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Thursday, 29 May 2008, 02:35 EDT
Gangs of Ankara: A "Deep History"
By By Dr. Zafer Yörük
The Kurdish Globe
Grasping the "deep meaning" of the recent Ergenekon arrests
The investigation into the Ergenekon gang has uncovered powerful connections including members of the military and Parliament, a convicted unltranationalist fugitive, and a police chief-and these individuals may only make up the beginning of a long list of the guilty.
On March 21, 2008, Turkey woke up to the shocking news about a new wave of arrests in the top echelons of society in relation to the ongoing Ergenekon investigation. The detainees included the 83-year-old editor of secularist daily Cumhuriyet, İlhan Selçuk, the former rector of Istanbul University, Kemal Alemdaroğlu, and the leading figure of Turkey's nationalist left, Doğu Perinçek. A number of academics, lawyers, and high-ranking journalists in addition to various ranks of military and police officers, including Gen. Veli Küçük, were already in custody, awaiting trial on the same charges. This shock came exactly one week after the transmission of an even more shocking affair: the filing of an indictment for the closure of Turkey's ruling party, AKP, in the Constitutional Court on March 14, 2008.
It has so far been established that Ergenekon, which is a combination of secularist, nationalist left, and ultra-right nationalist elements of military and civilian bureaucracy, were involved in a number of unresolved murders including some of the attacks that have been attributed to the PKK and Islamist groups. They also planned to assassinate Turkey's Nobel Laureate, Orhan Pamuk, and many high-profile Kurdish and AKP politicians, including the President and the Prime Minister. All these plans are believed to be part and parcel of a conspiracy to prepare the grounds for a military coup in 2009.
The sequence of these two events has led all the observers to read the two lawsuits as the symptoms of a new escalation in the ongoing secularist-Islamist conflict. However, a careful look at the history of the extrajudicial state organizations in Turkey may lead one to a different conclusion.
The history of the "deep state" or the "state gang" and the history of the modern Turkish state are one and the same thing. We can begin the story with the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II's inauguration of Turkey's first Western-style intelligence service, Teskilati Mahsusa, in the late 19th century. The original purpose of this organization was to engage in clandestine activities in India in order to disseminate Islamist propaganda against the British occupation. Abdulhamid was hoping to use the Indian Muslim resistance card in order to ease British pressure on the Ottoman Empire. It may be interesting to know that Abdulhamid also founded the first special war units of Turkey's history, the Hamidiye Regiments, as a military measure against the secessionist Armenian aspirations in the Kurdish provinces.
The Intelligence Service and the notion of Special War gained increasing importance in parallel to the speedy shrinking of the Empire. Ottoman land had become the field of antagonisms with 40 percent Christian population increasingly defining themselves in their opposition to the Turkish-Muslim rule and relying primarily on hopes of exogenous protection and intervention, while the Turks had to rely solely on their own "nationalization" and more importantly their state's apparatus of force and violence. According to the memoirs of Esref Kuscubasi, the founder of Teşkilatı Mahsusa, certain plans were drawn and put in practice for the liquidation of non-Muslim elements in Anatolia, which the Turkish state was designing as the "last shelter" for the Muslim-Turkish population of the outlying portions of the Empire. The military measures for this end consisted of direct intervention for forcible deportation, while political and economic measures aimed primarily to mobilize Turkish Muslim public to regain their dominance as the "essential element" in Anatolia through participation in the liquidation of the other elements.
This plan, which was originally drawn as early as 1894, was systematically implemented for three decades; its realization reached its peak with the Armenian Genocide of 1915, and was concluded by the population exchange with Greece in 1922. It is interesting to note that the same organization, Teşkilatı Mahsusa, uninterruptedly carried out the same plan under three different hostile regimes: the absolute monarchy of Abdulhamid, the constitutional monarchy of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), and the Kemalist Republican Regime of Ankara. This fact provides important indicators to establish the permanency of the Turkish "deep state" regardless of even the most radical changes on the political surface.
Under the Kemalist monoparty regime, certain elements of the "deep state," mainly the Islamists and partisan CUP elements, who could not adapt themselves to the new secularist dictatorship, were eliminated. This "classical Kemalist era" was marked by the "deep state" overtly operating on the surface in the form of a military-bureaucratic oligarchy, for there was no longer any need of secrecy. Following the transition to the multiparty system in 1950, the "deep state" had to be sunk once again in order to keep Turkey's political profile as a parliamentary regime intact. Under the surface, this structure had to go through an ideological metamorphosis according to Cold War conditions. Turkish "deep state" also linked itself with NATO's Europe-wide clandestine anticommunist organization, Gladio. Turkish "deep state," with its military wing, known as the Special War Department or Counter-Guerrilla, and its direct political extensions, such as "Anti-Communism Association," carried out a sustained civil war against popular socialist tendencies in Turkey for five decades until the 1990s without being affected by the diverse and hostile governments on the political surface. The most comprehensive achievement of the "deep state" was the 1980 military coup, which virtually liquidated all shades of the Turkish left through executions, widespread torture, and imprisonment.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc was immediately followed by a wave of eradication around Europe of the Gladio organizations, which had fulfilled their mission. The most traumatized purges took place in Italy in 1991, where the politics, economy, and society had been widely and deeply infiltrated by Italy's anti-Communist "deep state." As a result, the liquidation of Gladio led to the collapse of the whole political system, with the major parties' auto-liquidation under scandalous conditions.
Turkey managed to remain immune from this eradication, because the Turkish state was facing a further challenge, the Kurdish question, after the completion of the worldwide anti-Communist mission. When the 1990s approached, the Turkish "deep state" had already recomposed itself to lead a comprehensive war against Turkey's Kurdish citizens, which has lasted to date. This civil war was particularly intensive until the capture of Öcalan in 1999, during which more than 30,000 mostly Kurdish civilians were killed, tens of thousands of Kurdish villages were destroyed, and more than three million Kurds were forcibly displaced. The military wing of the "deep state" was extended to include a "special police force" in addition to the leftover elements of 1970s ultranationalist terrorist groups and Mafioso gangs.
The extensive dimension of the Turkish "deep state" was exposed with a scandalous car accident near the western town of Susurluk in November 1996. Sedat Bucak, a center-right Kurdish deputy, who was leading the paramilitary "village guards" against the PKK, Hüseyin Kocadağ, a high-ranking police chief famous for his left tendencies, and Abdullah Çatlı, a former ultra-right terrorist who was officially wanted by the authorities, emerged from the wreckage of the same car. In the boot, there were explosives, sniper rifles, and silencers. The police chief and the Mafioso terrorist died, while the Jash survived and refused to be questioned by the courts claiming that he had lost his memory during the accident. The Susurluk exposure led to a wave of arrests and imprisonments at the high echelons of the state apparatus, including the founder and commander of the "special police force," and led to Interior Minister Mehmet Agar's resignation. The Susurluk investigation revealed the link between the heroin trade and the anti-Kurdish war, in both of which the police, Mafia, and Kurdish Jash tribal leaders were equally involved. However, the investigation was not allowed to pursue the question of the degree of the military's involvement in this scandal. In fact, a military organization by the name of JITEM, which was responsible for a series of "unresolved assassinations" and torture of Kurdish politicians and intellectuals, had already been known as the extension of the same gang within the military. JITEM's "secret" commander, Gen. Veli Kucuk, was not charged until 2008, when he was indicted among the Ergenekon suspects.
Instead of a thorough clean-up operation, as happened in Italy in 1991, the Susurluk scandal of 1996 essentially led to the liquidation of the non-military elements of the "deep state." This purge, rather than indicating the end to the extrajudicial activities of the Turkish state, heralded mainly a new orientation in the ideology and practice of the "deep state." During the explosion of the Susurluk scandal, Turkey's government was led by the country's first Islamist prime minister, Necmettin Erbakan, which demonstrated that political Islam had already become an additional challenge to the conventional Republican establishment. Accordingly, the Turkish "deep state" began to reorganize itself in a strictly secularist fashion.
Erbakan's consent for the suppression of the Susurluk investigation, without probing the military, was not enough to save his position. His coalition government collapsed in 1997 under pressure from the military, and his Refah Party was closed down by the Constitutional Court. In this affair, a number of semi-official organizations calling themselves "civil society organizations" played a major role in mobilizing secular masses in demonstrations against the "threat of Sharia." Through these organizations, such as the "Ataturkist Thought Association" and "Mustafa Kemal Association," the "deep state" practiced an opening toward the secular left, through a discourse based on an amalgam of the secularist, nationalist, and socialist expressions. The iconic representation of this clumsy synthesis was the bringing together of the images of Che Guevara, the legendary revolutionary Deniz Gezmis, and the great Communist poet Nazim Hikmet, with images of Ataturk. This opening attracted extensively the left-inclined middle classes, who were feeling their secular lifestyles threatened by the rise of political Islam.
This secularist front was then extended through an exaggeration of the non-national character of political Islam, which went as far as to present Islamists as pursuing Arab interests against Turkish nationalism. This discourse managed to bring together the 1970s hostile siblings, the secular left and ultranationalist right, in a coalition government following the 1999 elections. Political expressions of this ideological orientation extended from the government to the streets with the increasing popularity of "nationalist left" and a political coalition between the MHP supporters and left elements, calling itself "red apple," a mythical object of Turkish nationalism.
The AKP's electoral victory in November 2002 was not welcomed by the Turkish "deep state," which had been reshaped to correspond to this secularist-nationalist synthesis. Two developments since 2002 have brought the "deep state" into its current shape: Firstly, the reforms that Turkey's accession to the candidate member status of the European Union required have created frustration among the state cadres, particularly among the police force, who were increasingly pressurized to change their methods of operation. And hostility toward the EU did not take long to emerge from these circles, one of the expressions of which has been a growing resentment toward the remnants of the non-Muslim population in Turkey. Secondly, the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, the participation in which the Turkish Parliament refused, and the consequent formation of the Kurdistan Region as a political entity in northern Iraq have sparked the Turkish fears of geographic disintegration. The nationalist ingredient of the "deep state" ideology was thus reinforced with a new push to the anti-Kurdish racism accompanied by a novel escalation in the anti-Christian and anti-Jewish sentiments. The typical Turkish quasi anti-imperialism was at work once again: When the Turkish nationalists felt themselves too weak to fight the international powers, they would turn their wrath to the people of their own country, whom they viewed as foreigners. This mindset led to the genocidal elimination of the non-Muslim Ottoman subjects during late 19th and early 20th centuries. This time, an identical quasi anti-imperialism has been responsible for a number of assassinations, including the Hirant Dink murder, and increasing lynch attempts targeting Kurdish families, Christian priests, and liberal intellectuals to accompany a sustained campaign that has aimed to turn the ordinary moderate nationalist masses into incurably racist "storm troopers."
The advance of the Ergenekon investigation reveals that this extensive extrajudicial state organization and various organizations directly formed by this gang or infiltrated by it have been involved in most of these horrific developments. The gang's aim has been declared to be implementing a provocative plan to drag the country toward a military coup in 2009. Ergenekon also aims to halt Turkey's political reform program supervised by the European Union, and many of its participants contemplate new international alliances by preaching closer relations with Russia and China to replace the ongoing U.S. domination of Turkey's domestic and international affairs.
The timing of the new momentum of the Ergenekon investigation was popularly interpreted as the AKP's response to the party's closure case. However, the above outline of Turkey's "deep history" demonstrates that a "deep conclusion" needs to be based on a reading of what exists beyond these immediate signs. We therefore need to take into account three points that derive from the above outline:
- Civilian political authorities, who prove incapable of carrying the investigation of a "deep state" scandal to its bitter end, are likely be overthrown in a very short time by the intervention of these uninvestigated elements.
- The program and activities of the extrajudicial extensions of the Turkish state are not affected by the political developments on the surface. Even the regime changes and coups d'état do not make much difference regarding the course of "deep state's" program and activities.
- The exposure of each "deep state" scandal is an expression of political will from inside the "deep state" for a new turn in the political-ideological orientation of the state and society.
In the light of these "deep points," the liquidation of the Ergenekon gang may well be read as a necessity for a new turn in the political and ideological orientation of the Turkish state that should be expected to take place in the near future. In fact, moving the focus of our attention from the AKP closure case to the April 2008 resolution of the National Security Council heralding the beginning of a new era in Turkey's relations with the Kurdistan Region, may well be the "royal road" to grasp the "deep meaning" of the recent Ergenekon arrests.
Dr. Zafer Yörük is a political analyst currently teaching political science at Salahaddin University.
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