On Friday, we listened to Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ once again, but this time he was not live on TV as usual but on several Internet Web sites, boasting to his staff how he is fighting the government and so on. He also clearly says in the recording that he directly ordered the two high-ranking officers who chased Bülent Arınç. He also states very powerfully and with a Turkish version of the f-word that he did not allow any judge to enter the cosmic room of the military (although it was legal). I am sure that almost all of you will say: “So what? This is what he is all about. What is new in this new message?” All right. That is actually my point as well. Mr. Başbuğ can never disappoint me with his anti-democratic harangues. What I will focus on today is something else. Any time the juntas, junta-lovers, anti-democratic forces, brotherhoods or illegal organizations are caught red-handed, they scream in unison that there is an F-Type illegal organization in the police department and they are plotting against the otherwise innocent law-abiding soldiers and so on. With “F-Type,” they imply police officers who allegedly like Fethullah Gülen and his ideas. I must note at this point that, to date, not even a single police officer has been caught committing alleged crimes by countless different intelligent organizations in the country.Mr. Başbuğ and his anti-democratic supporters always claim that the police are guilty. When several secretly buried LAWs were unearthed in a military area, Mr. Başbuğ said two things. First, that they were just empty pipes, not weapons, and second, that police also were given similar weapons. We all know that they were very dangerous weapons and that their serial numbers were traced back to the military, not the police. Başbuğ did not challenge this, hoping that we would forget this and forgive him. Anyway. When junta members are caught talking to each other on the phone about killing people, bombing places and so on, they also say two things: First, they were only joking, and second, the police fabricated the conversation.
After the most recent Başbuğ speech that I referred to in the first paragraph was publicized on the Internet, the General Staff Web site announced that it was a speech that Mr. Başbuğ made to his staff in Bucharest. Fair enough. He may still be thinking that law-abiding and military officers are two different terms, that when they are next to each other they only form an oxymoron and that Mr. Başbuğ is the law himself. What I want to underline here is this: Where are the F-Type police in this picture? As we all know, there are maybe three or five ordinary police officers in each embassy and consulate, and that is it. They are not chosen from the intelligence police, and they could not possibly have any equipment to secretly listen to and record Başbuğ’s conversation. So, where are the scapegoats? It is a little bit easier to convince the already-convinced junta-loving captive audience of Mr. Başbuğ inside Turkey to tell them that it is all about the F-Type police. But what about abroad? Are there Romanian F-Type police intelligence officers as well? That would be a strange and excellent conspiracy theory. Instead, why don’t you, Mr. Başbuğ, resort to your fellow travelers’ classic conspiracy theory about the ultranationalists’ good-old “God,” the almighty and omnipresent US, which is capable of everything? We know that you imply this occasionally.
But to appeal to your ultranationalist supporters (even though even your soldiers’ underwear is provided by the US, to say nothing of almost all your serious weapons, and you said that the Turkish army has transplanted everything American from training to doctrines, etc. -- and it is a well-known but unwritten secret that to reach the top in the army one needs to serve in a NATO position), if you again claim that “God” (the US) is chasing after you, my question is this: Can you stop “God”?
