Kurdish Globe, Iraq
May 29 2008

Gangs of Ankara: A "Deep History"

By Dr. Zafer Yörük
The Kurdish Globe

Grasping the "deep meaning" of the recent Ergenekon arrests

The investigation into the Ergenekon gang has uncovered powerful
connections including members of the military and Parliament, a
convicted unltranationalist fugitive, and a police chief-and these
individuals may only make up the beginning of a long list of the
guilty.

On March 21, 2008, Turkey woke up to the shocking news about a new
wave of arrests in the top echelons of society in relation to the
ongoing Ergenekon investigation. The detainees included the
83-year-old editor of secularist daily Cumhuriyet, Ä°lhan
Selçuk, the former rector of Istanbul University, Kemal
AlemdaroÄ?lu, and the leading figure of Turkey’s nationalist
left, DoÄ?u Perinçek. A number of academics, lawyers, and
high-ranking journalists in addition to various ranks of military and
police officers, including Gen. Veli Küçük, were
already in custody, awaiting trial on the same charges. This shock
came exactly one week after the transmission of an even more shocking
affair: the filing of an indictment for the closure of Turkey’s ruling
party, AKP, in the Constitutional Court on March 14, 2008.

It has so far been established that Ergenekon, which is a combination
of secularist, nationalist left, and ultra-right nationalist elements
of military and civilian bureaucracy, were involved in a number of
unresolved murders including some of the attacks that have been
attributed to the PKK and Islamist groups. They also planned to
assassinate Turkey’s Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk, and many
high-profile Kurdish and AKP politicians, including the President and
the Prime Minister. All these plans are believed to be part and parcel
of a conspiracy to prepare the grounds for a military coup in 2009.

The sequence of these two events has led all the observers to read the
two lawsuits as the symptoms of a new escalation in the ongoing
secularist-Islamist conflict. However, a careful look at the history
of the extrajudicial state organizations in Turkey may lead one to a
different conclusion.

The history of the "deep state" or the "state gang" and the history of
the modern Turkish state are one and the same thing. We can begin the
story with the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II’s inauguration of Turkey’s
first Western-style intelligence service, Teskilati Mahsusa, in the
late 19th century. The original purpose of this organization was to
engage in clandestine activities in India in order to disseminate
Islamist propaganda against the British occupation. Abdulhamid was
hoping to use the Indian Muslim resistance card in order to ease
British pressure on the Ottoman Empire. It may be interesting to know
that Abdulhamid also founded the first special war units of Turkey’s
history, the Hamidiye Regiments, as a military measure against the
secessionist Armenian aspirations in the Kurdish provinces.

The Intelligence Service and the notion of Special War gained
increasing importance in parallel to the speedy shrinking of the
Empire. Ottoman land had become the field of antagonisms with 40
percent Christian population increasingly defining themselves in their
opposition to the Turkish-Muslim rule and relying primarily on hopes
of exogenous protection and intervention, while the Turks had to rely
solely on their own "nationalization" and more importantly their
state’s apparatus of force and violence. According to the memoirs of
Esref Kuscubasi, the founder of TeÅ?kilatı Mahsusa,
certain plans were drawn and put in practice for the liquidation of
non-Muslim elements in Anatolia, which the Turkish state was designing
as the "last shelter" for the Muslim-Turkish population of the
outlying portions of the Empire. The military measures for this end
consisted of direct intervention for forcible deportation, while
political and economic measures aimed primarily to mobilize Turkish
Muslim public to regain their dominance as the "essential element" in
Anatolia through participation in the liquidation of the other
elements.

This plan, which was originally drawn as early as 1894, was
systematically implemented for three decades; its realization reached
its peak with the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and was concluded by the
population exchange with Greece in 1922. It is interesting to note
that the same organization, TeÅ?kilatı Mahsusa,
uninterruptedly carried out the same plan under three different
hostile regimes: the absolute monarchy of Abdulhamid, the
constitutional monarchy of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP),
and the Kemalist Republican Regime of Ankara. This fact provides
important indicators to establish the permanency of the Turkish "deep
state" regardless of even the most radical changes on the political
surface.

Under the Kemalist monoparty regime, certain elements of the "deep
state," mainly the Islamists and partisan CUP elements, who could not
adapt themselves to the new secularist dictatorship, were
eliminated. This "classical Kemalist era" was marked by the "deep
state" overtly operating on the surface in the form of a
military-bureaucratic oligarchy, for there was no longer any need of
secrecy. Following the transition to the multiparty system in 1950,
the "deep state" had to be sunk once again in order to keep Turkey’s
political profile as a parliamentary regime intact. Under the surface,
this structure had to go through an ideological metamorphosis
according to Cold War conditions. Turkish "deep state" also linked
itself with NATO’s Europe-wide clandestine anticommunist organization,
Gladio. Turkish "deep state," with its military wing, known as the
Special War Department or Counter-Guerrilla, and its direct political
extensions, such as "Anti-Communism Association," carried out a
sustained civil war against popular socialist tendencies in Turkey for
five decades until the 1990s without being affected by the diverse and
hostile governments on the political surface. The most comprehensive
achievement of the "deep state" was the 1980 military coup, which
virtually liquidated all shades of the Turkish left through
executions, widespread torture, and imprisonment.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was immediately
followed by a wave of eradication around Europe of the Gladio
organizations, which had fulfilled their mission. The most traumatized
purges took place in Italy in 1991, where the politics, economy, and
society had been widely and deeply infiltrated by Italy’s
anti-Communist "deep state." As a result, the liquidation of Gladio
led to the collapse of the whole political system, with the major
parties’ auto-liquidation under scandalous conditions.

Turkey managed to remain immune from this eradication, because the
Turkish state was facing a further challenge, the Kurdish question,
after the completion of the worldwide anti-Communist mission. When the
1990s approached, the Turkish "deep state" had already recomposed
itself to lead a comprehensive war against Turkey’s Kurdish citizens,
which has lasted to date. This civil war was particularly intensive
until the capture of Ã-calan in 1999, during which more than 30,000
mostly Kurdish civilians were killed, tens of thousands of Kurdish
villages were destroyed, and more than three million Kurds were
forcibly displaced. The military wing of the "deep state" was extended
to include a "special police force" in addition to the leftover
elements of 1970s ultranationalist terrorist groups and Mafioso gangs.

The extensive dimension of the Turkish "deep state" was exposed with a
scandalous car accident near the western town of Susurluk in November
1996. Sedat Bucak, a center-right Kurdish deputy, who was leading the
paramilitary "village guards" against the PKK, Hüseyin
KocadaÄ?, a high-ranking police chief famous for his left
tendencies, and Abdullah �atlı, a former ultra-right
terrorist who was officially wanted by the authorities, emerged from
the wreckage of the same car. In the boot, there were explosives,
sniper rifles, and silencers. The police chief and the Mafioso
terrorist died, while the Jash survived and refused to be questioned
by the courts claiming that he had lost his memory during the
accident. The Susurluk exposure led to a wave of arrests and
imprisonments at the high echelons of the state apparatus, including
the founder and commander of the "special police force," and led to
Interior Minister Mehmet Agar’s resignation. The Susurluk
investigation revealed the link between the heroin trade and the
anti-Kurdish war, in both of which the police, Mafia, and Kurdish Jash
tribal leaders were equally involved. However, the investigation was
not allowed to pursue the question of the degree of the military’s
involvement in this scandal. In fact, a military organization by the
name of JITEM, which was responsible for a series of "unresolved
assassinations" and torture of Kurdish politicians and intellectuals,
had already been known as the extension of the same gang within the
military. JITEM’s "secret" commander, Gen. Veli Kucuk, was not charged
until 2008, when he was indicted among the Ergenekon suspects.

Instead of a thorough clean-up operation, as happened in Italy in
1991, the Susurluk scandal of 1996 essentially led to the liquidation
of the non-military elements of the "deep state." This purge, rather
than indicating the end to the extrajudicial activities of the Turkish
state, heralded mainly a new orientation in the ideology and practice
of the "deep state." During the explosion of the Susurluk scandal,
Turkey’s government was led by the country’s first Islamist prime
minister, Necmettin Erbakan, which demonstrated that political Islam
had already become an additional challenge to the conventional
Republican establishment. Accordingly, the Turkish "deep state" began
to reorganize itself in a strictly secularist fashion.

Erbakan’s consent for the suppression of the Susurluk investigation,
without probing the military, was not enough to save his position. His
coalition government collapsed in 1997 under pressure from the
military, and his Refah Party was closed down by the Constitutional
Court. In this affair, a number of semi-official organizations calling
themselves "civil society organizations" played a major role in
mobilizing secular masses in demonstrations against the "threat of
Sharia." Through these organizations, such as the "Ataturkist Thought
Association" and "Mustafa Kemal Association," the "deep state"
practiced an opening toward the secular left, through a discourse
based on an amalgam of the secularist, nationalist, and socialist
expressions. The iconic representation of this clumsy synthesis was
the bringing together of the images of Che Guevara, the legendary
revolutionary Deniz Gezmis, and the great Communist poet Nazim Hikmet,
with images of Ataturk.

This opening attracted extensively the left-inclined middle classes,
who were feeling their secular lifestyles threatened by the rise of
political Islam.

This secularist front was then extended through an exaggeration of the
non-national character of political Islam, which went as far as to
present Islamists as pursuing Arab interests against Turkish
nationalism. This discourse managed to bring together the 1970s
hostile siblings, the secular left and ultranationalist right, in a
coalition government following the 1999 elections. Political
expressions of this ideological orientation extended from the
government to the streets with the increasing popularity of
"nationalist left" and a political coalition between the MHP
supporters and left elements, calling itself "red apple," a mythical
object of Turkish nationalism.

The AKP’s electoral victory in November 2002 was not welcomed by the
Turkish "deep state," which had been reshaped to correspond to this
secularist-nationalist synthesis. Two developments since 2002 have
brought the "deep state" into its current shape: Firstly, the reforms
that Turkey’s accession to the candidate member status of the European
Union required have created frustration among the state cadres,
particularly among the police force, who were increasingly pressurized
to change their methods of operation. And hostility toward the EU did
not take long to emerge from these circles, one of the expressions of
which has been a growing resentment toward the remnants of the
non-Muslim population in Turkey. Secondly, the 2003 American invasion
of Iraq, the participation in which the Turkish Parliament refused,
and the consequent formation of the Kurdistan Region as a political
entity in northern Iraq have sparked the Turkish fears of geographic
disintegration. The nationalist ingredient of the "deep state"
ideology was thus reinforced with a new push to the anti-Kurdish
racism accompanied by a novel escalation in the anti-Christian and
anti-Jewish sentiments. The typical Turkish quasi anti-imperialism was
at work once again: When the Turkish nationalists felt themselves too
weak to fight the international powers, they would turn their wrath to
the people of their own country, whom they viewed as foreigners. This
mindset led to the genocidal elimination of the non-Muslim Ottoman
subjects during late 19th and early 20th centuries. This time, an
identical quasi anti-imperialism has been responsible for a number of
assassinations, including the Hirant Dink murder, and increasing lynch
attempts targeting Kurdish families, Christian priests, and liberal
intellectuals to accompany a sustained campaign that has aimed to turn
the ordinary moderate nationalist masses into incurably racist "storm
troopers."

The advance of the Ergenekon investigation reveals that this extensive
extrajudicial state organization and various organizations directly
formed by this gang or infiltrated by it have been involved in most of
these horrific developments. The gang’s aim has been declared to be
implementing a provocative plan to drag the country toward a military
coup in 2009. Ergenekon also aims to halt Turkey’s political reform
program supervised by the European Union, and many of its participants
contemplate new international alliances by preaching closer relations
with Russia and China to replace the ongoing U.S. domination of
Turkey’s domestic and international affairs.

The timing of the new momentum of the Ergenekon investigation was
popularly interpreted as the AKP’s response to the party’s closure
case. However, the above outline of Turkey’s "deep history"
demonstrates that a "deep conclusion" needs to be based on a reading
of what exists beyond these immediate signs. We therefore need to take
into account three points that derive from the above outline:

– Civilian political authorities, who prove incapable of carrying the
investigation of a "deep state" scandal to its bitter end, are likely
be overthrown in a very short time by the intervention of these
uninvestigated elements.

– The program and activities of the extrajudicial extensions of the
Turkish state are not affected by the political developments on the
surface. Even the regime changes and coups d’état do not make
much difference regarding the course of "deep state’s" program and
activities.

– The exposure of each "deep state" scandal is an expression of
political will from inside the "deep state" for a new turn in the
political-ideological orientation of the state and society.

In the light of these "deep points," the liquidation of the Ergenekon
gang may well be read as a necessity for a new turn in the political
and ideological orientation of the Turkish state that should be
expected to take place in the near future. In fact, moving the focus
of our attention from the AKP closure case to the April 2008
resolution of the National Security Council heralding the beginning of
a new era in Turkey’s relations with the Kurdistan Region, may well be
the "royal road" to grasp the "deep meaning" of the recent Ergenekon
arrests.

Dr. Zafer Yörük is a political analyst currently
teaching political science at Salahaddin University.

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From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress