An addition to the problem of terrorism has been Turkey’s chronic internal problems stemming mainly from its fragile democracy as a result of military coups. This situation has prevented Turkey from restructuring its armed forces, turning it into a smaller but lethal professional force.
Instead, the military, seeing itself as the guardian of Turkey’s founder Kemal Atatürk’s secular principles, has focused on what it termed “internal threats” such as fundamentalism and subversion. The political authorities, in the meantime, have neglected to rule and govern the nation by taking the necessary legal steps to end the military’s intervention in politics. Governments have also fallen short of making civilian reforms to bring Turkey up to democratic standards. This rather bizarre political policy has encouraged the military to continue interventions in politics with the last one taking place in 2007 when the Turkish General Staff released a late night e-memo against the election as president of Abdullah Gül, whose wife wears an Islamic headscarf. However, Gül was later elected president by Parliament, sending a message to the military on the supremacy of the people’s will.
The source of ongoing tension in Turkey between the military-led secular establishment and the government stems from the latter’s lack of courage to fully govern the nation. Conversely, this has also led the military to have an important say in internal security issues, hindering any solution to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorism or to other real threats, such as increased extreme fundamentalism, including Turkish Hizbullah as well as Al-Qaeda units in the country. Economic problems have, in the meantime, deepened becoming an important source of tension in tackling law and order.
The past 10 years have seen attempts to address the lack of civilian oversight of the Turkish military with Parliament making some military and civilian reforms to adhere to the European Union’s democratic criteria as Turkey pursues EU membership.
As the reforms have begun to be felt on the ground, the military’s unaccountable status has begun to raise more questions.
As a result, civilian prosecutors have now been able, for the first time, to have access to military files hidden from them, as part of an investigation over allegations of an assassination plot against Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç and some other Cabinet ministers. I am referring to the prosecutors’ ongoing search at a critical and controversial Special Forces Command headquarters in Ankara as part of their investigation into the assassination claims.
The Special Forces Command is mainly designed for what the military describes as deterring internal threats that military-influenced National Security Policy Paper (MGSB) of 2006 described as a primary security threat to the country. This threat perception has led the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) to focus more on restructuring itself mainly to address internal security threats, strengthening the budget and the status of the Gendarmerie General Command (JGK), which is, in practice, a paramilitary force under military control.
Despite some government efforts it has not yet been possible to turn the JGK into a professional force operating under the full control of the Interior Ministry. This has also led, among other things, to a continuing mistrust among the gendarmerie and the police, making Turkey fragile to real threats.
There have been strong indications emerging as a result of numerous military-linked secret documents being published in the media in the past several years that some TSK elements have been involved in smear campaigns, not only against people from every walk of life but also against the current government.
Ongoing searches in the past five days by civilian prosecutors at the Special Forces Command have thus become extremely important, not only because it has created hopes that the armed forces will become more accountable and transparent, but that it will also end the perception of citizens as a threat.
