A Turkish court has ruled that President Abdullah Gul should face trial over a funding scandal in the 1990s involving a now-defunct Islamist party to which he belonged.
Published: 6:45AM BST 19 May 2009
Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2010
The court overturned a prosecutor’s decision to drop the case, ruling that Gul’s immunity as president did not cover allegations dating to the period before he took office, Anatolia news agency reported.
Authorities must now re-examine the case that alleges falsification of documents and violation of laws governing political parties.
The case threatens to exacerbate tensions between Turkey’s ruling Islamist-rooted party and secularists, who accuse Mr Gul and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, of seeking to erode the country’s secular traditions.
The ruling AKP has said it fully embraces secularism.
Mr Gul’s office denounced the court ruling in a statement and said a previous judgement had cleared him of responsibility in the case involving the Welfare Party, accused of embezzling money from the public treasury in the 1990s.
“The efforts in some circles to attempt to present our president as a suspect when he is neither charged nor in the process of being tried does not in any way result from good intentions,” it said.
The statement said Mr Gul could only be put on trial for treason.
Government spokesman Cemil Cicek also disputed the ruling.
“It is unthinkable that presidents not be protected by immunity when deputies are,” he said.
Welfare was outlawed in 1998 for undermining Turkey’s secular system, a year after it relinquished power under pressure from the military.
The American commentariat is shocked, shocked , to discover that Turkey has abandoned the Western alliance for an adventurous bid to become the dominant Muslim power in the Middle East. Tom Friedman of the New York Times suggested on June 15 that “President [Barack] Obama should invite him for a weekend at Camp David to clear the air before US-Turkey relations get where they’re going – over a cliff.” Friedman blames the European Community for rejecting Turkey’s membership bid which, he says, was a “key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world”.
But it is not quite so simple. Friedman and the conventional wisdom are wrong, as usual. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is behaving dreadfully, to the point that a group of retired senior Turkish diplomats denounced him for “neo-Ottomanism”. But Turkey has not moved closer to Iran, except in tactical diplomatic terms. The problem is more subtle: America’s blunders in Iraq gave Iran the chance to become a regional hegemon, and Turkey must vie with Iran for this role as a matter of self-preservation.
It was not the European Community, but rather the George W Bush administration, that pulled the rug out from under Turkey’s secularists and built up Erdogan as a paragon of “moderate Islam”. America’s feckless nation-building policy in Iraq helped Turkey over the edge into Islamism.
In a recent essay [1], I portrayed the Mavi Marmara incident in which nine Turks were killed by Israeli commandos onboard one of the six boats attempting to breach the blockade on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip, as a Turkish farce. It should be obvious to anyone with access to YouTube that Erdogan conducted an exercise in guerilla theater, which qualifies as a comedy of sorts unless you were one of the dead Turks on the boat. What has transpired over the past eight years, though, is a tragedy.
Turkey is held together by weak glue. It never was a nation-state, despite founding father Kemal Ataturk’s ferocious efforts to make it appear to be one. Kurds comprise somewhere between six million and 20 million (the Kurdish nationalists’ claim) of Turkey’s population, and Kurdish separatism poses a continuing threat to Turkey’s national integrity.
For the usual corrupt and foolish reasons, world opinion has focused on the nine dead Turks on the flotilla; of far greater consequence are the several dozen Turkish soldiers who died at the hands of Kurdish guerillas in the past two weeks. More important still are the 2,000 or so Turkic people who died in Kyrgyzstan in the past weeks. Much less distinguishes a failed state like Kyrgyzstan from an apparently successful state like Turkey than Westerners think.
America is about to leave Iraq; Iraq is likely to break up; and if an independent Kurdish state emerges from the breakup it will become a magnet for Kurdish separatists within Turkey. Erdogan has 1,500 Kurds under arrest, including the mayors of some Kurdish towns.
Ataturk’s post-war secularism defined “Turkishness” as a national identity that had never before existed. “Turkishness” is something of a blood pudding. Ottoman identity had nothing to do with nationality in the Western sense. It was religious and ethnic. A fifth of the population of Anatolia before World War I was Christian, mainly Armenian and Greek; virtually all were expelled or murdered. The Turks killed more than a million-and-a-half Armenians, employing Kurdish militia to do most of the actual dirty work (that is why what is now “Turkish Kurdistan” was until 1916 “Western Armenia”. The modern Turkish state was born in a bloodbath, and founded on massive population shifts. The enormous Kurdish minority got the southeast as a consolation prize but still longs for its own language, culture and eventual national state.
Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a monster, but for the Turks a useful monster. The 1988 Anfal campaign against the Kurds of northern Iraq killed up to 180,000 of them, and the crackdown on the Kurds after the 1991 First Gulf War killed as many as 100,000. The Turks, by contrast, killed perhaps 20,000 to 40,000 Kurds during the 1980s and 1990s.
Turkey in 2003 refused America permission to open a northern front against Saddam out of fear that the war would destroy Turkey’s ability to control its restive border. The destruction of the Iraqi state, moreover, created a de facto independent Kurdish entity on Turkey’s border, the last thing Ankara wanted. If America had simply installed a new strongman and left, Turkey would have been relieved. But America’s commitment to “nation-building” and “democracy” in Iraq, to Ankara’s way of thinking, meant that Iraq inevitably would break up; the Kurdish entity in northern Iraq would become a breakaway state; and Iran’s power would grow at the expense of Turkey.
Turkey has many reasons to fear Iran, whose possible nuclear ambitions make it a prospective spoiler in the region. But there is another vital issue. Among the fault lines that run through the modern Turkish state is a religious divide. Iran exercises influence through the Alevi minority in Turkey, a heretical Muslim sect closer in some ways to Shi’ite than Sunni Islam. No accurate census of the Alevi exists; they may comprise between a fifth and a quarter of of Turkey’s population. The late Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared the Alevi to be part of Shi’ite Islam in the 1970s, and they have been subjected to occasional violence by Sunni Turks.
The Iraq war undermined the position of the Kemalist military, which had bloodied its hands for decades in counter-insurgency operations against the Kurds. Erdogan’s Islamists argued that the weak glue of secular Turkish identity no longer could hold Turkey together, and proposed instead to win the Kurds over through Islamic solidarity. The Kurds are quite traditional Muslims; unlike the Turkish Sunnis, the provincial Kurds of southeastern Turkey and northern Iraq often practice female circumcision.
After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the George W Bush administration saw no reason to back the Turkish generals who had let them down in Iraq, and instead threw their backing to the Islamists, on the theory that Erdogan represented a sort of “moderate Islam” that would provide an example to other prospective democratic Muslim regimes. When Erdogan won parliamentary elections in 2003, Bush invited him to the White House before he took office, a gesture that persuaded most Turks that America had jettisoned its erstwhile secular allies, as I wrote in 2007. [2]
The Bush State Department stuck to the story of “moderate Islam” in Turkey even while Erdogan used outlandishly extra-legal methods to dismantle the secular establishment, as I wrote in 2008. [3] In fairness to the State Department, the idea that Turkey was home to a specially moderate strain of Islam was not the invention of American foreign policy analysts but of the Islam specialists of the Jesuit order. Father Christian Troll, a German Islamologist who advises Pope Benedict XVI, and his student Father Felix Koerner popularized the notion of a less virulent strain of Turkish Islam. I reviewed Koerner’s book on Turkish Islam in 2008. [4]
One cannot blame the Bush administration (nor the Jesuit Islamologists) for the person Erdogan has become. By the turn of the millennium, Kemalist secularism was a grotesque relic of 1930s European nationalism. Turkey’s leading novelist, Orhan Pamuk, evoked the spiritual misery of secularist Turkey and the attractions of radical Islam in his Nobel-prize-winning novel Snow, which I reviewed in this space in 2004. [5]
To the extent that there was some hope of keeping Turkey in the Western camp, though, the Bush administration’s nation-building blunders in Iraq and credulous admiration of “moderate Islam” in Ankara destroyed it.
Political Islam as a replacement for Kemalist nationalism is the glue that will hold Turkey together, in Erdogan’s view. It does not seem to be doing a good job. Islamic solidarity was supposed to persuade the Kurds to behave themselves, along with a few nods in the direction of the use of the Kurdish language, which the Kemalists tried to suppress. The killing of 11 Turkish soldiers in raids staged from Iraq and the bombing of a military bus in Ankara show that Kurdish resistance has not diminished. Erdogan, previously so concerned about human rights and the Biblical injunction against killing, raged that the Kurdish rebels will “drown in their own blood”.
Erdogan’s political Islam failed to stabilize Turkey. It will contribute to instability in the region to an extent that is difficult to foresee. Iran now has the more reason to assert its influence in Iraq, perhaps by encouraging the breakup of the country and the emergence of a Kurdish state that might threaten Turkey.
Turkey, in turn, has all the more reason to agitate among the Turkish-speaking, or Azeri, quarter of Iran’s population. Iran will use its influence among Turkish Alevis to challenge the Turkish Sunni establishment; Iran will encourage Turkish separatism. Meanwhile Erdogan’s alliance of opportunity with Hamas undercuts the American-allied Sunni Arab states, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, not to mention Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestine Authority.
With the United States in full strategic withdrawal, a Thirty Years War in western and central Asia seems all the more likely.
Notes
1. Fethullah Gulen’s cave of wonders Asia Times Online, June 9, 2010.
2. Why does Turkey hate America? Asia Times Online, October 23, 2007.
3. Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution? Asia Times Online, July 22, 2008.
4. Tin-opener theology from Turkey Asia Times Online, June 3, 2008.
5. In defense of Turkish cigarettes Asia Times Online, August 24, 2004.
Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman, senior editor at First Things magazine (www.firstthings.com).
Silivri is sunflower country, vast undulating sun-filled land that rolls down to the Marmara Sea about 72 kilometers west of Istanbul. Silivri Prison squats therein on spoiled high ground 72 million light-years beyond the rule of law. Here, in the best of fascist traditions, the so-called Ergenekon coup case is being tried in a converted gymnasium. Think Stalin. Think Hitler. Think Pinochet. Think Turkey. Think Auschwitz.
The charges are vague. The proof is a hodge-podge of illegal wiretaps, secret witnesses (think Spanish Inquisition), prosecutorial leaks to pro-government newspapers, planted and otherwise tainted evidence illegally obtained. Concern about the provenance of such evidence is ignored by the court. The dossiers against the accused—journalists, labor leaders, lawyers, writers, retired military officers, all defenders of the republic established by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—number in the hundreds, the pages therein in the hundreds of thousands. Think Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. The defendants on trial still do not know the specific charges against them. Some have been incarcerated for more than two years. There is no notion of habeas corpus. The case reads as if assembled by an infinite number of monkeys banging away on computers while juggling scissors and paste pots. The chief prosecutor, allegedly a lawyer, has the appropriate last name of Öz.
When I attended the session on 13 August the chief prosecutor was somewhere on the yellow brick road and thus absent, as were all his assistants. So the three judges interrogated the accused. This in itself is incredible. These are the same judges that are supposed to render a verdict of guilt or innocence. How can they be impartial if they are also helping the prosecutor make the case? How can they remain open-minded and just if they are emotionally involved in the prosecution? This is wildly prejudicial and trashes any notion regarding the presumption of innocence. More importantly, by directly interrogating the defendants, the judges have already accepted the validity of the evidence. Defense counsels were challenging the legality of the evidence but to no avail. The judges had already de facto accepted it. To whom should evidentiary appeals be made? Zeus? Telephone numbers and snippets of alleged conversation were read into the record. Do you know this man? No? Do you remember this telephone number? No. Amazingly, a listing of the prescription medications taken by an army general not even charged appeared in the dossier. What a fiasco! No corroborating evidence or witnesses were called. The session was just one long boring rendition of irrelevancies, immaterialities, and hearsay. On droned the three judges, See-No-Legal, Hear-No-Legal, Speak-No-Legal. An embarrassing travesty. Think Emile Zola’s J’Accuse.
In Chile, Pinochet executed all opposed to his regime in the football stadium in Santiago. In Turkey, a slower political genocide is unfolding, this one in a prison exercise hall. The victims? The heirs of the Turkish secular republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. The Turkish army, the supposed defender of Atatürk’s masterpiece has been neutered. It quietly licks its wounds and feathers its nest in incompetent solitude.
Yes, a political genocide of epic dimension is raging throughout the land. It reeks of injustice. But who cares? It is aided and abetted by the west. But who cares? We know where the traitors are. But where are the patriots? It’s the most disgusting of monkey business. Anyone care for a banana?
Court records and the testimony of former government officials show that Fethullah Gulen, who presently resides in Pennsylvania, has amassed more than $25 billion in assets from the heroin route which runs from Afghanistan to Turkey.
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator, testified that the drug money has been channeled into Gulen’s coffers by the C.I.A.
“A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes,” Ms. Edmonds said. “After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the US via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago, and Paterson, New Jersey.”
Ms. Edmonds further said that Turkish diplomats, who would never be searched by airport officials, have come into the country “with suitcases of heroin.”
According to Ms. Edmonds and other government witnesses, Gulen began to receive funding from the CIA in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union when federal officials realized that the U.S. could not obtain control of the vast energy resources of the newly created Russian republics because of deep-seated suspicion of American motives.
Turkey, the U.S. officials came to realize, could serve as a perfect “proxy” since it was a NATO ally that shared the same language, culture, and religion as the other Central Asian countries.
The strategy has met with success since Turkey has formed an alliance with Iran and is emerging as the world’s most powerful Islamic nation.
But the success has come with a price. The only way to provide Gulen with sufficient funds to topple Turkey’s secular regime and to conduct education jihad within the Russian republics came from the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
This scenario serves to explain why US-led coalition troops in Afghanistan are forbidden to firebomb the fields or fumigate the poppies with a chemical herbicide, such as glyphosate.
Despite such testimony and growing concern over Turkey, the Obama administration has opted to turn a blind eye to Gulen and his mountain fortress in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
Fethullah Gulen has been called the “most dangerous Islamist” on the planet.
In his native Turkey, Gulen’s vast fortune has been used to create the Justice and Democratic Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP), which has gained control of the government.
With the elections of 2002, the AKP gained absolute control of the Turkish government.
Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s first Islamist President, is a Gulen disciple along with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Yusuf Ziya Ozcan, the head of Turkey’s Council of Higher Education.
Under the AKP, Turkey has transformed from a secular state into an Islamic country with 85,000 active mosques – – one for every 350- citizens – – the highest number per capita in the world, 90,000 imams, more imams than teachers and physicians – – and thousands of state-run Islamic schools.
Despite the rhetoric of European Union accession, Turkey has transferred its alliance from Europe and the United States to Russia and Iran. It has moved toward friendship with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria and created a pervasive anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, and anti-America animus throughout the populace.
Gulen has purchased newspapers, television networks, construction companies, universities, banks, utilities, technological outlets, pharmaceutics, and manufacturing firms throughout the country.
In addition, he has established thousands of madrassahs (Islamic religious schools) throughout Central Asia where students are indoctrinated in the tenets of militant Islam so they may be of service in the creation of a universal caliphate.
This notion is not an idle pipedream. The dream of a universal caliphate came closer to reality in recent weeks with the collapse of the secular government in Kyrgyzstan,.
But the Gulen movement is not confined to Turkey and Central Asia.
Eighty-five Gulen schools have been set up in the United States as charter academies funded by public funds.
Is Gulen really affiliated with the CIA?
In support of his application for permanent residency status, Gulen obtained letters of support and endorsement, from Graham Fuller and other former CIA officials.
His petition was also endorsed by former Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman, and former Ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williamsis the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010 Erdogan Lies for the Benefit of Israel: Turks, Learn from the US and Germany
Christopher Jon Bjerknes
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan has lied to the World and claimed that Ergenekon is the power behind the PKK, without mentioning Israel. Erdogan had earlier said that there were evil forces behind the PKK without specifying who those evil forces are. Everyone naturally assumed that Erdogan was referring to Israel, because everyone knows that Israel is the power behind the PKK, having been caught training them. See:
PM specifies Ergenekon as power behind PKK terror
Erdogan is both lying by omission and is directly lying. If Erdogan would have us believe that Ergenekon timed the PKK attacks to coincide with the Israeli assault on a Turkish vessel, then Erdogan must admit that Ergenekon is an arm of the Israeli government, or shares its Jewish loyalty and common interests with the “Jewish State”. As such, Erdogan is lying by omission to cover up Israel’s longstanding war on Turkey, and the fact that Ergenekon is a Jewish organization run by Jews and crypto-Jews.
Erdogan is directly lying when he claims that Ergenekon runs the PKK which has arms in several countries and has been observed working with, and receiving training from, Mossad.
I have been warning that Erdogan would betray the country of Turkey, and he has committed this heinous act of betrayal of covering up the murder of Turkish citizens as acts of war by Israel against the Turkish nation, thereby creating the illusion that the problem is a domestic political struggle, instead of an international war in which Israel has murdered tens of thousands of Turks without any reprisals. This also serves to prevent the international community from recognizing that Israel is a State sponsor of terrorism, terrorism that has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives.
Though Erdogan is portrayed as some kind of hero because of the Israeli assault on a Turkish vessel, Erdogan was not aboard the ship and failed to protect it in spite of Israeli threats to assault it. Erdogan has performed no heroics, but has instead lagged behind Turkish public opinion and has repeatedly tried to soften the blow to Israel, instead of hammering the “Jewish State”.
Erdogan and the AKP continue to erode Turkish sovereignty, having recently arranged for visa free travel with Indonesia, adding to a growing list of nations. The AKP does not intend to stop with visa free travel, but is also seeking borderless travel and trade with many, many nations, and is making its strongest push to date for admission into the EU. See:
Turkey, Indonesia to lift visa requirements
Turks should be wary of these measures and learn from the US, and from Germany, where Turks were encouraged to move during Germany’s reconstruction so as provide cheap labor to rebuild the nation and its industry. There was a Wirtschaftswunderzeit for a brief period in Germany, but today Turkish neighborhoods are comparatively dangerous and unprosperous “slums” in Germany, though nowhere near so bad as the slums in America where blacks and Mexicans have been imported as cheap labor only to end up jobless and/or in prison.
Turks your economy may well continue to grow and I wish you well and encourage cooperation between Muslim nations, and have done so for years. But I warn you, do not so on the Jewish capitalist internationalist model.
Expect your wages to fall, slums to emerge in your cities, drugs and prostitution to infest your nation, greater disparity in wealth, healthcare to go to hell, and the loss of your culture, ethnic strife, etc. etc. etc. if you continue down the Jewish path to internationalization. Europeans, expect Turkey to be a temporary stop for hundreds of millions of immigrants, and their problems, if you admit Turkey into the EU in its present form. The rich in Turkey will get richer, but the rest will eventually suffer badly. There are better ways of doing what you plan to do, but do not expect Erdogan and the AKP to propose them.
It is very interesting that Erdogan is scapegoating the Ergenekon, which is also Jewish, for Israel’s part in the Jewish war on Turkey. It is also very interesting how the Ergenekon are going free after plotting to murder Erdogan, and this is being used as a pretext by the AKP to rewrite the constitution to make it EU friendly.
Is there strife between the Ergenekon Doenmeh and Israel? Erdogan is clearly working for the Israelis. I wonder if Erdogan is aware that the Ergenekon are as well? He must be. . . and they must be working together.
Deputies from Turkey’s ruling party have voted down a proposal to name a new university in İzmir after Zübeyde Hanım, mother of the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.
During a debate Tuesday evening in Parliament, the name “Zübeyde Hanım” was proposed for one of the eight new universities around the country to be established under a recent draft law.
Parliament convened to debate the new draft and decided that the university would be named “Katip Çelebi” instead.
During the debate Tuesday before the draft passed, Bülent Baratalı and seven deputies of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, proposed a resolution for the naming of the new university in İzmir “Zübeyde Hanım University.”
Education Minister Nimet Çubukçu, however, expressed her disagreement with the CHP proposal.
CHP deputy Baratalı pointed out that İzmir currently has seven universities and the new university in question was initially named “Turgut Reis,” but this name was later changed to “Katip Çelebi” by Parliament’s Planning and Budgeting Commission.
“For the first time, a university in Turkey would have been named after a woman. At the time the founder of the nation, Gazi Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was installed as president, he bore the title of parliamentary deputy – from İzmir,” Baratalı said. “His wife was from İzmir and he laid his mother to rest in İzmir – her grave is in [the local district of] Karşıyaka. For that reason, we, the people of İzmir, owe this homage to the founder of our nation.”
The Justice and Development Party, or AKP, members, however, rejected the resolution proposed by the CHP deputy, and the new university will be named after Çelebi, an Ottoman scientist who lived between 1608 and 1656.
The other universities established under the new law are Yıldırım Beyazıt University in Ankara, Bursa Technical University, Istanbul Medeniyet University, Konya University, Erzurum Technical University, Kayseri Abdullah Gül University and the International University of Antalya.
