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PLOT TARGETING TURKEY'S RELIGIOUS MINORITIES ALLEGEDLY DISCOVERED
http://europenews.dk/en/node/28575
17 December 2009
ISTANBUL - CD indicates naval officers planned violence against
non-Muslim communities. Chilling allegations emerged last month of
a detailed plot by Turkish naval officers to perpetrate threats and
violence against the nation's non-Muslims in an effort to implicate
and unseat Turkey's pro-Islamic government.
Evidence put forth for the plot appeared on an encrypted compact disc
discovered last April but was only recently deciphered; the daily
Taraf newspaper first leaked details of the CD's contents on Nov. 19.
Entitled the "Operation Cage Action Plan," the plot outlines a
plethora of planned threat campaigns, bomb attacks, kidnappings
and assassinations targeting the nation's tiny religious minority
communities - an apparent effort by military brass to discredit the
ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The scheme ultimately
called for bombings of homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims,
setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian and
Jewish citizens, and murdering prominent leaders among the religious
minorities.
Dated March 2009, the CD containing details of the plot was discovered
in a raid on the office of a retired major implicated in a large
illegal cache of military arms uncovered near Istanbul last April.
Once deciphered, it revealed the full names of 41 naval officials
assigned to carry out a four-phase campaign exploiting the
vulnerability of Turkey's non-Muslim religious minorities, who
constitute less than 1 percent of the population.
A map that Taraf published on its front page - headlined "The Targeted
Missionaries" - was based on the controversial CD documents.
Color-coded to show all the Turkish provinces where non-Muslims lived
or had meetings for worship, the map showed only 13 of Turkey's 81
provinces had no known non-Muslim residents or religious meetings.
The plan identified 939 non-Muslim representatives in Turkey as
possible targets.
"If even half of what is written in Taraf is accurate, everybody with
a conscience in this country has to go mad," Eyup Can wrote in his
Hurriyet column two days after the news broke.
The day after the first Taraf report, the headquarters of the Turkish
General Staff filed a criminal complaint against the daily with the
Justice Ministry, declaring its coverage a "clear violation" of the
laws protecting ongoing prosecution investigations from public release.
Although the prime minister's office the next day confirmed that the
newly revealed "Cage" plot was indeed under official investigation,
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Taraf's public
disclosure of the plan as "interfering" and "damaging" to the judicial
process and important sectors of the government.
But when the judiciary began interrogating a number of the named
naval suspects and sent some of them to jail, most Turkish media -
which had downplayed the claims - began to accept the plot's possible
authenticity.
To date, at least 11 of the naval officials identified in the Cage
documents are under arrest, accused of membership in an illegal
organization. They include a retired major, a lieutenant colonel,
three lieutenant commanders, two colonels and three first sergeants.
The latest plot allegations are linked to criminal investigations
launched in June 2007 into Ergenekon, an alleged "deep state"
conspiracy by a group of military officials, state security personnel,
lawyers and journalists now behind bars on charges of planning a coup
against the elected AKP government.
Christian Murders Termed 'Operations' The plot document began with
specific mention of the three most recent deadly attacks perpetrated
against Christians in Turkey, cryptically labeling them "operations."
Initial Turkish public opinion had blamed Islamist groups for the
savage murders of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro (February
2006), Turkish Armenian Agos newspaper editor Hrant Dink (January
2007) and two Turkish Christians and a German Christian in Malatya
(April 2007). But authors of the Cage plan complained that AKP's
"intensive propaganda" after these incidents had instead fingered
the Ergenekon cabal as the perpetrators.
"The Cage plan demanded that these 'operations' be conducted in a
more systematic and planned manner," attorney Orhan Kemal Cengiz
wrote in Today's Zaman on Nov. 27. "They want to re-market the
'black propaganda' that Muslims kill Christians," concluded Cengiz,
a joint-plaintiff lawyer in the Malatya murder trial and legal adviser
to Turkey's Association of Protestant Churches.
In the first phase of the Cage plot, officers were ordered to
compile information identifying the non-Muslim communities' leaders,
schools, associations, cemeteries, places of worship and media outlets,
including all subscribers to the Armenian Agos weekly. With this data,
the second stage called for creating an atmosphere of fear by openly
targeting these religious minorities, using intimidating letters and
telephone calls, warnings posted on websites linked to the government
and graffiti in neighborhoods where non-Muslims lived.
To channel public opinion, the third phase centered on priming TV and
print media to criticize and debate the AKP government's handling
of security for religious minorities, to raise the specter of the
party ultimately replacing Turkey's secular laws and institutions
with Islamic provisions.
The final phase called for planting bombs and suspicious packages
near homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims, desecrating their
cemeteries, setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian
and Jewish citizens, and even kidnapping and assassinating prominent
leaders among the religious minorities.
Lawyer Fethiye Cetin, representing the Dink family in the Agos editor's
murder trial, admitted she was having difficulty even accepting the
details of the Cage plot.
"I am engulfed in horror," Cetin told Bianet, the online Independent
Communications Network. "Some forces of this country sit down and make
a plan to identify their fellow citizens, of their own country, as
enemies! They will kill Armenians and non-Muslims in the psychological
war they are conducting against the ones identified as their enemies."
No Surprise to Christians "We were not very shocked," Protestant
Pastor Ihsan Ozbek of the Kurtulus Churches in Ankara admitted to
Taraf the day after the news broke.
After the Malatya murders, he stated, Christians had no official
means to investigate their suspicions about the instigators, "and
we could not be very brave . . . Once again the evidence is being
seen, that it is the juntas who are against democracy who [have been]
behind the propaganda in the past 10 years against Christianity and
missionary activity."
Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church also openly
addressed the Cage plot, referring to recent incidents of intimidation
against Christian and Jewish citizens in Istanbul's Kurtulus and
Adalar districts, as well as a previous raid conducted against the
alumni of a Greek high school.
"At the time, we thought that they were just trying to scare us,"
he told Today's Zaman. Several of the jailed Ergenekon suspects now
on trial were closely involved for years in protesting and slandering
the Istanbul Patriarchate, considered the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy's
300 million adherents. As ultranationalists, they claimed the Orthodox
wanted to set up a Vatican-style entity within Turkey.
Last summer 90 graves were desecrated in the Greek Orthodox community's
Balikli cemetery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul.
The city's 65 non-Muslim cemeteries are not guarded by the
municipality, with their maintenance and protection left to Greek,
Armenian and Jewish minorities.
As details continued to emerge and national debates raged for more
than a week over the Cage plan in the Turkish media, calls came
from a broad spectrum of society to merge the files of the ongoing
Dink and Malatya murder trials with the Ergenekon file. The Turkish
General Staff has consistently labeled much of the media coverage of
the Ergenekon investigations as part of smear campaign against the
fiercely secular military, which until the past two years enjoyed
virtual impunity from civilian court investigations.
According to Ria Oomen-Ruijten, the European Parliament's rapporteur
on Turkey, the long-entrenched role of the military in the Turkish
government is an "obstacle" for further democratization and integration
into the EU.
http://europenews.dk/en/node/28575
17 December 2009
ISTANBUL - CD indicates naval officers planned violence against
non-Muslim communities. Chilling allegations emerged last month of
a detailed plot by Turkish naval officers to perpetrate threats and
violence against the nation's non-Muslims in an effort to implicate
and unseat Turkey's pro-Islamic government.
Evidence put forth for the plot appeared on an encrypted compact disc
discovered last April but was only recently deciphered; the daily
Taraf newspaper first leaked details of the CD's contents on Nov. 19.
Entitled the "Operation Cage Action Plan," the plot outlines a
plethora of planned threat campaigns, bomb attacks, kidnappings
and assassinations targeting the nation's tiny religious minority
communities - an apparent effort by military brass to discredit the
ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The scheme ultimately
called for bombings of homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims,
setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian and
Jewish citizens, and murdering prominent leaders among the religious
minorities.
Dated March 2009, the CD containing details of the plot was discovered
in a raid on the office of a retired major implicated in a large
illegal cache of military arms uncovered near Istanbul last April.
Once deciphered, it revealed the full names of 41 naval officials
assigned to carry out a four-phase campaign exploiting the
vulnerability of Turkey's non-Muslim religious minorities, who
constitute less than 1 percent of the population.
A map that Taraf published on its front page - headlined "The Targeted
Missionaries" - was based on the controversial CD documents.
Color-coded to show all the Turkish provinces where non-Muslims lived
or had meetings for worship, the map showed only 13 of Turkey's 81
provinces had no known non-Muslim residents or religious meetings.
The plan identified 939 non-Muslim representatives in Turkey as
possible targets.
"If even half of what is written in Taraf is accurate, everybody with
a conscience in this country has to go mad," Eyup Can wrote in his
Hurriyet column two days after the news broke.
The day after the first Taraf report, the headquarters of the Turkish
General Staff filed a criminal complaint against the daily with the
Justice Ministry, declaring its coverage a "clear violation" of the
laws protecting ongoing prosecution investigations from public release.
Although the prime minister's office the next day confirmed that the
newly revealed "Cage" plot was indeed under official investigation,
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Taraf's public
disclosure of the plan as "interfering" and "damaging" to the judicial
process and important sectors of the government.
But when the judiciary began interrogating a number of the named
naval suspects and sent some of them to jail, most Turkish media -
which had downplayed the claims - began to accept the plot's possible
authenticity.
To date, at least 11 of the naval officials identified in the Cage
documents are under arrest, accused of membership in an illegal
organization. They include a retired major, a lieutenant colonel,
three lieutenant commanders, two colonels and three first sergeants.
The latest plot allegations are linked to criminal investigations
launched in June 2007 into Ergenekon, an alleged "deep state"
conspiracy by a group of military officials, state security personnel,
lawyers and journalists now behind bars on charges of planning a coup
against the elected AKP government.
Christian Murders Termed 'Operations' The plot document began with
specific mention of the three most recent deadly attacks perpetrated
against Christians in Turkey, cryptically labeling them "operations."
Initial Turkish public opinion had blamed Islamist groups for the
savage murders of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro (February
2006), Turkish Armenian Agos newspaper editor Hrant Dink (January
2007) and two Turkish Christians and a German Christian in Malatya
(April 2007). But authors of the Cage plan complained that AKP's
"intensive propaganda" after these incidents had instead fingered
the Ergenekon cabal as the perpetrators.
"The Cage plan demanded that these 'operations' be conducted in a
more systematic and planned manner," attorney Orhan Kemal Cengiz
wrote in Today's Zaman on Nov. 27. "They want to re-market the
'black propaganda' that Muslims kill Christians," concluded Cengiz,
a joint-plaintiff lawyer in the Malatya murder trial and legal adviser
to Turkey's Association of Protestant Churches.
In the first phase of the Cage plot, officers were ordered to
compile information identifying the non-Muslim communities' leaders,
schools, associations, cemeteries, places of worship and media outlets,
including all subscribers to the Armenian Agos weekly. With this data,
the second stage called for creating an atmosphere of fear by openly
targeting these religious minorities, using intimidating letters and
telephone calls, warnings posted on websites linked to the government
and graffiti in neighborhoods where non-Muslims lived.
To channel public opinion, the third phase centered on priming TV and
print media to criticize and debate the AKP government's handling
of security for religious minorities, to raise the specter of the
party ultimately replacing Turkey's secular laws and institutions
with Islamic provisions.
The final phase called for planting bombs and suspicious packages
near homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims, desecrating their
cemeteries, setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian
and Jewish citizens, and even kidnapping and assassinating prominent
leaders among the religious minorities.
Lawyer Fethiye Cetin, representing the Dink family in the Agos editor's
murder trial, admitted she was having difficulty even accepting the
details of the Cage plot.
"I am engulfed in horror," Cetin told Bianet, the online Independent
Communications Network. "Some forces of this country sit down and make
a plan to identify their fellow citizens, of their own country, as
enemies! They will kill Armenians and non-Muslims in the psychological
war they are conducting against the ones identified as their enemies."
No Surprise to Christians "We were not very shocked," Protestant
Pastor Ihsan Ozbek of the Kurtulus Churches in Ankara admitted to
Taraf the day after the news broke.
After the Malatya murders, he stated, Christians had no official
means to investigate their suspicions about the instigators, "and
we could not be very brave . . . Once again the evidence is being
seen, that it is the juntas who are against democracy who [have been]
behind the propaganda in the past 10 years against Christianity and
missionary activity."
Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church also openly
addressed the Cage plot, referring to recent incidents of intimidation
against Christian and Jewish citizens in Istanbul's Kurtulus and
Adalar districts, as well as a previous raid conducted against the
alumni of a Greek high school.
"At the time, we thought that they were just trying to scare us,"
he told Today's Zaman. Several of the jailed Ergenekon suspects now
on trial were closely involved for years in protesting and slandering
the Istanbul Patriarchate, considered the heart of Eastern Orthodoxy's
300 million adherents. As ultranationalists, they claimed the Orthodox
wanted to set up a Vatican-style entity within Turkey.
Last summer 90 graves were desecrated in the Greek Orthodox community's
Balikli cemetery in the Zeytinburnu district of Istanbul.
The city's 65 non-Muslim cemeteries are not guarded by the
municipality, with their maintenance and protection left to Greek,
Armenian and Jewish minorities.
As details continued to emerge and national debates raged for more
than a week over the Cage plan in the Turkish media, calls came
from a broad spectrum of society to merge the files of the ongoing
Dink and Malatya murder trials with the Ergenekon file. The Turkish
General Staff has consistently labeled much of the media coverage of
the Ergenekon investigations as part of smear campaign against the
fiercely secular military, which until the past two years enjoyed
virtual impunity from civilian court investigations.
According to Ria Oomen-Ruijten, the European Parliament's rapporteur
on Turkey, the long-entrenched role of the military in the Turkish
government is an "obstacle" for further democratization and integration
into the EU.