Wikileaks Story: The Legitimization of the Status-quo

The 29 September 2010 will be remembered as a day on which the status-quo in the world politics became upside down. Wikileaks, as an international organization which identifies its duty as “opening governments”, published documents of varying “secrecy degrees” from US-Embassies. From that day on the content of the documents has strictly been discussed; some were verified, some were refused. So what has Wikileaks done? What will happen now? These questions are not to be easily answered.

Before answering these questions, it’s beneficial to clarify certain points: First of all, Wikileaks identifies itself as an “international non-profit media” organization and has herewith an “ethical duty” in the international politics. This is more clearly to be understood out of its slogan: “We open governments”. In the light of this duty, they never declassify their sources and do not publish the documents before being completely sure about its verification.

For an organization that has such a big mission, the existence of 3 guarantees is indispensible:

1. Legal Guarantee: This they have from the Swedish laws. The Swedish Constitution is giving all kind of information providers total legal protection. Moreover, it’s forbidden according to Swedish law for any administrative authority to make inquiries about the sources of any type of information.
2. Economic Guarantee: Wikileaks, which is claimed to have no revenues except donates has almost 800 volunteers around the world. These claims create an economic-dilemma for an organization which is claimed to have yearly €200.000 expenses. However, undoubtedly the amount of its donators should be worthy to the greatness of the duty it accomplishes.
3.  Institutional Structure: Wikileaks is hosted by a Swedish company called PQR. Actually the power it obtains is based on this powerful institutional structure. In this manner, Wikileaks is able to use a military-grade encryption and such a high-qualified protection.

 From these classifications only one can conclude that the power Wikileaks acquires is very substantial. That’s why, before going into details about the content of the documents, one should recognize an important fact which I tried to explain in the following part of this writing:

For days, many have identified the USA as cornered and the USA, through its deeds, didn’t really reject it. Meanwhile, the representatives of the Turkish Government from varying degrees have not reacted strictly towards the USA and even said that such a normal event could never taint the relations between the USA and Turkey. At this point we should question what would happen if this was done by any opponent of the government inside Turkey. The Prime Minister, himself, reflected the answer of this question by accusing the opposition parties once again, as if all these claims and documents were published by themselves. Moreover, he has threatened the opponents by reminding them the ones under arrest who had accused him in a similar way. The Ankara US-Ambassador is, nevertheless, still in his place without getting any official warning from either Turkey or the USA. Because an important reality is missed: According to the international law, the ambassadors are the most authoritative representatives in the countries where they are working. Therefore what they say, as an ambassador, is both politically and legally binding for the countries they represent. If Mrs. Clinton is unaware of this normative code, while saying: “Politics is done in Washington”, then she, as the foreign secretary of the US, should have recalled all the US-Ambassadors, since the USA doesn’t need them.

Actually the picture is not that limited. Because neither Wikileaks is so fool that it corners the USA nor the USA is that much cornered. One should consider that only ‰3 of the 251,287 documents have been published and that the documents of the highest secrecy were either not published or censored with (***). Why hasn’t Wikileaks published the rest and actually the most-expected part of the documents? Is what had been published so far enough to corner the USA? These questions actually reflect what is aimed by Wikileaks or the so-called “9/11 of the Diplomacy”. Actually what we saw in the cables can be divided into two parts:

1. The personal opinions of US-Ambassadors about important people
2. The general opinions of the USA about certain issues.

If we look at the situation from Turkish perspective, we will see that the first part of the cables is the part which is supposed to corner the USA but actaully is not anything more than sugar-coating. For everybody knows that the long-lasting Turkey-US relations can’t be easily shaped by such an event. This is simply because of the fact that Turkey can’t easily give the USA the cold shoulder. Therefore the USA can easily get out from all the claims in the first part by apologizing one time, which it has already done. This is very obviously evident for us, when we look at the current situation: Mr. Davutoğlu was said to be “exceptional dangerous and crazy”. However, he doesn’t really seem to be angry with the USA.

The second part of the content includes the general opinions of the USA about certain issues which have created internal and international political crises. The most important characteristic of this part is that only three countries weren’t negatively influenced by it: The USA, Israel and England (The real allies). This is simply because the US-foreign policy doesn’t need to warn its allies in such a way. This is very obviously evident for us through the help of a number of examples from the current situation: The polemics between the opposition and the PM in Turkey and the comfortable situation of Israel and England after the publication of the cables. Therefore the second part of the cables, the real content, created controversies in countries and didn’t really taint the US-foreign policy.

To conclude, I can say that Wikileaks, as opposed to the popular belief, tainted the countries other than the USA, Israel and England, delivered the messages of the USA to the counties and, in this manner, consolidated and legitimized the current US-foreign policy, namely the status-quo. The Wikileaks issue, unfortunately, was not sufficient for us to believe that the long-lasting US-foreign could be opened and democratized in one night.

Edgar ŞAR

Edgar.Sar@PolitikaDergisi.com