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  • The Weakening Of Turkey's Military

    THE WEAKENING OF TURKEY'S MILITARY

    Council on Foreign Relations
    http://www.cfr.org/publication/21548/wea kening_of_turkeys_military.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpubl ication%2Fby_type%2Fregion_issue_brief
    March 1 2010

    Author: Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle
    Eastern Studies

    The arrest of forty-nine currently serving and retired Turkish military
    officers for an alleged 2003 plot to overthrow the government is
    unprecedented and has raised fears about destabilization arising from
    a showdown between the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party
    (AKP) and the military.

    But none of this should come as a surprise. The current crisis
    underscores the changes long underway in Turkish politics. Since 2003,
    the ruling AKP has been whittling away at the military's vaunted
    autonomy. Yet the oft-cited power of the Turkish General Staff may be
    more apparent than real. That perception stems from the fact that the
    military has carried out four coups d'état (1960, 1971, 1980, and
    1997) and countless less-dramatic interventions in Turkish politics.

    Rather than demonstrate the officers' power and influence, however,
    these interventions reflect the underlying weakness of Turkey's
    military establishment.

    Asserting Civilian Control

    Since the founding of the Turkish republic, the basic, if unwritten,
    rule of politics has been: Politicians and their followers must not
    elicit the ire of the General Staff lest they be pushed from office and
    banned (at least temporarily) from politics. As a result, successive
    Turkish governments have shied from challenging the military on issues
    such as personnel, the military budget, and weapons procurement,
    as well as areas beyond the officers' professional competence,
    including education, broadcasting, and the national economy. Indeed,
    the threat of military intervention has so conditioned Turkish civilian
    politicians that they have often campaigned in part on the implicit
    message that they could maintain good relations with the General Staff.

    [N]one of this should come as a surprise. The current crisis
    underscores the changes long underway in Turkish politics.

    In 2003, however, the AKP, riding a wave of unprecedented popular
    support for European Union-inspired reforms, began bringing the General
    Staff under civilian control. The AKP-dominated parliament granted
    itself oversight and control over the military's extra-budgetary
    funds, strengthened the civilian-controlled Ministry of National
    Defense--which is separate from and has no control over the General
    Staff--to identify priorities for defense expenditures, and removed
    military representatives from the Higher Education and Audio-Visual
    Boards. The officers on these boards were charged with ensuring that
    threats to the republic, notably Islamism and Kurdish separatism,
    did not creep into the educational system or national broadcasting.

    The most important changes were made to the National Security Council
    (known more commonly by its Turkish acronym, MGK), which had been
    the primary channel through which the officers influenced Turkish
    politics. First, the number of officers on the council was reduced
    from five to one--the chief of staff. Second, the legislation required
    that a civilian hold the office of MGK secretary-general, a position
    previously reserved for a military officer who reported directly to
    the chief of staff. The council was also stripped of its executive
    authority and its budget placed under the prime minister's control.

    Despite these dramatic changes, the military was forced to accept
    the council's downgraded status. Given the enormous public support
    (as high as 77 percent) for the EU reforms at the time, the officers
    could not oppose the changes to the MGK without risking the military's
    popularity among the Turkish public--something the officers hold dear.

    Despite periodic reports of grumbling among the officer corps about
    the Justice and Development Party's alleged "reactionaryism," there
    were no confrontations between the military and the government
    until April 2007, when the military tried to prevent then foreign
    minister and deputy prime minister Abdullah Gul from becoming
    Turkey's president. Although the post is largely ceremonial, the
    Turkish president has the power to approve or veto legislation. The
    officers feared that a Gul presidency would bring down the last
    firewall against the establishment of an Islamic state.

    Without naming Gul, the officers posted a message on the General
    Staff's website implicitly threatening intervention should the
    AKP-dominated parliament elect Gul to be Turkey's eleventh president.

    After a tense month of popular protests in Turkey's major cities,
    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called snap national
    elections. The Justice and Development Party won a landslide victory,
    capturing 47 percent of the vote, paving the way for Gul to be elevated
    to the Cankaya Palace in August. Once again, despite the military's
    clear threats, the officers proved that while they could raise the
    level of tension in the political arena, they were impotent to secure
    their desired outcome.

    Although the arrest of the forty-nine officers is big news, the fact
    remains that the popular perception of an all-powerful Turkish military
    is largely incorrect.

    The following March, the public prosecutor filed charges against the
    Justice and Development Party for being "a center of anti-secular
    activity." Although the military was not directly responsible for
    the charges, the General Staff's deep mistrust of AKP created an
    environment that made the charges possible. The Constitutional Court
    ultimately found the party guilty, but decided against shuttering the
    party and banning seventy of its members from politics. The decision,
    despite the verdict, was widely regarded as a victory for Justice
    and Development and a blow to the secular establishment, which the
    military leads.

    A string of embarrassing incidents have further eroded the military's
    public standing and allowed the AKP to begin subordinating the officers
    to civilian authority.

    These include the so-called Ergenekon investigation, which implicated
    several former senior officers and a number of serving junior officers
    in an effort to destabilize the country and provoke a coup. In
    addition, the Turkish daily Taraf published alleged documents
    demonstrating that the military was aware of planned Kurdistan
    Worker Party attacks on Turkish soldiers before they occurred, but
    chose to do nothing to undermine support for the AKP. And officers
    from the Special Forces command were recently accused of plotting
    the assassination of Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc. The latter
    incident resulted in civilian prosecutors searching Special Forces
    headquarters for evidence, an unprecedented development in Turkey.

    The Inherent Weakness of Coups

    Although the arrest of the forty-nine officers is big news, the
    fact remains that the popular perception of an all-powerful Turkish
    military is largely incorrect. The officers regard themselves as
    the keepers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's principles of secularism and
    republicanism. Yet, Kemalism--at least the officers' interpretation
    of Ataturk's ideas--demands a drab political conformity that
    never accommodated Kurds, pious Muslims, Armenians, the small Greek
    community, and, as Turkish society has become more modern and complex,
    those who want to live in a more democratic political system.

    The fact that the officers have had to intervene four times in five
    decades demonstrates their inability to force the military's political
    will on society. To be sure, the coups of 1960, 1971, 1980, and the
    "blank" or "post-modern" coup of 1997 reflect the awesome firepower at
    the General Staff's disposal, but coercion is the least efficient means
    of political control. Indeed, in the aftermath of each intervention,
    the military sought to ensure that it would not have to intervene
    again by writing, rewriting, and amending Turkey's constitutions to
    safeguard the Kemalist political order, yet each time the reengineering
    of Turkey's political institutions failed to prevent challenges to
    the political system.

    The U.S. Response

    Although the Obama administration has identified Turkey as a strategic
    partner in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South
    Asia, Washington must recognize that Turkey's internal political
    turmoil could undermine Ankara's capacity to be a useful ally in
    these critical areas. A military backlash in the form of a coup, or
    if the AKP uses the arrests to engage in a political witch hunt, will
    destabilize Turkish politics and markets for the foreseeable future.

    Washington must continue to emphasize the importance of the rule of
    law and the importance of Turkey's democratic transition to put both
    sides--the military and the government--on notice that the stakes in
    this situation for both Ankara and Washington are high.

    Weigh in on this issue by emailing CFR.org.
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