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Violence escalated through the 1970s until the military seized power in September 1980. The coup was Turkey’s third in twenty years.
How will
Turkey turn?
A Burch scholar learns how Turkey’s tempestuous past will shape its future. by Mark Derewicz
ON THE NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 14, 1980, Cangüzel Güner was at home in Ankara, Turkey when she heard a pounding at the door. Three men had come to arrest her father. His crime: being a member of the Turkish parliament during a military coup. “It was pitch black and here were these soldiers taking my father into the darkness,” Cangüzel says. The family heard no word of his whereabouts for two months. Twenty-eight years later, Cangüzel’s daughter Yekta was in Turkey with nine other Carolina students for a seven-week Burch Field Seminar with UNC history professor Sarah Shields. The students spoke to Turks of all stripes from large cities and tiny hamlets, trying to learn what makes Turkey tick. Is the country of the East or of the West, and in which direction will it turn now? They also spent hours in discussions with Shields, an expert on Turkish and Ottoman history. The students had incredible experiences, but while they were in Turkey rumors swirled of another military coup. Yekta, for one, was particularly troubled. She started researching the 1980 coup and its origins. When she returned to Chapel Hill, she sat down with her mother, who is the associate director of the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations. The two of them talked for hours about how and why Cangüzel’s father was arrested and what this had meant for his family. This oral history, combined with Yekta’s formal research, helped her write a unique research paper about why coups occur in Turkey and how they damage the lives of innocent people. endeavors 43