The Coronavirus pandemic is portrayed by the country’s pro-government as a tool of biological warfare.
COVID-19 has become an opportunity to dehumanize minorities and vulnerable social groups for some loyalists of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
“What is the purpose? Whose plot is it [COVID-19]?” an anchorman asked at A Haber, a widely watched news channel owned by Erdogan’s family.
In another program on the same TV channel, one of the commentators, Ergun Diler, argued that “the coronavirus pandemic is a global exercise carried out by the dominant powers. They do not want a population over 60. They want a young population that can fight. The growing size of the world population is threatening the world, as revealed by David Rockefeller. It has to be reduced.”
This kind of discourse is not peculiar to the Coronavirus pandemic in Erdogan’s Turkey. Erdogan himself first resorted to this kind of discourse during the Gezi protests, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets on May 28, 2013 to protest an urban development project initiated by Erdogan in Istanbul’s historic Taksim Square. The demonstrations were quickly transformed into civil unrest with an ever-increasing number of protesters who wanted to peacefully express their resentment of Erdogan’s growing authoritarianism. The civil unrest took on a dimension and magnitude compromising Erdogan’s rule similar to that seen in the Arab Spring.
Instead of empathizing with the protesters and trying to accommodate their wishes, Erdogan preferred to accuse them of being traitors and collaborators with external forces, which proved quite effective in quelling the uprising.
Seeing that this kind of political discourse paid off in consolidating the rank and file of his followers and in cornering his opponents, Erdogan made a habit of using the same political language whenever he found himself in a political bind. Thus, he dismissed the December 17-25, 2013 corruption investigations in which he, his son and four of his ministers as a conspiracy.
He and his henchmen used similar jargon when Turks faced a shortage of basic foodstuffs during a recent economic slump and held external conspirators/powers responsible for the shortage. Given this track record it is not surprising that Erdogan loyalists employ similar language for the spread of the Coronavirus, a predicament that will, to all appearances, overwhelm the country’s health infrastructure. Hence it is a pre-emptive tactic against the potential resentment of the people for the deficiencies of the health system vis-à-vis an enormous pandemic, a tested tactic proven to be highly effective.
