‘STATE AGAINST DEEP STATE’
By Lale Sariibrahimoglu
Today’s Zaman
Jan 24 2008
Turkey
This was the front-page headline of mainstream daily Sabah’s Jan. 23
issue, covering a recent roundup of 33 people from retired generals to
lawyers and journalists under an operation launched by the Ýstanbul
police against a far-right nationalist group accused of setting up
a gang to commit mainly political crimes.
This gang, allegedly calling itself "Ergenekon," was first discovered
several months ago when police raided a house filled with explosives
in Ýstanbul’s Umraniye district. At the time, several individuals
were taken to jail, including a retired captain, Muzaffer Tekin,
who allegedly has links to the murder of a Council of State judge in
Ankara in 2006.
The latest operation, the result of eight months of work, included the
detention of a retired general, a retired colonel and a journalist
as well as a lawyer who brought charges of "insulting Turkishness"
against novelist Orhan Pamuk, the 2007 winner of the Nobel Prize in
Literature in Ýstanbul and other regions following raids carried out
at the break of dawn. Some of those taken into custody are suspected
of involvement in the murder of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink and other violent attacks.
The suspects are accused of many individual crimes, but what they have
in common seems to be the links they have to clandestine gangs that
function similarly to Operation Gladio — a post-World War II NATO
operation structured as "stay-behind" paramilitary organizations,
with the official aim of countering a possible Soviet invasion
through sabotage and clandestine operations. In fact many analysts
believe such networks of groups in Turkey today, sometimes referred
to as the "deep state," are remnants of the Turkish leg of the actual
Gladio. (Today’s Zaman, Jan. 23, 2008).
Ret. Gen. Veli Kucuk, among those detained in the latest operation,
is an alleged founder of a clandestine unit in the Gendarmerie General
Command who is also implicated in the infamous Susurluk gang scandal.
As a matter of fact, the existence of gangs in Turkey, which have
recently mushroomed, has become public knowledge as a result of a
famous car accident that took place on Nov. 3, 1996 in the Susurluk
township of Turkey’s Balýkesir province.
This scandal has since then been known as "Susurluk" and is frequently
referred to indicate the state’s ongoing ineffectiveness in the fight
against gangs.
Susurluk in fact revealed state-mafia ties, and the then government
did admit to illegal ties between the state and the right-wing mafia.
The fatal traffic accident took place in Susurluk when a truck
collided with a Mercedes. The occupants of the Mercedes were found to
be the deputy of a political party and a security chief as well as a
criminal-turned-state employee (Abdullah Catlý) and his alleged lover,
a blonde former beauty queen. The only passenger to survive the crash
was Sedat Bucak, a Kurdish clan leader and a former politician.
According to an Ýstanbul court verdict dated April 11, 2002
concerning Susurluk, former official of Turkey’s National Intelligence
Organization (MÝT) and former officer of the Turkish Armed Forces’
(TSK) Special Operations Korkut Eken and former deputy head of the
Police Special Operations Bureau Ýbrahim Þahin were sentenced to
six years in prison each for leading a criminal gang, and 12 other
suspects to four years each for being members of the gang.
The court verdict on Susurluk held that the government had hired
death squads to kill people seen as threats to national security while
quoting the suspects as saying that they believed they had been acting
in the name of the state. "The suspects’ defense did not bear out the
facts as reflected in their case files. For the Turkish Republic to
entrust domestic and external security to murderers, drug smugglers
and the owners of gambling joints is unforgivable and unacceptable
behavior," stressed the same verdict.
But the court’s verdict did not satisfy the public at the time over
whether the Turkish state was determined to fight against the mafia.
This suspicion has been backed by revelations made at the time by seven
former senior generals including a former chief of general staff in
support of Korkut Eken, who was put in jail before being released.
The common thread in all of these gangs from Susurluk to Atabeyler and
Ergenekon are that they have an ultranationalist agenda, sometimes
forming alliances with extreme leftists called the "Kýzýlelma
Coalition" (Red Apple coalition) and sometimes with extreme
fundamentalists to undermine the state.
The current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government has
also been criticized for not taking strong action against the acts
of organized crime posing the most serious threat to Turkey’s security.
However, the latest massive operations against the Umraniye group
have given some hope to the Turkish public that the current political
leadership may this time be resolved to dig as deep as possible to
bring to the surface the masterminds of organized crime.
The fact that the majority of Turkish papers carried the latest
operations on their front pages, some of which urged the political
leadership to take swift and determined action against the gangs while
some Sabah daily branded the latest gang a "terror organization" with
the headline "State against deep state," should further encourage
decision makers to dig as deep as possible to bring to the surface
and finally to justice the key players seeking to undermine the
state hierarchy.
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