TURKPULSE No:157..........JUNE 12th, 2006
Ankara takes it as a “cracked voice” an American Government member’s (Daniel Fried’s) strongly worded statement in Washington on Friday (9th) that the United States will never recognize any government in Cyprus other than the Papandreu regime. Instead, the German Government’s quasi recognition of the TRNC by receiving President Talat at Foreign Minister level in Berlin (by the FM Frank-Walter Steinmeier) on the same day was appreciated by Ankara as a more realistic and more important development on the part of the Atlantic community for the long term solution of the Cyprus problem. Now diplomats will have to work out the finishing touches to this reality of the “Two State” formula on Cyprus, within the eventual EU integration for all the parties concerned, ie for Turkey and the TRNC, as the other parties are already in the EU, including the UK.
The Greek Cypriot presence in the EU will certainly cause a lot of headaches for Turkey’s prospective accession, but rather than Ankara’s, it will be the headache of those who made the mistake of admitting the Papandreau mentality to the European integration. It is a fact that, mindful of the security requirements and economic balances in this part of the world, Washington and London sincerely wish to see Turkey in the EU as a full member. This fact compels them to work hard for transcending over the current and future cases of the Greek Cypriot intransigence against the Turkish accession, according to Ankara’s assessments.
Language differences and disinformation will be the real problem
The real thorny points concerning Turkey’s Red Lines in EU accession go beyond the limits of Europe and involve the never-ending Troubled Alliance between Turkey and the United States. To put it on a nutshell, it concerns the East-West balance in this part of the world and Turkey’s key role. But even above and beyond this difficulty of a political nature, on which I’ll dwell below or in following articles, there rests the difficulties stemming from language and customs differences of the two sides and they really cause serious hurdles to overcome.
A tangible example was given by the outgoing EU ambassador (or Representative as they call him) to Ankara, Hansjorg Kretchmer, in an interview he gave to Milliyet on Thursday (9th).
Under a full page heading based on a quote from him, “The (Turkish) Government should respect the Judiciary,” Ambassador Kretchmer gives a perfect example of how little the West has understood the realities about recent trials of terrorist bands in mostly eastern Turkey, starting with the Semdinli events last November.
He says that he could not understand why the Turkish Government dismissed the Public Prosecutor of Van because his indictment attempted to link the Semdinli bombing of 9 November 2005 to some top commanders such as General Buyukanit. There could be mistakes in any judicial document and it would be corrected within the judicial process as is always done in every country, according to the EU Representative Kretchmer.
On the surface, what Kretchmer says is absolutely right according to the general rules of the democratic system, but he is equally wrong when certain facts he apparently did not know due to language problems and disinformation activities of the Turkish media are taken into account.
That is where the insurmountable difficulties of Turkey’s EU accession starts. Above all, the word “government” is a very tricky word. Contrary to American English which speaks of “The Executive (or Judicial) Branch of the Government,” in Turkish and some European terminologies “The Government” means merely the Executive Power and in that sense the Public Prosecutor of Van was never dismissed by the Government. It was done by the Judiciary and totally within the due process operation.
As for the claim that the Judiciary is not absolutely independent in Turkey because the highest administrative body of the Judicial Power, the Supreme Board of Judges and Prosecutors, is headed by the Justice Minister and the seven members of the Board contains the Under Secretary of Justice, in addition to the Minister himself, the claim is totally wrong at least in the case of the dismissal of the Public Prosecutor of Van.
Justice Minister Cemil Cicek says that to keep the Judicial Power’s autonomy intact he pays attention, as his predecessors have always done, to keep away from Board meetings when the personal promotion, retirement, and assignment affairs of judges and prosecutors are discussed. That is what he did in the case of the dismissal of the Public Prosecutor of Van, Ferhat Sarikaya. As for the possible influence of his Under Secretary among the remaining six Board members in the Sarikaya case, that is what makes ambassador Kretchmer’s criticism totally unjustified because, to my knowledge, the Under Secretary was the only Board member who opposed the dismissal and favoured a more lenient penalty to Sarikaya. But no need to be a top level judge as the Board members are, a simple glance at Sarikaya’s indictment about the Semdindi bomb outrage is enough to prove how unfit he was to be a public prosecutor with his totally biased views devoid of any respect for all the basic rules of Justice.
A rash remark serves to uproot bombs “planted” in Army and Judiciary
It is true that General Buyukanit was rash in remarking about a former comrade in arms “I know him, he is a good soldier,” but in the long run that mistake helped Turkey greatly in uncovering and detaching from the Turkish Armed Forces, a bunch of misguided people in uniform and some infiltrations in the Judiciary. Let me be more specific and outspoken for the sake of explaining certain facts that were unknown even to the Top Brass in Turkey and that has been being misunderstood and misrepresented in the world.
Gareth Jones of Reuters reports from Ankara about the Semdinli bomb outrage, “The detention of three members of the security services after the Nov. 9 bombing of a bookshop in the town of Semdinli in Turkey’s troubled Southeast reawakened suspicions that the ‘deep state’ is still alive and well. When prosecutors then freed two of the men, and Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, the head of Turkey’s land forces, described one of them as a ‘good soldier,’ the suspicions deepened.”
What Reuters and other Turkish and world media organs started to call “deep state” is alleged military intervention in Turkey’s civilian administration.
With signals from the boss beyond the Atlantic, the Washington-guided Turkish media was not late to exploit the Semdinli bombing as an alleged “tangible and undeniable deep state case” in Turkey and the first reaction of the TGS was to defend the arrested two NCOs, one of whom had gained Gen. Buyukanit’s favour at the battlefields in eastern Anatolia against PKK terrorism.
The reason for the TGS’s initial support of the two NCOs was that they believed that the accused soldiers were facing a PKK plot with the owner of the bombed bookshop having a notorious PKK record and with the knowledge that the Gendarmerie or any other Turkish military body had planned no such bombing plot. Yet the deepening investigation of the civilian prosecutors was producing certain suspicious cases against the two NCOs who are still under arrest. That is why the TGS stopped supporting them and began to wait for the outcome of the civilian trial, as General Buyukanit had said during his praise of the “good soldier,” “of course he pays if he has done any wrong,” a remark that was skipped by the Turkish and world media.
Cutting a long story short, Washington was so delighted with Buyukanit’s rash remark and so determined to prevent his promotion to the top of the Turkish Armed Forces in August upon General Hilmi Ozkok’s retirement that it did not only mobilize its Disinformation Mechanism but also activated its planted agents in the military and judicial organs in Turkey.
In return, the Turkish Armed Forces, particularly the special forces, stood solidly behind the Ground Forces Commander against these campaigns in the Turkish and world medias and it made Buyukanit (which means “the Great Monument” in Turkish) “even a greater monument,” as General Ozkok once put it.
Meanwhile, Washington kept on wavering against whom to channel the American disinformation and subversion mechanisms, against PM Erdogan or General Buyukanit, against the “state” or “deep state”. Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz rushed to denounce Alparslan Arslan, the Danistay assailant, as “a fanatical religious terrorist”, thus indirectly pointing at finger to the AKP’s political Islam. Yet investigation is proving that Alparslan has nothing to do with religion or religious terrorism. (Incidentally his codename in the Danistay outrage was Polat, apparently the CIA’s attempted vengeance of PM Erdogan for creating the Turkish Rambo, Polat Alemdar of the “Valley of the Wolves” film.)
Starting with the Semdinli terrorist band, a number of other terrorist bands involving some retired, discharged or even active officers and certain judicial persons such as Alparslan, who is a lawyer, have been exposed. Especially important among them is the Atabeyler Guerilla group. Because certain people were distributing documents to the media in front of the TGS building in Ankara in an attempt to promote the “deep state” rumours and to get the military involved in these bands or gangs about the ongoing investigation, the judiciary has banned the divulgence of information about the Atabeyler case. As the truth will come out during the trial with the indictment in process, I will skip commenting about it. What can be confidently said at this point is that while Turkey’s relations with the United States are giving way to appalling events and the EU is dragging its feet about getting on with the accession talks with Turkey, the Turkish-Russian cooperation is making headlong progress with certain remarkable achievements such as inducing Iran to rethink its nuclear bomb intentions. The details of this comparison require another 4-5 pages of space and will therefore be the subject of another Pulse article. uras@adanet.tr – 12 June 2006