Turkey Outlines New Role for Military

By MARC CHAMPION

ISTANBUL—Turkey’s government on Wednesday began laying out details of the civil-military order they want to see, making it clear even before a new command is announced that the country’s next top soldier, Gen. Necdet Ozel, will face a tough job.

The government, backed by the European Union, has been battling since it came to power in 2002 to get the country’s overbearing military, which conducted three coups since 1960, to submit to civilian control. With that battle now won, according to military analysts, Gen. Ozel’s job will be to begin reform of a military deeply suspicious of the government driving the changes.

As a start, the prime minister should sit alone at the head of the table at twice-yearly meetings of the Supreme Military Council, as he did for the first time this week, rather than next to the chief of general staff, according to Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc.

“They say, a village can’t have two headmen,” Mr. Arinc said bluntly, in televised remarks.

The four-day council meeting decides promotions throughout the military and has been the setting for an extraordinary drama this year, after Chief of the General Staff Isik Kosaner and three service chiefs resigned Friday, in protest against prosecutions against hundreds of military officers. That has left empty five seats empty at the table.

Asked by reporters whether the website of the general staff would be purged of politicized material, Mr. Arinc attacked the “e-memorandum” still on the site, which warned the military would act to protect secularism in Turkey. The memorandum was posted in April 2007, as then-candidate Abdullah Gul of the ruling Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was trying to get elected president. Some saw it as a veiled threat to intervene in the political process.

“This was a breaking point in Turkey,” said Mr. Arinc, also from the AKP. “Now, of course, for this wrong to be on a website is just as big a mistake as the wrong itself.”

The appointment of Gen. Ozel and his service chiefs won’t be announced until Thursday, but the tightrope he’ll have to walk between pleasing the government and his fellow officers was already evident Wednesday.

“What are you hiding from the other commanders?” asked Muharren Ince, vice chairman of the parliamentary group of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, in a televised statement. On Monday, the first day of the council meeting was cut short as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan pulled Gen. Ozel into an unusual private meeting of almost two hours.

Gen. Ozel differs from many of his fellow generals in that he has a cautious, studiously apolitical nature, according to Namik Cinar, a columnist who writes on military affairs for the liberal daily Taraf, and who attended military academy and infantry school with Gen. Ozel.

“He’s not very talkative. He has never knowingly given a political speech, and he doesn’t give interviews,” said Mr. Cinar.

Even as a student, Mr. Cinar remembers Gen. Ozel being careful and unusually self-disciplined —possibly overcompensating for the fact that his father taught at the military academy and he didn’t want to appear to be favored in any way. “When we would go on a march and there would be a rest break, everyone was relaxing, but he’d sit up like a candle,” said Mr. Cinar, in an interview.

That cautious nature makes Gen. Ozel a natural choice for the government, he added.

The general also has set himself apart from much of the other top brass by the things he didn’t do—or hasn’t been accused of doing.

Gen. Aslan Guner, who has been sitting at the far end of the table from Prime Minister Erdogan this week, twice appeared to snub President Gul’s wife because she wears a headscarf. Third Army commander Gen. Saldiray Berk, who sits next to Gen. Ozel, has been charged with taking part in an alleged anti-government plot called “Action Plan to Fight Reactionaryism.”

Aegean Army chief Gen. Nusdet Tasdeler was indicted last week for allegedly ordering dozens of websites to be set up to defame the government and Turkey’s ethnic and religious minorities.

And in February, Gen. Ozel was the only service chief not to take part in a highly publicized visit that Gen. Kosaner made to the jail that holds generals and admirals among more than 200 military officers currently awaiting trial on charges of plotting against the government.

Yet “he is regarded in the officer corps as a good Kemalist,” says Istanbul-based military analyst Gareth Jenkins. Kemalist refers to followers of the principles of modern Turkey’s secularist founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.

Mr. Jenkins said it was the other generals who put Gen. Ozel in position, within the military’s strict succession-hierarchy to take over from Gen. Kosaner. They chose him at last year’s August meeting of the Supreme Military Council because his views were Kemalist and he didn’t share the religious conservative outlook of the AKP, Mr. Jenkins added.

—Ayla Albayrak contributed to this article.

Write to Marc Champion at marc.champion@wsj.com

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