Istanbul: To grasp the breadth of the falling-out between Turkish president-elect Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his longtime ally Fethullah Gulen, it is necessary to examine the genesis of investigations into the coups allegedly cooked up by the Turkish military early in Mr Erdogan’s years as prime minister; and into the corruption scandals that exploded in the prime minister’s face at the end of 2013.
A striking element of both investigations was the similarities in modus operandi and key personnel. But setting them apart was this – the allegations that the military was plotting Mr Erdogan’s overthrow were about ensuring his and the ruling AKP’s longevity in office; whereas the corruption allegations were about embarrassing the prime minister and his party, maybe even seeing them off.
As Mr Erdogan and the AKP were consolidating their hold on power after winning the 2002 election, they had two objectives in seeking to neutralise the Turkish military: one, payback for the generals’ past suppression of various religious movements and civilian governments; and two, to so emasculate the officer corps that it would have neither the brains nor the courage to challenge the government in the future. Hence, there was a series of mass arrests and hundreds of military officers found themselves behind bars on charges of insurrection.
First there was the Ergenekon conspiracy in 2007 and three years later the alleged plot known as Operation Sledgehammer – at one stage, 20 per cent of Turkey’s generals were in jail, along with hundreds of their subordinates, on charges that they were plotting to overthrow the government. The commanders of each of the air, land and sea forces resigned in protest, playing into the hands of Mr Erdogan and the AKP.
There were suspicions that these two cases against the military were a witch-hunt; that evidence had been fabricated; and that believable justice was not possible with scores in the dock at a time. Also, the Ergenekon case was used as a cover to go after others that the government and its Gulenist allies simply did not like.
Apart from squaring away the military, Mr Erdogan had other scores to settle. He went after the judiciary, using the guise of democratic reform in an attempt to clip its wings in
punishment for a ruling on constitutional issues that fell just a single judicial vote short of outlawing the AKP – instead, a court fined the party $US20 million.
Less apparent, behind the veil of a notional democracy, was the manner in which democratic institutions were bent, pretzel-like, to achieve less than democratic ends.
The cases against the military officers are said to have been the work of Gulenists in the police and judicial services. But as Mr Erdogan tried to squeeze out the Gulenists, an internal slugfest evolved, the climax of which was the corruption scandal that rocked Turkey in December 2013.
State of surveillance
A critical weapon in the fight, it seems, was the wiring of virtually all of Istanbul for eavesdropping, discreet video-recording and general surveillance by the Gulenist elements in the police and prosecution services and by a spin unit said to operate from Mr Erdogan’s office and other arms of the AKP.
At the heart of the corruption allegations against Mr Erdogan and his circle, and helping to make them more credible than the case against the military, is a collection of sensational audio and video recordings that have been leaked to the Turkish media.
Collectively, the granular detail reveals corruption on an exponential scale:
- one of Mr Erdogan’s pet businessmen demands Turkish citizenship for his relatives and, by the way, for a meddlesome policeman to be sacked;
- ministerial staff downgrade the status of a prime site to circumvent conservation restrictions on redevelopment;
- the environment minister acknowledges taking bribes to allow illegal luxury developments;
- the proprietor of a pro-government newspaper cries as the prime minister shreds him over a news report;
- Mr Erdogan and his son Bilal discuss how best to hide tens of millions of euros;
- senior government officials discuss the possibility of war with Syria;
- an Erdogan aide asks a provincial governor to have a journalist jailed;
- video of an opposition politician’s very intimate moments with his mistress;
- two of Mr Erdogan’s media chums discuss how to doctor the results of an opinion poll to make the government look better.
Executives of the companies behind Erdogan’s most glamorous projects are among the 100 arrested in December on charges of bribery and rigging tenders, after a 15-month-long secret investigation of the cosy intersection of Turkish business and politics. These including a massive new bridge to span the Bosphorus, linking Europe and Asia, and a forest clearing almost as big as Manhattan on the northern outskirts of Istanbul, the site for what is billed as the fifth-biggest airport in the world.
An enraged Mr Erdogan thwarted a second planned wave of arrests by sacking and or reassigning as many as 12,000 police and prosecution officers who he branded, en bloc, as Gulenists. The judiciary was further squeezed, the intelligence services got expanded powers and constitutional checks and balances on the executive were watered down.
The pro-government Daily Sabah revealed that as many as 70,000 suspected Gulenists were being investigated across all government agencies and, alluding to the business backers of Mr Gulen's Hizmet [Service] movement, it said: “All companies and businessmen financially supporting the movement . . . may face legal charges based on ‘aiding and abetting [a] criminal organisation'.”
When one of Mr Erdogan’s ministers was accused of accepting a bribe in the form of a $US350,000 Swiss watch, social media went into overdrive with pictures of the minister flaunting the timepiece in public. Along with two of his ministerial colleagues, the same minister had shared a bribe kitty of more than $US60 million. As one of them was shown the door, he lashed out. Claiming to have acted with Mr Erdogan's full blessing, he said: “I can’t accept this pressure on me to resign – the prime minister too has to resign.”
Parliament was told that one of the corruption masterminds, the controversial Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, was behind a $US99 million donation to a foundation chaired by Mr Erdogan’s son Bilal, as a payoff for the acquisition of land held by the government.
The son of one of the sacked government ministers had so many cash-stuffed safes in his home that he had a currency-counting machine to tally it all. The public imagination was seized too, by allegations of the discovery of shoe boxes stashed with $4.5 million in various currencies at the home of a government-allied bank executive – making the shoebox Turkey’s newest symbol of ridicule and protest.
Six months after the revelations, AKP stonewalling in the parliament has ensured that there was no serious investigation of the allegations. And the pro-government media has focused more on amplifying Mr Erdogan’s claims that the prosecution effort is a politically-motivated smear against his government, his associates and his family.
The pro-AKP press didn’t deny the allegations, so much as insist that they were proof of a conspiracy more than of a crime. AKP spokesman Huseyin Celik tweeted: “Is it a coincidence that the businessmen who were building, or were going to be building, the third airport and the bridge were requested to be taken in? Maybe the real goal could
be sabotage, because these ‘crazy projects’ in Istanbul have turned some circles inside and outside crazy?”
Mr Erdogan’s instinctive response was to discredit the corruption allegations. And that requires exceptional political tap-dancing by the prime minister – because to succeed in this endeavour, he needed to cast doubt on the very similar process by which coup charges were brought against the military, without undermining the sense of his great achievement in having neutralised the generals.
As a result, it came as no surprise in mid-June when the country’s highest criminal court ordered the release and retrial of 230 military men. The other hundred or so had been released earlier and, in all likelihood, there will be no retrials.
Standing up for the rule of law
The 67-year-old lawyer slumps into a cafe chair, hands buried in his pockets, and he complains: “They won’t let me retire.”
Celal Ulgen represents seven of the jailed officers, including the army general named in court as the ringleader, 76-year-old Cetin Dogan.
Weariness fails to suppress Mr Ulgen’s outrage at what he describes as the fabrication of a case which was credible, only because plotting coups was what Turkish generals did historically – over four decades they had ousted four civilian governments which were perceived as threats to the military’s secular Kemalist sense of national propriety. And while the military was in power, hundreds of thousands were jailed and tortured.
“The challenge was to produce evidence, to tell the police and prosecutors where to find it and for them to use the evidence as their own. This concocted evidence was on three CDs – one each for the army, the air force and the navy.
“But there were no signatures and nothing to prove the legitimacy of this stuff. Absurdly, the documents supposedly were produced in 2003, but the software version
of Microsoft Office used to create them only became available in 2007.
Mr Ulgen has little sympathy for Mr Erdogan’s insistence that - like the victims in the Sledgehammer case - he, his ministers and his cronies are victims of a legal confection. “Why should I be sorry for him?” the lawyer snorts. “This Gulen gang was in control of the justice system for years – but only because they were allied with the government and, remember, the government congratulated the Sledgehammer prosecutors for their great work.
“It’s sweet justice for us that they have snared Erdogan – divine justice. He was deaf to claims that our clients were innocent. Turkish academies, intellectuals and NGOs were silent too, so they’re as guilty as the government.”
