Tweet
TURKEY: AN ACTION MOVIE WITHOUT A 'GOOD GUY'
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/17/turkey-an-action-movie-without-a-good-guy/
By Ayse Gunaysu // January 17, 2014
Special for the Armenian Weekly
In Turkey today, a very high-tempo, high-tension action scene
is unfolding, with a life-or-death fight at the top of the state
apparatus. A volcano of corruption is erupting once more, releasing
all the filth from below the surface. We're seeing the sons of
cabinet members being taken from their homes, alongside prominent
businessmen, and put into custody; the mass removal of middle-
to high-ranking security officers; and comprehensive changes in the
juridical organization. But there are no prospects for a better Turkey,
because both parties of this fierce fight belong to the "bad guy"
club--the ruling AK Party and the informal but all-mighty clandestine
organization of the "Gulen community."
Gulen (L) and Erdogan (Photo: worldbulletin.net)
The audience is deprived of the expectation of a reward for watching
these horrors play out. There is no hope for the emergence of a good
guy, who will punish the bad and set things right. There is no need to
wait for it, because there is no good guy at all in this action film.
None of the already-few forces of democracy in Turkey have the
slightest role to play in the plot.
The new enemies are, in fact, old comrades-in-arms. Until
very recently, both were acting in perfect harmony in their
evil-doings--their vulgar, gross denial of the genocides of Asia
Mnior's Christian population, their repression of the Kurdish
resistance, their involvement in judicial scandals (Turkey has the
highest number of political prisons in the world), in human rights
violations of every kind, in public racism and discrimination, in
the prisons where life becomes hell for the inmates.
The disintegrating state apparatus
Now, let's take a short look at what happened: On Dec. 17, 2013,
the Ä°stanbul police detained 47 people for their involvement in
corruption and bribery. The names of the detainees created a stir:
they included the sons of three cabinet members, Muammer Guler,
the Minister of Interior, Zafer Caglayan, Minister of Economy, and
Erdogan Bayraktar, Minister of Environment and Urban Planning; Mustafa
Demir, the mayor of the district municipality of Fatih (known for the
much-debated "urban renovation project" that left thousands of Roma
homeless); as well as a number of prominent businessmen, including
the Iranian-Azerbaijani Raze Zarrab and Suleyman Aslan, the general
manager of the state-run Halkbank. Newspapers have also reported
that Egemen BagiÅ~_, the Minister of European Union Affairs, may be
a potential suspect of bribery related to businessman Reza Zarrab.
The police reportedly confiscated some $17.5 million used for bribery
during the investigation; $4.5 million came from Aslan's residence, and
$750,000 from the Interior Minister's son's home. Prosecutors accused
14 people, including 2 sons of cabinet members, of corruption, fraud,
money laundering, and smuggling gold. On Dec. 21, the court ordered
their arrest. Reports indicated that a new investigation would be
held on Dec. 26 involving Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's sons,
Bilal and Burak, as well as certain al-Qaeda affiliates from Saudi
Arabia, such as Yusuf Al Qadi and Osama Khoutub. But police officers
in the Istanbul Security Directory, newly appointed by the government
just a few days prior, reportedly refused to carry out the orders
of arrest. The deputy director of public prosecutions also didn't
approve this new operation. The man behind this second investigation,
Prosecutor Muammer AkkaÅ~_, was dismissed on the same day. AkkaÅ~_
said he was prevented from performing his duty.
A few days later, on Jan. 7, the police force was purged, and the
positions of 350 police officers were changed, including chiefs of
the units dealing with fraud, smuggling, and organized crime.
The public's amazing state of numbness
The only good thing in this show is the possibility that the Turkish
people, still loyal to their "father state," may take one tiny step
towards doubting the morality of the entire mechanism that dominates
their life. With each new scandal, the Turkish public is shocked at
the extent of the corruption revealed. Yet, it always falls back into
an everlasting state of oblivion, forgetting that corruption seems
to be an integral part of the establishment.
The republican history is full of scandals that tell stories of
large-scale irregularities, embezzlement, and abuse. Not very long
ago, in 1996, the famous "Susurluk Accident," during the peak of
the armed clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army, had prompted
many to believe that nothing would be the same again. The car crash
victims included the deputy chief of the Istanbul police department;
a member of parliament who led a powerful Kurdish clan serving as
the paramilitary armed support of the Turkish army; and the leader
of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, who was a contract killer on
Interpol's red list.
The scandal had revealed the close relations between the government,
armed forces, and organized crime in a wide variety of unlawful
activities that ranged from drug trafficking, gambling, and money
laundering to extra-judicial killings and gross human rights violations
in the Kurdish provinces. Although then-Interior Minister Agar,
who was shown to be closely involved with outlawed gang members, and
then-Prime Minister Ciller, who led the state-sponsored assassinations,
resigned after the scandal, no one received punitive sentences. Agar
was eventually re-elected to parliament as a leader of the True Path
Party (DYP), and the sole survivor of the crash, chieftain Sedat Bucak,
was released. In short, the perpetrators escaped justice. A number of
Susurluk investigators subsequently died in car accidents suspiciously
similar to the Susurluk car crash itself--two in 1997, and one in 1999.
The corruption that gave birth to Turkey
Nothing--no restructuring of the state apparatus, no reformulation of
the founding values of the government, no enlightenment on the part
of the Turkish public--came from this outpouring of immense filth
that lay deep beneath the surface.
Corruption forms the very texture of life in Turkey, because corruption
is the initiator, the founder, the very reason for its existence. Less
than 100 years ago, it was founded on the massive plunder of Armenian,
Greek, and Assyrian property, and the unlawful transfer of their
wealth to the state and to the local Muslim population.
Since then, since this tremendously large-scale theft, embezzlement,
fraud, and corruption, we in Turkey all live on a vast land of sticky,
stinky swamp, bubbling continuously, emitting nauseous vapors, fuming
sickening smoke and, from time to time, creating small volcanoes that
throw up the age-long filth the swamp has struggled to keep inside.
Parliament is now (as of Jan. 12) debating a government-proposed bill
that would strengthen the Justice Ministry's hold on a council that
appoints judges and prosecutors and oversees their work. Opinion
makers, academics, and politicians are on TV heatedly protesting
(rightly) that this would put an end to the already feeble independence
of the judiciary system.
The judicial system and denialism
>From the start, the judicial system in Turkey was designed to serve
denialism--the denial of the founding essence of the Turkish state,
the genocide, the suppression of all opposition. It was the High Court
of Appeals that, in 1974, decided that the minority foundations'
"1936 declarations"--given at the request of the government to
record the immovable properties they presently possessed--should be
considered to be the foundations' charters and, therefore, unless it
was clearly indicated that the foundation could acquire new immovables,
acquisitions made after the declaration had no legal validity. So
hundreds of immovables acquired by foundations after 1936 (by way
of donation or passed on by elderly non-Muslim individuals, as they
were once sources of income of the non-Muslim communities' churches,
hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, and schools) were seized by the
state. What was unbelievably unlawful in this decision was that these
foundations of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey were referred to as the
institutions of "foreigners"! Such is the lawlessness practiced by
the highest body for justice in this country.
The swamp is sticky and contaminates everything that it comes into
contact with. The recent scandal that led to a wide-scale cabinet
reshuffling broke out during the so-called "peace process" between
the PKK, the armed organization of the Kurdish liberation movement,
and the Turkish government. While generally, individual Kurds and some
prominent local officials in the Kurdish provinces display an honest
and conscientious attitude towards Armenians' demands for genocide
recognition, recently one of the top-level Kurdish leaders, a woman,
Bese Hozat, made anti-Armenian, anti-Greek, and anti-Jewish statements,
causing great disappointment and resentment among democratic forces
in Turkey.
In an interview with the Kurdish Firat news agency about the "parallel
state" (a trendy phrase nowadays to refer to the Islamic Fethullah
Gulen movement), Hozat said: "The Jewish lobby, the nationalist
Armenians and Greeks are such parallel states. Such parallel states
are in touch with one another and have interests from each other.
Parallel states do not have formal and constitutional rights. It seems
they do not have troops either, but they have an organized and a strong
structure and they hinder the efforts for democratization in Turkey."
It was only a couple of weeks before that Rupen Janbazian, in the
Armenian Weekly, wrote how he was deeply impressed by his visit to
Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd. "What is interesting, however, was that nearly
a century after the genocide began, the descendants of those Kurds
not only accepted our delegation in Dikranagerd with open arms, but
actually apologized, time and time again, for the part some of their
ancestors had in the genocide--something Armenians across the world
wish to hear from the government of Turkey," he said. "Hospitality is
a trait Armenians have been known to value for millennia, but what we
experienced in our six days in Dikranagerd was something I had, quite
unfortunately, never felt in Armenia nor in the Armenian Diaspora, not
to that extent, anyway. These people, who I had heard only negative
things about from so many of my compatriots, were not only taking us
to all the sites of Armenian civilization and culture in the city, but
were giving us the factual, unadulterated history behind these places."
The only hope for a 'Good Guy'
Were Bese Hozat's words an answer to Rupen Janbazian? No, this
discourse has its roots in the original corruption, the initial
one--the genocide and its denial, the one that gave birth to the
still-fuming swamp that contaminates everything, even the politics
pursued by the most radical opponent of the present Turkish state,
the PKK.
These words reflect the dirty politics that the PKK leadership is
itself caught up in, in this fight between the two bad guys, believing
it has to choose the one that will maintain official power for the
sake of the "peace process," which will mean nothing if the original
corruption is not revealed, recognized, and compensated.
These words also reflect the Turkish state's biggest fear: the
possibility of mutual understanding and cooperation between the
politically involved Armenians and Kurds. The PKK leadership is
forced to give into the government's demands for a concession by
declaring that it will not challenge the official Turkish thesis on
the Armenian question.
But these words do not belong to the people of Dikranagerd who
welcomed Janbazian. Here is how Janbazian described them in the
Armenian Weekly: "One would assume that a stadium full of Kurds who
don't understand Armenian would be bored, uninterested, and ultimately
indifferent--especially since we were speaking as representatives of
a people who once called these lands 'home.' Yet, we witnessed the
exact opposite that day. As I read out loud what we had written in the
Western Armenian dialect of my forefathers, the audience watched and
listened attentively. It almost seemed like they understood everything
I said."
It is clear that the politically conscious sections of the Kurdish
people are far ahead of the PKK leadership, which is more interested
in gaining ground in the negotiations behind closed doors than adhering
to the ideal of justice.
The emergence of a "good guy" in this disgusting action film will
depend on whether or not the movement for recognition from below can
become strong enough to challenge the denialism that spews from the
swamp of corruption.
http://www.armenianweekly.com/2014/01/17/turkey-an-action-movie-without-a-good-guy/
By Ayse Gunaysu // January 17, 2014
Special for the Armenian Weekly
In Turkey today, a very high-tempo, high-tension action scene
is unfolding, with a life-or-death fight at the top of the state
apparatus. A volcano of corruption is erupting once more, releasing
all the filth from below the surface. We're seeing the sons of
cabinet members being taken from their homes, alongside prominent
businessmen, and put into custody; the mass removal of middle-
to high-ranking security officers; and comprehensive changes in the
juridical organization. But there are no prospects for a better Turkey,
because both parties of this fierce fight belong to the "bad guy"
club--the ruling AK Party and the informal but all-mighty clandestine
organization of the "Gulen community."
Gulen (L) and Erdogan (Photo: worldbulletin.net)
The audience is deprived of the expectation of a reward for watching
these horrors play out. There is no hope for the emergence of a good
guy, who will punish the bad and set things right. There is no need to
wait for it, because there is no good guy at all in this action film.
None of the already-few forces of democracy in Turkey have the
slightest role to play in the plot.
The new enemies are, in fact, old comrades-in-arms. Until
very recently, both were acting in perfect harmony in their
evil-doings--their vulgar, gross denial of the genocides of Asia
Mnior's Christian population, their repression of the Kurdish
resistance, their involvement in judicial scandals (Turkey has the
highest number of political prisons in the world), in human rights
violations of every kind, in public racism and discrimination, in
the prisons where life becomes hell for the inmates.
The disintegrating state apparatus
Now, let's take a short look at what happened: On Dec. 17, 2013,
the Ä°stanbul police detained 47 people for their involvement in
corruption and bribery. The names of the detainees created a stir:
they included the sons of three cabinet members, Muammer Guler,
the Minister of Interior, Zafer Caglayan, Minister of Economy, and
Erdogan Bayraktar, Minister of Environment and Urban Planning; Mustafa
Demir, the mayor of the district municipality of Fatih (known for the
much-debated "urban renovation project" that left thousands of Roma
homeless); as well as a number of prominent businessmen, including
the Iranian-Azerbaijani Raze Zarrab and Suleyman Aslan, the general
manager of the state-run Halkbank. Newspapers have also reported
that Egemen BagiÅ~_, the Minister of European Union Affairs, may be
a potential suspect of bribery related to businessman Reza Zarrab.
The police reportedly confiscated some $17.5 million used for bribery
during the investigation; $4.5 million came from Aslan's residence, and
$750,000 from the Interior Minister's son's home. Prosecutors accused
14 people, including 2 sons of cabinet members, of corruption, fraud,
money laundering, and smuggling gold. On Dec. 21, the court ordered
their arrest. Reports indicated that a new investigation would be
held on Dec. 26 involving Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's sons,
Bilal and Burak, as well as certain al-Qaeda affiliates from Saudi
Arabia, such as Yusuf Al Qadi and Osama Khoutub. But police officers
in the Istanbul Security Directory, newly appointed by the government
just a few days prior, reportedly refused to carry out the orders
of arrest. The deputy director of public prosecutions also didn't
approve this new operation. The man behind this second investigation,
Prosecutor Muammer AkkaÅ~_, was dismissed on the same day. AkkaÅ~_
said he was prevented from performing his duty.
A few days later, on Jan. 7, the police force was purged, and the
positions of 350 police officers were changed, including chiefs of
the units dealing with fraud, smuggling, and organized crime.
The public's amazing state of numbness
The only good thing in this show is the possibility that the Turkish
people, still loyal to their "father state," may take one tiny step
towards doubting the morality of the entire mechanism that dominates
their life. With each new scandal, the Turkish public is shocked at
the extent of the corruption revealed. Yet, it always falls back into
an everlasting state of oblivion, forgetting that corruption seems
to be an integral part of the establishment.
The republican history is full of scandals that tell stories of
large-scale irregularities, embezzlement, and abuse. Not very long
ago, in 1996, the famous "Susurluk Accident," during the peak of
the armed clashes between the PKK and the Turkish army, had prompted
many to believe that nothing would be the same again. The car crash
victims included the deputy chief of the Istanbul police department;
a member of parliament who led a powerful Kurdish clan serving as
the paramilitary armed support of the Turkish army; and the leader
of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, who was a contract killer on
Interpol's red list.
The scandal had revealed the close relations between the government,
armed forces, and organized crime in a wide variety of unlawful
activities that ranged from drug trafficking, gambling, and money
laundering to extra-judicial killings and gross human rights violations
in the Kurdish provinces. Although then-Interior Minister Agar,
who was shown to be closely involved with outlawed gang members, and
then-Prime Minister Ciller, who led the state-sponsored assassinations,
resigned after the scandal, no one received punitive sentences. Agar
was eventually re-elected to parliament as a leader of the True Path
Party (DYP), and the sole survivor of the crash, chieftain Sedat Bucak,
was released. In short, the perpetrators escaped justice. A number of
Susurluk investigators subsequently died in car accidents suspiciously
similar to the Susurluk car crash itself--two in 1997, and one in 1999.
The corruption that gave birth to Turkey
Nothing--no restructuring of the state apparatus, no reformulation of
the founding values of the government, no enlightenment on the part
of the Turkish public--came from this outpouring of immense filth
that lay deep beneath the surface.
Corruption forms the very texture of life in Turkey, because corruption
is the initiator, the founder, the very reason for its existence. Less
than 100 years ago, it was founded on the massive plunder of Armenian,
Greek, and Assyrian property, and the unlawful transfer of their
wealth to the state and to the local Muslim population.
Since then, since this tremendously large-scale theft, embezzlement,
fraud, and corruption, we in Turkey all live on a vast land of sticky,
stinky swamp, bubbling continuously, emitting nauseous vapors, fuming
sickening smoke and, from time to time, creating small volcanoes that
throw up the age-long filth the swamp has struggled to keep inside.
Parliament is now (as of Jan. 12) debating a government-proposed bill
that would strengthen the Justice Ministry's hold on a council that
appoints judges and prosecutors and oversees their work. Opinion
makers, academics, and politicians are on TV heatedly protesting
(rightly) that this would put an end to the already feeble independence
of the judiciary system.
The judicial system and denialism
>From the start, the judicial system in Turkey was designed to serve
denialism--the denial of the founding essence of the Turkish state,
the genocide, the suppression of all opposition. It was the High Court
of Appeals that, in 1974, decided that the minority foundations'
"1936 declarations"--given at the request of the government to
record the immovable properties they presently possessed--should be
considered to be the foundations' charters and, therefore, unless it
was clearly indicated that the foundation could acquire new immovables,
acquisitions made after the declaration had no legal validity. So
hundreds of immovables acquired by foundations after 1936 (by way
of donation or passed on by elderly non-Muslim individuals, as they
were once sources of income of the non-Muslim communities' churches,
hospitals, orphanages, cemeteries, and schools) were seized by the
state. What was unbelievably unlawful in this decision was that these
foundations of non-Muslim citizens of Turkey were referred to as the
institutions of "foreigners"! Such is the lawlessness practiced by
the highest body for justice in this country.
The swamp is sticky and contaminates everything that it comes into
contact with. The recent scandal that led to a wide-scale cabinet
reshuffling broke out during the so-called "peace process" between
the PKK, the armed organization of the Kurdish liberation movement,
and the Turkish government. While generally, individual Kurds and some
prominent local officials in the Kurdish provinces display an honest
and conscientious attitude towards Armenians' demands for genocide
recognition, recently one of the top-level Kurdish leaders, a woman,
Bese Hozat, made anti-Armenian, anti-Greek, and anti-Jewish statements,
causing great disappointment and resentment among democratic forces
in Turkey.
In an interview with the Kurdish Firat news agency about the "parallel
state" (a trendy phrase nowadays to refer to the Islamic Fethullah
Gulen movement), Hozat said: "The Jewish lobby, the nationalist
Armenians and Greeks are such parallel states. Such parallel states
are in touch with one another and have interests from each other.
Parallel states do not have formal and constitutional rights. It seems
they do not have troops either, but they have an organized and a strong
structure and they hinder the efforts for democratization in Turkey."
It was only a couple of weeks before that Rupen Janbazian, in the
Armenian Weekly, wrote how he was deeply impressed by his visit to
Diyarbakir/Dikranagerd. "What is interesting, however, was that nearly
a century after the genocide began, the descendants of those Kurds
not only accepted our delegation in Dikranagerd with open arms, but
actually apologized, time and time again, for the part some of their
ancestors had in the genocide--something Armenians across the world
wish to hear from the government of Turkey," he said. "Hospitality is
a trait Armenians have been known to value for millennia, but what we
experienced in our six days in Dikranagerd was something I had, quite
unfortunately, never felt in Armenia nor in the Armenian Diaspora, not
to that extent, anyway. These people, who I had heard only negative
things about from so many of my compatriots, were not only taking us
to all the sites of Armenian civilization and culture in the city, but
were giving us the factual, unadulterated history behind these places."
The only hope for a 'Good Guy'
Were Bese Hozat's words an answer to Rupen Janbazian? No, this
discourse has its roots in the original corruption, the initial
one--the genocide and its denial, the one that gave birth to the
still-fuming swamp that contaminates everything, even the politics
pursued by the most radical opponent of the present Turkish state,
the PKK.
These words reflect the dirty politics that the PKK leadership is
itself caught up in, in this fight between the two bad guys, believing
it has to choose the one that will maintain official power for the
sake of the "peace process," which will mean nothing if the original
corruption is not revealed, recognized, and compensated.
These words also reflect the Turkish state's biggest fear: the
possibility of mutual understanding and cooperation between the
politically involved Armenians and Kurds. The PKK leadership is
forced to give into the government's demands for a concession by
declaring that it will not challenge the official Turkish thesis on
the Armenian question.
But these words do not belong to the people of Dikranagerd who
welcomed Janbazian. Here is how Janbazian described them in the
Armenian Weekly: "One would assume that a stadium full of Kurds who
don't understand Armenian would be bored, uninterested, and ultimately
indifferent--especially since we were speaking as representatives of
a people who once called these lands 'home.' Yet, we witnessed the
exact opposite that day. As I read out loud what we had written in the
Western Armenian dialect of my forefathers, the audience watched and
listened attentively. It almost seemed like they understood everything
I said."
It is clear that the politically conscious sections of the Kurdish
people are far ahead of the PKK leadership, which is more interested
in gaining ground in the negotiations behind closed doors than adhering
to the ideal of justice.
The emergence of a "good guy" in this disgusting action film will
depend on whether or not the movement for recognition from below can
become strong enough to challenge the denialism that spews from the
swamp of corruption.