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ISTANBUL: Turkey's Red Lines

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  • ISTANBUL: Turkey's Red Lines

    TURKEY'S RED LINES
    MARKAR ESAYAN

    Today's Zaman
    Sept 30 2012
    Turkey

    When the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) began its
    Kurdish initiative in 2010, it, along with the government's Armenian
    and Cyprus initiatives, was perceived as a decisive move to remove
    the trump cards from Turkey's ages-old deep state, which recently
    came to be known as Ergenekon -- a clandestine organization nested
    within the state trying to overthrow or manipulate the democratically
    elected government.

    What was obvious was that the real power was wielded by the Turkish
    Armed Forces (TSK), i.e., the military of this country. The military
    had always seen itself as superior to the parliamentary system,
    forcing civilians to pursue a policy delineated by red lines. By
    analogy, it can be argued that most civilian governments had worked
    like municipalities since the introduction of the multi-party party
    system in Turkey in 1946. The military wanted to keep civilian
    governments within the "services" department, and those who raised
    objections to this system were either sent to the gallows, like the
    late Prime Minister Aydın Menderes, or to prisons, as was the case
    in the wake of the 1970 and 1980 coups.

    Under this iron sledgehammer of the military, a specific type of
    politician developed in Turkey. Such politicians accepted the military
    as the boss and would never imagine diverging from military-imposed
    lines of thought. The most famous of these politicians is Suleyman
    Demirel. For years, he traded the general public's yearning for
    civilian politics for submission to the army. He was a master demagogue
    and really a boon to the tutelary system.

    In the 1983 elections, held in the wake of the 1980 coup, Turgut
    Ozal managed to appeal to the general public's vast common sense
    despite two rivals openly backed by the military and immense pressure
    from military generals. Ozal introduce revolutionary changes to the
    country, helping it crack its hard shell. He was so self-confident
    that he removed the chief of General Staff from office. After this
    successful move, however, it seems that Ozal began to underestimate
    the military and slackened his reforms. He gradually became alone and
    ineffective. An attempt to assassinate him was a deep state operation
    as it was known that he had intended to settle the Kurdish issue
    through reasonable, fair methods. Whether they wanted to kill or
    just intimidate him (he survived the attempt with a minor wound to
    his finger), we will never know. Indeed, he was already ill during
    his presidency, and, after returning from a long visit to several
    Central Asian countries, his health deteriorated while at the Cankaya
    Presidential Palace. Without any emergency medical intervention,
    he died a suspicious death. Recently, prosecutors have decided to
    exhume Ozal's remains from his grave in İstanbul. Hopefully the
    doubts surrounding his death will be resolved.

    However, I must also note that if politically motivated murders are
    committed in this country and if these murders remain unexplained,
    this means there is still a deep state in the country and that it
    wields the true power. This is a universal criterion. Today, there
    are still many unsolved, politically motivated murders, such as that
    of journalist Hrant Dink. According to the above criterion, there
    is still a deep state in Turkey, which, although it may have grown
    weak and inched back, is still nested within the state and powerful
    enough to keep those murders from being solved.

    With the postmodern coup of Feb. 28, 1997, staged against religious
    politics and religious economic enterprises, the AK Party's senior
    leaders -- Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Abdullah Gul, Bulent Arınc and
    others -- seemed to have come to understand the style of rule that
    started with the Committee of Union and Progress' (CUP) B-team player
    Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and continued with his single-party Republican
    People's Party (CHP). The true bosses and owners of this country
    were the CHP and its elite supporters, and the general public was
    not how the CHP imagined it to be. So, it first tried to create the
    public of its dreams. To this end, it aggressively meddled with daily
    life. Soon, however, it realized that its social engineering efforts
    were ineffectual. So it changed its tactics and, in collaboration with
    the elite, tried to keep the general public away from the country's
    administration and riches.

    It made the TSK the watchdog of politics so that the public would
    not be able to get close to the country's governance. It formulated
    policies marked by red lines, such as those concerning the 1915
    Armenian massacres, the Cyprus issue, the Kurdish and the Kurdistan
    Workers' Party (PKK) problems, the Alevi issue, income inequality
    and many more matters. Indeed, it derived its power from leaving
    these issues unresolved, and this deadlock would justify the TSK's
    supremacy over civilian politics.

    Having understood this scheme, the AK Party, I think, concluded
    that the country must get rid of these burdens in order to start
    democratization and that it is the state which is the main source
    of problems.

    Unfortunately, however, they relied solely on public support --
    understandably, but without any serious preparations for tackling the
    problem of the deep state. So their approach was pragmatic but lacked
    any serious forethought. All of their initiatives eventually ended
    up in smoke. They negotiated the rights of Kurdish people with the
    PKK; this was both unethical and is attributable to the organization
    gaining more representative power than it had previously enjoyed.

    Today, all anti-AK Party groups seem to invest their hopes in the
    government's armed struggle with the PKK. The country is being
    seriously fractured and the government has to learn its lesson from
    the past.

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