As Turkey nears a controversial September 12 referendum to reform its constitution, the words of Cevik Bir, a retired general, are worth recalling:"In Turkey, we have a marriage of Islam and democracy. The child of this marriage is secularism. Now this child gets sick from time to time. The Turkish armed forces is the doctor which saves the child."
For more than half of Turkey’s 73 million-strong population, such sentiment may seem outdated. The teenagers who grew up after the country’s third coup in the 1980s experienced little of the heavy-handed military control that has marked the republic since its founding.
Read Full Article »
