SECRETARIAT-GENERAL FOR WITCH-HUNTING

Hurriyet
March 11 2010
Turkey

Allow me to begin with a correction irrelevant to this column’s
further contents. The person who needs to be corrected happens to
be the prime minister of Turkey. His remarks on the March 4 vote at
Congress’ Foreign Affairs Committee for the passage of Resolution 252
that recognizes the Armenian genocide were as follows: "The Jewish
lobby in the United States supported the Armenians in this voting.

They had not done so before…"

Recep Tayyip Erdogan may be thinking that there is a monolithic
structure that walks around in Washington’s official quarters with
a tag that reads "The Jewish lobby." In fact the Jewish lobby can
only be the sum of several – and sometimes disagreeing – independent
groups whose common purpose is the well-being of the state of Israel.

More importantly, Mr. Erdogan’s advisors should have reminded him that
in the 2007 voting at the same committee, chaired at the time by a Tom
Lantos instead of a Howard Berman, seven out of eight Jewish members
had voted in favor of the genocide resolution. The prime minister’s
anti-Jewish rhetoric has reached a point where even simple facts are
being distorted.

But let’s talk about a government office that surely does not go
with the name in this article’s title, but instead with the name
"Secretariat-General for the European Union," or ABGS in its Turkish
acronym.

There was a hilarious story on Hurriyet’s front page just the other
day. According to the story, an anonymous informer, who had apparently
intercepted the private email messages of some ABGS personnel, wrote
a letter to the ABGS to complain about these civil servants because,
as the informer informed, (a) these ABGS officials had the habit
of sending each other newspaper articles which our informer deemed
"anti-Justice and Development Party [AKP]," (b) the same people
sent each other a newspaper article reporting amputation as a means
of legal punishment in Iran, therefore revealed their anti-Shariah
worldview, and (c) they celebrated the New Year’s Eve at a party where
alcohol was served. So, the informer concluded, all these people were
"Ergenekoncu," or supporters of the Ergenekon gang.

The news story, not the original story, apparently angered our
minister for the EU, Egemen BagıÅ~_, who objected on two grounds:
a) all that had happened before he took charge, and b) "such news
stories do not serve our common goal of EU membership." So now we have
a new journalistic jurisprudence: Check your story first and see it
serves our common purpose of EU membership; if it does not, scrap it
(e.g. no corruption stories please as they would not be serving our
common purpose).

Immediately afterwards, the ABGS issued a "correction" which looked
more like a "confession." The statement said a) the events mentioned in
the story had in fact happened in 2006-8, b) a commission was set up to
investigate the claims and a technical examination was carried out, and
c) the news story aimed at battering Minister BagıÅ~_ and the ABGS.

I personally found both Minister BagıÅ~_’s and the ABGS’s statements
even more entertaining than the contents of the story. Here is why.

If an informer had sent the same letter with the same accusations to
any government agency in any one of the countries that make the EU,
what would the recipient authority do? We are basically talking about
three allegations against named government officials: circulating
articles critical of the government; having an anti-Shariah worldview;
and partying with alcohol for the New Year.

Put it in reverse reasoning, the ABGS personnel would not have been
investigated if they had been pro-government, had not consumed alcohol
and had approved amputations in Iran. Ironically, that was happening
only a few years ago, and at the Turkish government agency tasked
with making Turkey a member of the EU!

The "correction" is funny because it admits that a "special commission"
was set up to investigate these accusations. It also admits technical
examinations were carried out to support the "investigation." That
means the ABGS took the accusations "seriously."

How could it not? The informer was talking about dangerous criminals
who even consumed alcohol!

This is the transformation Turkey is going through – from one
tyranny to another, as one reader recently put it. In the past,
informers informed government agencies accusing civil servants whose
wives wore the Islamic headscarf to be members of secret Islamist
organizations, or of being crypto-Shariah supporters – the headscarf
was the unmistaken evidence of crime. Today the evidence of crime worth
of investigating is alcohol or standing against amputations in Iran.

What did the honorable AKP deputy say only a couple of weeks ago? "For
40 years they card-indexed us, and now it’s our turn to card-index
them." He was absolutely right!

But hats off to the informer! He possibly could not have chosen a
better agency to inform…