It seems that while I had been having my Sunday afternoon nap, there had been a revolution in the streets. This coup did not have tanks sitting outside the radio station, but it did involve seizure of a media organization. Civil servants from the bank supervisory body, the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund (TMSF) walked into the headquarters of an İstanbul newspaper with a squad of police. The coup was not directed against the Parliament, but rather the Sabah newspaper group and its related ATV television station. It’s a complicated story and no doubt there are more revelations on the way. Sabah used to be controlled by a man, Dinç Bilgin, who owned a bank that collapsed with massive debts. Mr. Bilgin did time in jail while fraud charges against him went through the courts. The control of Sabah was transferred to a Forbes-listed dollar billionaire, Turgay Ciner. Mr. Ciner is regarded as largely supporting the present government, so for a state organ to seize an asset is at the very least the cause for some surprise.
Mr. Ciner promised to pay Bilgin’s incurred debt of $433 million back to the TMSF over a period of 10 years, generally regarded as a low price. Recently Sabah has accused its main rival, the Doğan group, of dodging a huge corporate tax bill for the petrol distribution company it purchased from the government. The Doğan group-owned newspapers have been rubbing their hands over Sabah’s most recent fate. So was the Doğan group responsible for fermenting the latest coup? Or was it Mr. Bilgin himself, who having been slapped with another bill from the TMSF for nearly $1 billion, decided to get his current arrangement cancelled so that ATV and Sabah could be re-auctioned for a much higher price? Or was it simply justice at work acting from concern that the public transfer of Sabah had been done too cheaply, with the real deal under the table?
I am fascinated by the story, but perhaps what I find most interesting is my own reaction. A few days before this happened there was a breaking story about another more mundane sort of coup. It seems that in 2004 four senior officers had been seriously contemplating kicking out the elected government of this nation and replacing it with themselves. I write “seems” because the story was based on diaries allegedly belonging to the then head of the Navy, which somehow found their way into Nokta magazine. The author, Adm. Özden Örnek, denies that the diaries are his, but most of the press is taking his denial with a dose of salt.
The coup attempt faltered because Gen. Hilmi Özkök, who then headed the General Staff, told the plotters that they were being silly. And of course he was right. Had there been a coup, imagine what would have happened next?
If you recall, the severest crisis in post-war Turkish history started in 2001 when a minister threw a copy of the Constitution at the president. Within hours the value of the lira collapsed, the financial reserves went down the plughole and at one point interest rates rose to 7,000 percent. How much worse if the military had been firing not books but real bullets three years later, just as Turkey was beginning to turn the economy around? Turkey would have been completely isolated internationally. A military staging a coup would have turned both it own reputation and the proud and increasingly prosperous nation it serves into a joke.
So although the Nokta story was a brilliant news coup, it is almost too absurd to be taken seriously -- like reading that Martians had won an electricity privatization tender, or Prime Minister Erdoğan announcing that instead of standing for president himself, he’d like Süleyman Demirel to have another go. On the other hand, there is something gritty and delicious about the goings-on in Sabah. It’s about real life.
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