A WEEK after the attempted coup, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s supporters were still celebrating in Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Thousands came each night — and not just for the free soup. They gathered to wave their flags (also free), to sing along to patriotic songs being pumped out of huge speakers and to cheer speeches from leading Erdogan loyalists. And at nearly midnight last Wednesday the crowds were treated to the president himself streamed through from Ankara and displayed on two giant video screens. He used the occasion to declare a state of emergency.

Each evening columns of marchers arrived in the square to applause and cheers from those already there. Some of the newcomers paused to lay a rose at the base of a new structure that has been erected with names of the civilians shot dead by the army during the coup. The people who have been gathering in Taksim Square are Erdogan’s political base. His name is printed on the scarves they hold aloft and his image is reproduced on vast posters hanging on buildings overlooking the rolling rallies.

Back in 2013 Taksim Square was filled with a very different crowd: Istanbul’s liberals. Initially they were there to protest against Erdogan’s plans to redevelop Gezi Park — one of the few green spaces left in the city. But what started out as a row about city planning turned into a full-blown democracy movement demanding an end to the government’s autocratic tendencies. Those demonstrators were cleared from Taksim Square long ago.

It is now filled by the working men and women of the city; the aspirant middle classes; the people who support Erdogan not only because of his piety and his nationalism but also because of the steadily increasing prosperity his 14 years in power have brought them. And as Pakistan’s civilian politicians might care to note, that is why his televised appeal in the midst of the coup for people to go onto the streets was answered. Many of the people who risked their lives to defy the tanks and to defend his government did so because they wanted to hold on to the future Erdogan has delivered and made possible for them.

The liberals — many of whom also took to the streets to defy the coup — are now keeping a low profile, too afraid to publicly criticise Erdogan for fear of being detained as disloyal putschists. But they are not hard to find. Just a few hundreds metres from the square they can be seen drinking wine and beer on the pavement tables of well-designed bars. Dressed more fashionably than most New Yorkers, they watch veiled women walking by on their way to the pro-Erdogan rallies. The liberals know Turkey is changing and unlike the Erdoganists they fear what the future may bring.

The celebrations since the coup are already morphing into anti-American conspiracy theories. Erdogan’s people say the coup was orchestrated from rural Pennsylvania where Erdogan’s ally-turned-rival, the cleric, Fethullah Gulen, lives in self-imposed exile. Some go further, claiming the US only condemned the coup when they knew it had already failed. It all adds up to one message. As one man walking around the square put it on a poster: ‘America OUT People IN’.

Behind him, jets of bright red and green florescent light shot into the air from flares held aloft by young excited men, their arms extended to the skies. The fizzing flames produced clouds of smoke that billowed towards vast, 30-metre national flags flapping lazily in the evening breeze, sometimes brushing and flicking over the heads of the Erdogan supporters. Some in the crowd reached up to touch the flag, bathing themselves in patriotism.

But the display in Taksim Square is only part of Turkey’s post-coup story. There are hidden undercurrents of concern and anger. The joy and pride occasioned by the failure of the coup — shared by the vast majority of Turks — hides deep divisions. There is another, darker side to what is going on. It’s not just senior military officers involved in the coup plot — including over 100 generals — who have been arrested.

In addition tens of thousands of judges, teachers and low-level officials have been suspended and in some cases detained as well. The families of those people — and countless others who fear they may be next — are not in Taksim Square singing songs and waving flags. They are at home, behind closed curtains and shuttered windows waiting to see what the next days will bring and wondering whether their lives are at any moment about to be turned upside down by the sound of a knock on the door in the middle of the night.

Published in Dawn, July 24th, 2016