Category Archives: Turkey

Voices of Turkey’s purged

Diego Cupolo reports: The night of July 15, Seda was at home in Erzurum, a town in eastern Turkey, when she got a call from her son, a student at a military academy in Ankara, the nation’s capital. Turkey was under attack, and he was being deployed with his classmates. His unit had been given rifles but no ammunition, he told Seda from the back of an army truck bound for the city center. Then he hung up.

Five days passed before Seda heard from her son again. This time, his message was relayed through a lawyer. Her son, the lawyer told her, was in Sincan high-security prison, just outside the capital, along with hundreds of others who had allegedly attempted to seize power from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in what would turn out to be a failed coup.

Seda told me this story as she stood among dozens of parents in a parking lot near the prison. Like her, they had come to visit their sons, who had been jailed for allegedly participating in the failed attempt to overthrow the government, and were now being held in a facility built for prisoners serving life sentences. “My son wouldn’t participate in a coup,” Seda said. “He was fooled and they are holding him without charge. It’s not right. None of this is right.”

The parents I spoke to at Sincan said they had been granted 30-minute visits with their children. They spoke anonymously — for fear of further endangering their sons — of ongoing interrogations, overcrowding, and abusive conditions like those that independent rights groups such as Amnesty International have also documented. [Continue reading…]

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The Turkish government’s response to the attempted coup is an affront to democracy

Benjamin Ward writes: The word “coup” in French literally means “blow” or “shock.” The latter meaning aptly describes the reaction of the world to the events in Turkey on the night of July 15-16 by elements of its military.

The circumstances of the coup attempt are still far from clear. What is clear is that its failure owes a great deal to the spontaneous reaction of ordinary people who flooded the streets to resist the military and the solidarity across the political spectrum. All four of the main political parties united in opposition to the attempt to overthrow the democratically elected government. According to the Turkish government, 246 people were killed amid resistance to the coup, 179 of them civilians, and 2,000 were wounded.

But after the shock has come a second blow as the government unleashed a purge that goes far beyond holding to account those involved in trying to overthrow it. It has hit most of the country’s major institutions– the judiciary, prosecutors’ office, police, the media, the civil service, schools, universities, trade unions and hospitals.

This second blow is weakening the democracy that Turkey’s population took to the streets to defend. Turkey’s international partners should act quickly to press Ankara to reverse course and ensure that people caught up in the purge are given due process and fair criminal trials and that the country’s institutions are strengthened rather than weakened. [Continue reading…]

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Conspiracy theory consensus: Turks agree U.S. was behind failed coup

The New York Times reports: A Turkish newspaper reported that an American academic and former State Department official had helped orchestrate a violent conspiracy to topple the Turkish government from a fancy hotel on an island in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul. The same newspaper, in a front-page headline, flat-out said the United States had tried to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the night of the failed coup.

When another pro-government newspaper asked Turks in a recent poll conducted on Twitter which part of the United States government had supported the coup plotters, the C.I.A. came in first, with 69 percent, and the White House was a distant second, with 20 percent.

These conspiracy theories are not the product of a few cranks on the fringes of Turkish society. Turkey may be a deeply polarized country, but one thing Turks across all segments of society — Islamists, secular people, liberals, nationalists — seem to have come together on is that the United States was somehow wrapped up in the failed coup, either directly or simply because the man widely suspected to be the leader of the conspiracy, the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, lives in self-exile in the United States.

“Whenever something shocking and horrific happens in Turkey, the reflex is conspiracy,” said Akin Unver, an assistant professor of international relations at Kadir Has University in Istanbul. [Continue reading…]

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Fethullah Gulen exercises full control inside his cult

Mustafa Akyol writes: After the AKP and Gulenists parted ways in December 2013, the Gulenists led a corruption investigation of prominent AKP members. That was a watershed event that initiated incredible enmity between the AKP and Gulenists, as both sides believed the other’s ugly face had been exposed. For me, however, both sides were exposed. The corruption within the AKP proved to be massive, and the scope of Gulenist infiltration and espionage also proved substantial.

A key point among the exposures was Gulen’s full control over his organization. In a wiretapped conversation between Gulen and one of his followers, posted on YouTube in early 2014, the latter was asking Gulen what to do about a refinery in Africa, planned gifts to Turkish businessmen and even campaigns on Twitter. Gulen, it turned out, was really not the ascetic Sufi we were told about, but a micro-manager of a global organization based on secrecy and hierarchy. “He really controls everything,” I was told in June 2014 by Huseyin Gulerce, the man who introduced me to Gulen himself 10 years ago in Pennsylvania, but who had defected by that point.

In the next two years, I kept arguing that the AKP should indeed disestablish the Gulenist “parallel state” within the state, but not attack the schools, companies or charities of the Gulenists. The latter must engage in “self-criticism” about their misdeeds, I added, while the AKP must be honest about corruption. Surely, neither side liked these arguments. [Continue reading…]

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‘Young, old, conservative, liberal’: Turkey in shock over journalists’ arrest

The Observer reports: Turkish media are in a state of shock this weekend after the government arrested 17 journalists in recent days on terror charges and issued arrest warrants for dozens more, in what a press freedom group has warned is a “sweeping purge” of the sector.

Turkey had already ordered the closure of more than 100 papers, broadcasters and publishing houses as part of a crackdown after the failed 15 July coup attempt, before sending police to round up reporters, columnists, a novelist and social commentators.

The impact of those arrests was documented by US-based journalist and government critic Mahir Zeynalov, who was expelled from Turkey for his work two years ago and who took to Twitter to commemorate the work and reputations of the journalists arrested.

“Everybody was highlighting numbers and statistics, but nobody really explained who these people are,” he told the Observer. Some are personal friends, others celebrated within the profession and several are nationally famous. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey compares coup attempt to 9/11 and likens Fethullah Gulen to Osama bin Laden

Politico reports: Is President Barack Obama willing to damage America’s relationship with a critical NATO ally over the fate of an elderly Muslim man living in the Poconos?

Turkey is trying to find out.

Turkish leaders, already busy purging their own institutions of alleged enemies, are intensifying pressure on the U.S. to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim spiritual leader Turkey blames for the recent attempted coup there. In op-eds, briefings and interviews with Western media, Turkish leaders are comparing the putsch to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, saying their desire to bring Gulen to justice is similar to America’s demand that Afghanistan hand over Osama bin Laden.

But while U.S. agency spokesmen are trying to be cautious in what they say, skepticism about Turkey’s claims that Gulen directed the plot are widespread in Washington. Last week, in comments that likely burned a few ears in Ankara, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told The Washington Post that he did not believe Turkey had yet offered enough proof to implicate Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region for years.

At this stage, “the rhetoric has been ratcheted so high it’s almost impossible to find a suitable compromise,” said Joshua Walker, a former State Department official now with the German Marshall Fund. “Turkey is too strategically important to lose over Gulen … However, at the same time, the U.S. can’t be seen to be short-circuiting its own legal and due process.” [Continue reading…]

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Turkey expands purge, shutting down news media outlets

The New York Times reports: The Turkish government ordered the closing of more than 100 media outlets on Wednesday, including newspapers, publishing companies and television channels, as part of a sweeping crackdown following a failed military coup this month.

The Turkish authorities ordered the shutdown of 45 newspapers, three news agencies, 16 television channels, 15 magazines and 29 publishers in a decree that was published in the government’s official gazette on Wednesday.

Among those ordered to close are the newspaper Zaman and the Cihan News Agency, which had previously been seized by the government over suspicions that it has links to the network of Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in the United States and has been accused of orchestrating the July 15 coup attempt. [Continue reading…]

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The tragedy of Turkish democracy in five acts

By Erik C. Nisbet, The Ohio State University

The failed July 15 military coup in Turkey was a long time in the making. Its aftermath is the final act in what may be viewed as the devolution of Turkish democracy into an authoritarian state.

Prelude: Turkish appetite for democracy

Turkey is a country where citizens’ demand for democracy has steadily grown over the last 15 years. A long period of competitive parliamentary elections and political liberalization created hope that democracy had become enshrined in Turkey’s political culture.

Everyday citizens embracing democratic governance as the only legitimate form of government are required for any democracy to be successful. When citizens do not demand democracy, preferring a strong authoritarian leader as in Russia, there is little hope for democracy to flourish.

As part of the Comparative National Election Project (CNEP) at Ohio State University, we surveyed nearly 1,200 Turkish citizens about their views on democracy in early 2015.

Respondents expressed a large demand for democratic governance. Three-quarters of respondents consistently rejected each of the four types of authoritarian rule (one-party, strong man, military, religious) about which we asked. About four out of five (78 percent) respondents stated that democracy was preferable over any other form of government.

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$1.3 billion of weapons flowing from Europe to Middle East

The Guardian reports: Eastern European countries have approved the discreet sale of more than €1bn of weapons in the past four years to Middle Eastern countries that are known to ship arms to Syria, an investigation has found.

Thousands of assault rifles such as AK-47s, mortar shells, rocket launchers, anti-tank weapons and heavy machine guns are being routed through a new arms pipeline from the Balkans to the Arabian peninsula and countries bordering Syria.

The suspicion is that much of the weaponry is being sent into Syria, fuelling the five-year civil war, according to a team of reporters from the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).

Arms export data, UN reports, plane tracking, and weapons contracts examined during a year-long investigation reveal how the munitions were sent east from Bosnia, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Montenegro, Slovakia, Serbia and Romania.

Since the escalation of the Syrian conflict in 2012, the eight countries have approved €1.2bn (£1bn) of weapons and ammunition exports to Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey – key arms markets for Syria and Yemen. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey cracks down on journalists, its next target after crushing attempted coup

The New York Times reports: One journalist, who was on vacation, had his home raided in the early morning by the police. Others were called in to their bosses’ offices last week and fired, with little explanation. Dozens of reporters have had their press credentials revoked.

A pro-government newspaper, meanwhile, published a list of names and photographs of journalists suspected of treachery.

The witch-hunt environment that has enveloped Turkey in the wake of a failed military coup extended to the news media on Monday, as the government issued warrants for the detention of dozens of journalists.

The step followed the dismissals of tens of thousands of workers — teachers, bankers, police officers, soldiers, bureaucrats and others — as well as the arrests of thousands accused of ties to the conspiracy.

The government said the journalists, too, were part of a vast network linked to Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania who it has alleged was the mastermind of the botched coup.

A senior Turkish official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with government protocol, said the dismissal of the journalists was not related to their professional activities, but to possible criminal conduct.

But it has been a common reflex of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to crack down on freedom of expression during times of crisis. [Continue reading…]

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Wikileaks put women in Turkey in danger, for no reason

Zeynep Tufekci writes: Just days after a bloody coup attempt shook Turkey, Wikileaks dumped some 300,000 emails they chose to call “Erdogan emails.” In response, Turkey’s internet governance body swiftly blocked access to Wikileaks.

For many, blocking Wikileaks was confirmation that the emails were damaging to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the government, revealing corruption or other wrongdoing. There was a stream of articles about “censorship.” Even U.S. National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden tweeted the news of the Wikileaks block with the comment: “How to authenticate a leak.”

But Snowden couldn’t have been more wrong about an act that was irresponsible, of no public interest and of potential danger to millions of ordinary, innocent people, especially millions of women in Turkey. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey unity rally draws thousands as post-coup torture claims emerge

AFP reports: Many thousands of Turks massed on Sunday for the first cross-party rally to condemn the coup attempt against the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, amid a purge of suspected state enemies.

Istanbul’s Taksim square was transformed into a sea of national flags as Erdoğan’s ruling Islamic-conservatives and the opposition secular camps briefly set aside their differences in a show of national unity.

But in stark contrast to the broadly celebratory mood in Istanbul, human rights group Amnesty International in London claimed it had “credible evidence” of the beating and torture of post-coup detainees.

The official number of those in custody since the 15 July putsch has surged above 13,000 soldiers, police, justice officials and civilians in a wave of arrests that has alarmed Nato allies and European leaders.

Despite the high tensions since the coup attempt, the mood at the Istanbul rally was strongly patriotic.

“We defend the republic and democracy” read one sign in the vast crowd, while others declared “sovereignty belongs to the people alone” and “no to the coup, yes to democracy!”

A few banners also protested against the post-coup state of emergency, with one proclaiming “no to the coup, no to dictatorship”. [Continue reading…]

Amnesty International has gathered credible evidence that detainees in Turkey are being subjected to beatings and torture, including rape, in official and unofficial detention centres in the country.

The organization is calling for independent monitors to be given immediate access to detainees in all facilities in the wake of the coup attempt, which include police headquarters, sports centres and courthouses. More than 10,000 people have been detained since the failed coup.

Amnesty International has credible reports that Turkish police in Ankara and Istanbul are holding detainees in stress positions for up to 48 hours, denying them food, water and medical treatment, and verbally abusing and threatening them. In the worst cases some have been subjected to severe beatings and torture, including rape.

“Reports of abuse including beatings and rape in detention are extremely alarming, especially given the scale of detentions that we have seen in the past week. The grim details that we have documented are just a snapshot of the abuses that might be happening in places of detention,” said Amnesty International’s Europe director John Dalhuisen. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s military coup attempt failed, but Erdogan’s institutional coup has been a huge success

Adnan R. Khan writes: There has been a curious reversal playing out in the days following last Friday’s coup attempt in Turkey. The coup failed, but Turkey’s ruling AK Party has acted in ways that bear an unsettling resemblance to those who have succeeded in a coup attempt.

Successful coups — the one in Pakistan in 1999, for instance, as well as the more recent Egyptian coup — have some common denominators: in the days that follow, the putschists stoke nationalist fervour to legitimize their rule. They flood the streets with supporters and fire them up with appeals to patriotic duty. They warn of an abundance of danger, both within and without, to justify the mass arrests that inevitably accompany a coup and the state of emergency that follows it.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has deployed all of these tactics so faithfully that it now appears two coups hit Turkey last week. One , the military version, failed spectacularly; the other, an institutional coup, appears to be a whopping success.

Erdogan’s critics are either detained, on the run, or laying low, hoping the storm passes. The media landscape, already crippled by years of government crackdowns, is all but broken. No one now dares engage in any semblance of critical debate, and if they do they risk their careers. According to Amnesty International, in the wake of the coup attempt more than 20 news websites have been blocked, another 25 media agencies have had their licences revoked, while an additional 34 individual journalists have had their press passes cancelled. All in less than a week. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey’s president is destroying the democracy that Turks risked their lives to defend

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The Economist: Much is unknown about the attempted military coup in Turkey on the night of July 15th. Why was it botched so badly? How far up the ranks did the conspiracy reach? Were the putschists old-style secularists, as their initial communiqué suggested; or were they followers of an exiled Islamist cleric, Fethullah Gulen, as the government claims?

But two things are clear. First, the people of Turkey showed great bravery in coming out onto the streets to confront the soldiers; hundreds died (see article here and here). Opposition parties, no matter how much they may despise President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, united to denounce the assault on democracy. Better the flawed, Islamist-tinged strongman than the return of the generals for the fifth time since the 1960s.

The second, more alarming conclusion is that Mr Erdogan is fast destroying the very democracy that the people defended with their lives. He has declared a state of emergency that will last at least three months. About 6,000 soldiers have been arrested; thousands more policemen, prosecutors and judges have been sacked or suspended. So have academics, teachers and civil servants, though there is little sign they had anything to do with the coup. Secularists, Kurds and other minorities feel intimidated by Mr Erdogan’s loyalists on the streets.

The purge is so deep and so wide — affecting at least 60,000 people — that some compare it to America’s disastrous de-Baathification of Iraq. It goes far beyond the need to preserve the security of the state. Mr Erdogan conflates dissent with treachery; he is staging his own coup against Turkish pluralism. Unrestrained, he will lead his country to more conflict and chaos. And that, in turn, poses a serious danger to Turkey’s neighbours, to Europe and to the West.

The failed putsch may well become the third shock to Europe’s post-1989 order. Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 destroyed the idea that Europe’s borders were fixed and that the cold war was over. The Brexit referendum last month shattered the notion of ineluctable integration in the European Union. Now the coup attempt in Turkey, and the reaction to it, raise troubling questions about the reversibility of democracy within the Western world — which Turkey, though on its fringe, once seemed destined to join. [Continue reading…]

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How Erdogan’s erstwhile allies turned into an existential threat

Mustafa Akyol writes: When Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., came to power in 2002, they felt threatened by the hard-core secularists who have dominated Turkey’s military since the days of Ataturk, the father of the Turkish republic. Mr. Erdogan viewed the Gulenist cadres in the state as an asset, and an alliance was born. The Erdogan government supported Gulenist police officers, prosecutors and judges as they went after secularists. Starting in 2007, hundreds of secularist officers and their civilian allies were jailed.

This witch hunt was driven by Mr. Erdogan’s political agenda, but the Gulenists were even more aggressive than the A.K.P. More worrying: Some of the evidence turned out to be overblown. Two secular journalists and a police chief who exposed the fake evidence, and blamed the “The Imam’s Army,” were soon themselves imprisoned on bogus charges.

“How can they justify using fake evidence to blame innocent people?” I once asked my disillusioned Gulenist friend. “Since their end goal is so great,” he said, referring to the movement’s global, apocalyptic ambition, “they think all means are justified.”

It eventually became clear why the Gulenists had been so fervent in their persecution of the secularists: They wanted to replace them. Many of the officers who reportedly took part in last week’s coup attempt had been promoted thanks to a major purge of the military in 2009 that supposedly saved Mr. Erdogan from a coup.

By 2012, the old secularist guard had been quelled and the Gulenists and the A.K.P. were left more or less alone to run Turkey. It took less than two years before the two Islamist groups developed distrust and, ultimately, enmity. This tension came to a head in December 2013, when Gulenist police officers and prosecutors arrested dozens of government officials in a corruption investigation, most likely in the hope of toppling Mr. Erdogan, who condemned the inquiry as a “coup attempt.” At the time, this sounded like a self-serving exaggeration.

But the bloody plot of July 15 is far more destructive than anything Turkey has seen in recent years. Notably, the plot came as Mr. Erdogan was supposed to be planning a major purge of suspected Gulenists from the military. [Continue reading…]

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Inside a failed coup and Turkey’s fragmented military

Aaron Stein writes: The recent coup attempt in Turkey revealed profound political cleavages in the Turkish armed forces. The coup pitted a minority — but nevertheless significant — faction of the Turkish military against the majority of the country’s armed forces, which remained loyal to their commander in chief, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The coup nearly succeeded in achieving what, in retrospect, appears to have been its primary objective: the killing or capture of Erdogan, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim, and Hakan Fidan, the chief of the country’s intelligence agency, MIT. The plotters, using a number of well-placed insiders, did manage to take the chief of the general staff, Hulusi Akar, hostage. The clashes resulted in 240 deaths. Turkish government officials allege that the plot was hatched by followers of Fetullah Gulen, a self-exiled Turkish cleric, currently living in Pennsylvania.

The following account remains incomplete and relies on a Whatsapp conversation between some of the coup plotters, open source data, compiled by blogs like The Aviationist, as well as discussions I have had with Turkey based journalists and colleagues, all whom prefer to remain anonymous. I relied on pro-government sources, including state-owned and government aligned media outlets, but sought to compensate for their biases in my analysis. The complete story has yet to be told and all of the details have yet to be released publicly.

The story of the coup suggests a relatively large plot that drew support from numerous parts of the Turkish Armed Forces, spanning various commands around Turkey. The number of senior officers involved, including the commander of Incirlik air force base where U.S. aircraft are now based for the fight against the Islamic State, suggest that the Turkish military is divided. The narrative following the coup is that this was a small, ill-conceived group of plotters who failed to overthrow the elected government, but this narrative is at odds with information coming out about the extent of the plot. This was a larger and far more credible attempt than has thus far been reported.

The fact that this was relatively well planned — if hastily implemented — coup attempt has several implications — namely that the Turkish military’s senior leadership is deeply factionalized, with one sizeable minority of officers willing to use force, even though their decision risked civil war. This suggests that Turkey is unstable and faces serious challenges in the near term in ways that will surely impact American and Western security interests in the Middle East and Europe. [Continue reading…]

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Erdoğan may be divisive, but a coup in Turkey would have been devastating

Fawaz A Gerges writes: Of all the coverage of the attempted military coup against the Erdoğan government, the many “what if” have received hardly any scrutiny. For instance, if the coup had succeeded, the fallout would have been seismic for Turkey, the Middle East and the western security architecture, particularly Nato.

Even die-hard opponents of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, including secularists and the Kurds, were vehemently opposed to the coup for fear of the unrest and instability it would have undoubtedly caused at home and in the region. The Turkish people do not have fond memories of four military interventions in Turkish politics in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997, which exacted a heavy toll on state and society.

If the uprising had succeeded, it would have been likely that the military would have suspended the democratic process in Turkey and brutally persecuted Erdoğan and his allies, plunging the country into civil strife. The deep historical tensions that exist between Turkey’s military, which views its role as the guardian of the secular state, and Erdoğan, whose AKP party has its roots in moderate Islam, would have escalated into all-out war. Entrenched in both Syria and Iraq, Islamic State and al-Qaida would have found a fertile breeding ground in another conflict zone. Political instability in Turkey would have been a godsend to Isis jihadis. [Continue reading…]

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