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ISTANBUL: Whistleblower reveals foreign policy blunders in Turkey

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  • ISTANBUL: Whistleblower reveals foreign policy blunders in Turkey

    Whistleblower reveals foreign policy blunders in Turkey

    http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-304470-whistleblower-reveals-foreign-policy-blunders-in-turkey.html
    18 January 2013, Friday

    ABDULLAH BOZKURT
    [email protected]


    A highly classified letter sent by an anonymous officer to the boss of
    Turkey's spy agency in 2007 was leaked to the press from the Turkish
    Parliament this week. The letter, apparently written by a
    whistleblower in the Special Forces Command (ÖKK), which is a special
    operations unit answerable directly to the General Staff, reveals
    shocking plans cooked up by a junta in the military. The ÖKK often
    rendered services for the Tactical Mobilization Group (STK), formerly
    known as the Special Warfare Department (ÖHD), an equivalent to the
    Gladio style stay-behind operation in the Turkish military.
    Therefore it is safe to assume that s/he had intimate knowledge of
    shady deals planned in this secretive branch of the Turkish military.
    The officer wrote six letters in total detailing how he was involved
    in dirty schemes devised by a clandestine gang in special ops. They
    were sent to the parliamentary Coup and Memorandum Investigation
    Commission for examination by the National Intelligence Organization
    (MİT). The officer was complaining that the special forces were being
    manipulated by a select group of coup-loving junta members who were
    determined to oust the democratically elected and popular government
    in Turkey despite the fact that the STK was designed to mobilize
    national assets in time of war against the external threat. The letter
    was addressed to then-Undersecretary of MİT Emre Taner.

    It was certainly a hair-raising experience to read the letter leaked
    to reporters. According to the whistleblower's account, the ÖKK was
    ordered to draw plans to blow up two bridges across the Bosporus in
    İstanbul, the Boğaziçi and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges, the Yalova
    ferry and the Bolu Tunnel on the highway connecting Ankara and
    Istanbul as well as key crossing points on the Black Sea Ring Highway.
    The command's plans also included the bombing of Atatürk's mausoleum,
    called Anıtkabir, in the country's capital.

    The plan also included a series of bombings during massive protests
    that were held against the government in 2007, dubbed "republican
    rallies" by their organizers, in several provinces of the country. The
    attack was supposed to be blamed on religious fundamentalist groups
    affiliated with the governing Justice and Development Party (AK
    Party). We now learned from the ongoing court cases in Turkey that
    these protests were organized with the manipulation of the Ergenekon
    terrorist organization, a shadowy network nested within the state with
    the aim of overthrowing the government.

    Since there is not enough space to detail all plans mentioned in the
    letter here, I will dwell on points that involve foreign policy and
    Turkey's neighbors. The letter claims that the junta wanted to risk
    dragging the country into hot international conflicts just to expand
    the maneuvering room of the military in Turkey and to put embarrassing
    blemishes on the government's record. Looking back to events in 2007
    before and after the June snap elections held because of the
    presidential election crisis in Parliament, it is obvious that some of
    these plans were actually carried out.

    For example, the reports on dogfights between Turkish and Greek jets
    over the disputed Aegean airspace sharply increased following the May
    2006 incident in which Turkish and Greek F-16 jet fighters collided in
    mid-air as they were shadowing each other. The Turkish and Greek
    foreign ministries exchanged mutual accusations claiming a violation
    of national airspace in March 2007, almost a year after the aviation
    incident. According to General Staff, in the first half of 2007
    (interestingly in the period leading up to the July elections) Turkish
    jets engaged Greek fighters 207 times to prevent incursion into
    Turkish airspace. In the same year, cockpit conversations among
    Turkish pilots and how they operate during these dogfights were posted
    on the YouTube website. These events cannot be coincidental.

    This reminds me of Operation Thunderstorm (Oraj) which was a sub-plot
    of the Sledgehammer military coup operation that was discovered in
    2010 court documents. The plan sees an escalation of the crisis with
    Greece by provoking conflict in the air, at sea and on land borders.
    However, the ultimate target of the plan was not Greece but the
    Turkish government itself. Bringing Turkey to the brink of war with
    Greece was a "means to an end" scenario to prepare the groundwork for
    an armed military intervention in Turkey. It perfectly fit the
    scenarios mentioned by the whistleblower's letter in 2007.

    The Oraj plan, dated February 2003, specifically asks for increased
    flights over the Aegean and orders commanding officers to instruct
    pilots to engage in harassment maneuvers with Greek fighter jets. It
    wants Turkish pilots to be more aggressive and even issues new rules
    of engagement allowing pilots to take shots at Greek fighters, albeit
    unofficially. The plan suggests reorganizing the Special Fleet within
    the Turkish Air Forces (THK) with the specific objective of tasking a
    Turkish pilot to shoot down a Turkish jet in his own squadron in case
    all efforts to provoke a Greek fighter jet to destroy a Turkish one
    fail. Fabricated stories would then be planted in the media, saying
    that Greece intentionally shot down a Turkish jet. The plotters hoped
    that this would create a huge embarrassment for the ruling AK Party
    government.

    Going back to the letter again, another foreign policy issue the junta
    tried to exploit by mobilizing some assets among civil society groups
    in order to hammer the government was Cyprus. There was an intensive
    campaign in 2007 against the government based on false allegations
    that Turkish Cypriots on the divided Mediterranean island were sold
    out by the AK Party. Even advocacy groups that have nothing to do with
    foreign policy started issuing declarations against the government
    that the Turks in Cyprus were left alone in their fight against the
    Greek Cypriots. The fact that there are too many examples from 2007 of
    this campaign shows how the junta was effective in its planning
    through special ops.

    2007 was also a year when Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was
    shot dead outside his newspaper's office in Şişli in January. Since
    the issue of non-Muslims in general and the Armenian genocide in
    particular are sensitive topics in Turkey, it would not come as a
    surprise that the junta tried to exploit these sensitivities in
    Turkish society. Hopefully other documents MİT has referred to in the
    parliamentary commission can shed some light on finally resolving the
    Dink murder. The same goes for the Malatya massacre case involving the
    slaughter of three Christians in 2007, and the case of Father Andrea
    Santoro, who was murdered in 2006 in Trabzon. In that same year,
    Armenian genocide bill discussions in the US Congress further fueled
    nationalist fervor in Turkey, much to the benefit of the junta's aims,
    putting more strain on the government.

    The Kurdish issue to the extent it linked with the semiautonomous
    Kurdistan in northern Iraq was another area in which the junta saw an
    opportunity to score against the government. Starting in January 2007,
    the government was subjected to an intense campaign of being too
    passive when it comes to dealing with northern Iraq. The then-chief of
    Turkey's General Staff Gen. Yaşar Büyükanıt was publicly accusing
    Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq of actively backing Kurdistan
    Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists, threatening a cross-border incursion.
    The military was overstepping into the policy decision-making process,
    creating a deep rift between the army and the government. The goal was
    to create the impression that the government was simply too weak to
    handle a critically important issue on the national agenda when it
    resisted the idea of a special military operation into northern Iraq.
    The government was able to fend off the pressure until June but was
    eventually forced to cave in and allowed the military to go into
    northern Iraq.

    No doubt that all of these plans require the manipulation of public
    opinion through the media, and the ÖKK had plenty signed up for this
    job, some voluntarily and others without even knowing they were on the
    hook. The whistleblower's letter also exposes this by saying that as a
    part of these plans, journalists would be urged to write false news
    stories. Therefore some of the journalists accused in the coup cases
    are actually co-conspirators in these hideous plans against the nation
    and are now responding to charges in a court of law. They have not
    performed their public duty by exposing dirty deals to the public but
    instead have behaved as pens-for-hire to serve the interests of coup
    mongers in Turkey. Those who are keen to advance the press freedom
    issue in Turkey need to separate these bad apples from legitimate
    infringement on freedom of the press cases in order to help contribute
    to the further democratization of Turkey.


    From: Baghdasarian
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