Nurturing democracy in Turkish politics halted by secret plots

    International Strategic Research Organization (USAK) President Sedat Laçiner says he feels the footprint of an Ergenekon-type organization behind the leaked video footage that shows Baykal intimately involved with party deputy Nesrin Baytok. “This method was often used by the Ergenekon terror organization -- a clandestine network of people nested within the state apparatus including judiciary, military and bureaucracy and charged with a plot to topple the democratically elected government in Turkey -- as we have seen in the evidence disclosed to the public by prosecutors in the ongoing trial,” he told Sunday’s Zaman. “I think they felt the Republican People’s Party [CHP] leader is not capable of challenging the government as a viable alternative, and they use the video footage to discredit him,” he added.

    One of the first people to describe the incident as an attempt at social engineering to redesign the opposition was author Haşmet Babooğlu, who pointed out the change of heart on the part of the media that used to advocate for Baykal all the time. “Why was it that pro-CHP media publications did not waste a single day in calling for his resignation? Is it a coincidence that the same people and same media placed similar calls on the late Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit when he fell ill? It is obvious that behind the call for resignation, amid ethical and clean politics, lies the footprints of an operation for social engineering,” he wrote. The Turkish army, of course, tops the candidate list of the social engineering roster in Turkey. It had accomplices along the way ranging from small groups of wealthy businessmen to media moguls, from union chiefs to academic circles. With the perception of being the self-appointed guardian of the regime, the Turkish military has not shied away from disrupting the political process either directly or indirectly.

The tradition started in 1960, with a group of young officers overthrew the government of Prime Minister Adnan Menderes. The ensuing court process resulted in the execution of the ousted prime minister as well as his finance and foreign ministers. The second military intervention took place in the form of a memorandum a decade later, in March 1971. Amid an ongoing bloody leftist-rightist conflict in the country, army officers sent a letter to the government warning that political factions were developing within the army and that the regime would fall if precautions were not taken. The government fell as a result of this warning.

The most notorious example of social engineering happened on the eve of the military coup in 1980. The climax of the ensuing violence was tolerated intentionally and the army stood idly on the sidelines to wait for the right moment to overthrow the government and rein in the terror and violence. The coup ushered in a new period for Turkish politics during which post-coup military leaders tried to shape politics by banning certain leaders from politics and shutting down parties completely. The military rulers invented their own center party to counterbalance the left and right parties, yet the attempt failed miserably when the ballot boxes opened and people voted in a landside for the newly formed grassroots Motherland Party (ANAVATAN), headed by the late President Turgut Özal.

But the human toll was heavy. In the post-coup period, when the military was in power, 517 people were sentenced to death. While 98,404 people were tried for being members of illegal organizations, some 30,000 people were fired from their jobs for supposedly being dangerous. Some 14,000 people were stripped of their citizenship. Some 30,000 people fled the country as refugees and 300 people died in suspicious ways. It was determined that 171 people died because of torture.

Most of the social, political and legal problems Turkey is facing today in fact come from the constitution designed under a hard-liner statist/elitist ideology that had no popular mandate. In fact, the last two constitutions, drafted in 1960 and 1982, were written under military tutelage and aimed at restricting the power of democratic institutions while preserving the influence of the military over state agencies. Military rulers at the time also developed schemes to keep accountability out of the barracks, as the defense budget was not subject to general audit rules and military contracts were governed under sui generis principles. The National Security Council (MGK) has been the main tool for exerting military influence on government policy on a variety of matters, not limited to only security.

Fractured political parties of the ’90s

Another successful social engineering project was the marketing of Tansu Çiller, who took the helm of the True Path Party (DYP) after Süleyman Demirel. Most other serious contenders were pushed aside within the party after the media put her name in the headlines. When another center-right party leader, Mesut Yılmaz, who was the head of the Motherland Party (ANAP), locked himself in a dogfight with Çiller, the project failed, paving the way for the victory of the Welfare Party (RP) in the 1995 national elections. The RP’s victory proved once again that social engineering and political interference by the military-bureaucratic establishment was out of touch with the electorate, who decided to push top-down party schemes aside. They now barely receive 1 or 2 percent of the national vote.

That, of course, did not stop the plotters, who were not happy with the conservative party at the helm of the government. With the blessing of the army, the establishment organized rallies and secured the support of wealthy, influential businessmen and leading unions. The last blow to the RP-led government coalition came from the MGK, who presented a long list of demands to the government on Feb. 28, 1997, effectively demanding the coalition step down from power. Necmettin Erbakan, the RP’s leader, was banned from politics. Even now-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was the mayor of İstanbul at the time, was sentenced to jail for reciting a poem and forced to step down from office.

At this juncture, the social engineers decided to invest in the rival Democratic Left Party (DSP) headed by the late Prime Minister Ecevit. When he became seriously ill, they developed a conspiracy plot against the late prime minister, in which a fake medical report was to be produced to prevent him from serving as the head of government.

The İstanbul court hearing the trial into the Ergenekon terror network is now investigating claims that Başkent University Hospital staff was engaged in efforts to forge a medical report for Ecevit. When the claims first surfaced in 2002, Ecevit was immediately rushed to the Gülhane Military Academy of Medicine (GATA) by his wife, Rahşan Ecevit. Ecevit died in 2006. Mehmet Haberal, the rector of Başkent University, was detained last year as part of the Ergenekon probe. He was also a senior physician at the hospital.

Curbing Parliament’s power

 The tension that can be seen today between the judiciary and the government over the investigation and trial of Ergenekon is in a sense also a product of Feb. 28. The Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court of Appeals and the Council of State have signed off on a number of politically motivated rulings since the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) came to power. The most important of these are the infamous 367 decision during the 2007 presidential election process, the ruling that cancelled certain new amendments to the Constitution and a ruling on the coefficient formula used in university admissions.

Turkish courts have banned more than 20 parties over the years on allegations of having Islamist or Kurdish separatist agendas. The ruling AK Party survived a closure case brought against it in 2008. Both politics and the Turkish economy have been dealt a blow by Feb. 28 and have yet to fully recover from it. Power players discomfited by up-and-coming Anatolian grass roots also took measures during the Feb. 28 process to stem this growth. To avoid any changes in the balance of power that could result from the accumulation of wealth and prosperity in Anatolia, a new concept -- “green capital” -- was conjured up to bring institutions operating based on Islamic financial principles under tight observation and regulation. Due to this, many such institutions went bankrupt.

Similarly, many foundations were shut down, accused of being controlled by religious orders. Though in 2008 the AK Party made amendments to the Foundations Law regarding property owned by minorities, it has been unable to affect any changes for foundations that were shut down and seized by the state during the Feb. 28 process.

The effects of the Feb. 28 process also extended to the media, with a decision by the MGK used as a basis to shut down a number of publications. The military made good use of media outlets during the Feb. 28 process and has ever since continued a tradition of biased accreditation according to the tone of publications with regard to the military and its actions. Alleged military coup plans that have emerged one after the other in recent months have also revealed that the military has created “good” and “bad” lists of journalists, with some journalists scheduled to be jailed in the event of a coup while others are referred to as likely sources of aid and support during a coup process.

Political parties law ought to be changed

Part of the reason why there is no shortage of plots against party leaders in Turkey is the Political Parties Law, which gives full control to the party leaders. It is next to impossible to defeat the incumbent, no matter how many elections he or she might have lost in the past, because the party leader controls both the leadership ranks and also the delegates who will vote for him in the party congresses.

“Since it is difficult to change the leaders in Turkey’s parties, power centers who desire change invent schemes to topple the leaders all the time,” says sociologist Hikmet Aydın. Stressing that Baykal’s infidelity had been known for some time by many, he told Sunday’s Zaman that people who called themselves nationalists realized that Baykal was not a serious contender to challenge the AK Party. “Those who have a beef with the government wanted to strengthen the CHP. But with Baykal at the helm, they thought this was almost impossible so they wanted to force him to resign by leaking the video footage to the media,” he explained.