TURKPULSE No:110..........NOVEMBER 27th, 2003
Ankara puts down its foot against blaming Al Qaeda or “Islamic terrorism”
The Anglo-American disappointment of Turkey over these acts of violence stems from the fact that from the first moment the Erdogan Government carefully refrained from putting the blame on Al Qaeda, even though it admitted that this was a religious oriented event and that they were too sophisticated terrorist actions to be restricted to Turkish fundamentalists. The answer to the question, so “who is behind it?” was also quite blunt. The government spokesman, Justice Minister Cemil Cicek said straight after the relevant Cabinet meeting on 17 November, that the western allies were shedding crocodile tears over these dreadful massive murders by sending messages of condolences after having harboured these perpetrators.
Into the bargain, former intelligence chiefs such as Ambassador Koksal Sonmez or certain retired generals and high officials briefed the Turkish people over the media about the background of these international terrorist activities attributed to Islam or Islamic activists. Retired Ambassador Sonmez said, for instance, that shortly after the downfall of the Shah of Iran at the beginning of 1979 an international Islamic guerrilla force was formed by the United States with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan playing the leading role and that Turkey also made unofficial contributions to it. These Islamist activists were most prominent through Taliban in Afghanistan led by Osame Bin Laden. They were particularly active in ending the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and triggering off Islam uprisings in several parts of the world, especially in Central Asia and Chechnya.
The genocide attempts in Bosnia Herzegovina within the long standing American plans of disintegrating and dismantling Yugoslavia, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were the limit for Turkey after the mass murder of 200,000 innocent Muslims in Bosnia. Turkey’s raising its voice louder and louder against this genocide finally won the United States over when these massacres reached the levels of Hitler’s holocaust of the Jews 4-5 decades before. The Dayton Agreement in 1995 was the beginning of the end of the American involvement in the archaic Taliban adventures. It was also the beginning of the parting of the ways between Osame Bin Laden’s terrorists and the CIA, with various terrorist actions against the Americans throughout the world, going as far as the 9-11 disaster two years ago, according to Ambassador Sonmez’s and other retired generals’ explanations over the TV.
Ankara also revealed that 1050 Turkish activists were involved in these destabilisation activities in several parts of Europe and Asia underhandedly engineered and led by the CIA. These Turkish militants were trained in these Islamic terrorist camps mostly run by the Pakistani intelligence service and gathered around two religious terrorist organisations in Turkey, IBDA-C and Hizbullah (the Turkish fanatical terrorist organisation which has no organic ties or anything to do with the Palestinian or Iranian Hezbollah). After the defeat of the PKK terrorism that had been going on since August 1984, this religious terrorism became the Turkish security forces’ preoccupation as the PKK’s successors (not as its replacement but as the new growth to disturb Turkey’s peace and security). Hizbullah was delivered a deadly blow in January 2000 when its leader Huseyin Veziroglu and its governing team were killed at a security operation in Beykoz, Istanbul. The documents captured in this operation provided invaluable information about Hizbullah’s terrorist activities in Turkey as well as its links with the other religious terrorist organisations in the world. During Turkey’s 15-16 years of war against the PKK terrorism in eastern and south eastern Anatolia, the Western media kept on blaming Turkey with charges of disappeared persons styled after General Pinochet’s elimination of Allende supporters in Chile. The Veziroglu operation in Beykoz on 17 January 2000 resulted in the discovery of most of the bodies of these “disappeared persons” in Turkey. The two monsters of “International Terrorism,” the PKK and Hizbullah, were fighting between themselves and putting the blame on the Turkish security forces for their mutual hideous murders.
Where do the Istanbul bomb outrages stand within “International Terrorism?”
The answer to this question is obvious and ready for the man in the street. The two sets of four dreadful explosions in Istanbul last week were committed against Synagogues and the diplomatic and financial British offices with the typical methods of the Taleban and they were certainly the crimes of “Islamic Terrorism.” Besides a branch of Al Qaeda, the “Abu Hafz al Masry Brigades,” was claiming responsibility for the 50 odd murders on behalf of Al Qaeda in an Arabic publication in London.
These views of the common belief in the world are not, however, shared by PM Tayyip Erdogan or the officials in the know in Turkey. They are also reluctant to blame the CIA or the West and restrict themselves to broadcasts of vague information about the so called Islamic terrorism which is summed up above.
These quarters and political Islam of Turkey explain that Al Qaeda makes its announcements not through the London based Arabic publications but through the Al Jazira or Al Arabiya TV stations which are now banned in Iraq. That is why the London datelined announcements do not concern them. They also note that only a few Brits like the late Roger Short were accidentally killed in Istanbul. The rest of the victims are all Turks and mostly Muslim Turks. PM Erdogan flatly refuses to use the word Islam as the adjective of terror or terrorism while even his righthand men such as Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul and the Government spokesman Cemil Cicek admit that the suicide bombers in Istanbul and their accomplices are acting with religious motivations.
Indeed, the findings of the police prove that the suicide bombers of the Synagogue outrages were Mesut Cabuk and Gokhan Elaltintas and they were assisted by Feridun Ugurlu and Azad Ekinci who, along with others behind them, provided them with the suicide vans, the explosives and the hundreds of billions TL money needed for the operation. There are certain common characteristics or all of them and the others arrested after the second outrage on 20 November. These characteristics are:
They are all religious fundamentalist Hizbullah members nested in Bingol, Batman, Diyarbakir in Eastern Turkey. They are all the Bingol branch of Hizbullah and they all act according to Veziroglu’s successor Isa Altinsoy’s order “to die as martyrs.” Altinsoy is now abroad harboured in the West and Mehmet Sudan is the leader of Hizbullah in Turkey. Most of them, especially the last two, Ugurlu and Ekinci, have been in Pakistan and Chechnya as long periods as two years for terrorist training and activities. Ugurlu was the perpetrator of the second lot of suicide explosions against British targets on 20 November.
Were the Turkish police successful or erred in Istanbul outrages?
The achievements of the Turkish police were astonishing in bringing to daylight the whole terrorist band with the forces behind them in as short a period as 12 hours. Yet it failed to prevent the second lot of massive explosions in five days. The Istanbul police chief, Celalettin Cerrah, blamed the media for this failure and had to apologise from the press when he was subjected to a broadside for his words. Indeed, was there any point in putting the blame on the press for reporting the valuable information reaching it name by name about the perpetrators?
Actually he was not blaming the media, but the mechanism (what Pulse persistently calls the Disinformation Mechanism) that cut down the ground from under the police’s feet by reporting everything. The governor of Istanbul Muammer Guler said, “Most of the information that was published was distorted.” The police chief Cerrah said that if it had not been for these publications they would have captured the whole terrorist ring and the second lot of two explosions against British targets would not have taken place.
Milliyet (24th) reported that Feridun Ugurlu who, along with Azad Ekinci, provided the vans to the first two suicide bombers, Cabuk and Elaltintas, before he allegedly fled to Dubai was the suicide bomber of the British Consulate General of Istanbul five days later. Thanks to these untimely revelations of the synagogue outrages by the media he (Feridun Ugurlu) and his accomplices could freely work for the second lot of two explosions in Istanbul five days later.
As for why the police did not prevent these leakages to the press or take measures against this abuse, they did, but were successful only partially because the Disinformation Mechanism is a deeply installed evil in the Turkish media and, in the name of democracy and for good relations with the Western world, Turkey has to put up with it.
Still the police extracted a verdict from the judiciary preventing unauthorised publications about the suicide bomb outrages. They kept Israel’s ZAKA team and the UK’s Scotland Yard away from the investigation spots lest they could get the evidences before the Turkish Government.
It is Ankara’s State policy to refrain from publicly accusing the United States of destabilisation activities against Turkey because there is no point in engaging into overt hostilities with a super power which dismisses the most flagrant evidences as “conspiracy theory” and the entire world media follows suit. Instead Ankara tries to silently take measures in an attempt to render these subversions ineffective.
What will Turkey do now and how will the economy be saved from this evil?
That is why instead of engaging into futile polemics about the forces behind the Istanbul outrages, Turkey prefers to focus attention on eliminating the factors that enable terrorists to commit these crimes.
UNSC Resolution 1516 was a step in that direction.
Another step was to correct past mistakes in these activities. The investigation showed that the latest four suicide bomb outrages in Istanbul were the doings of Turkish citizens who had been involved in the events in Chechnya and Central Asia. These former activists of Chechnya, numbering 1050, became dormant in Turkey and they are now being reactivated by their bosses, starting with the Istanbul events.
Are they still Al Qaeda militants? PM Erdogan and the present Government refrain from naming them as Osama Bin Laden’s El Qaeda. They only say, “Al Qaeda is not a vertical organisation, but a horizontal one.” It means there is no chain of command among the Al Qaeda cells and affiliates and that no one knows exactly who commands whom in that organisation.
The Observer reporter Jason Burke who is the author of an authoritative book entitled “Al Qaeda” confirms this outlook and says that rather than an organisation working under a chain of command Al Qaeda is a world platform for terrorism. Its cells and affiliates work independently from one another.
Now Ankara’s pressure on the United States and Europe will intensify for effective measures to eliminate the PKK and other Turkish terrorists they harbour, as Resolution 1516 provides Turkey with fresh cards to do so. Also the over 1000 Turkish terrorists trained as Islamic activists along with Taliban are being kept under strict surveillance and control. Will these measures prevent the British forecasts of imminent fresh terrorist activities in Turkey from proving right remains to be seen.
The 9-day Ramadan holiday in Turkey forestalled the Istanbul explosions from having a stampede in ISE (Istanbul Stock Exchange) when the Government immediately closed the markets after the first explosion on 15 November, but it is still not known if the panic will reappear in ISE when it reopens on Monday (1st).
The Government has been stressing that the Turkish economy is very strong and that it can easily withstand such shocks with its enormous foreign exchange reserves.
Indeed, the inflation and interest rates are steadily falling and the TL is appreciating especially in its dollar parity. The only weak point of the Turkish economy today is the $15 billion foreign trade gap even though the exports have reached the record level of $42 billion a week before the end of November. In the remaining five weeks it is expected to be $46-47 billion for the year.
This enormous gap between the imports and exports has resulted in widening current expenditure deficits. According to the official statistics, as of August the current deficit was $870 million in 2002 and $4.1 billion this year. It may cause another financial crisis in Turkey as it did in November 2000 and February 2001, it’s claimed.
Insider economists dismiss this claim and say that the current expenditure in August 2002 was not $870 million, but $1.6 billion along with the -$750 million error and omission column of the balance of payments. It is almost the same this year because the $4,087 million current deficit sharply falls when the error and omission column’s $2.6 billion positive balance is taken into account. As for where this enormous positive error and omission emerged in the balance of payments this year, the rumours vary. They stretch as far as the Saddam time and Iraqi oil revenue which may have made its way to Turkey as forecast in this publication months ago. uras@ada.net.tr – November 27th, 2003