The report prepared by Maj. Gen. Giora Eiland on the Israeli raid on the Freedom Flotilla on the night of May 31 criticized high-level military officers for failing to cooperate with Mossad on intelligence gathering and for their inability to foresee the resistance peace activists had shown the Israeli soldiers. Yes, the report did not single out a particular person to be punished for the apparent failure of the Israeli navy’s operation on the Mavi Marmara. Yes, it didn’t suggest any disciplinary action. Yes, it didn’t enter into a discussion on the legitimacy of boarding a civilian ship in international waters with fully armed soldiers. By not doing so Maj. Gen. Eiland was trying to protect the national interests of the state of Israel. But he didn’t expand his protective silence to include the higher-ranking officers serving in the Israeli navy. He didn’t declare that the soldiers who planned and executed the attack on the flotilla are heroes. He didn’t suggest any promotions for the top admirals of the navy. In fact, several retired army generals suggested that the language of the report is strong enough to invite Navy Commander Adm. Eli Marom to resign from his post.Our case is different
For me it is an unquestionable fact that the Turkish army as an institution and as an inheritor of a long tradition is on higher moral ground than the Israeli army. Thank God, the Turkish army is not an occupying army; it does not (at least no longer) kill children intentionally, and it does not safeguard housing settlements on the land of another nation. But there are officers in the army, it seems to me, who regard the interests of their close circle of I don’t know what as more important than those of the army as an institution, and those of the army as more important than those of the nation. We have a clear case at hand: the so-called “wet-signature” case.
As is already well known, a colonel by the name Dursun Çiçek has his signature on a coup plan document in which a secret group within the army planned to hide weapons in the homes of innocent students and then to find them and thereby accuse these students of being terrorists. The plan was much more sophisticated, and after describing the exposed plan as a “piece of paper” and the weaponry found as part of the investigation as “mere pipes,” the General Staff decided yesterday to “sell Çiçek out.” The military prosecutors intervened with the civilian court process by launching their own investigation into the coup plan and came up with the most absurd interpretation of what that “piece of paper” was. The prosecutors submitted to the fact that the signature on the document belonged to Col. Çiçek, but they claimed that Çiçek had prepared this plan on his own in order to just put the army in a difficult situation. This is a part of a larger plan to protect the interests of the close circle of generals and other officers whose names are mentioned in the indictment of the Çiçek case. According to the internal regulations of the Turkish army anybody who is subject to a civilian or military court review cannot be promoted until his or her innocence is proven by the court. Now names like Gen. Saldıray Berk, Col. Ali Tapan and Col. Recep Gençoğlu are facing such a situation. And August is a period of appointments and promotions in the army. According to the rules none of these officers can be promoted at this year’s Supreme Military Council (YAŞ) meeting. The military prosecutor seems to have found a clever, but unethical and ruthless, plan to turn these people into the victims of Col. Çiçek’s plan, rather than his accomplices.
Now, I don’t want my army be like the Israeli army, but I want it as accountable as the Israeli one. I want to see my army as self-critical as the Israeli army, at least.
