A broad definition of Turkish national security policy has always given the military much room to maneuver in all spheres of life in Turkey. In 2003 and 2004, military and civilian reforms curbed some of those powers of the military. Yet, events that have been occurring since then have proven that those reforms have fallen short of limiting the military's power in politics, although, it is also true that the TSK has been pursuing a more defensive policy in justifying its intervention into politics.
Turkey's almost three-decade-long war against the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) has continued to have a devastating effect on the country as a whole, from an economic, cultural and political perspective. Government spokesperson Cemil Çiçek revealed several months ago that about $1 trillion has so far been spent on the fight against the PKK. This amount is much higher than Turkey's national budget. Yet it is not clear whether the state has any precise information on the exact amount spent on this war, dubbed low-intensity warfare.
Despite reforms, the political authority has not realized democratic civilian oversight of the TSK to allow the public to know what has been happening to their taxes, as there are massive arms purchases that are free from a transparent and accountable process.
There is no practice of informing the public on developments taking place within the military and, in particular, on the real circumstances of the fight against the PKK. If the Taraf daily had not reported it last week, the Turkish public would not have known that four privates died as the result of a lieutenant's malpractice. At the time of the incident it was reported by the military that four privates had been killed accidentally when a bomb exploded.
But the truth about this misleading military information came out in a Taraf story last week. It revealed that four soldiers died when a hand grenade exploded in the hands of one of the privates. The grenade was given to the private by Lt. Mehmet Tümer with its pin pulled out, thus ready to explode at any time, to punish the soldier for sleeping during his night watch. The news that Lt. Tümer was arrested only came on Aug. 28 after Taraf reported the excerpts from a military court hearing of the event that took place on Aug. 17.
Psychology Professor Nevzat Tarhan, a retired colonel, told Taraf that there is a serious education and training problem within the TSK.
If the private had been well trained, he could have thrown the grenade to a safe distance letting it explode and saving both his life and the life of the three other soldiers. Instead, he begged Lt. Tümer for almost 25 minutes to restore the grenade to a secure mode. Nevertheless, in any armed force where the staff and conscripts are well trained, no officer would have had the courage to punish his inferior in this manner.
In a separate incident, again reported by Taraf, it was understood that a mine that exploded in a Kurdish-dominated southeastern province, killing several soldiers, had allegedly been placed by a general on duty in the region and did not occur as a result of a PKK attack.
Stories such as these that come to light show there have been serious flaws in security within the military during the fight against the PKK. This should not be surprising in the face of an absence of full democratic control of the TSK by the civilian authority. Making this absence worse is the indifference of Turkish opposition parties to the ill-defined, self-designed autonomous military policies.
Apart from the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP), neither of the two other opposition parties have so far supported the government's new attempts to solve the Kurdish question which hopes to lessen the PKK threat. Nor have those opposition parties given support to a re-initiated government plan to normalize relations with Armenia. Whereas both the solution to the decades-old Kurdish question and a resolution to the Armenian dispute are in Turkey's national interests, neither the political actors in the opposition nor the TSK have been lending support to these peaceful initiatives.
Hard to understand I recently obtained a thick military document on Turkey's national security policy dated 2002. Events that have been taking place since then suggest that the contents of this paper have not changed. The paper defines several nations in Turkey's environs as a threat while prioritizing internal security over external security vis-à-vis threat perceptions. This is despite the fact that the government has been trying to mend fences with those countries defined as threats in this military document. This is not new information for me but reading it from the document itself has reinforced my knowledge and made me realize, once again, that this policy document should be completely rewritten, this time by the civilian authority. That may ease the government's attempts to solve Turkey's long-standing disputes, which block the road to its prosperity.
