THE WEAKENING OF TURKEY’S MILITARY
Council on Foreign Relations
kening_of_turkeys_military.html?breadcrumb=%2Fpubl ication%2Fby_type%2Fregion_issue_brief
March 1 2010
Author: Steven A. Cook, Hasib J. Sabbagh Senior Fellow for Middle
Eastern Studies
The arrest of forty-nine currently serving and retired Turkish military
officers for an alleged 2003 plot to overthrow the government is
unprecedented and has raised fears about destabilization arising from
a showdown between the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party
(AKP) and the military.
But none of this should come as a surprise. The current crisis
underscores the changes long underway in Turkish politics. Since 2003,
the ruling AKP has been whittling away at the military’s vaunted
autonomy. Yet the oft-cited power of the Turkish General Staff may be
more apparent than real. That perception stems from the fact that the
military has carried out four coups d’état (1960, 1971, 1980, and
1997) and countless less-dramatic interventions in Turkish politics.
Rather than demonstrate the officers’ power and influence, however,
these interventions reflect the underlying weakness of Turkey’s
military establishment.
Asserting Civilian Control
Since the founding of the Turkish republic, the basic, if unwritten,
rule of politics has been: Politicians and their followers must not
elicit the ire of the General Staff lest they be pushed from office and
banned (at least temporarily) from politics. As a result, successive
Turkish governments have shied from challenging the military on issues
such as personnel, the military budget, and weapons procurement,
as well as areas beyond the officers’ professional competence,
including education, broadcasting, and the national economy. Indeed,
the threat of military intervention has so conditioned Turkish civilian
politicians that they have often campaigned in part on the implicit
message that they could maintain good relations with the General Staff.
[N]one of this should come as a surprise. The current crisis
underscores the changes long underway in Turkish politics.
In 2003, however, the AKP, riding a wave of unprecedented popular
support for European Union-inspired reforms, began bringing the General
Staff under civilian control. The AKP-dominated parliament granted
itself oversight and control over the military’s extra-budgetary
funds, strengthened the civilian-controlled Ministry of National
Defense–which is separate from and has no control over the General
Staff–to identify priorities for defense expenditures, and removed
military representatives from the Higher Education and Audio-Visual
Boards. The officers on these boards were charged with ensuring that
threats to the republic, notably Islamism and Kurdish separatism,
did not creep into the educational system or national broadcasting.
The most important changes were made to the National Security Council
(known more commonly by its Turkish acronym, MGK), which had been
the primary channel through which the officers influenced Turkish
politics. First, the number of officers on the council was reduced
from five to one–the chief of staff. Second, the legislation required
that a civilian hold the office of MGK secretary-general, a position
previously reserved for a military officer who reported directly to
the chief of staff. The council was also stripped of its executive
authority and its budget placed under the prime minister’s control.
Despite these dramatic changes, the military was forced to accept
the council’s downgraded status. Given the enormous public support
(as high as 77 percent) for the EU reforms at the time, the officers
could not oppose the changes to the MGK without risking the military’s
popularity among the Turkish public–something the officers hold dear.
Despite periodic reports of grumbling among the officer corps about
the Justice and Development Party’s alleged "reactionaryism," there
were no confrontations between the military and the government
until April 2007, when the military tried to prevent then foreign
minister and deputy prime minister Abdullah Gul from becoming
Turkey’s president. Although the post is largely ceremonial, the
Turkish president has the power to approve or veto legislation. The
officers feared that a Gul presidency would bring down the last
firewall against the establishment of an Islamic state.
Without naming Gul, the officers posted a message on the General
Staff’s website implicitly threatening intervention should the
AKP-dominated parliament elect Gul to be Turkey’s eleventh president.
After a tense month of popular protests in Turkey’s major cities,
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called snap national
elections. The Justice and Development Party won a landslide victory,
capturing 47 percent of the vote, paving the way for Gul to be elevated
to the Cankaya Palace in August. Once again, despite the military’s
clear threats, the officers proved that while they could raise the
level of tension in the political arena, they were impotent to secure
their desired outcome.
Although the arrest of the forty-nine officers is big news, the fact
remains that the popular perception of an all-powerful Turkish military
is largely incorrect.
The following March, the public prosecutor filed charges against the
Justice and Development Party for being "a center of anti-secular
activity." Although the military was not directly responsible for
the charges, the General Staff’s deep mistrust of AKP created an
environment that made the charges possible. The Constitutional Court
ultimately found the party guilty, but decided against shuttering the
party and banning seventy of its members from politics. The decision,
despite the verdict, was widely regarded as a victory for Justice
and Development and a blow to the secular establishment, which the
military leads.
A string of embarrassing incidents have further eroded the military’s
public standing and allowed the AKP to begin subordinating the officers
to civilian authority.
These include the so-called Ergenekon investigation, which implicated
several former senior officers and a number of serving junior officers
in an effort to destabilize the country and provoke a coup. In
addition, the Turkish daily Taraf published alleged documents
demonstrating that the military was aware of planned Kurdistan
Worker Party attacks on Turkish soldiers before they occurred, but
chose to do nothing to undermine support for the AKP. And officers
from the Special Forces command were recently accused of plotting
the assassination of Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc. The latter
incident resulted in civilian prosecutors searching Special Forces
headquarters for evidence, an unprecedented development in Turkey.
The Inherent Weakness of Coups
Although the arrest of the forty-nine officers is big news, the
fact remains that the popular perception of an all-powerful Turkish
military is largely incorrect. The officers regard themselves as
the keepers of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s principles of secularism and
republicanism. Yet, Kemalism–at least the officers’ interpretation
of Ataturk’s ideas–demands a drab political conformity that
never accommodated Kurds, pious Muslims, Armenians, the small Greek
community, and, as Turkish society has become more modern and complex,
those who want to live in a more democratic political system.
The fact that the officers have had to intervene four times in five
decades demonstrates their inability to force the military’s political
will on society. To be sure, the coups of 1960, 1971, 1980, and the
"blank" or "post-modern" coup of 1997 reflect the awesome firepower at
the General Staff’s disposal, but coercion is the least efficient means
of political control. Indeed, in the aftermath of each intervention,
the military sought to ensure that it would not have to intervene
again by writing, rewriting, and amending Turkey’s constitutions to
safeguard the Kemalist political order, yet each time the reengineering
of Turkey’s political institutions failed to prevent challenges to
the political system.
The U.S. Response
Although the Obama administration has identified Turkey as a strategic
partner in the Middle East, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and South
Asia, Washington must recognize that Turkey’s internal political
turmoil could undermine Ankara’s capacity to be a useful ally in
these critical areas. A military backlash in the form of a coup, or
if the AKP uses the arrests to engage in a political witch hunt, will
destabilize Turkish politics and markets for the foreseeable future.
Washington must continue to emphasize the importance of the rule of
law and the importance of Turkey’s democratic transition to put both
sides–the military and the government–on notice that the stakes in
this situation for both Ankara and Washington are high.
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