Events of the past several years have proven that earlier military reforms to end military influence in politics have remained nothing more than cosmetic arrangements.
A recently released report by the İstanbul-based Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation (TESEV), titled “Security Sector in Turkey: Questions, Problems and Solutions,” concludes that as long as substantial and deep-rooted reforms are not put into force and implemented, amendments made or to be made to this end will stay cosmetic and will not yield the desired effect.
This new TESEV report was released at a two-day-long weekend conference held in İstanbul and organized jointly with the Turkey office of the German Heinrich Böll Stiftung during which the role of the Turkish military in politics was elaborated on in depth. The TESEV report summarizes two security sector almanacs it published in cooperation with various think tanks in 2006 and this year.
Apart from the TESEV-Heinrich Böll conference held in İstanbul this past weekend, another two-day seminar, organized by the Ankara-based Bilkent University and the Dutch-based Center for European Security Studies (CESS), took place in Ankara on Nov. 19-20. The Ankara seminar was the second of its kind since last summer, when Turkish academics from various Turkish universities were brought together for the first time with the aim to improve their skills in the security sector, which has been under the monopoly of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).
Turkey suffers from a shortage of civilian and independent experts in matters of defense and security, the Bilkent seminar organizers stated. The seminar wishes, among other things, to help establish a dialogue between the academia and the executive and legislative branches of the state on matters of defense and security and advocate better access for independent scholars to government information in the domains of defense and security. Ironically, the Bilkent seminar fell short of realizing that defense and security matters in Turkey are not fully in the domain of the government but in the hands of the TSK.
Nevertheless, the Bilkent seminar was another useful tool in helping Turkey find a remedy to its chronic problem of military influence in politics. The military played a role to varying degrees in five military coups from 1960 to 2007.
But TESEV still stands as a unique tool in the creation of public awareness over problems resulting from the TSK’s overwhelming influence in politics. As its recently released report correctly put it, in the context of the European Union, which Turkey aspires to join, the military-civilian relationship has to be examined over and over again from the viewpoints of democratization, the development of civil society and civilian domination of politics as well as repositioned within a new framework.
Since no institution such as the TSK will give up its autonomous and privileged status by itself, the main responsibility in ending the military trusteeship in Turkey lies with civilian authorities, the opposition and Parliament as a whole.
But the practices of these civilian actors do not appear promising in ending the military role in politics that stands as a serious roadblock before democratization.
The TESEV report, for example, recalls the 2008 National Program in which Turkey presented to the EU an outlines of Turkish commitments to be undertaken to meet the union’s criteria. The Turkish National Program on civil-military relations, however, fell short of meeting the EU’s democratic standards in this area. This, in addition to the current rather passive policies being pursued by the civilian authority in response to junta acts within the TSK, does not draw a promising picture of civilians being determined enough to fully control the TSK and bring about a stable Turkey.
The military’s heavy role in internal security matters through the Gendarmerie General Command (JGK) is another issue that has to be scrutinized by civilian authorities as well as its problematic military court system.
Several documents published mainly by the Taraf daily over the past few years that have disclosed internal memos allegedly prepared by the TSK and intended to use illegal means to unseat the government and create chaos within the society, are doomed to be confirmed by the independent civilian judiciary. But if the civilian judiciary does not have access to military files, how will all these documents be authenticated? This is another big question mark. The answer again lies with the emergence of a strong political will to initiate legal reforms to enable civilian prosecutors to have access to military files.
