Author: Greg Madatian

The Independent - Daily Edition
 Friday
Gulen is facing extradition by Trump - he should read up about his Turkey first
A new book laying bare the Turkish regime's collaboration with Isis
and its systematic campaign against the Kurds is a frightening read -
particularly so for one US-based imam
ROBERT FISK MIDDLE EAST CORRESPONDENT
Fethullah Gulen says he has no intention of fleeing America if Donald
Trump is going to extradite him to Turkey. But the Muslim cleric might
like to read a new book before he obliges the Turkish President by
climbing aboard a plane for Ankara or Istanbul. Accused of fomenting
the attempted coup almost exactly a year ago, he has a touching faith
in Turkish justice which has organised the arrest of 50,000 Turks for
involvement in the "terrorist" crime. For Ezgi Ba??aran's Frontline
Turkey: The Conflict at the Heart of the Middle East - published by
that ever loyal imprint of IB Tauris, a true friend of the region -
reveals a shocking story of police brutality, torture and Turkish
secret police crime and involvement with Isis.
It's also not very nice about Fethullah Gulen himself. Born in Erzerum
in 1942, he became a cleric, one of the founders of the "association
for fighting communism" - which might appeal to Donald Trump - but
Gulenist schools, attended at first by poor children, prepared their
pupils to occupy as many posts as possible in the country's judiciary,
police and military. This is Ba??aran's contention, and she backs it
up with a revealing quotation from Gulen used in an indictment that
accuses him of trying to topple the secular state in 1999 and which
doesn't sound very democratic.
"You must move in the arteries of the system without anyone noticing
your existence until you reach all the central powers," he said,
according to his charge sheet. "You must wait until such time until
you have got all the state power, until you have brought to your side
all the power of the constitutional institutions of Turkey???"
When he realised he might be arrested in 1999, Gulen failed to obtain
a preference visa to the US because, according to the Americans, he
was not an "educator", as he claimed, but "the leader of a large and
influential religious and political movement with immense commercial
holdings". But he got a US green card with three reference letters -
from a former US ambassador to Turkey and two ex-CIA officials.
So while Gulen looks like a rather cuddly imam, spending his twilight
years in American retirement, he has built up an extraordinary system
of Islamic schools and charities in the US, UK and Turkey worth
billions of dollars - and represented himself as a humble servant of
God with moderate ideas. His own movement subsequently withdrew a book
on the Turkish market (My Little World) in which, according to
Ba??aran, he justifies wife-beating, "albeit as a last resort",
describes Christianity as "perverted" and characterises America as
"our merciless enemy" - not the kind of quote to get you a green card.
Ba??aran is a journalist who was editor of Radikal - it sometimes ran
my own articles, but was closed in 2016 - and her speciality is the
Kurds. And Erdogan. And now Isis. She writes that "the new [sic]
Turkey" under Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is
"rushing headlong towards an authoritarian regime and a new, darker
Middle East after the hope of the Arab Spring". The solution to what
is happening in the Middle East is "directly related to Turkey's
40-year-old Kurdish problem and how the Turkish government chooses to
deal with it".
Ba??aran's survey of Kurdish history is both familiar and instructive.
The Kurdish people were supposed to get a state after the First World
War. The Americans declined to accept the League of Nations mandate
for "Kurdistan" - let's see if they betray them again after the
capture of Raqqa - although it's interesting to be reminded that the
original map of Turkey drawn by Ataturk included Mosul, Kirkuk and
Suliemaniya because these three now Iraqi cities were Kurdish "and
Kurds and Turks were inseparable". Hence Erdogan's interest in pushing
his army into northern Syria and into Iraq outside Mosul. Clearly,
someone has pulled the old map out of the archives.
Ataturk, in fact, talked about autonomy for some Kurdish areas since
they had fought with the Turks in the First World War - they also
helped to perpetrate the genocide of the Armenians in 1915, although
Ba??aran makes scarcely a mention of this. In a protocol drawn up by
Ataturk and the still existing Ottoman parliament in 1919, the first
article accepted the principle of Kurdish autonomy and recognised the
national and social rights of the Kurds. It was kept secret until the
1960s. But a gradual "Turkification" of the country took away these
rights. The Kurds revolted 28 times between 1923 and 1938 and the
government began a "resettlement" of the Kurdish people. It was not
surprising that Hitler admired Ataturk.
Indeed, in the last months of Ataturk's life, his military attacked
Dersim, a rebellious and mainly Kurdish and Alawite town in
south-eastern Turkey where, in the words of one Turkish politician and
lawyer, "we annexed Dersim by annihilating it". One of the pilots
assaulting Dersim was Sabiha Gokcen, Ataturk's stepdaughter, the only
woman to fly a combat aircraft. She returned home a hero.
Erdogan, of course, is no Ataturk fan. He wants to return to the
glorious days of the Ottoman Empire and this week declared on the BBC
that the EU is not "indispensable" to Turkey. And thank heavens for
that! But Ba??aran says that the government "intentionally built an
explosive triangle of Isis, Kurds and Turks". The PKK, the Kurdish
Workers Party, embarked on a ferocious war against the Turkish army
and police, but the authorities proceeded with a "de-Kurdification" of
Turkish Kurdistan. By 1986, for example, 2,842 out of 3,524 Kurdish
villages had been given Turkish names. The Brits tried that in Ireland
more than 100 years ago. We know the result. Watch Brian Friel's play
Translations.
Initially, Gulen backed Erdogan. And it was during this period that
Gulenist newspapers were filled with stories about army officers
planning a coup. The evidence appears to have been fabricated. Three
hundred stood trial. The case was dismissed - after Gulen had done a
bunk to the United States.
In 2013, Gulen's movement leaked tapes of a corruption scandal
including leading government figures. Erdogan called this an attempt
at a "civilian coup". Trials began which labelled Gulen a "terrorist".
But the AKP was in the ridiculous situation of being the ones who had
put Gulenists into key positions to prevent a secular state. AKP
members would also have to be put on trial. If Gulen is indeed
extradited, his trial will be well worth attending; he will have much
to say.
In 2014, the Isis siege of the Syrian Kurdish town of Kobani began and
the Kurds immediately suspected that Erdogan was more interested in
destroying them than destroying Isis. The PYD (Democratic Unionist
Party, part of the PKK) were surrounded but the Turkish government
newspaper Sabah was already saying that the PYD was "more dangerous
than Isis". The Kurds were outraged. They suspected that Turkey was
arming Isis - and proved it when the Turkish police stopped four
lorries sent to the border by the Turkish intelligence service,
carrying up to 30 missiles, more than 20 crates of mortar ammunition
and anti-aircraft guns. Erdogan said he would make the editor of
Cumhiryet - who had revealed the arms smuggling operation - "pay a
heavy price". Not the act of an innocent man, least of all one who
claimed this week that Turkey doesn't imprison journalists.
Turkey kept its border open until Kurdish forces took control of Til
Abyad in mid-2015, which cut the Isis supply route to Raqqa. So Isis
began to attack Kurds in Turkey. Ba??aran's newspaper Radikal began to
expose the connections. The Kurds had warned that an Isis assault team
of 100 men had been sent to Turkey. Their warning was ignored by the
government. It was true. The paper published a series of interviews
with parents in Adiyaman whose sons had gone to Syria as "jihadis". In
Diyarbabkir, a bomb killed five people. The bomber was Orhan Gonder,
whose parents Radikal had interviewed in Adiyaman.
At the heart of the Adiyaman cell, Radikal discovered, was a teahouse
called the "Islam Cayevi". The government did not want to know. There
was another suicide bombing in Suruc: 34 dead. The bomber was
20-year-old Seyh Abdurrahman Alagoz from Adiyaman. His father went to
the police when he originally vanished from his home. They didn't want
to know. Alagoz's brother Yunus was manager of the tea house. Ba??aran
warned in her Radikal column that more attacks were coming. In October
2015, a bomber exploded himself at a peace rally in Ankara, killing
107. One of the bombers was Yunus Alagoz, the brother of the Suruc
bomber and owner of the teahouse.
It is a fascinating, frightening story, journalism bringing all the
connections together. So now the Turkish-Kurdish war goes on, Gulen is
ready for his extradition and Isis appears to be free to stage its
suicide attacks in Turkey. After Aleppo and Mosul - and Raqqa soon, I
suppose - it's easy to take our eyes off Turkey. Even America has
earned Erdogan's rebuke by staging air strikes to help the surrounded
Kurds of Kobani. Watch this space. And read this book.