PULSE of TURKEY No:106 ............................MAY 15th, 1999
The delay in government formation is due to the wish to set up a long lasting coalition to lead Turkey to the new century. The election for Speaker is related with the election of the next President in a year. No serious problems exist among the three coalition partners other than wearing a headscarf at university, but the MHP knows well that it has to back down on this aspect of its election promise. Paradoxically Merve Kavakci helped the Prime Minister to overcome this thorny question. It put the entire State mechanism on alert.
The prolongation of the government formation has inevitably given way to speculations in the media that there are difficulties about the tripartite coalition. Political leaders like Mesut Yilmaz have also fanned these speculations inadvertently by claiming that Ecevit could well hand back the duty of Prime Minister to the President.
Difficulties are bargaining chips rather than a serious rift
In reality, there have been no serious problems in working out the highlights of the structure of the coalition. Even the program of the Government is ready, but for understandable reasons President Demirel and PM Ecevit chose to move cautiously. Weeks before, the President said that the Government would not be formed before May 20th and everything is moving in that direction.
This delay in the Government formation was in accordance with President Demirelís habit of using time as an ally in politics. PM Ecevit has also come round to using time for solving future problems and this slow motion government formation was the outcome.
It is apparent that both Demirel and Ecevit want to pave the way for the elections of Speaker and President before finalising the formation of the coalition. On May 18th the third round of voting will be held for the election of a Speaker and the competition will be between the DSPís Uluc Gurkan and the MHPís Sadi Somuncuoglu. If the candidates from the other parties do not withdraw their candidacies at the third ballet, the fourth and last round will be on May 20th between the top two, ie Gurkan and Somuncuoglu. Presuming that ANAPís votes will go to Gurkan and the FPís to Somuncuoglu, the determining factor will be the DYPís votes. If the second round of voting was any indication for the final voting the DYP is expected to support Gurkan and get him elected.
In a way, MHP Chairman Devlet Bahceli has also helped the DSP to get its candidate elected. Initially Murat Sokmenoglu (MHP-Istanbul) was going to be the candidate for Speaker, but Bahceli changed it to Somuncuoglu who is nowhere as popular as Sokmenoglu. During the voting on Wednesday (12th), Uluc Gurkan met Sokmenoglu in the lobby and told him that the DSPís election chances would have been diminished if Sokmenoglu had run for the election of Speaker.
Sokmenogluís father, Tayfur Sokmen, was the president of Hatay and played a key role in annexing that province to Turkey in June 1939. Also, Murat Sokmenoglu proved to be a man of his word by resigning from Parliament as he had announced he would do when Turgut Ozal was elected the President in November 1989.
The Speaker of Parliament is now more important than ever before because presidential elections will be held next May and it means the Speaker will be the Acting President for a long time next year. PM Ecevit understandably wants to keep this key position in his partyís hands for both the smooth functioning of Parliament in the following period and also to influence the election of the next President.
Efficiency and new preoccupation of Turkish intelligence
For all these reasons, the delay is due to efforts to form a strong partnership to last five years, rather than a serious rift. MHP Chairman Devlet Bahceli knows full well that the headscarf issue is not a flimsy question and that Turkeyís security forces regard it as a tool of external forces to split Turkey.
Indeed, President Demirel was prompt to call Merve Kavakci (FP-Istanbul) an agent provocateur ìwhose roots are abroadî.
Equally firm in this issue was PM Ecevit who took immediate action to remove Merve Kavakciís Turkish nationality because she had taken an oath in the United States to recognise no other sovereignty or loyalty than the American one. Noticeably she took the oath and became an American citizen only on March 5th, 1999, less than a week after the lists of candidates became final on February 28th and it was obvious that she would be elected to Parliament at the April 18th elections.
The noteworthy side of this dispute was that both the President and the Prime Minister had been informed in all detail about the headscarf issue and the role Merve Kavakci was to play in the Turkish Parliament in the new term. That is why they chose to nip it in the bud and took rapid steps about wiping Merve Kavakci off Turkeyís political scene.
FP Chairman Recai Kutan said on Wednesday (12th) that Merve Kavakci was not the only Member of Parliament with dual nationality. There were about 20 and one of them was even a member of the Ecevit Government. PM Ecevitís answer was that they would come to grips with them too if there was concrete evidence.
The MPs claimed to have dual nationality are the Energy Minister Ziya Aktas, MHP deputy Suleyman Sazak, DSP deputy Tayyibe Gulek, and FP deputy Oya Akgonenc. They all deny the claim or evasively say that they had taken no oath to become an American national. Some of them having been born in the United States they probably hardly need an oath for the citizenship.
Anyway, the important aspect of the whole affair was that Turkish Intelligence has proved to be alert and very well informed about these activities and that they have learned the art of ìdisinformationî or ìcounter-disinformation.î
Incidentally, Pulse has marked its first anniversary as an electronic publication on May 13th, with very modest results as far as the business side of it goes, but has been established reasonably well as a reliable source of information about Turkey.
The main difference between the newsprint Pulse of the last three decades and todayís electronic Turkpulse is that the former used to harp on, indeed campaign, against the ìAmerican disinformation mechanism in the Turkish mediaî. In a way, it used to fulfil the service of a ìdisinformation correctorî. This campaign, for its part, rightly or wrongly, gained it a reputation of being anti-American.
The electronic Pulse, on the other hand, has tried to steer clear of these disinformation arguments and probably managed to appear as a more even-handed, more impartial publication. Why has Pulse made this change in its writing style? It was certainly not for business considerations. The Pulse editor, Vedat Uras, is just as bad a businessman today as he has always been. The reason for this change was that it is no longer needed for a journalist to campaign against disinformation activities in the Turkish media, because it is now being done beautifully and efficiently by the competent security organisations. The handling of the Merve Kavakci crisis was the best and latest example of this efficient counter-disinformation activity in Turkey.
Co-ordination between the State and the Government
The new Ecevit Government will be of a structure to facilitate this co-ordination between the State organs and the Government (ie the Executive Power). The National Security Council being the highest security organ of the Turkish State, all three coalition partners will be represented there. Distributing three ministries, those of the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Defence among the three parties will carry this out. As it now stands the DSP will have the MFA, the MHP Defence and ANAP the Interior. As these three ministries are represented at the NSC all three coalition partners will have their finger in Turkeyís top security questions.
It is to be hoped that the MHP Chairman Devlet Bahceli will act more responsibly than his predecessor did in the past. During the MC (Milliyetci Cephe=Nationalist Front) governments before the September 12th, 1980 coup, Alpaslan Turkes used to attend the NSC meetings in his capacity as Deputy Prime Minister and used to take note of the secret reports on the ìulkucuî (idealist) activistsí terrorist activities. Instead of rectifying the wrongdoing of his followers, he used to try to stop information leakage. It ended up in the military takeover.
Every measure is now being taken to prevent the recurrence of these abuses and mistakes of the past. Another misdeed of the MHP was to fill the State cadres with its militants. Tekel (the Monopolies Administration), as one of the biggest SEEs (State Economic Enterprises), had a 30-year old ìulkucuî as its general manager when the MHP had the Customs and Monopolies Ministry. Naturally all the liquor and cigarette factories were bursting at their seems with ìnationalist workersî recruited en masse. It was the same with the Iskenderun steel plant and other enterprises.
The new MHP will not get a chance of repeating these destructive practices of the past. The Government has recently passed a decree for employing all public sector personnel on merit basis with a central examination similar to the one for university entrance exams. Not only the civil servants of the Central Government, but all other public sector employees such as SEEs are also included in this new system.
All these preparations for the smooth functioning of the new coalition are being carried out objectively in the light of the files available in State agencies about past abuses. The prosecutors of the Court of Appeal and the Ankara State Security Court have launched surveys into the program and charter of the MHP to see if it can be a legitimate ruling power.
MHP parliamentarians are also being viewed carefully to see if past activists have dropped their bad habits. It is common knowledge that the MHP parliamentarians include several activists, even criminals. To cite a few examples: Mehmet Gul was involved in the March 16th, 1978 massacre at Istanbul University where seven students were killed by "ulkucu" terrorists. Ali Uzunirmak is the partner of a man who was charged with killing the union leader Kemal Turkler. Muzaffer Cakmakli is currently being tried for narcotics smuggling. Fahri Yuksel was imprisoned for being involved in Nevzat Yildirimís murder. Adnan Ucas is on trial for corruption. Ismail Hakki Cerrahoglu has been charged with killing a reporter (Unal) of the newspaper Demokrat. As against this infiltration of activists and possible foreign agents in especially the MHP and the FP, the security forces are not sleeping and they are determined not to allow the recurrence of this film that is deja vu in Turkey. The delay in the formation of the new Ecevit Government is for paving the way as strongly as possible with the help of the President and State security organs. Apart from this question, everything is ready for the new government whose coalition protocol was even published by the mass circulation daily Hurriyet (13th). It was an embarrassment for PM Ecevit because it should not have become public before it was shown to his future coalition partners, but Ecevit apologised and the other partners manifested understanding. This leakage was further evidence of how careful the Government members have to be about the people around them. "Su uyur, dusman uyumaz,"(Water may sleep, but the enemy will not), goes the Turkish proverb. Turkey is living through such a critical period, believe Turkish rulers. uras@ada.net.tr, May 15th, 1999