TURKEY AND ITS ARMY
Erdogan and his generals
The once all-powerful Turkish armed forces are cowed, if not quite impotent
Feb 2nd 2013 | ANKARA AND ISTANBUL |From the print edition
IMAGINE a country with NATO’s second-largest army that counts Iraq,
Iran and Syria as neighbours and is encircled by the Aegean, the Black
Sea and the Mediterranean-but has nobody to command its navy. Just
such a situation looms in Turkey after this week’s resignation of
Admiral Nusret Guner, the number two in the navy who was expected to
take over when its incumbent head steps down in August. There are no
other qualified candidates, not least because more than half of
Turkey’s admirals are in jail, along with hundreds of generals and
other officers (both serving and retired), all on charges of plotting
to oust Turkey’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK)
government.
Admiral Guner’s resignation came after prosecutors claimed that 75
naval officers being tried for allegedly running a sex-for-secrets
ring had planted a spy camera in his teenaged daughter’s bedroom. In
an emotional speech the admiral said he believed in his colleagues’
innocence.
The series of cases known as Ergenekon has left Turkey’s once
omnipotent armed forces weak and divided. At last count one in five
Turkish generals, including Ilker Basbug, a former chief of the
general staff, was behind bars. This ought to be a triumph for Turkish
democracy. But the trials are dogged by claims of spiced-up evidence
and other discrepancies.
The families of over 250 defendants given long prison terms in
September 2012 in another alleged coup plot, Sledgehammer, are taking
their case to the UN Human Rights Council. They insist the evidence
was doctored. Independent forensic experts back their claims. Jared
Genser, a lawyer based in Washington, DC, who has worked for such
luminaries as Vaclav Havel and Desmond Tutu, says he agreed to act for
the Sledgehammer defendants because he “firmly believes” in their
innocence and because the evidence against them “was demonstrably
forged”.
Some point fingers at a powerful Muslim group led by Fethullah Gulen,
a moderate Turkish cleric living in self-imposed exile in
Pennsylvania. The generals hounded the Gulenists after they ejected
Turkey’s first Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, in 1997.
The Gulenists have made a comeback under AK and are said to have
infiltrated the police and judiciary.
Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, shares some doubts,
even though he has cut down the generals’ influence during his decade
in power. “These operations against the army are affecting morale.
There are 400 serving and retired officers in jail. At this rate we
will have no officers left to appoint to command positions,” he
complained in a recent interview. As clashes with the Kurdish
separatist PKK continue despite new peace talks and the conflict in
Syria threatens to spill over the border, Mr Erdogan is right to be
worried.
Yet even as the prime minister seeks to distance himself from the
Ergenekon case, some claim that he has struck a cosy alliance with the
army. The chief of the general staff, Necdet Ozel, who owes his rise
to the resignation in 2011 of his predecessor in protest at Ergenekon,
is fiercely loyal. Mr Erdogan rushed to his defence in December 2011
after the Turkish air force had rained bombs on Kurdish civilians who
were apparently mistaken for PKK rebels as they slipped into Turkey
from Iraq. Some 34 Kurds, mostly teenagers, died. A parliamentary
commission investigating the affair has run into claims of a cover-up.
Not a single head has rolled.
It may be that the still-popular Mr Erdogan feels that the army is
fully under his control. The National Security Council through which
the generals used to bark orders to nominally civilian governments has
been reduced to a symbolic role. After constitutional reforms were
approved in a 2010 referendum, soldiers began to be tried in civilian
courts. “Erdogan sees the army as his boys,” comments Henri Barkey, a
professor of international relations at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania.
Yet for all their recent setbacks the generals still retain
considerable sway. The defence budget remains largely immune to
civilian oversight. The chief of the general staff is not subordinate
to the minister of defence. And an internal service law that allows
the army to intervene in politics remains in place.
Indeed, the idea that some officers may have been conspiring to topple
the AK government is not far-fetched. In 2007 the army tried
unsuccessfully to stop Abdullah Gul, a former foreign minister, from
becoming Turkey’s president because his wife wears the Islamic
headscarf. In 2008 the generals egged on the constitutional court to
ban AK on flimsily documented charges that it was seeking to impose
sharia law. In the event the case was dismissed by a single vote. As
for Ergenekon, “even in the absence of tampered evidence, there is
sufficient proof of coup plotting to send scores of generals to jail,”
argues Orhan Kemal Cengiz, a human-rights lawyer who has studied the
case.
Turkey’s army has overthrown no fewer than four governments since
1960. The bloodiest coup came in 1980, when 50 people were executed,
500,000 were arrested and many hundreds died in jail. Yet millions of
Turks, who have long revered the armed forces as custodians of
Ataturk’s secular legacy, cheered the coup. Its leaders are now at
last facing trial; opinions are belatedly shifting amid gruesome
revelations of the army’s misdeeds. A recent poll suggests that, for
the first time, the presidency has supplanted the army as the
country’s most popular institution. And a report by the Platform for
Soldiers’ Rights, an advocacy group, detailing abuse of conscripts,
has dealt a further blow. Some 934 soldiers are said to have committed
suicide over the past decade, surpassing the number killed while
fighting the PKK. Were the conscripts killed by their superiors? Their
parents want to know.
From: A. Papazian
http://www.economist.com/news/europe/21571147-once-all-powerful-turkish-armed-forces-are-cowed-if-not-quite-impotent-erdogan-and-his