Whistleblower reveals foreign policy blunders in Turkey

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Whistleblower reveals foreign policy blunders in Turkey

 

http://www.todayszaman.com/columnist-304470-whistleblower-reveals-foreign-policy-blunders-in-turkey.html

18 January 2013, Friday

 

ABDULLAH BOZKURT

a.bozkurt@todayszaman.com

 

 

A highly classified letter sent by an anonymous officer to the boss of

Turkey's spy agency in 2007 was leaked to the press from the Turkish

Parliament this week. The letter, apparently written by a

whistleblower in the Special Forces Command (ÖKK), which is a special

operations unit answerable directly to the General Staff, reveals

shocking plans cooked up by a junta in the military. The ÖKK often

rendered services for the Tactical Mobilization Group (STK), formerly

known as the Special Warfare Department (ÖHD), an equivalent to the

Gladio style stay-behind operation in the Turkish military.

Therefore it is safe to assume that s/he had intimate knowledge of

shady deals planned in this secretive branch of the Turkish military.

The officer wrote six letters in total detailing how he was involved

in dirty schemes devised by a clandestine gang in special ops. They

were sent to the parliamentary Coup and Memorandum Investigation

Commission for examination by the National Intelligence Organization

(MÝT). The officer was complaining that the special forces were being

manipulated by a select group of coup-loving junta members who were

determined to oust the democratically elected and popular government

in Turkey despite the fact that the STK was designed to mobilize

national assets in time of war against the external threat. The letter

was addressed to then-Undersecretary of MÝT Emre Taner.

 

It was certainly a hair-raising experience to read the letter leaked

to reporters. According to the whistleblower's account, the ÖKK was

ordered to draw plans to blow up two bridges across the Bosporus in

Ýstanbul, the Boðaziçi and Fatih Sultan Mehmet bridges, the Yalova

ferry and the Bolu Tunnel on the highway connecting Ankara and

Istanbul as well as key crossing points on the Black Sea Ring Highway.

The command's plans also included the bombing of Atatürk's mausoleum,

called Anýtkabir, in the country's capital.

 

The plan also included a series of bombings during massive protests

that were held against the government in 2007, dubbed "republican

rallies" by their organizers, in several provinces of the country. The

attack was supposed to be blamed on religious fundamentalist groups

affiliated with the governing Justice and Development Party (AK

Party). We now learned from the ongoing court cases in Turkey that

these protests were organized with the manipulation of the Ergenekon

terrorist organization, a shadowy network nested within the state with

the aim of overthrowing the government.

 

Since there is not enough space to detail all plans mentioned in the

letter here, I will dwell on points that involve foreign policy and

Turkey's neighbors. The letter claims that the junta wanted to risk

dragging the country into hot international conflicts just to expand

the maneuvering room of the military in Turkey and to put embarrassing

blemishes on the government's record. Looking back to events in 2007

before and after the June snap elections held because of the

presidential election crisis in Parliament, it is obvious that some of

these plans were actually carried out.

 

For example, the reports on dogfights between Turkish and Greek jets

over the disputed Aegean airspace sharply increased following the May

2006 incident in which Turkish and Greek F-16 jet fighters collided in

mid-air as they were shadowing each other. The Turkish and Greek

foreign ministries exchanged mutual accusations claiming a violation

of national airspace in March 2007, almost a year after the aviation

incident. According to General Staff, in the first half of 2007

(interestingly in the period leading up to the July elections) Turkish

 

jets engaged Greek fighters 207 times to prevent incursion into

Turkish airspace. In the same year, cockpit conversations among

Turkish pilots and how they operate during these dogfights were posted

on the YouTube website. These events cannot be coincidental.

 

This reminds me of Operation Thunderstorm (Oraj) which was a sub-plot

of the Sledgehammer military coup operation that was discovered in

2010 court documents. The plan sees an escalation of the crisis with

Greece by provoking conflict in the air, at sea and on land borders.

However, the ultimate target of the plan was not Greece but the

Turkish government itself. Bringing Turkey to the brink of war with

Greece was a "means to an end" scenario to prepare the groundwork for

an armed military intervention in Turkey. It perfectly fit the

scenarios mentioned by the whistleblower's letter in 2007.

 

The Oraj plan, dated February 2003, specifically asks for increased

flights over the Aegean and orders commanding officers to instruct

pilots to engage in harassment maneuvers with Greek fighter jets. It

wants Turkish pilots to be more aggressive and even issues new rules

of engagement allowing pilots to take shots at Greek fighters, albeit

unofficially. The plan suggests reorganizing the Special Fleet within

the Turkish Air Forces (THK) with the specific objective of tasking a

Turkish pilot to shoot down a Turkish jet in his own squadron in case

all efforts to provoke a Greek fighter jet to destroy a Turkish one

fail. Fabricated stories would then be planted in the media, saying

that Greece intentionally shot down a Turkish jet. The plotters hoped

that this would create a huge embarrassment for the ruling AK Party

government.

 

Going back to the letter again, another foreign policy issue the junta

tried to exploit by mobilizing some assets among civil society groups

in order to hammer the government was Cyprus. There was an intensive

campaign in 2007 against the government based on false allegations

that Turkish Cypriots on the divided Mediterranean island were sold

out by the AK Party. Even advocacy groups that have nothing to do with

foreign policy started issuing declarations against the government

that the Turks in Cyprus were left alone in their fight against the

Greek Cypriots. The fact that there are too many examples from 2007 of

this campaign shows how the junta was effective in its planning

through special ops.

 

2007 was also a year when Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink was

shot dead outside his newspaper's office in Þiþli in January. Since

the issue of non-Muslims in general and the Armenian genocide in

particular are sensitive topics in Turkey, it would not come as a

surprise that the junta tried to exploit these sensitivities in

Turkish society. Hopefully other documents MÝT has referred to in the

parliamentary commission can shed some light on finally resolving the

Dink murder. The same goes for the Malatya massacre case involving the

slaughter of three Christians in 2007, and the case of Father Andrea

Santoro, who was murdered in 2006 in Trabzon. In that same year,

Armenian genocide bill discussions in the US Congress further fueled

nationalist fervor in Turkey, much to the benefit of the junta's aims,

putting more strain on the government.

 

The Kurdish issue to the extent it linked with the semiautonomous

Kurdistan in northern Iraq was another area in which the junta saw an

opportunity to score against the government. Starting in January 2007,

the government was subjected to an intense campaign of being too

passive when it comes to dealing with northern Iraq. The then-chief of

Turkey's General Staff Gen. Yaþar Büyükanýt was publicly accusing

Kurdish authorities in northern Iraq of actively backing Kurdistan

Workers' Party (PKK) terrorists, threatening a cross-border incursion.

The military was overstepping into the policy decision-making process,

creating a deep rift between the army and the government. The goal was

to create the impression that the government was simply too weak to

 

handle a critically important issue on the national agenda when it

resisted the idea of a special military operation into northern Iraq.

The government was able to fend off the pressure until June but was

eventually forced to cave in and allowed the military to go into

northern Iraq.

 

No doubt that all of these plans require the manipulation of public

opinion through the media, and the ÖKK had plenty signed up for this

job, some voluntarily and others without even knowing they were on the

hook. The whistleblower's letter also exposes this by saying that as a

part of these plans, journalists would be urged to write false news

stories. Therefore some of the journalists accused in the coup cases

are actually co-conspirators in these hideous plans against the nation

and are now responding to charges in a court of law. They have not

performed their public duty by exposing dirty deals to the public but

instead have behaved as pens-for-hire to serve the interests of coup

mongers in Turkey. Those who are keen to advance the press freedom

issue in Turkey need to separate these bad apples from legitimate

infringement on freedom of the press cases in order to help contribute

to the further democratization of Turkey.