25 November 2009 / STAR BERAT ÖZİPEK,
To call the “Kafes [Cage] Operation” plans brought to light by the Taraf newspaper “horrible” is not sufficient. According to these plans, killings of non-Muslim Turkish citizens were to be carried out and blamed on Islamic factions after which the message to the rest of the world would be “Christians are being massacred under an Islamist government.”
Thus the world would go along with any coups that then took place here, and the work would be covered up. In the above-mentioned plan the murders of Hrant Dink and Catholic priest [Andrea] Santoro as well the murders at a Malatya publishing house are all referred to as “operations.” If today we see that the pro-junta factions of Turkey have not achieved their goals, the biggest reason for this is the determination and efforts of those political actors within the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) who, despite the presence of some status-quo supporting, nationalistic, natural-born bureaucrats within their ranks, persist in pursuing and emerging with a justice-based approach towards minorities in Turkey.
