By Nazlan Ertan
The word of the week is operasyon, which is hardly surprising. Ahead of the NATO summit, Turkish authorities announced an operation resulting in hundreds of detentions. A wave of dawn raids sounds like a strange way to say “Welcome allies!” but operations are no novelty. Open a newspaper on any given morning and an operation is almost certainly underway somewhere. The target may be poultry farms, fuel companies, supermarkets or, with luck, somebody else's problem.
The curious thing about operasyon is that it rarely describes what actually happened. It is a linguistic curtain. Something happened, certainly. The word simply prefers not to dwell on the details.
Its most innocent meaning is medical. Doctors rarely announce that they are about to cut into somebody. The operation may be minor: a nose adjusted, eyelids tightened, a little lift here, a little tuck there. In a country that has become a global destination for affordable cosmetic procedures, operations have become an export industry. A glance at the British tabloids suggests that a small touch-up may have consequences far greater than its modest name implies.
The same applies to the state.
Hundreds of homes were entered and hundreds of people detained. Calling it an operation sounds so much tidier. The authorities did not raid businesses and seize assets. It was an operation. The word draws a linguistic curtain across the action itself. What remains visible is not the intrusion but the purpose.
LAUNCHING OPERATIONS
In Turkey, operations can target drug traffickers, illegal gambling networks, poultry farms, fuel distributors, alleged coup plotters, organized crime groups, migrants, smugglers, cocaine users or people exercising what they regard as their constitutional rights. The targets change, from the Kurdish militants of the 1990s to the Gülenist suspects in the post-2016 period. In the years following the failed coup attempt, scarcely a week passed without headlines announcing new operations against alleged members of the movement. The targets changed. The word remained.
And that word has become so pervasive that it has escaped official institutions altogether. Turks routinely complain that somebody is “operasyon çekmek” on them. Politicians accuse rivals of it. Party leaders accuse opponents of it. In 2022, presidential candidate Muharrem İnce complained that 'they wanted to pull an operation on us.' The phrase has no neat English equivalent. It usually means that somebody is trying to manipulate events from behind the scenes, and that the victim would very much like you to know about it.
The intelligence world has taken this linguistic creativity even further. The National Intelligence Organization, MİT, maintains a glossary of operational terminology that includes expressions such as ölü operasyon — a 'dead operation' that has lost its usefulness or been compromised. There are active operations, covert operations, influence operations and failed operations. Leave it to intelligence professionals to produce a taxonomy for a word that already seems capable of meaning almost anything.
NOT AN OPERATION
Yet not every operation is an operasyon.
When Turkish troops cross a border, the preferred word is often harekât. Euphrates Shield was a harekât. Olive Branch was a harekât. In English they are usually translated as operations. In Turkish, however, the distinction matters.
Derived from the same root as hareket — movement — harekât sounds larger, nobler and more purposeful. Operasyon suggests intervention. Harekât suggests a mission. One belongs in a police file. The other belongs in military history.
The distinction reveals something about the Turkish political imagination. Not every exercise of power deserves the same vocabulary. Some actions are presented as corrections. Others as destiny.
Which may explain why operasyon enjoys such excellent health in public life. It can improve a nose, dismantle a criminal network, seize a company, capture a spy or explain away an uncomfortable headline. An operation, after all, is what happens when somebody wants to change something and prefers not to dwell on the details.
