THE ONCE ALL-POWERFUL TURKISH ARMED FORCES ARE COWED, IF NOT QUITE IMPOTENT – THE ECONOMIST
TERT.AM
09:18 ~U 01.02.13
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.