Turkey Attempted Military Coup

[CharlesHarris]

The Turkish military traditionally has been fiercely secular and in 1997 quickly overthrew an attempt to empower an Islamic government, so my take is that this is probably good for long term stability.

As usually happens, early reports on such things are unreliable, so it is best to let the smoke clear and see whether there is a new sheriff in town or if the old order has been maintained on Monday. Anything else at this point is speculation. As is their custom the Turkish military is trying to hold the publicity lid on.

This is what they do. The Turks are not real big on political correctness, but are probably the most dependable troops in NATO and they have second biggest Army in NATO next to the US.

I'm not taking any bets on this one, as nothing in this part of the world is certain.

[Mortblanc]

Turkey borders Syria, Iraq and the Soviet Union. They are beset with instability in their society and have no room for messing about with feel good philosophy. The military is the most stable platform they have to operate with, but this coup is not the "overthrow" publicized at this point.

Very disorganized and led by a low level "legal advisor" to a minister, who is only a .Col. Neither the Air force or the Navy is supporting the coup and only a small faction of the Army so far.

At least that is the news I am getting here on Friday night.

But even if unsuccessful it will give the regular forces time to make arrests, clear the streets and make a lot of decenters and suspected terrorists evaporate as well as giving TPTB a chance to sort things out while declaring Martial Law and ignoring the politically correct to insure some continued stability.

[harrypalmer]

Flash in the pan thankfully.

[Mortblanc]

Hardly a flash in the pan.

To the contrary, it went exactly as planned.

The president was out of town in a safe haven inside the country, Coup crushed, 6,000 arrested, officer corps purged, clamp down on media.

Doing this without a "coup" to crush would have been unacceptable to the western world.

Almost a perfect example of the false flag situation addressed in another thread right now.

[CharlesHarris]

Now to wait and see of Obama will honor Turkey's extradition request for the exiled cleric in PA. Then when the "traitors" receive the "most severe" punishment how many will be shot versus imprisoned. Turkish jails are certainly not "Club Fed" where Martha Stewart was exiled to write her cook books and conduct cooking classes for the tatoodd ladies....

[CharlesHarris]

Looks like the people involved in the failed Turkey coup will be having a bad week:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/07/...of-soldie/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/j...repressive

[CharlesHarris]

Another good read: http://observer.com/2016/07/turkeys-week...ng-knives/

...The military has always represented a stumbling-block to Erdoğan’s increasingly overt plans to re-Islamize Turkey. Although the country is 99 percent Muslim, the Kemalist legacy of official secularism meant that for decades Islam was kept out of politics in way that’s seldom encountered in the Muslim world. That the AKP has undone.

To achieve that, Erdoğan has ruled Turkey in a manner similar to how Vladimir Putin has run Russia. There are elections, sometimes of dubious validity. Increasing numbers of officials are appointed by the ruling party rather than elected. The state indirectly controls most of the media, with newspapers and websites the ruling party doesn’t like being shut down unceremoniously. Thuggish police do dirty work as needed. Arrest awaits more forthright regime opponents, real and imagined.

No Turkish institution has suffered more from the heavy hand of Erdoğan than the military...The biggest purge came with the so-called Ergenekon trials, which lasted from 2008 and 2013, and posited a vast military-led conspiracy against the government. Even in Turkey, which loves conspiracies in every form, this was far-fetched...

...That’s where foreign-based plotters come in, according to the AKP and Erdoğan. They have fingered an exiled Islamic leader in rural Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gülen, as the real motivator of last weekend’s coup...

Gülen is unquestionably an opponent of the AKP, having been allied with it for years as it rose to power. However, he and President Erdoğan fell out in 2013 and the exiled imam has become Public Enemy Number One in Ankara, despite there being no real evidence that Gülen has anything to do with military coup planning.

Nevertheless, the abortive coup has given the AKP the green light to undertake a thoroughgoing purge of its enemies, real and imagined: secularists, terrorists, Gülenists, plus a wide array of political opponents. In the last couple days, Ankara has arrested more than 6,000 people, including most of the country’s military leadership. Judges are being fired by the thousands, as are civil servants deemed unfriendly to the AKP.

Vowing to “clean all state institutions of the virus,” President Erdoğan has threatened retribution as well as demanded the extradition of Gülen back home to face terrorism and treason charges. His equally vehement demands to restore the death penalty indicate where this may be headed, as has word of mass purges, in the many thousands, of the civil service.

Erdoğan has demonstrated a discipline and planning that was altogether lacking on the part of the coup plotters. Given the speed and scope of this purge, the biggest in recent Turkish history, it’s clear that the AKP had lists of thousands of official enemies ready to go, once the right opportunity to clean house presented itself... The notion that the coup was a stage-managed drama—a pretext for the regime to purge its remaining enemies—may seem fanciful to Westerners, yet is entirely within the realm of possibility for Turks...

Did Erdoğan roll the dice again with a pseudo-coup to permit him a final settling of accounts with his domestic enemies?... The cultish Gülen movement enabled the rise of Erdoğan and his party to their current power position in Ankara, and it now represents a threat that the AKP wants to be rid of. Purging the military of any remaining secularists is always in Erdoğan’s interests.

What’s happening in Turkey is something that NATO needs to ask directly—and quickly.

[harrypalmer]

Good diatribe CH

[cephalopod]

It has long been known that Erdogan's greatest ambition is the rebirth of the Ottoman empire with him as the Sultan. It seems strange that the recent attack on Attaturk airport by alleged IS was noticibly lacking in the usual retribution that is generally meted out on any Khurdish action when it takes place, which begs the question was this also a flag event to prepare for the coming events.
The swift and brutal retribution of the so called rebels was clearly well planned and well executed, and it is hard to believe that this was truly a coup attempt, and not a more sinister way for Erdogan to gain even more control of his increasingly "Stalinist" state.
As a member of NATO (all be it with a great deal of reservation) on the rest of NATO members if this were a complicit ploy by him to gain total control of the country he is moving into very dangerous territory, with a huge nuclear arsenal on Syria,s border that is doubling as a base for strikes on IS, and which according to reports has already been searched by "police", (which under international convention is illegal), it really is becoming very worrying, these are not items which should fall into a budding despots hands, and make no mistake this idiot is so full of himself that he would use them.#
If as is suggested Erdogan is indeed looking to raise the Ottoman empire, his actions with regard to the refugee crisis speak volumes. With the second largest standing army in the world it should have been simple not only for Turkey to control the influx of refugees, but also to prevent the exit of IS fighters. What better way to de-stabilise a continent than to send over a million people onto their soil, they have to be fed/clothed/medical treatment, this all costs money that if(please not), this is a pre-invasion ploy would use resources that should be sent to other areas.
With Greece in such dire circumstances it would be easy for an invasion by Turkey through this door way, if a million refugees can do it, a million solidier,s would p***s it.
One thing of interest I noticed was that I watched police putting up a fence on the Serbian border, this news item was not on for long, and just caught on the edge of the shot of the fence you could see the army laying tank traps, what possible use could these be against humans they just climb over them, but perhaps the Serbian government is expecting an invasion of something altogether different!

[CharlesHarris]

http://thecipherbrief.com/article/middle...-miss-1091


Now that the dust has settled over last Friday’s failed military coup attempt in Turkey, we are beginning to witness the full extent of that failure.

...President Recep Tayyip Erdogan – nominally led by Prime Minister Binali Yildirim – has begun a wide-ranging purge of suspected dissidents, including the firing of 9,000 police officers, the suspension of almost 3,000 judges, and the arrest of 6,000 military personnel, including 103 generals and admirals...Erdogan has blamed the supporters of his former political ally Fetullah Gulen, who currently resides in the United States. Why did they do this now, after almost 14 years of Erdogan rule? And what does this mean for Turkey and Erdogan going forward?

Coups are hardly a rare occurrence in Turkish history. Since 1960, the military has ejected civilian governments about once every ten years.

However, this coup was different. First, according to Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy and Cipher Brief expert Soner Cagaptay, “normally Turkish military coups are top-down affairs, but this time it seems to have been a splinter group within the military… perhaps 20 percent of all generals and admirals.” Rather than pit the government against the military as a unitary institution, this coup only mobilized that minority splinter group. Its success depended on the rapid capture of key institutions, including the media, and government officials. In failing to accomplish either of these objectives, the coup plotters quickly lost the momentum, which might have attracted more military leaders to their cause.

The second feature that sets this weekend’s coup attempt apart from past plots was an outpouring of public opposition to the coup across the political spectrum. At the same time, the coup plotters’ willingness to open fire on some anti-coup protesters crossed a “red line” in Turkish politics, which had never been breached before. As Cagaptay explains, “the Turkish military is a conscript army… the only organization in which all Turks participate.” Thus, “the military was sort of firing on itself when it fired on its own people.”

The crossing of that red line, in particular, hints at a new era in Turkish politics, which divorces the military as an institution ever further from society. So far as this represents a popular response against anti-democratic military coups, that is a positive development. However, as former U.S. Ambassador to Turkey and Cipher Brief expert James Jeffrey notes, it also “strips the military of any stabilizing and unifying role in a country split between pro- and anti-Erdogan factions, and facing a resilient 30 year old PKK insurgency.”

In addition...protests on the street have been dominated by Islamist supporters of Erdogan and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Indeed, at 1:15 AM on the night of the coup, it appears that Erdogan himself ordered the Diyanet – a religious governing body that coordinates the call to prayer at Turkish mosques – to issue an off-schedule call to prayer in order to rally supporters against the pro-coup forces.

As a result, street demonstrations and public rallies have been dominated by Islamist sentiment. According to Cagaptay, “the counter-coup against the Young Turks in 1909… was the last time you saw a religious movement in the streets.” Since then, the secular nationalism espoused by founder of the modern Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, has largely defined Turkish politics, even under mildly Islamist AKP rule. The resurgence of more overt Islamism in public life threatens to inject a measure of sectarianism into the country’s politics, especially as President Erdogan continues his quest to consolidate power by revising the Turkish constitution into a more executive presidential system.

Compounding these political developments has been the ruthless response of Erdogan’s AKP-led government against the coup plotters, specifically those who they believe to be connected to the self-exiled Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, a moderate Islamist preacher who once boasted deep influence in Turkey through his thousands of followers at high levels of government, was originally a powerful ally to Erdogan. However, when “Gulenists” in the police and judiciary launched a series of corruption investigations against AKP officials in 2013, Erdogan turned against Gulen and his followers. Since then, the President has lashed out harshly against critics, pushing suspected Gulenists out of government, arresting journalists, and even shuttering the liberal newspaper Zaman.

In similar form, Erdogan seems to be using this coup attempt – and its alleged “Gulenist” origins – to further rid the government of opponents. The sheer number of government workers arrested or suspended within just two days suggests that, at the very least, those workers have been punished without proper investigation and, more probably, that their names were already on some kind of list.

The extent of this apparent purge has unsettled E.U. and U.S. officials, as has Erdogan’s suggestion that parliament might revisit the death penalty, a policy which would definitively nix the possibility of Turkish accession to the EU. Finally, any Turkish request for Fethullah Gulen’s extradition from the United States, where he is currently a legal resident, may strain relations with Washington, just as recent Turkish cooperation in the anti-ISIS coalition has helped spur gains against the group in Syria.

As Ambassador Jeffrey observes, “no matter how important Turkey’s fate is to America, there is nothing the U.S. can do to fundamentally impact domestic developments.” At least for now, the coup forces failed to destroy one of the world’s largest Muslim democracies. However, the concern is that the attempt will push Erdogan and the AKP too far down the road to autocracy.