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.
Search
Calendar
Help
