PULSE of TURKEY No: 69............................ NOVEMBER 12^th,  1998

As a short-lived Prime Minister twice up to his current rule for the last year-and-a-half, ANAP Chairman Mesut Yılmaz’s political career was considerably tied to his claims of Mafia infiltration and organized crime in the Government, following his second short-term premiership straight after the December 1995 general elections.

As the official opposition leader in the one-year Erbakan-Çiller coalition up to June 1997, Mesut Yılmaz claimed that the Mafia infiltration in the Government was the limit and that he had undeniable evidence of it. He was, however, unable to produce evidence when pressed to do so, and would rather mumble about it.

This absolutely correct and shrewd observation, but failure and frustration to prove it apparently induced Mesut Yılmaz when he was in the opposition to make contacts, directly or indirectly, with the suspected Mafia men as well as their extensions in the Administration, especially in the Secret Service, MIT.

Battle of recordings annoys MIT

Now that Mesut Yılmaz, in his capacity as Prime Minister, is striving to eradicate organized crime in the country, he is paying for his contacts with these shady people, as they have all been tape-recorded for blackmail purposes in future.

Under the pressure of the NSC and his honest coalition partner, Bülent Ecevit, however, Mesut Yılmaz is braving these attacks and fighting a courageous battle against allegations. He is paying a certain price for it at times, such as loosing his right-hand man in these contacts, Eyüp Aşık, who resigned from both the position of State Minister and also from Parliament to facilitate a judicial investigation into the matter.

Eyüp Aşık was the victim of a broadcast tape-recording of his conversation with Mafia godfather Alaattin Çakıcı who was arrested in France last August as a result of PM Mesut Yılmaz’s putting into force his promise of cracking down on organized crime in Turkey. When Çakıcı fulfilled his threats and broadcast the tape-recordings over the media, Aşık said, “This tape-recording is not accurate. It has been put together with fragmented pieces of conversation. When we were in the opposition we had difficulty in securing the flow of information after the Susurluk affair and made the most of the opportunities we got. Before we came to power I talked with him (Çakıcı) six, seven times. He told me a lot of things. I conveyed them to the police. By doing so I stuck out my neck, but it was needed for the good of the country. They can hardly find another stupid bloke like me to do that again if the public does not support me. Give that tape-recording to the Prosecutor of the SSC (State Security Court) and I’ll vote for lifting my parliamentary immunity. There are things I want to tell the SSC.”

Eyüp Aşık did better than voting for lifting his parliamentary immunity and resigned from both the Cabinet and Parliament. He recently voluntarily went to the SSC Prosecutor and in four hours told everything he knew. On his way out he told the press, “They’ve scored a goal, but the match is not over yet.”

Indeed, the match continued before the eyes of the whole world with tape-recordings being leaked to the media every other day at the beginning of the scandal. It was claimed that MIT was leaking at least some of these tapes to the public.

On October 17^th, the MIT Chief, Şenkal Atasagun, issued a statement announcing that it was against their principles to release such documents to the media. They were supplying them only to the competent authorities by law. However, there were some misguided personnel of the organization who had kept personal archives of these recordings and the organization was now paying for it. “The Organizational Law and the auto-control system of MIT are sufficient enough to rapidly uncover and dismiss such people from the Service. We are taking legal action against all allegations. Naturally, our Organization takes advantage of technical facilities for information gathering during its activities concerning organized crime. But the outcome and products of this work are never supplied to anyone other than the competent authorities,” reads the statement of the Under-Secretary of MIT, Şenkal Atasagun.

He also expressed regret that the dosage of certain “fictive and unjust accusations” against the Intelligence Service has been increased at a time when “attacks from domestic and external axes against our territorial integrity have been stepped up”.

PM Mesut Yılmaz told a press conference on September 19^th that 8 or 9 MIT and 31 Police officials had been removed from their duties for involvement in these matters. These dismissed MIT members include high-level officials such as Mehmet Eymür and Yavuz Ataç who provided a diplomatic passport to Alaattin Çakıcı. Also, a task force composed of four MIT and four Police officials has been set up to look into the allegations of further State involvement in organized crime.

Why was MIT involved in ultra right-wing activist cooperation?

Indeed, why did Yavuz Ataç, who was once MIT’s second-in-command, risk his future and issue a diplomatic passport to Alaattin Çakıcı, a criminal on the run? The answer could be he was another Mafia man who infiltrated the Secret Service, but, by all indications, it is not true. Ataç would not have been so open about it and have his photograph taken along with Çakıcı during a wedding if it had been the case.

A report on the Susurluk scandal and organized crime in Turkey prepared by the inspectors of the Prime Minister’s Office shows that PM Mesut Yılmaz also sought an answer to Abdullah Çatlı’s and other ultra right-wing activists’ involvement with MIT. He was told that there was no written document about it in the Secret Service. When he pressed, “There may not be any written document, but surely there should be information about it,” he still got no answer.

The Parliamentary investigation committee into the Susurluk scandal attempted to seek President Evren’s testimony about it and the retired President declared to be ready to comply, but some hidden forces prevented him from attending the investigation committee hearings. The inspectors’ report reads:

“Asked if he was rebutting the claim that in the early 80s Hiram Abas, who was not a MIT official then, organized certain idealists such as Haluk Kırcı and sent them abroad, with the approval of the President, against Armenian terrorism, the Deputy Under-Secretary of MIT, Mr Alpay, said, ‘No, I’m not’. Neither would he deny that these idealists were later turned over to MIT. ”

Hiram Abas, who organized these things, was an old hand in the intelligence business. He went in and out of MIT several times, but has always remained loyal to the basic principle of the career, “Once intelligence, always intelligence”, keeping the secrets of the Service even when he was not in their pay. That is how he worked his way up as high as the MIT Chief during Özal’s time in the 80s.

In the autumn of 1962 he was in Brussels with a diplomatic passport as vice-consul of the Turkish Consulate-General of Batumi, Georgia. His interest was with the meeting of fourteen revolutionaries who had been sent abroad to Turkish embassies for two years after the 27 May 1960 revolution and who were returning home, having fulfilled their two years abroad. Hiram Abas, who was a Mülkiye (Faculty of Political Science) graduate, received, in the traditional solidarity of Mülkiye graduates, the help of a member of the Embassy staff who had family ties with one of the Fourteen. Hiram Abas left Brussels with a note in his pocket from one of the Fourteen, introducing him as a friend to certain friends in Turkey. Most of these “friends” were later brought before a Court Martial along with some of the Fourteen such as Alpaslan Türkeş for alleged involvement in the May 21^st, 1963 abortive coup. They were all acquitted because the Fourteen had not been involved in that coup attempted by the Commander of the War College, Colonel Talat Aydemir who was later executed.

These upheavals of the Sixties made it clear that the Armed Forces’ interventions in the Administration should never be made from the bottom by relatively junior officers, but within the chain of command from the top. That is how the March 12^th, 1971 and September 12^th, 1980 military interventions took place in Turkey, to put an end to the failures of the civilian administration in bringing law and order to the country.

In the 1971 interregnum, several court martial tribunals were set up for the trial of anarchist bands. Hiram Abas was among the arrested along with some of the Fourteen like Numan Esin of the Madanoğlu Group. Time would show that the Turkish Intelligence Service was receiving inside information about these activities and their external links, as Hiram Abas would later become the MIT Chief. He paid for it with his life in the late 1980s when he wanted to write his memoirs upon retirement. Unidentified gunmen killed him while he was getting into his car.

Çiller’s time provided a heaven to the “idealists”

Hiram Abas’s organization of the right-wing “idealists” to fight ASALA terrorism attained its goal, but its residue is continuing to this day, with these ultra right-wing adventurers’ unruly conduct and illegal activities of all sorts. Even though MIT tried to dissociate itself from these “idealists” after the Armenian operation was over, Tansu Çiller’s period in power was heaven for them.

In the 1993-mid-1997 period the organized crime and Mafia activities gained international dimensions. In some cases, the “idealist” activists and the regular organs of the State got so intermingled that not only the outsiders, but even regular personnel of the State organs were confused about who was representing whom and who was doing what for whom. A case in view is the attempt on President Aliyev’s life by Rushen Dzevadov’s militia in March 1995 with the help of “Turkey”.

A group of “Idealists” attached to State Minister Ayvaz Gökdemir, another former “idealist”, set up a separate communication system in Dzevadov’s headquarters to make contact with Ankara and the outside world, while there was no wireless telephone system in Azerbaijan at that time. They engineered the plot against President Aliyev’s life with the help of certain officials such as the MIT Chief in Baku and allegedly the Turkish Ambassador. They were not using the Embassy’s or MIT’s regular communication channels, but their own lines.

A few days before the assassination, however, the MIT chief in Baku had the scruples to use the regular MIT channels and reported everything in detail. Thus President Demirel, the Military and other organs of the Turkish State learned from MIT of the grave attempt plotted against a friendly Head of State by the “idealists” in the name of Turkey. PM Çiller pretended not to know of it, putting all the blame on Ayvaz Gökdemir. It was decided that President Demirel inform President Aliyev of the plot at their meeting in Copenhagen as he would be killed in Baku Airport upon his return from Copenhagen.

Unprecedented “State secret” abuses and the victory of the Mafia over the Prime Minister

This event was only one of the examples of organized crime acting on behalf of Turkey during Çiller’s time. Again, on her last day in office as Prime Minister, she drew out TL500 billion from the Prime Minister’s secret funds and did not give an account of it to anyone, neither to the President nor to her successor, openly or in secret. She only said that what she did with the money was “A secret of the State.” Yet no constitutionally founded Government agency was aware of what this “State secret” was.

Today there is a similar case. The inspectors’ investigation has proved that millions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition brought from Israel appear as Mehmet Ağar’s responsibility when he was the Director-General of the Police and then the Minister of the Interior. But he says about what happened to these guns is a “Secret of the State”. Yet PM Mesut Yılmaz says that no Government agency is aware of such a State secret. It was merely Ağar’s secret.

At a time when the Mesut Yılmaz Government decided to bring these “unauthorized State secrets” before Parliament to make Çiller and Ağar account for them, another broadcast tape-recording by arrested businessman Korkmaz Yiğit has brought the Government to the brink of a downfall.

Yiğit claimed in this recording which he taped on October 24^th and broadcast on November 10^th that Türkbank which he had bought for $600 million was organized by PM Mesut Yılmaz and State Minister Güneş Taner. But they later took the bank away from him when his links with Alaattın Çakıcı were proved with another tape-recording.

The three opposition parties, the FP, DYP and CHP jumped on the opportunity provided by this allegation and immediately tabled three censure motions against the Prime Minister. It means unseating the Government with a vote of no confidence at the end of 7-8 days of debates and voting.

Leaving aside the details of this political struggle and the reasons for CHP Chairman Deniz Baykal’s backtracking from his commitment to support the Government until the end of the year, what will happen when the Yılmaz Government falls within a week or so?

The answer to this crucial question rests with PM Mesut Yılmaz’s diagnosis that his prospective downfall is a victory of organized crime and a move to frustrate this first serious and radical fight against Mafia infiltration in the State in Turkey. Yet this fight is entrusted to the Government by the top security organization, the NSC. The top commanders, starting with Chief of the TGS, General Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu, paid visits to the Police Chief Necati Bilican to show their support to this anti-Mafia fight and such visits of Commanders to the Police were totally unprecedented in Turkey.

Now that the Government which was waging this fight very effectively is being unseated in an attempt to stop this move, it is expected that the President will put down his weight on the side of the coalition by setting in motion Article 116 of the Constitution.  (Yılmaz Government Minus Yılmaz Until Elections?). It means elections in 45 days under a government that does not need a vote of confidence from Parliament under Article 114 of the Constitution. It is not important if this new Prime Minister is Mesut Yılmaz, Bülent Ecevit, Ismet Sezgin or someone else. It is certain, however, that this transitional government will be a continuation of the present government so that the anti-Mafia fight is not left interrupted or unattended. uras@ada.net.tr, November 12^th, 1998

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