
In 1995 Cem joined Ecevit’s DSP and was re-elected as MP. He served for three months as culture minister in the ensuing right-led coalition government of Tansu Ciller, Turkey’s first female prime minister. Two years later he was given the chance of a lifetime: the role of foreign minister. Turkey’s leading social democrats, men such as Inonu and Baykal, had served as the country’s top diplomats before but none had done so for any length of time. They had barely made a mark. For his part, Cem served five years in that role under the center-right prime minister Mesut Yilmaz (1997-99) and under his old comrade Ecevit (1999-2002.)
Just as he started his new job, Britain’s Labour Party made a historic comeback to power under Tony Blair. Bill Clinton was in the oval and there were socialist prime ministers in France and Italy. Cem capitalized on the momentum and pushed for Turkey’s membership in the European Union. When Turkey was offered less than full membership at the EU Summit in 1997, Cem protested this “Tamagutchi membership,” after the Japanese virtual pet toy then popular.
But on December 12, 1999, the EU summit in Helsinki finally offered full candidateship for Turkey. The offer had come after tough politicking and a nocturnal trip to Ankara by EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana and its enlargement commissioner, Gunter Verheugen. Both men had been members of SI. The European socialist network helped connect Cem to them.
The socialist fraternity was invaluable in facilitating comradery between Cem and Papandreou. Just a few years earlier Athens and Ankara had teetered on the precipice of war. They hadn’t signed a bilateral agreement in forty years. But under Cem and Papandreou, everything changed. Bilateral trade blossomed to billions and the two men became symbols of peace-making. In 2000, the East-West Institute granted them a joint award as statesmen of the year. In a 2001 visit to the Greek island of Samos they planted a sapling of peace, and that ritual has since become a tradition for peacemakers around the world. Athens saw the opening of its first-ever Turkish music bar. Turkey and Greece even submitted a request for joint-hosting the European football championship (they lost it to a joint Austrian-Swiss bid.)
Cem’s focus on Turkey’s European identity was never one-sided. In both his writings and his public statements, he emphasized Turkey’s “historical geography.” He often said that Turkey’s “greatest wealth and strength” was its bi-continentalism – both European and Asian. After Iran elected a reformist president in 1997, Cem travelled to Tehran and signed a major gas deal. In 2002 he organized a joint forum of the EU and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in Istanbul to prove commitment to Turkey’s Islamicate links, flouting pervasive islamophobia.
And Cem exemplified prescience about the region in another way: In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Ecevit and Cem met with American allies Donald Rumsfeld, Condolezza Rice and Dick Cheney and warned them about the consequences of destabilizing Iraq. They were ignored and their warnings have been mostly left out of the historical record.
In 2002, Turkish social democrats seemed to have the wind in their sails. Having spent years cultivating the intellectual and political bases for the Turkish center-left, Cem was reaping the fruit of his efforts. But the winds changed. Ecevit fell badly ill in May 2002 and he refused to resign as party leader, wreaking Biden-like havoc on his own party. Cem was one of the seven cabinet ministers and more than 40 MPs who resigned in July to pressure Ecevit. Under Cem’s leadership the group formed the New Turkey Party (YTP). Perhaps the most impressive recruit of the party was Kemal Dervish, a former World Bank official and Ecevit’s minister of economy. The old prime minister didn’t stand a chance without him.
But in a stunning volte face, Dervish went to Baykal’s CHP leaving YTP high and dry. When the elections were held in November Turkey’s center-left splintered. Only two parties got the minimum threshold of 10 percent: The newly-founded AKP with 34 percent and Baykal’s CHP with almost 20 percent. DSP and YTP got around 1 percent each. Ecevit and Cem were humiliated.
In the aftermath Cem was diagnosed with pulmonary cancer and had to travel to the US for prolonged treatment. YTP shuttered in 2004 after a poor performance in local elections. Cem continued advising his old friend Baykal and lectured in Istanbul’s Bilgi University on foreign policy. But he would never fully recover. He passed away in January 2007. Ecevit had already died at eighty-one the year before. The leading lights of Turkey’s social democracy were gone in a blink. Cem’s passing was a death knell for the movement.
At the hands of Baykal, CHP was no match for AKP which managed to woo millions of devout Muslims in Turkey, including many Kurds who hoped the party would offer them a historic new peace process as well as Western leaders who believed in Erdogan’s offer of a “Turkish model” that combined neoliberal economic policies with social conservatism and pro-Europeanism. Erdogan insisted that his Islamism was analogous to German Christian Democracy. What could be more refreshing in the post 9/11 world than a NATO-aligned, capitalist, democratic, and moderate Islamism? In time AKP would come to disappoint most of its domestic and foreign supporters. But Erdogan has maintained a vice grip on power, both by winning elections and by tilting the ground in his favor. Turkey is now governed by ‘competitive authoritarianism,’ as the political scientists put it.
CHP has struggled to win more than a quarter of the vote in most national elections since but it has demonstrated continued vitality through stunning victories in mayoral elections in Turkey’s largest cities such as Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. Elected to Istanbul’s mayoralty in 2019, Ekrem Imamoglu has emerged as a new flag-bearer for the party of social democracy. Erdogan noticed the rising star and had Imamoglu arrested last month, blatantly barring his most serious rival from running in the next presidential elections. A new low for Turkish democracy.
But as CHP looks to revive itself as a national force, it would do well to draw upon the legacy of Ismail Cem: The man who fought for a social democracy which drew strength from Turkey’s past and present as well as from European democratic socialism.
