Statements made by the government immediately following the highly tragic incident, which contributed significantly to the rising mistrust of the state among Kurdish citizens, indicated that it was not informed of the bombing by the military in advance. This remains the only established fact nearly six weeks after the incident.
In response to the co-leader of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), Selahattin Demirtaş, who accused him of making the decision to launch the attack in cold blood, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan said on Jan. 31: “We authorize our security forces in a general framework. This is how politics is run and how the government operates. And our security forces, be they the armed forces or the police force, have exercised their authority within that framework.” I was taken aback when I read this statement by Erdoğan and asked myself how it was possible that the security forces -- “be they the armed forces or the police” – could exercise such broad authority without consulting the government in charge.
I came across the clearest answer to that question in a short article published in the latest issue of the periodical Terrorism Monitor, titled “The Uludere Air Raid and Systemic Gaps in Turkey's Intelligence Infrastructure,” written by Francesco F. Milan, a Ph.D student at King's College in London: “One of the problems the incident highlighted is the lack of civilian oversight of military operations. As the military stated, the UAV spotted the moving group at 06:39 p.m., while jet fighters attacked at 09:37 p.m. For a three-hour span, commanding officers were acting with total autonomy but clearly took some time before deciding to launch an air raid. The fact that the Prime Minister was collecting information from the military after the fact suggests there was no civilian monitoring of the operation. During that time the military did not contact any political or civilian authority to involve a civilian decision-maker in the operation. The absence of civilian oversight during military operations is a recurrent and troublesome element in Turkish civil-military relations, but it becomes particularly problematic in situations such as the one at Uludere, where the same institution ends up being in charge of both the intelligence cycle and the decision-making process.”
On Feb. 8 a public prosecutor with special powers in İstanbul summoned, without informing and acquiring the consent of the government in Ankara, five executives of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), including its former and current chiefs to testify as “suspects” in the investigation concerning the Kurdish Communities Union (KCK), the PKK's urban network. It eventually became clear that they were summoned primarily to testify concerning the secret talks between MİT and PKK representatives that broke down soon after the general elections in June of last year. When they refused, a court in İstanbul issued arrest warrants for four of them, excluding the current chief. Right after the news about MİT chiefs being summoned to testify, two top executives of the anti-terrorism department of the İstanbul police were dismissed in what seemed to be a counterattack by the government. And finally, the prosecutor in question was removed by his superiors from his position at the head of the KCK investigation.
At first glance it appeared to be a conflict between the prosecutor and the police chiefs in İstanbul on the one hand and the government and MİT in Ankara on the other, but the problem is certainly much more complex. The article I referred to above seemed to shed light on that complexity: “Another systemic problem in Turkish intelligence is the lack of interagency cooperation. In the context of the Uludere case, the extent of cooperation between MİT and the military remains uncertain. The two institutions have a history of rivalry, especially since MİT came under civilian control 15 years ago, with the most recent example occurring in October 2011, when the chief of general staff General Ozel stated the military was absolutely in the dark about the fact that MİT was engaged in secret negotiations with PKK leaders, a fact that was revealed only after a secret recording of a meeting was leaked (Hürriyet, October 30, 2011). Recent reforms tried to diminish personnel attrition and distance between different intelligence bodies, but with no tangible results so far.”
It appears that in Turkey we are faced with a government that is not able to oversee military operations, coordinate and supervise the intelligence services of the military, the police and MİT. This renders valid the question as to whether the more important problem in Turkey is gaps in government authority over the military-bureaucratic establishment rather than the much-criticized authoritarian tendencies of the government.
