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Tag: Terrorism

  • Terror inquiry proves a nice little earner

    Terror inquiry proves a nice little earner

    Police claim £5 million in overtime bonanza

    Britain’s biggest anti-terrorist investigation was a £5 million overtime bonanza seized on by police as the chance to pay for Caribbean holidays, plasma televisions and nights at The Savoy.

    The Times has seen e-mails circulated to officers across Thames Valley Police offering “premium rates” of pay to those “with a raging credit card habit”. Volunteers were told that night shifts, believed to be paid at £300 each, would give them time to “read a good book, take up botany or ornithology, study for your sergeant’s exam [or] work out the compound interest on a rest day’s pay”.

    One message, which was marked “108 shopping days to Christmas”, sought officers for Saturday shifts and said that the payments “could buy the joy and admiration of your children on Christmas morning . . . is that not priceless?”

    The internal e-mails were sent to officers across the force at the height of a big search in King’s Wood and Fennels Wood near High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The work was part of Operation Overt, the inquiry into an alleged terrorist plot to blow up transatlantic airliners

    Thames Valley Police said yesterday that the e-mails were “in poor taste” and that its involvement in the operation cost the force £8 million, including £4.9 million in overtime.

    After the end of the airline plot trial last week, Andy Hayman, the former Scotland Yard officer in charge of special operations, disclosed in The Times that he had resisted pressure from Thames Valley Police Authority to stop the searches, which it said were too expensive.

    While specialist teams searched the woodland, uniformed Thames Valley officers were required to stand guard. The e-mails seeking volunteers were sent by Sergeant David Bald to colleagues in Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Wolverton and Newport Pagnell.

    Mr Bald, who signed off as “Miracle Worker” in an e-mail of August 24, 2006, added: “So there you have it. Not only would you be insuring [sic] the integrity of evidence in the most important terrorist trial in the UK for 30 years (and that is reward in itself, not to mention a great PDR [personal development record] entry) but you could also afford one of the above rewards which would give you great enjoyment and satisfaction.”

    The next day he wrote: “If you’re available then please ping me an e-mail – it’ll pay off the credit card.”

    Another message was circulated on September 6 and said: “For all officers (especially those scared of the dark) I now have a significant number of day shifts available on premium rates.”

    On September 8 he said that the duties required “little effort, no paper-work and a restful time away from the stresses and strains of everyday life”.

    The disclosure comes as the police service is increasingly concerned about its image. Ian Johnston, president of the Police Superintendents’ Association, issued a warning this week that the public was losing confidence in officers.

    Home Office assessments ranked Thames Valley last year as the third-worst performing police force in Britain. A report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary said that the diversion of Thames Valley’s resources to Operation Overt had “significantly depleted its operational capacity”.

    A spokesman for the force said: “The e-mails were unacceptable but do not reflect the attitude of police officers as a whole. They were misguided and written in poor taste and recalled as soon as senior officers became aware of them.”

    Hundreds of Thames Valley officers took part in Operation Overt over a six-month period. The spokesman said: “We deployed officers from their usual Thames Valley postings for 5,184 working days, at an opportunity cost of £1.4 million. This put a strain on the policing of local communities and therefore overtime at a cost of £4.9 million was used, as well as assistance from other forces at a cost of £1.9 million.”

    Sean O’Neill, Crime Editor

    The Times

    Source:

  • Police in crisis after jury rejects £10m terror case

    Police in crisis after jury rejects £10m terror case

    Sean O’Neill, Security Editor

    Police and prosecutors were locked in crisis meetings last night after what they believed to be the strongest terrorism case ever presented to a court was rejected by a jury.

    At the end of a £10 million investigation and trial lasting more than two years, jurors were unable to decide whether or not a group of British Muslims were part of a plot to blow transatlantic airliners out of the sky.

    The outcome of the case – which featured al-Qaeda-style martyrdom videos made by six defendants – will be seen as a severe blow to Britain’s anti-terrorist effort.

    Three men were convicted of conspiracy to murder, but the jury was deadlocked on the central allegation, that terrorists planned to use liquid bombs to destroy aircraft en route from Heathrow to cities in the United States and Canada.

    The jury’s indecision in the face of a detailed Crown case raises questions about the public perception of the terror threat that could undermine government attempts to introduce further security legislation.

    The Crown Prosecution Service indicated that it was likely to seek the retrial of seven men in an attempt to prove that there was a plan to attack aircraft and kill thousands of people.

    The discovery of the plot, in August 2006, led to a global security clamp-down at airports that paralysed international travel.The alert resulted in restrictions on carrying liquids in cabin baggage that remain in force and are unlikely to be relaxed.

    Retrials are being sought even though the jury at Woolwich Crown Court convicted three of the eight defendants of conspiracy to murder.

    Prosecutors met to discuss their options amid concern that the jury could not decide on a separate charge specifying that airliners had been the targets of that conspiracy.

    The jurors also failed to reach verdicts on serious terrorist charges against four other men, who had recorded al-Qaeda-style suicide videos and admitted charges of conspiring to cause a public nuisance.

    Another defendant, described in court as a shadowy figure with terrorist connections, was acquitted of all charges and cannot be retried.

    The jurors deliberated for 52 hours, but their discussions were disrupted by a two-week holiday, frequent sickness breaks and other commitments.

    Scotland Yard refrained from comment last night, but the senior officers of their disappointment over the outcome of the case.

    Andy Hayman, former assistant commissioner for special operations, said: “This was one of our strongest cases – there will have to be an intensive debrief. But now is not the time for that, now is the time to prepare for retrials.”

    A CPS spokesman said: “The jury found there was a conspiracy to murder involving at least three men but failed to reach a verdict on whether the ambit of the conspiracy to murder included the allegation that they intended to detonate IEDs (improvised explosive devices) on transatlantic airliners in relation to seven of the men. It is therefore incorrect to say that the jury rejected the airline bomb plot.”

    The men convicted of conspiracy to murder were Ahmed Abdulla Ali and Tanvir Hussain, both 27 and from Walthamstow, northeast London, and Assad Sarwar, 28, of High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire. The four men on whom the jury failed to reach verdicts were Ibrahim Savant, 27, Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, Waheed Zaman, 24, and Umar Islam, 30.

    Mohammed Gulzar, 27, from Birmingham, was acquitted on charges of conspiracy to murder and conspiring to murder by blowing up aircraft. He had vigorously denied any involvement. The Crown had alleged that Mr Gulzar, who arrived in Britain using a false name during July 2006, was a key figure in the alleged airline plot but the jury rejected that case.

    Home Office sources said that Mr Gulzar would be the subject of a control order and it is expected that he will be questioned by police in connection with a serious criminal offence committed in Birmingham in 2002. Another key figure in the plot, Rashid Rauf, is on the run in Pakistan after escaping from custody.

    Four further trials related to the alleged airline plot are pending.

    Source: business.timesonline.co.uk, September 9, 2008

  • Hot, Flat, and Crowded

    Hot, Flat, and Crowded

    In June 2004, I was visiting London with my daughter Orly, and one evening we went to see the play Billy Elliot at a theater near Victoria Station. During intermission, I was standing up, stretching my legs in the aisle next to my seat, when a stranger approached and asked me, “Are you Mr. Friedman?” When I nodded yes, he introduced himself: “My name is Emad Tinawi. I am a Syrian-American working for Booz Allen,” the consulting firm. Tinawi said that while he disagreed with some of the columns I had written, particularly on the Middle East, there was one column he especially liked and still kept.

     

    “Which one?” I asked with great curiosity.

    “The one called ‘Where Birds Don’t Fly,’” he said. For a moment, I was stumped. I remembered writing that headline, but I couldn’t remember the column or the dateline. Then he reminded me: It was about the new—post-9/11—U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. For years, the U.S. consulate in Istanbul was headquartered in the Palazzo Corpi, a grand and distinctive old building in the heart of the city’s bustling business district, jammed between the bazaars, the domed mosques, and the jumble of Ottoman and modern architecture. Built in 1882, and bought by the U.S. government twenty-five years later, Palazzo Corpi was bordered on three sides by narrow streets and was thoroughly wove

    ‘Hot, Flat, and Crowded’ – WSJ.com

  • France is Faced with its Genocidal History

    France is Faced with its Genocidal History

    Currently holding the EU Council Presidency, France, which assumes it as a duty to give human rights and democracy lessons to the world, is now being accused of genocide.

    Because of its role in the events that occurred between two tribes in 1994 and resulted in the death of 800 thousands of people, France is officially accused of genocide with a report declared by Rwandan government on August 5th 2008. In the report prepared by the Rwandan Investigatory Committee, it is mentioned that “The support of France had a political, military, diplomatic and logistical nature”.

    In the 500-pages report of the Commission, it is stated that France was aware of the genocide arrangements, took part in these arrangements, and played an active role in the murders. France is also being accused of providing intelligence, strategy and military support to the perpetrators of genocide, contributing to the determination of the list of people to be murdered, providing weapons, being directly involved in the killings. The commission suggests Rwandan government in its report that “Formal allegations against the French government should be submitted to the international institutions, legal action should be brought and 33 French political and military officials should be brought to trial”.

    The Investigatory Committee also makes heavy accusations against French soldiers who were on duty during the military operation carried out by France in June-August 1994 under the guise of “humanitarian assistance”. Rwandan Ministry of Justice tells in its statement on the issue that “French soldiers were also directly involved in the genocide, they killed Tutsis and those Hutus who had been blamed for hiding Tutsis, and they raped many Tutsi people who survived”. The Ministry of Justice emphasizes that “France’s great support for, decisiveness in and insistence on the murder policy in Rwanda prove that French military and political officials were accomplices in the execution and arrangement of Tutsi genocide in 1994”.

    Among the French officials who are being accused in the report are the President of the time Francois Mitterand, Prime Minister Eduard Balladur, Foreign Affairs Minister Alain Juppé, his former chief of staff Dominiques de Villepin, Elysee Secretary General Hubert Véedrine.

    As is known, the downing of the French airplane aboard which Rwandan and Burundian presidents were traveling in 1994, resulted in the incitement of massacres in Rwanda. It had been found out that the missiles used in the sabotage against the plane had come from the arsenal of the French army. All of the three French pilots had died in this sabotage.

    According to the United Nations, the genocide that resulted in the death of so many people in April-July 1994 had been “planned” for the annihilation of Tutsis by Hutus. In the statements made by the UN at different times, it was told that French companies had continued to supply weapons to this country even after the UN imposed arms embargo to Rwanda and that the UN had been warned about the massacres three months ago, but the initiatives for a resolution to be taken by the Security Council for tasking the UN troops in order to prevent any massacre had been hindered by France.

    Despite all these developments, French administration insistently continues to avoid making any explanation showing repentance. It is reported that in the course of the preparation of the report, France has been making efforts to prevent genocide allegations from getting official recognition by pressuring Rwandan government through a variety of means, Rwandans did not yield to pressures, and they opted for the truth to come to light.

    When the report was announced, France strictly rejected the accusations against its former political administrators and military officials and Romain Nadal, the Spokesman of the Foreign affairs Ministry, told that there were “unacceptable” accusations against French political and military leaders in the report prepared by the Committee; and this stance of France is accepted as an example of typical “French custom of denial”.

    Rwandan genocide is unfortunately neither the first nor the last damage to the humanity caused by France with its wars and intrigues. Despite all its denials, the dark past of France is full of serious crimes against humanity.

    This decision on genocide is not the first accusation against France in the international arena. In June 2006, French State and Railway Company “were convicted of playing a role in the transportation of the Jews to the concentration camps during the Second World War” and were ordered to pay compensation. The French Railway Company also had similar convictions previously.

    It has been already written in the pages of history that France subjected 1 million people in Algeria to genocide with its attacks directed at innocent civilians during the Second World War and that it attempted to annihilate Algerian people by torturing 25.000 people and with the extrajudicial killings of 3.025 persons. In the course of the investigations into what happened in Algeria, it was established that in the murky operations of certain Algerian terrorist groups, there was a forth individual, mostly a police officer or a military security officer who accompanied them and that these terrorist groups confirmed that the police, military security or SDCE (French Secret Services) and a subordinate secret service called GIC gave them information slips and thus indicated their targets; in short, it is known they carried out the filthy activities on behalf of the police and the republican army.

    In that period, the Algerian Muslims called Harkis, who were conscripted in the French army, were disappointed with the result of their attempts to take refuge in France after the independence of Algeria. Only for 42 thousand of them, they had provided homes. Upon the request of De Gaulle in 1962, they were housed behind barbed wire deep in the French forests in small uncomfortable barracks constructed hastily. This is an interesting example of what has happened to the collaborators of the French against the independence of their country.

    Turkey is also one of the countries that have been targeted by France for her obscure policies. During World War I, France had occupied Ottoman territory and massacred millions of innocent civilian people. As a result of “the friendship ties that had strengthened for centuries” between the Armenians and France, the Armenian gangs were provided with arms in the end of the 19th century and provoked to rebel against the Ottoman Empire. Part of the members of these Armenian gangs who did not succeed to pull away territory from Turkey at the end of World War I, fled to France.

    These Armenians, who went to Marseilles, were brought together in the Oddo camp which had extremely bad housing conditions. The Oddo camp was officially closed down in 1928, but actually in 1935. Not any Armenian could leave the camp without a working contract. The authorities treated these Armenians like stateless people, but when France fought with Germany they were sent as soldiers constituting another hypocrisy in history that the French have to account for.

    It is still fresh in our minds that – until it caused harm to the country with the Orly attack – France did not show any reaction for years against the terrorist organization ASALA, which came into existence in the 1970’s and was known for its attacks against Turkish targets especially diplomats, and that France felt sympathy for the Armenian terrorists and adopted a tolerating attitude.

    In the 1980’s, the Armenian terrorist organizations changed their tactics upon the reactions they received from the world’s public opinion and resorted to cooperation with the terrorist PKK. The PKK was known for its attacks against Turkey and became now affiliated with ASALA which killed diplomats. These facts were stated many times by the relevant experts and supported with evidence. In spite of this, France did not take any measure against these terrorist organizations that were hostile towards Turkey and refrained from cooperation. This was extremely meaningful….

    When talking about “France” and “terror”, one of the names that comes up in our minds is Mitterand and his wife who are also accused for the genocide in Rwanda. The Turkish public opinion knows these two very well. The support provided by France to the PKK has increased considerably due to the foreign policy understanding of Mitterand and maybe also a little bit due the effect of the “special protection” shown to the PKK by First Lady Daniella Mitterand as a result of her “personal friendship” with Head of the Paris Kurdish Institute Kemdal Nezan. Consequently, France has become one of the most important bases of this terrorist organization in Europe. And it appears that France still continues to welcome terrorist groups that have no other aim than being hostile to Turkey.

    However, the Armenian diaspora in France as well as the terrorist organizations, that are striving against the independence and/or territorial integrity of other countries, are collaborating with France without foreseeing what will happen to them by trying to understand what has happened to those who betrayed Algeria, Rwanda and the Ottoman State. In the future, as it has happened before, France shall push aside the traitors in accordance with its own interests or shall, instead of her own children, send the traitors to other wars to die.

    As a matter of fact, it is not a coincidence that France is pronounced whenever we talk about a massacre, war or genocide at any place of the world. While she has a history of colonization, she continued her aggressive, expansionist policies in the 21st century. She holds control of an important part of the world’s arms trade. Her national income is bolstered with the blood shed in other countries darkly shadowing world peace. Every year, more than 300 thousand people are being killed on the world with conventional weapons. Even more people are being wounded, violated in their rights, forcefully deported and left helpless. In 2005, 82% of all the arms transfer on the world was realized by five countries. One of these countries is France. Thus, France has an important portion in the world’s arms trade. A war that is staged at any place on the world is sustaining the French economy.

    In France there is still a longing for colonization and laws that praise the era of imperialism and slavery are still in force. Although these raise some doubts about the long-term foreign policy goals of France, at present they talk about a “French crisis” on the world. Certain historians say that the “regression process” of this country started with the Prussian-French War in 1870. Although France won in World War I on paper, this was actually the beginning of the end. World War II followed by the Cold War era caused polarization between the USA and the USSR as a result of which France regressed even more and in the international arena this country was not taken so seriously anymore.

    The time has come for France to refresh her memory and encounter her past not only because of its inhuman acts in Rwanda, but also in the territories of the Ottoman Empire, in Algeria and in the other colonies.

    France should accept the role that she has played in the genocides throughout her history and apologize for that. French politicians and military officials that are responsible for the genocide in Rwanda should face trial in the international court for war criminals.

    In spite of everything is there still freedom, equality, brotherhood?…

    The Organization for the Commemoration of the Genocide Victims

    (SKAO)

  • Letters from Istanbul’s ARMENIAN FRONT

    Letters from Istanbul’s ARMENIAN FRONT

    Letters from Istanbul

    Over the past two years, the Armenian Weekly has published dozens of interviews with and articles written by Turkish dissident scholars, journalists, and human rights activists in an effort to provide a first-hand account of political and civil society developments in Turkey.

    Starting this week, and for the first time in the history of post-genocide Armenian print media, we take another major step in that vein: An Istanbul-based Turkish journalist and human rights activist starts a column in the Weekly.

    The bi-weekly column, titled “Letters from Istanbul,” will deal with Turkish political and social issues, in general. The columnist, Ayse Gunaysu, is a familiar name to the readers of the Weekly. She contributed articles to the April 24 special publications in 2007 and 2008.

    Gunaysu is a professional translator and human rights advocate. She has been a member of the Committee Against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association of Turkey (Istanbul branch) since 1995, and was a columnist in a pro-Kurdish daily from 2005–07.

    The Weekly welcomes her to the long and distinguished list of columnists in its 75-year history. We appreciate her courage in accepting our invitation to regularly contribute to the Weekly.

    Below is Gunaysu’s first column

    A Tradition Still Alive in the Turkish Press

    By Ayse Gunaaysu

    It’s not the first time that a mainstream newspaper in Turkey features a highly provocative front page headline making an unfounded accusation that would obviously incite public hatred and animosity towards the “other.”

    I’m talking about Hurriyet, one of the biggest circulation newspapers in Turkey. It’s front page headline on Aug. 3 named the PKK—the outlawed Kurdish armed organization—as the perpetrator of the July 28 bombing in Istanbul that killed 17 people. The news item reported in detail how one of the nine suspects detained—the “bomber”—entered Turkey illegally and how he watched, in cold blood, people dye in the explosion.

    What the readers of Hurriyet—whose logo reads “Turkey belongs to Turks”—couldn’t learn from their newspaper was that, after a thorough police and then public prosecutor’s interrogation, the court had detained the suspects not on charges related to the July 28 bombing but because they were members of an outlawed organisation. The court ruling for the arrest of the suspects had made no mention of the bombing at all. This was because there was practically no evidence to accuse any of the nine persons taken in custody of being the bomber or being linked in any way with the bombing. The daily Taraf, interviewing the family and the employer of the suspect, reported in its Aug. 5 issue that the alleged bomber did not enter Turkey illegally, but was, in fact, a textile worker working uninterruptedly in the same factory for the past seven years and living with his family.

    On the same page, next to this news item, Ahmet Altan, son of the legendary Labour Party member of the Turkish parliament in the 1960’s, starts his column by saying that the fundamental aim of justice is not to catch a criminal but to protect the innocent. Justice, he continues, catches and punishes the criminal for the sake of protecting the innocent. And the biggest fear of justice is to punish an innocent. With his usual forceful style, he uses “is” instead of “should be,” just to underline that using the format “should be” is not enough in formulating such a vital principle and that this should be an axiom, a categorical, rather than a conditional rule.

    However, despite the fact that the court ruling is open to all, the Minister of Interior and other government spokespersons declared the suspect as the bomber, without making any reference to Taraf’s counter-arguments.

    Several newspapers, including Taraf and Radikal, reported that the PKK had disowned the bombing and condemned it. The group’s spokesperson had clearly stated that the bombing had nothing to do with the “Kurdish liberation movement,” and that they were against the killing of civilians and believed this looked like one of the secret operations staged many times in the past.

    Hurriyet’s headline and the provocative report supporting the Minister’s statement is not just an example of poor reporting practice. This is a country where the ongoing armed clashes for the past 30 years has triggered, every now and then, mass aggressions on Kurdish immigrants trying to make a living in the cities far away from their war-stricken home villages. Several times in the outskirts of big cities, Kurdish laborers working at terribly low wages without any social security have been the target of lynch attempts following rumors that they were linked with the PKK. The buildings of the DTP, the Kurdish party represented in parliament with 17 deputies, have at times been attacked by ultra-nationalists, and several years ago a bus carrying DTP members was destroyed by stone-throwing mobs yelling anti-Kurdish slogans in Gebze, a district of Istanbul, leaving dozens of people injured. More recently, a conference hall where the DTP held a meeting was blockaded for hours by thousands of people, with police doing nothing about it, and a DTP member dying of a heart attack in the process. In other words, Hurriyet knew very well that such an accusation, proven to be unfounded by the court ruling, carried the potential of triggering a new surge of anti-Kurdish sentiment among ultra-nationalists.

    But, yes, this is not the first time. For decades, semi-official Turkish newspapers provoked hatred towards the “enemies of the nation”—sometimes the “communists,” many times the “disloyal minorities,” and frequently the “Kurdish separatists.” Throughout many tragic events in the history of Turkey, not to mention the minor ones, headlines in newspapers have served as a catalyst in stirring frantic masses to action.

    Turkish readers were introduced to the history press’s role in various incidents of ethnic and religious mass aggression towards non-Muslims in Rifat Bali’s book Cumhuriyet Yillarinda Turkiye Yahudileri: Bir Turklestirme Seruveni, roughly translated to Jews of Turkey in the Republican Period: A Story of Turkification (Iletisim, 1999).

    I’m not even talking about the ultra-nationalist and ultra-Islamist newspapers’ routine hate speech here, but the practice of one of the biggest dailies in Turkey. The routine hate speech in extremist publications includes open insults aimed at Armenians, Jews, and Kurds and personal attacks on religious leaders of minorities. But while there are laws protecting Turkishness from being insulted, there are none that protect non-Turks from insult in Turkey.

    These are the days when, for the first time in this country’s history, a legal case is under way against figures who were pointed out by human rights advocates for years as having dark ties with the “special war machine” within the state, what is known in Turkey as the “deep state.” These are the times when the DTP, the independent Istanbul deputy Ufuk Uras, and various other opposition circles are calling for a deeper investigation that would pave the way for some kind of partial catharsis and a much better democracy, rather than a superficial washing of the hands of the most visible criminals already known very well by some. In the midst of such unpredictability, some people—like the editors of Hurriyet—further blur the public’s perception by means of unfounded accusations against the nation’s hate figures such as the PKK and the Kurds. After all, inciting hatred and animosity is the best, most efficient, and most sustainable means of manipulation.


  • The new ’moderate’ Turkey By Robert Ellis, August 15 2008

    The new ’moderate’ Turkey By Robert Ellis, August 15 2008

    The new ’moderate’ Turkey
    By Robert Ellis, August 15 2008

    Under AKP rule Turkey has become a Big Brother state where critical journalists risk arrest.

    Since the AKP (Justice and Development Party) came to power in 2002, and especially in the last year, Turkey’s development has taken an Orwellian turn.

    For the first three years things went well and the AKP government continued with the reform program embarked on by the previous coalition government. But since Turkey started accession negotiations with the European Union in October 2005, the zeal for reform has lost momentum.

    Together with the reform packages aimed at opening the gate to the Promised Land, there was a parallel development designed to secure the AKP’s grip on Turkey. The preamble to the Turkish constitution establishes that “there shall be no interference whatsoever by sacred religious feelings in state affairs and politics” but this is exactly what the AKP has done.

    In Sepember 2006 General Ilter Basbug, who has just been appointed Chief of Staff, warned of “intentional, patient and systematic attempts” to erode what the Turkish republic has achieved since it was founded in 1923. At the same time the higher echelons of the state administration and particularly inside education have been replaced with the party faithful. For example, last year 4,500 people were appointed as principals and deputy principals, two-thirds of whom were affiliated with the governing party.

    God’s will
    The year after the AKP came to power its parliamentary majority voted to appoint 15,000 new imams instead of a proposed 1,500 for the country’s more than 77,000 mosques. But the move was blocked by the International Monetary Fund, which as a condition for a $16 billion loan had limited the total number of new jobs in the health, education, police and religious services to 34,000 that year.

    Another move which has pleased the AKP’s grass roots has been to ease the restrictions on Koran courses, which have since almost doubled. One consequence was the recent gas explosion in a ramshackle building in Konya province, where an illegal Koran course was being held. As a result, 18 young girls were killed but this was ascribed by the parents to God’s will.

    The government has also increased quotas for enrollment at religious high schools by 66 percent, compared to only 8 percent for standard high schools, but the AKP has not yet succeeded in gaining admission to the universities for these students on an equal footing with the others.

    The question of whether female university students should be allowed to wear the Islamic headscarf has been at the root of the clash between the government and secular supporters in Turkey. The AKP’s attempt in February to change the constitution to make this possible was annulled by the Constitutional Court, and at the end of July the party’s state subsidy was halved as a punishment for becoming “the center of acts against the principle of secularism”. However, there is no reason to believe that the AKP intends to deviate from its present course.

    The AKP has also laid its hand on the Higher Education Board, whose chairman was appointed by the government in March. President Gül, the AKP’s former foreign minister, has just chosen 21 new university rectors from lists prepared by the Board, and consequently bypassed a number of candidates chosen by the universities. This has been considered as yet another blow to the universities’ autonomy and tit for tat for the refusal by many rectors to allow the Islamic headscarf.

    Ergenekon
    A clear indication of the AKP’s mindset is the proposal put forward by the party’s deputy chairperson, Edibe Sözen, with the intention of protecting Turkey’s youth.

    This includes compulsory prayer rooms at all schools, a ban on entering Internet cafes for young people under 18 and the registration of anyone buying pornography.

    Edibe Sözen claims there is similar legislation in Germany but because of a strong reaction from different groups in society the proposal has been withdrawn.

    At the same time as the Constitutional Court deliberated over the future of the AKP, the government launched a counter-offensive in the form of the so-called Ergenekon case, where the public prosecutor has in a 2,500-page indictment charged 86 people with being members of a terrorist organization opposed to the government. This allegedly includes a number of critical journalists, including the 84-year-old editor of a secular daily, who was dragged out of his sickbed at four in the morning.

    Turkey has just marked the 100th anniversary of the lifting of press censorship but this has also been overshadowed by the Ergenekon case. In this connection the Turkish Journalists Association issued a written statement, deploring that the number of journalists taken into custody for alleged claims that they disrupt the government is increasing.

    The AKP government has tightened its grip on the Turkish media through the controversial sale of the Sabah-ATV media group to Calik Holding, which is owned by a close friend of Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, and where Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law is the general manager. The purchase sum of $1.1 billion was financed by two loans totalling $750 million from two state banks and the rest from a Qatar-based company. Moreover, KanalTurk, which was formerly anti-government, has been bought by an AKP associate.

    An eery dimension is that Turkey is being transformed into a Big Brother society.

    According to Soner Cagaptay from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Turkish journalists believe the AKP government has intercepted more than 1.5 million phone and email conversations involving its secular opponents. And Transport Minister Binali Yildirim has admitted: “It is not possible to prevent being listened to; the only way is not to talk [on the phone]. If there is nothing illegal in our actions, we should not be concerned about such things.”

    An AKP deputy interviewed by The Economist claims Prime Minister Erdogan has become a tyrant and the editor of the Middle East Quarterly, Michael Rubin, has dubbed him “Turkey’s Putin”. Taking this into account, the question is how long Turkey can maintain its image as a spokesman for “moderate Islam”.

    Robert Ellis is a frequent commentator on Turkish affairs in the Danish press and since 2005 also in Turkish Daily News. However, after a critical article on the AKP in the Los Angeles Times in March, he was informed by TDN’s editor he was ‘persona non grata’.