The world is now jaded about news of Turkish generals and military staff aspiring to military coups. It is accustomed to the sight of media owners and businessmen offering support to nihilist generals. Yes, onlookers are all too thoroughly acquainted with the ideological and sectarian groups within the opposition party; however, to hear of plotting by high-ranking judges, former (prime) ministers and former presidents to eliminate aspects of Turkey's hard-won democratic processes is surely enough to shake any "objective" observer from complacency.In the fifth revealed voice recording (March 23) of retired Gen. İsmail Karadayı, a former chief of general staff, he elaborates on the prospective military coup, adding that democracy in Turkey must remain under the tutelage and guardianship of the military junta for 25 to 30 years. Again we hear recited the anti-democracy mantras of the deep state: "The people, the constituency, cannot be trusted with electing the president. Selecting the president by the people's common vote is extraordinarily dangerous. People are ignorant … ."
Karadayı explains who must be the president, as well as who should be the prime minister and the minister of education. He reveals how he has contrived with Republican People's Party (CHP) Vice Chairman Onur Öymen and former CHP and present Democratic Left Party (DSP) member İsmail Tanla to pen a statement to appeal to the Constitutional Court against the election of the president by public vote and a press release to invite the military to assume its duty to save the system from the ordinary people.
The conspirators among the chiefs of general staff are now known to have formed exclusivist salons and secret society organizations, such as the Council of Consultation (Encümen-i Daniş) and the Friends Association (Dostlar Grubu), from which they sent guidelines, indeed ultimatums, to presidents, prime ministers, governments and bureaucrats on how to carry out their state and public duties and projects; they issued instructions about uniting parties before elections, as in the case of the Motherland Party (ANAVATAN) and True Path Party (DYP) before the presidential election, and about whether those parties should attend the election session in Parliament during presidential voting and certain constitutional amendments.
Other generals who retired after their roles in such schemes were revealed and who are furious at their thwarted ambitions and the likely effects on future financial gains also do not cease to conspire against participatory, parliamentarian democracy. Through new brotherhoods, associations and platforms, they take part in many activities against the elected government and against other civic and faith-based initiatives that do not sympathize with such schemes.
But this is not a mere soap opera of salons, clubs and diaries. Behind the uniformed façade erected by these "tutors and guardians," the self-proclaimed "security valve for the tenets of the republic," the would-be "indispensable elements of stability in Turkey and the region" that assumes the right "to intervene in public and politics when conditions necessitate it," there lie more sinister vistas. There are acid wells, hidden weapons and ammunition caches, detailed plans for assassinations, death squads, an inexplicable accumulation of funds, text and phone messages containing schemes and boasts of plots. There is false flag terrorism and the deaths of 17,000 people in southeastern Turkey.
"Objective" observers inside and outside Turkey who are not losing their loved ones, homes, property, land, honor, blood, future and hope at the hands of such "guardians" may claim to be bemused at the fate of their "democratic, secular, progressive" friends who are apparently being entrapped by backward zealots. All the facts and figures remain a faintly unreal item of news for them, mere data for their academic pursuits about a distant region of the world. Some choose to remain blind, deaf and dumb to the real intent of the Ergenekon terrorist organization and the vested interests, economic and ideological, behind it.
But the Ergenekon trial is expected to bring a tradition and a mindset to an end in Turkey, and it must be so abroad, too. Perspectives on the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), or more correctly, the coup-loving and coup-making top-ranking generals, and their so-called "secular" elitist accomplices in the state bureaucracy, need to change both domestically and internationally. The "old elite" is no longer the sole ruler of contemporary Turkey. Turkey is not "a special case" where such schemers have to be tolerated.
So far, many from the Western world -- journalists, academics, military officers, politicians, human rights activists -- have interacted mostly with this small elite due to the public, political and economic resources it monopolizes. This distorts perspectives on Turkish society. In the current state of knowledge, those writing and commenting on democracy and human rights in Turkey would be well advised to reconsider some of their informants and perspectives. Turkish people are growing more confident, and this is a two-way conversation. Observers form and express opinions about the motives and methods of Turkish people; Turkish people are capable of drawing conclusions about the true interests and commitments of those who comment on them.
