TURKEY: TENSIONS RISE OVER PURPORTED MILITARY COUP PLANS
Jacques N. Couvas
Axis of Logic
Global Info
Wednesday, Jul 1, 2009
Less than two years after its discreet sealing, the truce between
ruling Justice and Development (AK) Party and the Turkish Armed Forces
(TSK) seems to have ended.
The publication Jun. 12 of an article in Taraf, a liberal newspaper,
of an alleged plan by army officers to overthrow the government and
incriminate Fethullah Gulen, a religious leader and founder of the
country’s largest Muslim brotherhood, revived the polemic over the
role of the military in the governance of the nation.
Although Taraf’s scoop stirred indignation among politicians from
all sides, the spirits remained calm for the past two weeks. But
the verdict last Wednesday of the General Staff military prosecutor
that the plan revealed was not prepared at TSK headquarters, and his
decision not to file charges against the plan’s purported author,
Col. Dursun Cicek, an officer serving in the army’s psychological
warfare unit, triggered the ire of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Over the weekend, senior ministers disclosed that Erdogan would
bring additional evidence on the plan and its authors before TSK’s
leadership at the National Security Council (MGK) meeting scheduled
for this Tuesday. This high-level confrontation is expected to test
the limits of the entente between the heads of the state and army.
The plan, according to the accusations by Taraf and AKP, contemplates
mobilising agents controlled within AK to discredit the party through
their actions and words. It also envisages planting of weapons in the
homes of members of Gulen’s movement, in order to make a convincing
case that its members are "terrorists" with links to separatist
Kurdish PKK rebels.
Manipulation of the media for igniting nationalistic and anti-Greek and
Armenian feelings among the public is another milestone in the plan.
Military coups are a periodical occurrence in Turkish politics. Since
the end of World War II, there have been three dictatorships, in 1960,
1971 and 1980, and a "post-modern" coup, when on Feb. 28, 1997 the
MGK demanded that "the forces of reaction should be confronted",
precipitating the collapse of the government and its replacement by
a secularist coalition.
The "forces of reaction" in the event was a reference to the
Welfare Party (RP), the first Islamist political movement to have
won legislative elections in the country. Its leadership, including
Erdogan, then mayor of Istanbul, was banned from politics for several
years. Erdogan also served prison as a result of this crisis. After
the victory of the newly formed AKP, successor to RP, in the 2002
national elections, and especially after the return in 2003 to politics
of Erdogan and his appointment to premiership, senior army officers
became again more vigilant.
When, in April 2007, Abdullah Gul, a leader within AKP, remained the
sole candidate to the presidency of the state, the Chief of the General
Staff, at that time Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, issued a warning against
the appointment of an Islamist at the top office of the republic,
implying that the armed forces might intervene. An arm-wrestling
contest began, which ended in August at a confidential meeting between
the PM and Buyukanit.
No spectacular incidents have been observed since. On Aug. 28, 2007,
Gul was elected President by the AKP-dominated parliament. His
swearing-in ceremony, held the same day, was not attended by the
Chief of the General Staff. Tradition, supported by certain articles
of the Constitution, calls for the army’s allegiance to the principles
defended by the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
a resolute secularist.
Gul is the first head of the state to have an Islamist background. He
served between 1983 and 1991 at the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi
Arabia, where his wife Hayrunnisa completed her university studies. The
First Lady wears the Islamic scarf in all her appearances. The
President is a supporter of Fethullah Gulen, who is resident in
the U.S..
Following the appeasement in the AKP-TSK relations, the Turkish
parliament voted overwhelmingly in August 2007 in favour of the
invasion of northern Iraq to hunt down armed insurgents of the
Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). PKK is considered a terrorist
organisation by Turkey, the U.S. and the E.U.
The TSK had previously been asked to refrain from such expedition,
on the insistence of the U.S. In the end, however, the Turkish army
entered north Iraq in February 2008.
Political life took its normal course. On the surface only,
however, because in the meantime the government had started legal
proceedings to bring to justice 89 politicians, journalists, and
retired military officers, suspected to have conspired to overthrow
the government. Their trial began last October, on the basis of a
2,500-page indictment, but 39 new arrests, including active officers,
were added earlier this year.
The trial has been stretching the nerves of the officers at all
levels. Most at TSK believe that the plot is a set-up to discredit
the armed forces.
The government claim that the ‘action plan’ to fight Islamic
fundamentalism, revealed by Tafar, was masterminded at TSK headquarters
could be the drop that will make the vase overflow.
Prime Minister Erdogan and Gen. Iker Basbug, the Chief of General
Staff, met at the end of last week privately for over an hour. Their
respective positions seem to have remained unchanged.
Gen. Basbug has backed the decision of the military prosecutor,
and insisted that the document was not produced at his
headquarters. Erdogan remained convinced that the plan is an official
army document, and declared that the quest for culprits will be
pursued unrelentingly.
This clash may just be the top of the iceberg. Public opinion, which,
according to polls, considers the armed forces the most trusted
institution of the country, has shown since 2007 that military juntas
are no longer in fashion. A plan for a coup could therefore only be
the work of an isolated group of officers.
What may be more likely as the cause of the crisis is the diverging
agendas of the government and the military on a number of issues,
including Cyprus, the Kurdish issue, the recent rapprochement with
Armenia, the low-key but systematic introduction of laws that favour
Islamist practices in everyday life, the dosed purge of 300 TSK
officers this decade so far, and the new constitution intended by AKP
which will aim at clipping the wings of the military in order to prove
Turkey’s adherence to the process for accessing the European Union.
As the economy is still away from recovery, in spite of daily
assurances of local pundits, and the regional situation increasingly
unstable, the protagonists of this new version of AKP-TSK performance
are stuck in a prisoner’s dilemma.