TURKPULSE No: 38 ..................... MAY 24th, 2001
Judging
by the campaign that has been going on in the Turkish media for months,
Washington is trying to replace Mesut Yilmaz with Sadettin Tantan, have Recep
Tayyip Erdogan as the leader of the religious fundamentalists, within or outside
the FP and, of course, make Kemal Dervis the next Prime Minister of Turkey.
Meanwhile, the tripartite Ecevit government is marking its second anniversary
(Monday 28th), an unprecedented achievement in recent Turkish
political history for the last quarter of a century. And this achievement was
despite intensive superpower efforts to smear ANAP leaders with corruption
charges over energy investments, primarily the Blue Stream project. The
following is the details of this eye-opening story.
Summer
months will see almost all the parties in intense political activity even though
general elections are three years away. PM Ecevit has again confirmed that there
would be no elections before 2004 by which time the economy will have recovered
and the “wounds
healed”.
On the coalition front, the DSP has just had its national convention and re-elected PM Bulent Ecevit as party chairman. There were criticisms that the party was not democratically run because Sema Piskinsut (DSP-Aydin) was not permitted to address the convention to stand for party chairman in competition with Ecevit. Even though she walked out of the convention in protest she still got 86 votes, which showed what Kemal Dervis could have done in the party if he had been admitted in, with the all-out media campaign that has been going on in his favour since he returned home three months ago. Nevertheless, the biggest ruling coalition party seems to be safe and secure under its chairman’s leadership until the next general elections, as Ecevit seems healthy enough despite non-stop rumours about his days being numbered – wishful thinking on the part of some rather than any truth in it.
The second coalition party, the MHP, also seems stable under Deputy PM Devlet Bahceli’s leadership. The last two years in the tripartite coalition helped this one- time ultra nationalist activist party to save itself from these extremisms, especially by its youth branches, the Ulkuculer (idealists). It is constantly consolidating itself as a strong centre-right party with a say in the next elections.
The third leg of the coalition, ANAP, is clearly the party most disturbed, or rather more in the public eye, not because there is any serious challenge to the Mesut Yilmaz administration, but because that is how the media is introducing it to the public. Deputy PM Mesut Yilmaz’s chairmanship is uncontested even though the media is apparently exerting intensive efforts to put forward the Minister of the Interior, Sadettin Tantan (ANAP-Istanbul), as a rival to him at the next national convention.
Tantan is a retired police chief renowned for his honesty and easygoing attitude with the common people. He has been very successful as the Interior Minister in chasing and curbing organised crime in the country and corruption in the Administration for the last two years. He lit the green light for tapping the telephones of his fellow Energy Minister, Cumhur Ersumer (ANAP-Canakkale), for three months with a court verdict and did not inform Mesut Yilmaz or Ersumer about it. He cooperated with the Gendarme (which comes under him) for the purge of corrupt officials in the Energy Ministry and several other places, but by so doing he, with the system set up for it, violated the principle of due process, as well as several provisions of Turkish laws and even an international treaty as will be explained below.
All these actions on the part of Tantan, the forces behind him and their prosecution mechanism were useful in fighting corruption in big energy investments, but tended to take a turn for highhanded and even a kind of fascist management. Also, it was unfriendly, untrusting and even a bit of treacherous behaviour towards Tantan’s colleagues and the person who brought him to that position, Chairman Mesut Yilmaz. As expected, this fact and several other similar actions on the part of Tantan strained their relations.
Given the fact that the Americans have long been overtly active with the end in view of getting rid of Mesut Yilmaz and Cumhur Ersumer from the Turkish Government, one cannot help wondering if a certain junta guided from or rather blessed by Washington is staging in Turkey a movement similar to McCartyism in the United States after WW II. There is no doubt, however, that neither the independent Turkish Judiciary, nor the Turkish Armed Forces would definitely permit such a thing and solve within their own systems the problem created by certain officious persons’ abuses of authority. In fact, two separate State Security Tribunals have turned down Prosecutor Salk’s indictments and referred them to ordinary criminal courts.
It was also noteworthy that the Turkish media all of a sudden began to bring up Tantan’s leadership for ANAP and started quite a campaign in his favour. Yet Tantan is the last person for such a position as a party chairman because he has no charisma whatsoever. He speaks for half an hour on the TV and says nothing. One cannot even get his message or what he is getting at. Not even a superpower’s wealth and propaganda mechanism can make such a person a party leader under these conditions.
Time will show if Tantan will realise his shortfalls and drop these activities at ANAP’s ongoing provincial congresses, or will Yilmaz “shake him off from their collar” as he promised to do without naming anyone. Most probably, common sense will prevail and both sides will avoid a showdown for the good of the party and everyone concerned. The latest tendency over the Yilmaz-Tantan strife was “to solve the problem within the family”.
Prosecutor sticks his neck out with American disinformation tactics and achieves Ersumer’s resignation
The indictment prepared by the public prosecutor in charge of the corruption case in energy investments, Talat Salk, could not pin any convincing accusation on Mesut Yilmaz and Cumhur Ersumer, despite several violations of the basic rules of law such as due process and impartiality of judicial expert reports. He only achieved to make Ersumer resign under the pressure of his indictment, because it had as serious an accusation against him and Yilmaz as a testimony that at the reactor tenders a $50 million bribe was paid to them. The claim came from one of the accused who is now in prison on corruption charges. Did the prosecutor not ask the testifier how he knew it? Of course he did. And the latter gave a name for the source of the information. When the prosecutor approached that person, his answer was, “I hear such a thing for the first time.” Nevertheless, Prosecutor Talat Salk inserted in the indictment the first part of the accusation of $50 million bribery, but “forgot” the second part.
Another such absent-mindedness was about the documents concerning the telephone tapping. During the three months of telephone tapping of the accused, those under arrest today were talking on the phone about how to coordinate their testimonies to the inspectors investigating the charges and swearing at Ersumer for making their work difficult about tenders subject to corruption and bribery charges. Prosecutor Salk also forgot to include these evidences in his indictment. He later said that they were in the annex, the trucks load of documents no one could possibly have any time to go into.
Also, the judicial experts he had chosen for specialist advice included a lawyer who had sued the Energy Ministry before and sent an insulting letter to Ersumer, whereas the law calls for a judge’s qualities and impartiality for such judicial experts. Furthermore, the prosecutor violated international treaties about going through the Foreign Ministry in seeking diplomatic missions’ documents by directly approaching the EU, IMF and the World Bank for evidence. He repeatedly violated laws about being discreet at the investigation stage and kept on delivering public statements against Ersumer and Yilmaz.
The indictment and several other documents also kept on leaking to the media against Yilmaz and Ersumer. And noteworthy about these leakages was that one of the Americans’ disinformation tactics was used during these leakages. If there were now secret talks between Turkey and the United States about, say, the missile shield issue, Turkey’s experience shows that the Americans try to get their way at secret talks, say a missile base in Turkey. Failing to do so, they leak these secret talks to the Turkish press with a distortion that Ankara has agreed to grant a base to the Americans in eastern Anatolia, thus turning Moscow, Beijing and other capitals against Turkey, no matter how much Ankara rebuts the claim and no matter how Washington also officially joins in this rebuttal.
In the case of the leakages of Prosecutor Salt’s documents, the document that was leaked out contains some minor differences from the official text, thus enabling the Prosecutor to say that the published text was not his own, even though they are 95% identical.
At one point Prosecutor Salk’s boss, chief prosecutor Vural remarked, “What eagerness this is to be medyamatik (media happy). It’s not certain that we will call for the Minister’s prosecution.” And indeed, despite Salk’s statement to the press, the indictment did not include “fezleke”, the official document calling for legal action against a minister by the Government and Parliament in order to bring him before Justice, even though Salk had already prepared it. Still with or without a “fezleke,” Ersumer had to resign much to Washington’s delight. The press has quoted the former American Ambassador Marc Parris as saying in Washington that he was pleased to see Ersumer resign.
Certainly, the Government could easily have removed Talat Salk from this duty through the Justice Minister, but it wisely did not do so because it did not want to “create a hero,” as Yilmaz said at his party caucus. Instead, the Justice Minister has set in motion the Board of Judges and Prosecutors about Talat Salk’s behaviour and the matter is sub judice at the moment. The Judiciary will rectify, in other words, the mistakes of a prosecutor, if any, without any interference by the Executive or the Legislature.
With all these upheavals, ANAP is the most disturbed coalition party, but this is mostly because of the great service it has rendered to the country in securing Turkey’s future energy requirements under the most suitable terms and prices and thus annoying Washington with the Blue Stream project. Disinformation and propaganda may succeed for a while, but it is not possible to smear honest people indefinitely.
The opposition parties are no alternative to the present ruling power
On the opposition front, the official opposition party, the FP, is facing the danger of being closed down for the fourth time by the Constitutional Court on the grounds that it is a successor to a banned party, the defunct RP, though no one wants the Court to pass such a verdict.
If the Constitutional Court closes down the FP only two FP parliamentarians will lose their parliamentary status for causing it and the necessity of a major by-election will not appear. Chairman Recai Kutan has once threatened that they could all resign and go to the nation in that event, necessitating new elections, but it was most probably casual talk with no foundation.
In fact, the FP is a party much more deeply split up and disturbed than ANAP. An underhanded struggle has been going on in this party between the central management led by Kutan with Necmettin Erbakan behind the scene and the revisionist youngsters led by the former Mayor of Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. This second group will most probably be pleased with the Constitutional Court’s verdict to close down the FP in which case they will found a new party with a claim to the FP’s legacy. The new party will be called the “Erdemliler” movement or party, “Erdemli” being a new word in Turkish for virtuous. It will try to cover the entire Centre Right by attracting the dissidents of the MHP, ANAP and the DYP, as well as the small conservative parties not represented in Parliament, such as the BBP led by Muhsin Yazicioglu, LDP by Besim Tibuk, YDP by Hasan Celal Guzel, and DP by Korkut Ozal. In practice, they are nothing but zero plus zero plus zero.
The catch about this plan is that like Erbakan, Erdogan has also been ousted from politics by a constitutional court ruling and neither can be a political party member, much less its founding chairman. The Erdogan group claims that with the latest amnesty for prisoners this ban has also been cancelled, but others disagree with this interpretation. Whichever is the case, if there is an amnesty to Erdogan’s political ban; there is a similar one to Erbakan. It means an open clash between the two for leadership of the conservative religious groups, after they have been stripped of their political bans and it is bound to end up in Erbakan’s victory. So Washington’s plans to win over the religious fundamentalists by making Recep Tayyip Erdogan the leader do not hold much water at least at this stage.
A more realistic American plan for Turkish politics may be their intention to make Kemal Dervis the next Prime Minister of Turkey, but it is too early to comment on it at this stage, as Dervis and Washington themselves seem not to know what they will do about it and wisely prefer to play it by ear. At the moment Dervis and his charming wife are touring some big Anatolian cities with an army of media men behind them. It is so far, so good. No one took the FP whip Yasin Hatipoglu seriously when he took the trouble of holding a press conference in Parliament on Thursday (24th) to announce that Catherine Dervis was not of Turkish culture because she had said, in answer to a question, that she was not a messiah, as if it was a secret that she was from a different culture.