Kayan is well known as the official searching the headquarters of the Special Forces Command, where confidential military documents are archived, as part of a probe into a suspected plot to assassinate Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç. In its statement on Friday, the General Staff said the first vehicle was carrying two drivers and a sergeant, and the second vehicle tailing Kayan was carrying two drivers, an electrical technician and a carpenter but it gave no details about why they were tailing the judge, raising further suspicions about the military’s involvement in the assassination plot against Arınç.Star’s Mehmet Altan, who found the General Staff’s statement unconvincing, refers to Emre Uslu, an academic at the Police Academy and a columnist for the Taraf daily who approached the issue from another perspective. “Anyone who knows a little bit about ‘tailing’ knows there is a method called ‘harassment tailing.’ This aims to let the person who is being tailed know that ‘we are behind you.’ And having individuals such as electrical technicians, carpenters and cooks in the tailing car is deliberate. In line with this, since you want the tail to be noticed because you want to harass the person and when the person you are tailing is a judge, you have to keep in mind the possibility of being captured. When you are captured you should be able to say, ‘We were not tailing anybody, the people in the car are electrical technicians, carpenters and cooks’,” Altan quoted Uslu as saying.
Şamil Tayyar, another columnist from the Star daily, quipped about the General Staff’s statement: “Just because the General Staff made such a statement, we have to believe it as the General Staff is not in a position to tell a lie. When it recently denied the existence of JİTEM, a death unit established within the gendarmerie to crush separatist terrorism, I believed it without question. Didn’t you believe it? I also never believed that the General Staff carried out the military interventions of May 27, 1960, March 12, 1971, Feb. 28, 1997 and April 27, 2007. I never witnessed the military leaving its barracks; I never saw it being involved in politics. And nobody can make me believe in the existence of a soldier who has links with Ergenekon, a shadowy crime network which has alleged links within the state and is suspected of plotting to topple the government.”
Sabah’s Nazlı Ilıcak says the General Staff is right in complaining that everyone has become suspicious of each other in society but, she says, it is the General Staff itself that has led society to the current situation with the psychosocial warfare documents and coup plans it prepared. “I am sorry, but we have the right to complain about this situation,” she says.
