You'll find yourself modded up and down over this.
In a purely intellectual sense, it is definitely a shame that the coup failed. The turkish miliatry has a history of stepping in when a government no longer adheres to the pricipals of the republic, specifically in relation to secularism.
By any metric, Tayyip's leadership is not secular.
However, the turkish people (at least according to my friends) are are badly shaken after the two recent terrorist attacks - the coup represents more violence - regardless of its 'benevolance'.
Turkey's admiration of Atatürk, the 'founding father' of modern Turkey is absolute: a benevolant dictator, he molded Turkey into a modern balanced country, uniting multiple social, ethnical and religous systems.
It is widely held that Tayyip is doing exactly the opposite: peice by peice dismantling the social balance and fundamentals of Turkey. Naturally, his actions are liked by some - but his goal is to divide, as opposed to unite.
Based upon this, the coup seems to be yet another tangile proof of the disquiet that has been installed under the Tayyip regieme.
Essentially, the turkish people have had enough of bloodshed, division and disharmony.
You and I may not like it, but the vast majority of the population supports the views and policies of the AKP and Erdogan. Democracy means the government can be controlled by unreasonable politicians, but it's not a dictatorship. If anything it's probably a bug in the political system in how a majority number of seats can control so much despite a considerable number of opposing seats in parliament.
Switzerland has a direct democracy where, if the population were to vote for it, they would pass all kinds of crazy policies. This is in contrast to the UK where people now believe the referandum means the government has to embark on an EU-exit process. They don't, because the UK is not a direct democracy. If Front Nationale ruled France and pushed discriminatory policies, would we call Le Penne a dictator as well?
Speaking of Ataturk, back when he introduced the reforms, some of it was unsupported by parts of the electorate, just as some of Edogan's policies are. Democracy means what the majority votes for wins, unless there's some rigging like in US, Russia, or probably Turkey as well. I mean, if votes can be rigged in the US and any and all objection is silenced by friends in the Supreme Court, then what do you expect from Russia or Turkey, really?
Isn't the current situation in Turkey just another case of shock doctrine, as unfortunately happens annually all over the globe?
I mean, if votes can be rigged in the US and any and all objection is silenced by friends in the Supreme Court, then what do you expect from Russia or Turkey, really?
There is a lot of misinformation about what happened in the 2000 election and about the Florida recount.
In the 2000 election, the close result in Florida triggered an automatic machine recount under Florida law. The machine recount still had Bush leading. So Gore sought hand recounts in only four heavily-Democratic counties. The Florida Supreme Court then ordered statewide hand recounting only of "undervotes" (ballots where the machine failed to detect any vote for any candidate). But the recount process itself was a total disaster: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/01/the-florida-recount-of-2000. The various counties doing the recounts were applying totally different standards to counting the votes.
In a 7-2 decision,[1] the Supreme Court held that the Florida recount violated the Constitution's "Equal Protection Clause," which requires the law to be applied equally to all people. It found that recounting only some ballots and recounting them using different standards in different places resulted in unequal application of the law based on where people voted.
In my opinion,[2] the Supreme Court got it right. The right thing to do would have been to stop after the machine recount. There is no way a hand recount was going to be a more fair and trustworthy process than the machine recount. The machine might not properly count what everyone intended to vote (e.g. because they didn't punch out the chad on the voting card all the way), but machine error is going to be random. Hand counting, on the other hand, will be biased toward favored candidates. Moreover, a subsequent $1 million study commissioned by news organizations found that Bush still would've won under most recount scenarios.
[1] The oft-reported "5-4" decision in Bush v. Gore was not about whether the recount was valid. 7 of 9 Justices agreed it was not. It was about whether Florida still had time to do a proper state-wide recount within the statutory deadline.
[2] I was too young to vote in 2000, but at the time I supported Gore. I too was infuriated about the 2000 election until I actually studied Bush v. Gore in law school.
Much more than simple majority vote, Democracy as we'd like to understand in the western world is about (1) Checks and Balances and (2) respect for individuals and minorities who are not in the ruling side. So it is not about Democracy vs Dictatorship, but Democracy vs Authoritarianism.
would we call Le Penne a dictator as well?
What would you call Chavez or Maduro? If not dictators (after all, "There is already too much democracy in Venezuela" according to their supporters), certainly they are the leaders of an authoritarian kleptocracy.
Democracy means what the majority votes win.
No. Voting is just the end stage of a much longer process, backed by the credibility of the Institutions to which the people put faith in.
Isn't the current situation in Turkey just another case of shock doctrine?
No. This is you trying to fit your worldview into the events.
Yeah, and the special thing about Turkey is (was?) that the military is one of the balancing forces because they were not controlled by the government as they are in many alternative democracies. This is partly historical due to past military coups. It's hard for me to say whether it's good or bad, given that the military independence has led to very negative outcomes like the 1980 coup, but it can also provide a force to keep a crazy parliament in check.
What would you call Chavez or Maduro?
Can't comment because I don't know enough, sorry. Will look into them.
This is you trying to fit your worldview into the events.
Maybe you're right, all I'm saying is that it looks like they are in the process of passing controversial policies while the electorate is under shock.
I don't mean "respect for minorities" in the sense of policies for disenfranchised groups. I meant in the pure numerical sense, i.e, "people who voted for the other guy don't get to lose their rights".
But I think we are just using different names for the same beast. "Liberal Democracies" are "Democracies as we'd like to understand them in the western world".
You and I may not like it, but the vast majority of the population supports the views and policies of the AKP and Erdogan.
Erdogan succeeds in part because he attacks democracy. The whole reason Erdogan (with ISIS's help) attacks the Kurds is because "they" deprived Erdogan's party of a parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002. [1][2] So his military attacks his own cities. [3]
Erdogan's been threatening academics for a long time. For example, detaining them for a petition for peace, hacking/blocking it so people can't read it. [5]
Erdogan destroying his opposition isn't democratic.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the HDP (and other anti-Erdogan political parties, if I understood the news correctly) oppose the latest coup? How could this be, if they believed Erdogan was such a major threat to democracy?
If they mutely oppose the coup, before it concludes, and the coup wins, then they might well not get the worst of it. They can also do a 180 after the fact - the coup will be too busy purging the AKP.
If they support the coup, this undermines their legitimacy, and in the likely case that Erdogan wins, they will immediately be purged, along with the coup planners. Of course, that can happen regardless.
There's an old Soviet joke about this - three men are in a cell, and try to figure out why they are there. It turns out that one criticized a minister, another praised that same minister, and the third is that minister.
Just because they are the opposition doesn't mean that they would take power in the event of a coup, which creates huge political and social upheaval, especially with the way the Turkish military does it historically. The last time they led a coup, in 1980, over half a million people were arrested and the political board was entirely reshuffled.
The opposition may not have much power right now but they'd have none at all if the military took over so it's all about theit survival instinct.
Fully understood. I'm Latin American and believe me, I have no love at all for military coups.
My point was, if Erdogan is such a threat to democracy, how come his political opponents -- such as the pro-Kurdish HDP and leftist parties -- didn't support this military coup, which was allegedly in favor of liberty and secularism and everything good that Erdogan seems to be against? Maybe these opposition parties were aware that military coups are seldom democratic, are often followed by arbitrary imprisonment and summary executions, and maybe it wasn't obvious that this rebel army faction was a better and more democratic alternative to Erdogan?
A sibling to my last reply states it best: coups are risky and if the opposition chose the wrong side they'd be the first to go in a large scale purge. The resulting political landscape would be significantly worse for everyone. If the plotters had managed to capture Erdogan early on in the attempt and one of the coup leaders went on national television to show Erdogan's dismembered head then maybe, maybe the opposition could have gone along without taking an unacceptable risk.
The whole reason Erdogan (with ISIS's help) attacks the Kurds
Erdogan attacked Kurds long before he lost his parliamentary majority. He attacks them because it's politically convenient for him to have a unifying enemy (most non-AKP Turks do believe the Kurds should renounce violence and drop their separatist demands). In fact, the HDP reached such a high level of support in those elections because a lot of people finally saw through the game and were tired of playing it.
I don't disagree that Erdogan all but helped IS/Daesh against Assad and Kurds, I'm just saying that his attitude towards the Kurdish problem has been more or less the same since the '90s.
Isn't the current situation in Turkey just another case of shock doctrine
Sorry, when you start talking about tens of thousands imprisoned without due process, that's way beyond approving undemocratic legislation in opportunistic ways.
If Front Nationale ruled France and pushed discriminatory policies, would we call Le Penne a dictator as well?
A dictator can be voted in and still be a dictator (see also the one-Godwin-stops-me-from-mentioning). In fact, the original Roman dictators were elected, and followed Roman laws. Modern dictators usually reach power with a golpe, but that's very recent; both Mussolini and Hitler were regularly elected and nominated heads of government by following their proper constitutional laws - the King of Italy was not deposed, nor was the German President (he died of natural causes and left the office technically vacant).
Dictatorship is defined by how power is exercised once attained, not by how it is reached. Removing regularly-appointed judges on political grounds, that's dictatorial; taking political prisoners without following due process, that's dictatorial; and so on and so forth.
Speaking of Ataturk,
I agree that we (especially outside of Turkey) now carry a rose-tinted view of Ataturk, conveniently forgetting his ugly side: he all but deported and killed swaths of population in order to "solidify" the ethnic background of his state, especially in remote areas and on the islands bordering Greece; and was, after all, a dictator who might have wished for democracy but didn't practice it very much. He was very much a man of his time, from a generation that produced Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin and so on.
Vast majority my arse. Erdogan won the last election in 2014 with less than 52% of the vote [1] on less than 75% turnout and he has only been so successful in his career because of a quirk of demographics. Turkey has been slower than other countries in urbanization and the rural Islamic majority has used their very slim majority to wipe out democracy and institute their policies at the expense of the urban secular minority. Just look at the distribution of protests in the country and you see a very clear pattern: the cities are very different from the rest of the country.
Putin is someone who has the support of the vast majority of his constituents, even despite the hardships and corruption, while Erdogan is just another opportunistic authoritarian who abused a faulty system to become a "democratically elected" dictator. In the eyes of much of the rest of the world, he has no legitimacy and is a pariah whose only leverage is the migrant crisis and the conflict with ISIS.
The United States doesn't have compulsory voting like Turkey does. Australia, another country with compulsory voting (although much better enforced), regularly sees elections with over 90-95% turnout. That is a real democratic mandate.
There is a long list of opposition parties in Turkey but few of them have any power [1]. The main opposition party with about a quarter of MPs (vast majority representing urban districts) is the Republican People's Party, which was the first political party in Turkey post WWI as well as the one led by Ataturk during his secular revolution.
One of the requirements for democracy is a free press, but Erdogan has been oppressing it for years through means such as shutting down newspapers he didn't like and jailing journalists. There is also a law against insulting the president that has lead to over 2,000 people arrested. Reporters Without Borders lists Turkey as 151 out of 189 countries for freedom of the press.
So essentially you say "Tayyip's leadership is not secular, military is secular, coup needed, shame it failed. Tayyip is a baddy, Ataturk was a benevolent dictator, united everyone, all were nice and dandy. But not anymore."
Excellent, super analysis of recent Turkish history. I am speechless.
The turkish miliatry has a history of stepping in when a government no longer adheres to the pricipals of the republic, specifically in relation to secularism.
Is there any indication that the coup of to try to restore secularism, and not instigated by Gulen and his followers? I ask this sincerely because a couple of my very educated Turkish friends in the west do think Gulen was behind the coup attempt in some form or the other.
Zero indication at all. None. Exactly the opposite actually. Not sure about the exact numbers but a lot of the the generals that were promoted after the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases were behind the coup. A lot of secular Generals were put to jail after those cases and West didn't seem to care at all.
Are you saying Erdogan replaced pro-Ataturk generals with pro-Islam generals, and that led to more Gulen followers with control of troops than there were before?
Actually it was not a friendship. Perhaps a mutually beneficial partnership. And things went downhill probably much before 2012, regardless of political speeches.
Erdoğan and public was convinced with the coup plan in 2009 ( who knows probably they were plotting for real and gülen supporters in the army exposed it) and Gülen probably have put some (many?) of his supporters among replacements. They are extremely secretive so I doubt anybody got suspicious. I read some of the captive coup army officials statements, they are quite shocking.
Do you believe that those statements were legitimate (that is, truthful, unforced, and actually said by the officers they were attributed to)?
I'm not saying that they weren't legitimate. I have no information one way or the other. But if the regime wished to exploit the failed coup for political reasons, faked statements are one standard way to do that.
Statements are very detailed and fits the previously known inner workings of the movement. Sure there may be some modifications we never know. They just sound legit to me.
Firstly I do not think this is about secularism. Turkey is still a more or less a secular country happen to be ruled by a central right - somewhat religious party.
My personal view is that Gulen was involved with the coup, but possibly jocobin nationalist/kemalist fractions in the army was also in the mix.
You'll find yourself modded up and down over this. In a purely intellectual sense, it is definitely a shame that the coup failed. The turkish miliatry has a history of stepping in when a government no longer adheres to the pricipals of the republic, specifically in relation to secularism.
Preferably after a bloody purge. It has a distinguished history of organizing death squads, torture, murder of political opponents, and probably a few false flag operations, not to mention a cozy relationship with business interests. This, obviously, doesn't make Erdogan into a nice guy, but the rosy picture many people outside of Turkey seem to have of these good old secular generals risking it all to uphold their moral values isn't, IMHO, supported by facts.
a benevolant dictator
I think the Kurds in particular will take issue with such a description.
Chief of Staff General Hulusi Akar, testifying as a plaintiff to Ankara prosecutors, said while he was held hostage by pro-coup soldiers, Gen. Hakan Evrim, the commander of a main jet base, asked him to speak with Gulen.
"Hakan Evrim said they could put me on phone with Fethullah Gulen, who he described as their 'opinion leader'," Akar said.
Some funny business relating to that, for fans of the false flag hypothesis:
One of the main coup guys having a go at Akar was Gen. Mehmet Dişli who "initially ordered Akar to sign the declaration and read it out to the Turkish public. Facing Akar’s firm rejection, Dişli held Akar at gunpoint and attempted to physically force him to comply with the order by cinching a belt around his neck, the sources claimed. " http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/chief-of-staff-held-at-gunp...
Mehmet Dişli "happens to be the brother of Saban Dişli, a former vice president of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Saban is a close confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan." http://www.gagrule.net/turkey-the-alleged-coup-leaders-two-s...
I keep running into this opinion, and as Turk who's a supporter of both secular and democratic rule, I feel I have to provide a counterpoint whenever it shows up.
As usual, Turkish politics is all about nuance. First of all, a coup benefits no one - previous coups perhaps brought short term "stability", but at the cost of the lives of many people jailed and executed without due process, and a lack of respect for the rule of law. They were pyrrhic victories at best, and set the stage for the current mass polarization of "secularists" and "islamists" that is causing so much unrest and strife. Back in the day, it also was "communists" once. Coups are not good or right, regardless of who they're orchestrated by. Lest you think
Lest you think the coups were mostly harmless, some examples of what happened were widespread (thousands) torture and arbitrary jailing, capital punishment, public hangings, repression of freedom of speech and books, purging of dissenting opinion from universities and government, special courts created to swiftly punish any opposition, repression of trade unions are just some of the results. Examples:
Having said that, to the actual point: The right-wing secular generals have been dismantled for the most part anyway. The prevailing theory is that the coup might have come from the supporters of Fettullah Gulen, who's for some reason seen as a harmless moderate in the West, but in Turkey he's not. It's never mentioned, for example, that his organization in Turkey runs "houses of light" (isik evleri) which serve as alternate housing for students who can't afford proper housing, where young children are gently groomed and selected for religious coercion and indoctrination, to then join the organization for life. They're given proper educations, jobs, business connections, in return for their service of course. Perhaps the Gulen schools in the US don't engage in that, probably because they know that won't fly there, and Gulen is relying on the US's protection against the Turkish government. Also not mentioned is that they worked with the Erdogan government when it was dismantling supporters of secularity from branches of government. What makes you think that these people would make for a better leadership than the current one?
To further this point, this is a nice US-based analysis from the Middle East Quarterly in 2009 of Gulen and presumably the folks who participated in the coup seeing as the Kremelists (secularists) had already been removed by him). http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition.
It sounds like secular proponents of democracy in Turkey are up the proverbial creek no matter who prevailed.
Someone on reddit told me the Gulen movement was comparable to Scientology in the eyes of the Turks. I didn't have more details, your comment is clearer. Thanks.
What do you think about press being cleaned ? in the west it's seen negatively obviously, but is there other details that may explain, like in the Gulen movement case, the decision ?
Is Erdogan feeding the people populist lies in order to rally them ? Some people have said he's starting to look like Germany pre WW2 politic style.
Well, yeah - at least in the eyes of my social circle, but I doubt that he'd gather so much influence if everyone thought the same.
What do you think about press being cleaned ? in the west it's seen negatively obviously, but is there other details that may explain, like in the Gulen movement case, the decision ?
Well, I have very mixed feelings.
Someone made a point that a lot more people were complicit in the nazi atrocities than were indicted in the Nuremberg trials, and that makes sense. So the ones directly involved with the coup plot, yes, absolutely prosecute and punish them swiftly. The rest is trickier.
Obviously Gulen and his supporters need to be dealt with. But how can we be sure that the trials will be fair and equitable, and not a mockery of the justice system, like the Sledgehammer case that Erdogan participated in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(coup_plan) )? How does a government prosecute thousands upon thousands when its courts and prosecutors can barely hold under the current case load?
How can we ensure that the tens of thousands accused are actually guilty? Of course a trial is done to test exactly this, but there is no right to a speedy trial in Turkey, and people routinely die in detention waiting for their court date. How many are genuinely suspected to be guilty rather than merely detractors who are being conveniently removed? They've done it before, and they'll do it again. This makes me extremely uncomfortable, because who's next?
Especially with the press, I think it's important to preserve free and unrestricted speech. But it's also true that that ship long sailed under Erdogan, when news organizations would get fiscally investigated if they dissented loudly. So given that I don't think it'll improve, should the Gulenist reporters go to jail? Perhaps - if their only crime is to write articles supporting backwards views, then probably not. I'd rather them ousted and judged in the court of public opinion.
So, mixed feelings and no good answers.
Is Erdogan feeding the people populist lies in order to rally them ?
That's the kicker - he doesn't have to. This situation benefits him greatly, and fell conveniently on his lap. Some people of course accuse him of organizing the coup as a false flag, but I think that's too much of a conspiracy. All he'd have to do would be to notice it a tiny bit in advance, prepare for it, and allow it to happen. Or even just get lucky enough to narrowly escape, but then make use of the situation fully.
So if I understand correctly, most the people arrested (teachers, journalists, police, etc) were Gulen activists or supporters ? Not just neutral or opposing the current governement ?
allow it to happen
Yeah passively playing the victim seems to be more efficient.
So if I understand correctly, most the people arrested (teachers, journalists, police, etc) were Gulen activists or supporters ? Not just neutral or opposing the current governement ?
Well, it's unclear. Of course the Erdogan government claims they are, but we don't know - there could be a lot of innocent people in there too. And that's exactly the issue and source of contention.
"It's never mentioned, for example, that his organization in Turkey runs "houses of light" (isik evleri) which serve..."
And here is the problem that I personally have, it could be that the whole organisation is like Scientology, Opus Dei or they spend their evenings with prosecuting chickens, but regarding the coup the world still need to see some solid evidence. Where is the proof and preferably something that has more value than Erdogan's word for it.
It doesn't matter if somebody is a not a nice person. When there isn't any evidence of a crime you don't prosecute them, simple as that. Also don't tell me that of all that is going on after the coup, that these are the results of proper investigations or a good functioning justice system.
Meanwhile in this European country we are confronted by Turkish (even third generation) people that threatening other Turkish people, arson or destruction against buildings of people they clearly don't like and that mainly because some egomaniac in a country far away is throwing blind accusations like there is no tomorrow.
We are even at the point that the Turkish embassy is calling all people to report anybody who "insults" Erdogan, because the world clearly needs more LOTR comparisons or poems. Hell, this week the president of this region needed to make the comparison with nazi's because that was the last time we were confronted with a foreign power trying to meddle in our local affairs. In the end the ambassador needed to apologize, but we are seeing more and more of those incidents.
I agree completely with your sentiment regarding conviction without proof, but want to comment on this thought one part for a second, in isolation from the rest of the discussion. First of all, that the world doesn't see evidence on gulen's shady dealings or extreme islamist tendencies at all is a measure of the world's own ignorance. I don't mean this in an accusatory way - it's not your fault.
Outside observers, especially those who do not understand Turkish, are excluded from huge swathes of news, discussion, court cases and information. What you're getting is the gist. It's second hand information at best, and the foreign media often gets it wrong, misses historic context, or glosses over the nuances.
Just like all the people here (and in western news organizations) who didn't know Gulen existed up until very recently - an deficiency in knowledge so huge that it should scare you away (and perhaps disqualify you) from holding a strong opinion on Turkish politics immediately.
So when outsiders ask for "evidence" - really they're asking for a New York Times / Economist / Wall Street Journal / Foreign Policy op-ed. Because that's considered a respectable news organization, but Turkish sources aren't considered respectable, never mind that they probably share most of their sources on Turkish news.
So, demands for "solid evidence" in this sense are a measure of privilege that's so monumental that people don't even realize they're subject to it.
So when I try to make an argument with someone who isn't from Turkey, the best I can do is point to sources like these, which all have surface-level milquetoast reports on gulen, painting him a "reclusive cleric", an islamic scholar and "supporter of interfaith dialogue" - all true to some degree, but definitely not the whole story.
---
As a more concrete example, let's look at the progression of Gulen profiles in the nyt over the years:
It's amazing to see how the language and the detail in the account of his activities change across the years. The 2000 article gets the part about the prosecution, but misses the point on Gulen completely. Nor a single bad thing about him. Anyway, recently, they gave the soapbox to gulen himself twice:
Again, I don't think this is some conspiracy, but just ignorance. The 2000 article was ignorant of basic, common knowledge in Turkish politics. The more recent ones are less ignorant.
It also comes from the Middle East Forum which is a conservative think tank, so take that as you will. But this is what I mean - they have a huge incentive to badmouth islam, so they actually bother to engage in research. Impressively, most of the sources on the bottom are Turkish language sources.
---
Anyway, my point isn't about gulen, but the attitude and the cultural notion that facts exist when they exist in the western media, and anything else is unreliable conspiracy theories and bunk. And this coming from people who barely knew Gulen - a central figure in Turkish politics - a few months ago.
Yes, things do suck in Turkey, and are nonfunctional in many ways. Many things are wrong, many sources are unreliable and corrupt, but we're not completely stupid either, and the sneering sense of superiority I so often encounter is counterproductive, surprising and tiring.
One thing to keep in mind is that Turkey has had at least 4 successful military coups in the last century, so the people are traumatized in that regard and you won't find many who would support any military-led coup at all, even if it were to remove a full-on dictator.
1960 and 1980: Old school military colonel - generals. They thought they should show these puny civilians who the real boss was, hanged a few people including a prime minister, oppressed free speech and media.
1998 was different, it was a half coup, they disbanded government, created a huge vacuum of authority, caused the biggest economical depression in Turkish history, oppressed majority of people (Those pesky conservative people, why do they want to go to university?)
2016: They failed miserably regardless of their motivation. I hope this would be a lesson to them, Turks had enough of this crap.
The people behind this coup is also islamists and most of the people in Turkey support Erdoğan so I doubt it. A civil war is quite possible in that scenario.
What kind of coup has a fighter jet with the President's plane in its sights, and then doesn't shoot it down, and instead allows it to land? What kind of coup doesn't bother actually capturing the leaders, and instead goes and captures a bridge? What kind of coup ignores the leaders but then shoots at protesters from helicopters? What kind of coup shoots at an empty parliament building?
If this was a coup, it was the most incompetent coup ever conducted in the history of the world. Turkey has had a bunch of coups over the years, and none of them looked anything like this one. When you want to conduct a coup, you do it in the middle of the night and you capture the nation's top political leadership first and foremost, and you definitely do not harm civilians.
Best explanation I have about what happened is this;
The attempt was real. It was actually planned pretty well. Their plans were exposed. They panicked, couldn't really follow through with all their plans. Generals that weren't part of the coup took the chain of command pretty fast to stop the attempt.
2) Apparently there were other jets that were actually following Erdogan's plane
3) They kidnapped almost all high ranked military personnel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bCuv6G5I0. The ones that escaped actually took back the chain of command and was able to stop the attempt.
I'm thinking maybe it was a hybrid of false flag and genuine - Erdogan fearing a coup gets some of his general friends to try to foment a coup. Most of the followers think it's for real. Then everyone gets arrested. Erdogan's friends do a year in jail and then are released, the others treated harshly.
More like a false-flag operation designed to cement his leadership by allowing the execution of anyone critical of the great leader.
It would have been hard for a real coup to be as damaging as more time with Erdogan will be. It'll look like Syria in a year or two. We might as well just remove the name Turkey from the map and wait until the flames die out.
Why? Do you want to have these coups in your own country every 10 years, destroying economy, killing people and setting back the progress another 20 years?
Italian newspapers published emails from desperate Turkish academics stationed abroad, available to work for free on anything, just to avoid answering the call they got from national authorities to go back. People with PhD literally begging for a few months more, just so that they can find a job and make a new life out of Turkey. It's the sort of thing you read in German or Italian letters from the 1920s and 1930s, almost verbatim.
There is a lot to be said for people abusing words like "dictator" and "fascism" when this or that ruler does not agree with them, but when the situation gets to this level, you have to reach for those words in no uncertain terms. This is how a fragile democracy dies.
Anybody in a position to help these people today, should do that.
This has been going on for years under Tayyip unfortunately. Around the time of the Gezi protests, I had several renouned journalist friends with high-profile jobs (hurriyet etc) that were immediately axed: their publishers were given the 'choice' of purging or being shut-down.
The only silver-lining is that Tayyip is now under the international spotlight; even if he doesn't seem to care, at least more people are aware.
I suspect it's a way of showing less respect. Some people in the US referred to President Clinton as "Billy", for another instance of (I suspect) the same thing.
My comment may have come across as snide, my apologies for that. But I stand by my point; if we want to discuss something we shouldn't stoop to derogatory use of names. In English it is permissible and customary to refer to officials by their last name (e.g., 'Obama', 'Hollande', 'Merkel'). Using their given names, unless done in an obvious tongue-in-cheek fashion, laces your opinion with weasel-speak. It detracts from a sensible exchange of ideas, views, and standpoints.
If we all resort to using whatever we feel is most applicable for Erdoğan (or any other demagogue) I would be very surprised if half of the pseudonyms used did not hint at the alleged illegitimate consummation of those of the caprid persuasion — let's not venture there.
You're overselling your point. For example, in the 2016 presidential primaries, many of the candidates were using their first names preferentially: Hillary, Bernie, Jeb, Rand, Carly. Of course, some candidates focused on their last names: Trump, O'Malley. And others used their full name: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio.
This purge is really something, even cabin crew for Turkish Airline have lost their jobs as part of this. The real coup seem to be going on right now. Its starting to look like "Night of the Long Knives."
It's tempting to make parallels with 1930s Germany, but that was just such a unique situation. These are usually "all unhappy families are different" situations.
I think the parallel is pretty close to the Reichstags fire - apparently it is (still) disputed if it were orchestrated by the nazis themselves or not - either way it opened the door to dictatorship. Much as there's been no credible evidence about the who or why of the coup -- it's clear it's being used as an excuse to tighten the iron grip.
Either way. Even if the Reichstags fire was indeed the work of a single man - and not orchestrated - the Nazi party used it for what it was worth. Similarly with this coup; if it wasn't staged, it still seems clear that Edrogan is using it for what it's worth in order to usher in/cement his dictator powers?
It's pretty clear that Erdogan has been moved closer to being - metaphorically - a "mob boss" than what we consider an "elected official" in the US ( assume a sort of spectrum between those). Your thinking changes when you deal with the possibility of assassination. Guys like Putin can't simply resign; they'll probably be hunted down and killed if they leave power. They're riding the tiger.
The general pattern in the Arab Spring has been to assassinate people like Q'daffi - who remind me more of the heads of crime families than political leaders. But here I sit in the US, where we can afford to have ... separation of concern for those roles. And to an extent, the meritocratic myth even in the US is just that - a myth. It's
not like we don't have a presidential pretender running on the idea that it doesn't really work.
I can't imagine a modern politician actively embracing Sharia for any reason other than simply wanting to stay in power.
I totally agree and I didn't mean in the literal sense but rather in the sense of its immediacy and fervor. It probably wasn't the best historical comparison.
Well, historical events should be compared within their context. 90 years after in a country still in NATO, one can not kill the other easily. But arresting and expecting them to die in jail or commit suicide should be equal to Night of long knives.
Yes and I admitted it probably wasn't the best historical comparison. But given that that less than five years ago this country was being touted as a model for democracy, religious moderation and pluralism for the region, I don't that it's that it's entirely inappropriate.
One thing to do is actually voting with your wallet. For example, stop flying Turkish Airlines which is currently flooding the market with cheap tickets.
Hm... but still buy iPhones and other cheap Chinese stuff? Seems like a very intellectually dishonest proposition (edit: to clarify: as China is no more free than Turkey)...
In addition, if we've learned anything from the past decade, it's that economic problems breed political instability. So maybe Turkish population is better off (in the long run) if we support them economically.
Hm... but still buy iPhones and other cheap Chinese stuff? Seems like a very intellectually dishonest proposition...
I honestly don't think that boycotting a country or company for reason x can be called "dishonest". Where did you read that I encouraged people to by iPhones and "other cheap Chinese stuff". Hint: I haven't.
Perhaps your parent feels like they owe more to Turkey, or that their choices have more influence in Turkey, which is a far smaller country than China?
"Economic problems breed political instability..." - yes, but popular/populist political systems seem to also breed these economic problems. A strategy for leadership is to stop trying to align with any economic theory ( such as it is ) and appeal to popular discontent based on one or more fallacies in economics, or abandon any pretensions to that and use something else to gain power.
Isn't this essentially the Arab Spring come to Turkey? In that case, the democratizing influence of the Web and smartphones seems a critical element.
We, the oh-so-enlightened in the US face a 2% growth target and can't maintain that. Kemalism in Turkey was stable for a long time, but is now at risk.
I'm not sure how much you know about Gulen movement. It is an identical copy of Opus Dei. They have been building their secret network since 1970s. Gulenist people have all critical positions in Turkey. 50% of high-ranked officers in military accused of being part of this group and now arrested. Even though I'm not a supporter of Erdogan, this coup thing is very serious and unfortunately I have to stand with Erdogan. Because it is about our national security. Gulenist people have schools not only in Turkey but also all around the world. Russia passed a law to close all the schools related to Gulenist Movement. Guess what? Because these schools are gateway for CIA. Turkey and USA have contradictory strategies across the middle east. Fethullah Gulen is the leader of Gulenist Movement and now lives in USA. He born in Turkey and he is primary school graduate in this context. There is no way for him to get a green card in US. Anyway, He is supported by invisible government in US or by someone or some groups. How's that possible a turkish guy who has primary school diploma can build schools all over the world and gain thousands of supporters ? I have never seen this entrepreneurship spirit in TR.
As we are turkish people, we want him to be extradited to Turkey. He will come and defend himself in the court.
Can you try to cite some actual evidence here instead of parroting what basically sounds like an insane conspiracy theory?
None of this justifies persecuting academics for conducting science and/or having not great opinions of their government. None of this is an excuse to throw away rule of law, and none of it justifies treating humans without basic dignities https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.independent.co.uk/ne...
If you really want to understand the mentality of people that would lead them to submit to an organization like that, I suggest reading "Black Book" by Orhan Pamuk.
(As an aside, we met 2-3 years back in Portland a few times at some of those New Relic meet ups, I hope neocities is still doing well!)
I'm certainly not ruling out that this could all be true. What I'd love to see is a compilation of evidence.
There's a great site on Neocities that's been doing this with Scientology since our foundation and is regularly updated https://scientology.neocities.org
This coup thing is very well organized and trust me. I'm secular and not following mainstream media. Mainstream media didn't say anything about US or who's behind this. But I'm telling you the truth, these people or gulenist people whatever you call are supported by some organization or people residing in North America.
“Battles have been won against greater odds” John Snow.
Jokes aside, most of these generals were already getting arrested or getting kicked out of the military in the following weeks, they just decided to actually do the crime they are getting arrested for
One thing I'd like to understand is if some of the improvements like less discrimination of minorities and getting rid of the death penalty were purely for EU relations and never supported by the AKP. Considering to reinstate the death penalty now is something I don't understand. Can someone who grew up and lives in Turkey explain? I recall that when they snatched the PKK leader they didn't terminate him, and he's jailed. So how come the death penalty is seriously considered an improvement in 2016?
So how come the death penalty is seriously considered an improvement in 2016?
This is primarily to make it difficult to oppose Erdogan. Earlier, an opposition would mean - jail time and potential release sometime in the future. Now, an opposition would mean - you have to sacrifice your life. Basically, the government has upped the stakes against dissent.
I haven't been following very closely but don't think they got rid of political immunity in general. They only removed immunity from MPs, where Erdogan is the president.
I'm less sure of this but I don't believe they lifted immunity for all MPs, I think the bill listed the exact MPs they were going to target.
My personal theory is that a death penalty applied selectively will be a sweet way to get rid of people who know too much (generals etc), while looking magnanimous for pardoning everyone else.
It's actions like this by Erogan that do tend to make him look like a dictator in action and indeed I ask myself if he was not an Islamic leader then would he have public support by the mass majority of Islamic people in that country and are the supporting him or their religion. As for me if you remove religion from the equation then you equally remove his support and that is very much the crux. More so when he has pushed thru more religious schools, curtailed and closed down free schools and very much done everything possible to drive things in the name of religion protectionism in many eye's. Which is and has been an issue with turkey in the past and indeed, seen the military rise up to curtail it as per the mandate they have. But this time, was very messy and over the years Erdogan has been making sure key people in the military are very much onboard with his religious party line and that in itself would explain the lacklustre mess of a coup. Previously they have had the military step in without any action and been civil, was this impossible in the current time I wonder and I'm tending to learn towards yes as I do not see any request from the military being listened too and indeed when the controlling political party is so embedded, near on impossible.
After all when they label political opposition as terrorists and dissent and then somehow use this as a tool to remove political opposition and control education, is that going to end well democracy wise one seriously wonders.
So how come the death penalty is seriously considered an improvement in 2016?
The best argument for the death penalty is about legitimacy of the government. Given the choice between revenge killings and the death penalty sentence in fair courts, we should choose the death penalty. Of course, this presumes fair trials, etc., so if the trials themselves are non-existent or unfair, the calculus changes. And if the impulse for violent revenge does not exist among a people, then the calculus changes as well.
To be clear, the argument isn't that repaying murder with death is just. The argument is that to maintain a stable government, the government needs to respect popular opinion on the issue.
All that being said, I don't have any particular insight into Erdogan's changes. But changing rules just after a traumatic event can lead to regrets and overreach, as the U.S. found post 9/11.
Popular opinion in many Western countries also supports the death penalty even where it's outlawed. In general, it's not difficult to find unpopular policy that governments pursue nonetheless, and this does not necessarily result in instability.
Another pro-death penalty argument is its deterrent effect. While criminologists found that murder may not be deterred by the death penalty, we would expect other crimes requiring more deliberation and intelligence, to be deterred by the prospect of state killing. There is scope for innovative and beneficial use of the death penalty. For example, serious white collar crime, political corruption, and to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
I would love to see some reliable statistics that prove support even anywhere near 50% in major European countries for a reintroduction of the death penalty, especially since your remark about "popular opinion" seems to suggest widespread public support for the death penalty that is subsequently ignored by politicians.
I would love to see some reliable statistics that prove support even anywhere near 50% in major European countries for a reintroduction of the death penalty
The UK public until very recently had decisive majority support for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Last year the NatCen British Social Attitudes Report found 48% of the 2,878 people it surveyed were in favour of capital punishment. This is the lowest figure since the survey began in 1983, when around 75% of people were in favour. Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Great Britain in 1965.
Thank you for the link. I guess I should never count out the Brits when it comes to these things! ;) The last reliable thing I found for Germany was an article that cited a rise to 25% after something or other in 2014, which is why I didn't quite expect those numbers. But in these days...
It kind of is, though? The US don't count, they have the death penalty and are not a European country, but the UK, just like basically all other European countries (not just EU countries) excluding Belarus & Kazakhstan are members of the Council of Europe, where membership requires abolishing the death penalty. Also, the article for Germany showed, as I said, a rise to 25%, which is really rather far from anything approaching a majority, while the BBC article talked about a decline to 50%. So there is quite a difference.
For example, serious white collar crime, political corruption
If you look at the actual legal outcome of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs cooking of Greece books, Euribor Fraud, revolving doors between government a sweet consulting jobs, Panama papers, recurrent "tax" amnesty, ... it seems there is very little in common between what people think is illegal and what actually is. So what kind of deterrent would introducing death penalty actually achieve ? The fall guys would fall harder ?
Even just Bernie Madoff and the Libor crooks being executed would probably have a socially beneficial effect. But of course, you could equally say there is no point in having any laws if they are not enforced.
So what kind of deterrent would introducing death penalty actually achieve?
The point is that the severity of the punishment must match the severity of the crime. Crooked people getting off easy is a different example of the same issue. In both cases, the legitimacy of the government is eroded. Sometimes this looks like people ignoring even more laws or voting for candidates that ignore the existing checks and balances. In more volatile cases, you could see the rise of tribal forces (including mafia and gangs), more revenge and honor killings, a full-on coup, or any number of other things.
The legal cost of committing a crime is something like (severity of punishment * likelihood of punishment). I suspect that the latter term is far, far more important to the legitimacy of a government, since it indicates competence whereas the former indicates stringency or leniency, and people respect a competent but lenient government far more than a harsh but incompetent one.
Besides, life in prison is a harsher punishment than death.
At least with respect to the 2008 financial crisis, there was actual fraud going on there. People were lying about lots of things. Doing it a little may be subject to breach of contract lawsuits. Doing it a lot is fraud, and can be prosecuted.
Sadly, hardly anyone was indicted, so there's no point (yet) to debating the usefulness of the death penalty for white collar crimes.
Dictators don't care about their country's prospects, only their own, their kin and their lackeys. Mugabe, Kim Jong-Un, those of the *stans - all are doing very well for themselves.
I read somewhere that the Turkish ruling party said it themselves: "The higher the education level, the less they vote for us." How can you expect them to educate people modernly after that?
That was in the past... This is a new century. That is why these academics are so uneasy-- they are not doing science, instead, hoping salvation from military coups.
Are you aware of killing people at that attempt by soldiers who support Gulen ? This is not about an issue for only AKP or Tayyip Erdogan, this is also about 90% percent of people who lives in Turkey. No one sees after-coup plan of gulen supporters like executing of more than 20.000 anti-gulen people . If so , why should academics be silent ? If they work in this country, they have to help their country for democracy
I've been in Turkey for the last 2 years. There are so many things to say against that article but it won't be read or put some importance on.
Here you see how Western media discriminates cultures and manipulates the news. It's just I am constantly shocked by how hard the Western media tries to impose its own views for its own citizens.
Maybe in all modern history of Turkey, there hasn't been such a huge agreement about the failed coup but still Western media gives the message that even coup would be better...
That day guys, 246 people have died for democracy. Even this fact can change everything, but it's not even mentioned.
Literally the title of the Wikipedia article [1]. Every reference I checked in that article, including this one from CNN [2], called it a coup. "Coup" and "revolution" aren't dirty words in Western lexicon.
Western media manipulates the news? Maybe some things are not 100% correct but what does Erdogan then?
You put the things wrong way around. Erdogan abolished democracy from Turkey. Maybe you are already brainwashed by his censorship?
We have many Turkey discussions here in germany and the Erdogan people don't have any arguments. Sometimes they just lie so hard that it's just ridiculous.
That day guys, 246 people have died for democracy.
Some would doubt that even half of those really care about democracy as there friends are willingly following the current government into what is increasingly indistinguishable from a dictatorship.
For democracy it is not sufficient to implement the will of the majority: There also has to be a well-educated majority, freedom of the press, a working justice system and so on. Otherwise you might just get a tyranny of the (manipulated) masses.
An atheist, lefty dev from Turkey here. Never voted for Erdogan and never will. I'll dance when he legitimately GTFO, be it election, sickness, his death, legal trial, anything normal in life.
But not via a bloody coup. That night, half of the military elite turned against their own people, ordered opening fire to crowds and National Assembly. Some people died on the street in pajamas, think how impulsive people's response was against the coup.
Mentally, Turkey is a very separated country. There's almost no way to unite Erdogan followers with left wing secularists and Kurds. But we are all united against the coup and there are almost no doubt that Gulenists are behind this bloody adventure. For the last 17-18 years, various layers of Turkey came against Gulen and realized how brutal he is against any idea criticizing him. The last layer left was Erdogan's followers and they also saw the truth in the last 3 years in two different occasions.
Erdogan is still Erdogan, he was on his way to dictatorship and shows signs of using the situation in that way. His past actions makes us believe that. But we still can hope to overthrow him with an election, as we nearly did in June 2015. But there's no way to get rid of any general in power because of a bloody coup. Turkey got 3 successful coups in history and we can see clearly how those times held us back in the world scene. We don't want any more of that.
Atheists in Turkey are safe but I wouldn't recommend going out into a city square touting atheism. I think a lot of people don't realize that you can live a western life in some Turkish cities without major issues. The risks come from being an activist against Erdogan.
As a Greek I’m glad that Erdogan prevailed. At least with him in power we’ve been through a long period of relative peace of mind. I’m not sure that would be the case if the coup had succeeded.
Is there any real proof that Gulen is behind the coup? I'ved heard a number of Turks both here and on Quora saying he is, but I've never seen any proof presented. It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to find given that the movement is supposedly huge.
I am not saying you are asking the wrong question of anything, and I am sorry if it reads as a snarky comment, but if it quack like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck... it's shadowy politics after all, not physics. Would you expect the coup organizers to have written paper notes saying "yes, we did it"?
I am not saying you are asking the wrong question of anything, and I am sorry if it reads as a snarky comment, but if it quack like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck... it's shadowy politics after all, not physics. Would you expect the coup organizers to have written paper notes saying "yes, we did it"?
Given that all of the previous military coups in Turkey were carried out by the secularist military establishment, you need to present evidence beyond accusations that the Gulenist movement, an Islamist movement, is behind this one. Show us the quacking and walking.
Again, given that the all previous military coups have been conducted by secularists, you're gonna need to provide specific evidence that the coup was planned by the Gulenists.
The quotation you point to has nothing to do with the coup at all, it's from the 90s and describes a totally different hypothetical situation, one in which his supporters have seized control of all state institutions. That is clearly not the case. It's Erdogan's AKP that has gradually seized control of all institutions in Turkey.
The events of 2013-2014 that solely aimed overthrowing Erdogan were undeniably controlled by Gulen movement. However they lost the battle big time.
One or two weeks before the coup, some army officials in Izmir were detained linked with a previous army spy case and they were linked to Gulen. The supreme military council was about to be happening with the agenda of sacking multiple army officials related with him.
IMO, coup was not solely planned by Gulen, but they were involved significantly.
The confessions of a few captives, under duress from a dictator that's purging both public and private sectors of all opposition under false pretenses and threatening to bring back executions, carry very little weight in my book. There's a long history of compelled false confessions in similar circumstances.
The 2013-2014 protests consisted of just about everyone who opposed Erdogan.
If you were a Gulenist you would have claimed that this video is not what it isand try to be likeable so people who don't speak Turkish would choose to believe you.
A proper Gulenist would say that this video just shows a guy in a military uniform. What you should do is to google the name of the guy and find old articles with photos about him being dismissed from his job as a police chief.
From reading a few articles with help of Google Translate, the current purge of Gulenists seems to be similar to persecution of Falun Gong in China. Just another case of history repeating itself.
The subject is incredibly complex. Google Translate would not help you.
I would suggest reading articles by foreigners living in Turkey.
Try Claire Berlinsky, a British national and the biographer of Margaret Thatchet. She is living in Turkey since a decade and closely following the political science.
Though that just shows there were some alleged Gulenists involved and I gather Gulenists are about 10% of the population. It doesn't prove Gulen himself was involved.
I admit to confusion. However considering who was behind the coup there are two leading hypotheses - Gulen or Erdogan, both widely suspected of being responsible by the Turks.
A main instigator was "General Mehmet Dişli, the brother of a long-serving MP with the ruling AK party, allegedly gave the order that set the coup in motion, sending army special forces officers to arrest the military’s senior command." (Guardian).
He's "a two-star general who happens to be the brother of Saban Dişli, a former vice president of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Saban is a close confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan."
So that's a fairly direct connection for Erdogan being linked. Is there anything like that for Gulen? Like a coup leader being a brother of one of Gulen's mates? Also Gulen has preached peace throughout whereas Erdogan seemed quite happy to go kill Kurds when he felt it would help him politically.
Turkish media had overwhelming evidence on this (all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many high ranking generals had been incapacitated by their subordinates during the coup attempt). Sadly, none of the communications, testimonies, or sequence of events even superficially surfaced on the Western media.
This coup attempt was unusual to Turks in that for twelve hours we didn't know who was behind the coup. Contrast that with the coup in 1980 where the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared on state TV, and informed the public of their action.
Edit: Search & translate hurriyet.com or sozcu.com.tr's archives for details. The Hurriyet newspaper is more mainstream, trustworthy, and has been critical of Erdogan. Sozcu is vocally critical of Erdogan (and usually for good reason).
"Half an hour after the shooting started the British intelligence service GCHQ intercepted phone calls, e-mails and SMS from within the Turkish government apparatus saying that the purges would start next day and that Gülen should be presented as the mastermind of the coup"
Still too early to confirm since it's the only publication that claims this.
Coup of 1980 destroyed Turkish left and opened the door to rightwing extremists. In 14-15 years after the coup, fundamentalists and nationalists pretty much seized the bureaucracy, which led to the raise of Erdogan and deterioration of secularism.
I think this is a very valid question. For me, the undeniable fingerprint of Gulenists is the fact that police chiefs dismissed for affiliation with Gulen were caught inside the military tanks. There are videos of it and I don't see any other logical explanation for catching suspicious civilians in military vehicles during a coup.
For people who followed the last 10 years of the Turkish politics, the Gulenist affiliation is obvious but I think it is still very hard to explain it to people who are exposed for the first time. Before Erdogan, the Turkish military was actively cracking down on the Gulenist infiltration and it is 40 years old subject with hard to believe but proved multiple times conspiracies.
Gulenists always abuse the benefit of doubt and as a secretive cult usually the evidences against them have some kind of explanation and all these strange coincidences are tagget as normal. After all, there is nothing stopping the Lottery from winning on the 1 2 3 4 5 6 numbers every time, its just improbable so it is not 100.000000% guarantied to be fraud.
In a normal democracy, he'll get arrested for doing that, no? :) Of course, if he refuses than he'll sure have a military power backing him, be it the police force or a part of the military or both. And that's just another coup, I expect the same response we showed against Jul 15th coup attempt: uprising and sane part of the military's action.
What Western citizens do not know is that the military coup often has many legs: Military, Media, Financial institutions and Academy etc. This military coup killed around 250 people wounded 2000 people. Moreover, the senate and the citizens were bombed by the military. What would do if your academics are in bed with those criminals?
"All" described in the article is not true. There were some arrested because they were advising criminals (in fact, one of them was caught at the military airpot that launches F16 against people). Some were dismissed from critical positions. Don't forget that many of those are government employees.
I'm not sure about who did what in the coup but a couple of years ago 2000 academics signed a petition asking for peaceful negotiations with the Kurds rather than military action and Erdogan branded them terrorists and fired them for that which kind of shows his attitude.
Yes, that was the time when PKK terror organization destroyed 5-10 Kurdish cities and killed hundreds of Kurds. Those so-called academics were labeling the government as "terrorist" because Erdogan was defending Kurds and the country. Erdogan of course labeled them as terrorists. Remember that those academics do not do science-- see the scientific publications--instead doing politics.
I don't know the specifics in Turkey, but academics elsewhere are often expected to be the front-line defenders of free inquiry and equality. This is because free speech, free thought, etc. are necessary to do honest research.
It's really too bad the coup there failed.
For this comment to have any value, you should substantiate it, not leave it at this oneliner.
Controversial liners have value when they kickstart a conversation (as this one did).
You'll find yourself modded up and down over this. In a purely intellectual sense, it is definitely a shame that the coup failed. The turkish miliatry has a history of stepping in when a government no longer adheres to the pricipals of the republic, specifically in relation to secularism.
By any metric, Tayyip's leadership is not secular.
However, the turkish people (at least according to my friends) are are badly shaken after the two recent terrorist attacks - the coup represents more violence - regardless of its 'benevolance'.
Turkey's admiration of Atatürk, the 'founding father' of modern Turkey is absolute: a benevolant dictator, he molded Turkey into a modern balanced country, uniting multiple social, ethnical and religous systems.
It is widely held that Tayyip is doing exactly the opposite: peice by peice dismantling the social balance and fundamentals of Turkey. Naturally, his actions are liked by some - but his goal is to divide, as opposed to unite.
Based upon this, the coup seems to be yet another tangile proof of the disquiet that has been installed under the Tayyip regieme.
Essentially, the turkish people have had enough of bloodshed, division and disharmony.
You and I may not like it, but the vast majority of the population supports the views and policies of the AKP and Erdogan. Democracy means the government can be controlled by unreasonable politicians, but it's not a dictatorship. If anything it's probably a bug in the political system in how a majority number of seats can control so much despite a considerable number of opposing seats in parliament.
Switzerland has a direct democracy where, if the population were to vote for it, they would pass all kinds of crazy policies. This is in contrast to the UK where people now believe the referandum means the government has to embark on an EU-exit process. They don't, because the UK is not a direct democracy. If Front Nationale ruled France and pushed discriminatory policies, would we call Le Penne a dictator as well?
Speaking of Ataturk, back when he introduced the reforms, some of it was unsupported by parts of the electorate, just as some of Edogan's policies are. Democracy means what the majority votes for wins, unless there's some rigging like in US, Russia, or probably Turkey as well. I mean, if votes can be rigged in the US and any and all objection is silenced by friends in the Supreme Court, then what do you expect from Russia or Turkey, really?
Isn't the current situation in Turkey just another case of shock doctrine, as unfortunately happens annually all over the globe?
What vote rigging are you talking about?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_election_recount
Edit: Is rigging the wrong term?
There is a lot of misinformation about what happened in the 2000 election and about the Florida recount.
In the 2000 election, the close result in Florida triggered an automatic machine recount under Florida law. The machine recount still had Bush leading. So Gore sought hand recounts in only four heavily-Democratic counties. The Florida Supreme Court then ordered statewide hand recounting only of "undervotes" (ballots where the machine failed to detect any vote for any candidate). But the recount process itself was a total disaster: http://www.factcheck.org/2008/01/the-florida-recount-of-2000. The various counties doing the recounts were applying totally different standards to counting the votes.
In a 7-2 decision,[1] the Supreme Court held that the Florida recount violated the Constitution's "Equal Protection Clause," which requires the law to be applied equally to all people. It found that recounting only some ballots and recounting them using different standards in different places resulted in unequal application of the law based on where people voted.
In my opinion,[2] the Supreme Court got it right. The right thing to do would have been to stop after the machine recount. There is no way a hand recount was going to be a more fair and trustworthy process than the machine recount. The machine might not properly count what everyone intended to vote (e.g. because they didn't punch out the chad on the voting card all the way), but machine error is going to be random. Hand counting, on the other hand, will be biased toward favored candidates. Moreover, a subsequent $1 million study commissioned by news organizations found that Bush still would've won under most recount scenarios.
[1] The oft-reported "5-4" decision in Bush v. Gore was not about whether the recount was valid. 7 of 9 Justices agreed it was not. It was about whether Florida still had time to do a proper state-wide recount within the statutory deadline.
[2] I was too young to vote in 2000, but at the time I supported Gore. I too was infuriated about the 2000 election until I actually studied Bush v. Gore in law school.
Thanks for the detailed correction.
You should be infuriated about the fact Bush won with a minority of the popular vote (the electoral system), not the Florida supreme court decision.
Much more than simple majority vote, Democracy as we'd like to understand in the western world is about (1) Checks and Balances and (2) respect for individuals and minorities who are not in the ruling side. So it is not about Democracy vs Dictatorship, but Democracy vs Authoritarianism.
What would you call Chavez or Maduro? If not dictators (after all, "There is already too much democracy in Venezuela" according to their supporters), certainly they are the leaders of an authoritarian kleptocracy.
No. Voting is just the end stage of a much longer process, backed by the credibility of the Institutions to which the people put faith in.
No. This is you trying to fit your worldview into the events.
Yeah, and the special thing about Turkey is (was?) that the military is one of the balancing forces because they were not controlled by the government as they are in many alternative democracies. This is partly historical due to past military coups. It's hard for me to say whether it's good or bad, given that the military independence has led to very negative outcomes like the 1980 coup, but it can also provide a force to keep a crazy parliament in check.
Can't comment because I don't know enough, sorry. Will look into them.
Maybe you're right, all I'm saying is that it looks like they are in the process of passing controversial policies while the electorate is under shock.
We called those type of government 'liberal democracy'.
Democracy says nothing about check and balance, or respect for minorities.
I don't mean "respect for minorities" in the sense of policies for disenfranchised groups. I meant in the pure numerical sense, i.e, "people who voted for the other guy don't get to lose their rights".
But I think we are just using different names for the same beast. "Liberal Democracies" are "Democracies as we'd like to understand them in the western world".
You and I may not like it, but the vast majority of the population supports the views and policies of the AKP and Erdogan.
Yes, but that's un-american and therefore, evil.
Erdogan succeeds in part because he attacks democracy. The whole reason Erdogan (with ISIS's help) attacks the Kurds is because "they" deprived Erdogan's party of a parliamentary majority for the first time since 2002. [1] [2] So his military attacks his own cities. [3]
(The Erdogan/ISIS connection is obvious. [4])
Erdogan's been threatening academics for a long time. For example, detaining them for a petition for peace, hacking/blocking it so people can't read it. [5]
Erdogan destroying his opposition isn't democratic.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey...
[2] http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/7/29/turkey-launc...
[3] http://www.france24.com/en/20160714-turkey-unesco-heritage-s...
[4] http://time.com/3980085/these-5-stats-explain-turkeys-war-on...
[5] https://news.vice.com/article/turkey-detains-21-academics-fo...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the HDP (and other anti-Erdogan political parties, if I understood the news correctly) oppose the latest coup? How could this be, if they believed Erdogan was such a major threat to democracy?
If they mutely oppose the coup, before it concludes, and the coup wins, then they might well not get the worst of it. They can also do a 180 after the fact - the coup will be too busy purging the AKP.
If they support the coup, this undermines their legitimacy, and in the likely case that Erdogan wins, they will immediately be purged, along with the coup planners. Of course, that can happen regardless.
There's an old Soviet joke about this - three men are in a cell, and try to figure out why they are there. It turns out that one criticized a minister, another praised that same minister, and the third is that minister.
Just because they are the opposition doesn't mean that they would take power in the event of a coup, which creates huge political and social upheaval, especially with the way the Turkish military does it historically. The last time they led a coup, in 1980, over half a million people were arrested and the political board was entirely reshuffled.
The opposition may not have much power right now but they'd have none at all if the military took over so it's all about theit survival instinct.
Fully understood. I'm Latin American and believe me, I have no love at all for military coups.
My point was, if Erdogan is such a threat to democracy, how come his political opponents -- such as the pro-Kurdish HDP and leftist parties -- didn't support this military coup, which was allegedly in favor of liberty and secularism and everything good that Erdogan seems to be against? Maybe these opposition parties were aware that military coups are seldom democratic, are often followed by arbitrary imprisonment and summary executions, and maybe it wasn't obvious that this rebel army faction was a better and more democratic alternative to Erdogan?
A sibling to my last reply states it best: coups are risky and if the opposition chose the wrong side they'd be the first to go in a large scale purge. The resulting political landscape would be significantly worse for everyone. If the plotters had managed to capture Erdogan early on in the attempt and one of the coup leaders went on national television to show Erdogan's dismembered head then maybe, maybe the opposition could have gone along without taking an unacceptable risk.
Erdogan attacked Kurds long before he lost his parliamentary majority. He attacks them because it's politically convenient for him to have a unifying enemy (most non-AKP Turks do believe the Kurds should renounce violence and drop their separatist demands). In fact, the HDP reached such a high level of support in those elections because a lot of people finally saw through the game and were tired of playing it.
I don't disagree that Erdogan all but helped IS/Daesh against Assad and Kurds, I'm just saying that his attitude towards the Kurdish problem has been more or less the same since the '90s.
Sorry, when you start talking about tens of thousands imprisoned without due process, that's way beyond approving undemocratic legislation in opportunistic ways.
A dictator can be voted in and still be a dictator (see also the one-Godwin-stops-me-from-mentioning). In fact, the original Roman dictators were elected, and followed Roman laws. Modern dictators usually reach power with a golpe, but that's very recent; both Mussolini and Hitler were regularly elected and nominated heads of government by following their proper constitutional laws - the King of Italy was not deposed, nor was the German President (he died of natural causes and left the office technically vacant).
Dictatorship is defined by how power is exercised once attained, not by how it is reached. Removing regularly-appointed judges on political grounds, that's dictatorial; taking political prisoners without following due process, that's dictatorial; and so on and so forth.
I agree that we (especially outside of Turkey) now carry a rose-tinted view of Ataturk, conveniently forgetting his ugly side: he all but deported and killed swaths of population in order to "solidify" the ethnic background of his state, especially in remote areas and on the islands bordering Greece; and was, after all, a dictator who might have wished for democracy but didn't practice it very much. He was very much a man of his time, from a generation that produced Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin and so on.
Vast majority my arse. Erdogan won the last election in 2014 with less than 52% of the vote [1] on less than 75% turnout and he has only been so successful in his career because of a quirk of demographics. Turkey has been slower than other countries in urbanization and the rural Islamic majority has used their very slim majority to wipe out democracy and institute their policies at the expense of the urban secular minority. Just look at the distribution of protests in the country and you see a very clear pattern: the cities are very different from the rest of the country.
Putin is someone who has the support of the vast majority of his constituents, even despite the hardships and corruption, while Erdogan is just another opportunistic authoritarian who abused a faulty system to become a "democratically elected" dictator. In the eyes of much of the rest of the world, he has no legitimacy and is a pariah whose only leverage is the migrant crisis and the conflict with ISIS.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_presidential_electio...
52% of the vote on 75% turnout is fantastic. When's the last time an American president was voted in on such a mandate?
The United States doesn't have compulsory voting like Turkey does. Australia, another country with compulsory voting (although much better enforced), regularly sees elections with over 90-95% turnout. That is a real democratic mandate.
Thanks for the information; I was unaware that Turkey has compulsory voting.
Is there a credible opposition party to AKP, or a smattering of smaller parties?
There is a long list of opposition parties in Turkey but few of them have any power [1]. The main opposition party with about a quarter of MPs (vast majority representing urban districts) is the Republican People's Party, which was the first political party in Turkey post WWI as well as the one led by Ataturk during his secular revolution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_parties_in_T...
Vast majority was against the coup. That is for sure.
In the Last election Erdogan's `party` had 49.5% of votes with %85.18 turnout.
One of the requirements for democracy is a free press, but Erdogan has been oppressing it for years through means such as shutting down newspapers he didn't like and jailing journalists. There is also a law against insulting the president that has lead to over 2,000 people arrested. Reporters Without Borders lists Turkey as 151 out of 189 countries for freedom of the press.
So essentially you say "Tayyip's leadership is not secular, military is secular, coup needed, shame it failed. Tayyip is a baddy, Ataturk was a benevolent dictator, united everyone, all were nice and dandy. But not anymore."
Excellent, super analysis of recent Turkish history. I am speechless.
Is there any indication that the coup of to try to restore secularism, and not instigated by Gulen and his followers? I ask this sincerely because a couple of my very educated Turkish friends in the west do think Gulen was behind the coup attempt in some form or the other.
Zero indication at all. None. Exactly the opposite actually. Not sure about the exact numbers but a lot of the the generals that were promoted after the Ergenekon and Balyoz cases were behind the coup. A lot of secular Generals were put to jail after those cases and West didn't seem to care at all.
Are you saying Erdogan replaced pro-Ataturk generals with pro-Islam generals, and that led to more Gulen followers with control of troops than there were before?
Yep exactly ! Erdogan and Gulen were close allies until 3 years ago.
A stadium full of Gulen supporters cheering for Erdogan, just 4 years ago.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP7r0U8mfg
Erdogan's speech; "I wish Gulen was here with us today"
Actually it was not a friendship. Perhaps a mutually beneficial partnership. And things went downhill probably much before 2012, regardless of political speeches.
Erdoğan and public was convinced with the coup plan in 2009 ( who knows probably they were plotting for real and gülen supporters in the army exposed it) and Gülen probably have put some (many?) of his supporters among replacements. They are extremely secretive so I doubt anybody got suspicious. I read some of the captive coup army officials statements, they are quite shocking.
Do you believe that those statements were legitimate (that is, truthful, unforced, and actually said by the officers they were attributed to)?
I'm not saying that they weren't legitimate. I have no information one way or the other. But if the regime wished to exploit the failed coup for political reasons, faked statements are one standard way to do that.
Statements are very detailed and fits the previously known inner workings of the movement. Sure there may be some modifications we never know. They just sound legit to me.
Firstly I do not think this is about secularism. Turkey is still a more or less a secular country happen to be ruled by a central right - somewhat religious party.
My personal view is that Gulen was involved with the coup, but possibly jocobin nationalist/kemalist fractions in the army was also in the mix.
Preferably after a bloody purge. It has a distinguished history of organizing death squads, torture, murder of political opponents, and probably a few false flag operations, not to mention a cozy relationship with business interests. This, obviously, doesn't make Erdogan into a nice guy, but the rosy picture many people outside of Turkey seem to have of these good old secular generals risking it all to uphold their moral values isn't, IMHO, supported by facts.
I think the Kurds in particular will take issue with such a description.
If they were putting the held-hostage chief of staff on the phone with Gulen, does that sound secular to you?
I may have missed this. Can you provide a source?
It's alleged:
http://www.trtworld.com/turkey/turkish-top-general-was-told-...
Some funny business relating to that, for fans of the false flag hypothesis:
One of the main coup guys having a go at Akar was Gen. Mehmet Dişli who "initially ordered Akar to sign the declaration and read it out to the Turkish public. Facing Akar’s firm rejection, Dişli held Akar at gunpoint and attempted to physically force him to comply with the order by cinching a belt around his neck, the sources claimed. " http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/chief-of-staff-held-at-gunp...
Mehmet Dişli "happens to be the brother of Saban Dişli, a former vice president of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Saban is a close confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan." http://www.gagrule.net/turkey-the-alleged-coup-leaders-two-s...
Some more on that stuff here https://www.quora.com/Who-is-behind-the-coup-attempt-in-Turk...
I keep running into this opinion, and as Turk who's a supporter of both secular and democratic rule, I feel I have to provide a counterpoint whenever it shows up.
As usual, Turkish politics is all about nuance. First of all, a coup benefits no one - previous coups perhaps brought short term "stability", but at the cost of the lives of many people jailed and executed without due process, and a lack of respect for the rule of law. They were pyrrhic victories at best, and set the stage for the current mass polarization of "secularists" and "islamists" that is causing so much unrest and strife. Back in the day, it also was "communists" once. Coups are not good or right, regardless of who they're orchestrated by. Lest you think
Lest you think the coups were mostly harmless, some examples of what happened were widespread (thousands) torture and arbitrary jailing, capital punishment, public hangings, repression of freedom of speech and books, purging of dissenting opinion from universities and government, special courts created to swiftly punish any opposition, repression of trade unions are just some of the results. Examples:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Turkish_military_memorand... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
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Having said that, to the actual point: The right-wing secular generals have been dismantled for the most part anyway. The prevailing theory is that the coup might have come from the supporters of Fettullah Gulen, who's for some reason seen as a harmless moderate in the West, but in Turkey he's not. It's never mentioned, for example, that his organization in Turkey runs "houses of light" (isik evleri) which serve as alternate housing for students who can't afford proper housing, where young children are gently groomed and selected for religious coercion and indoctrination, to then join the organization for life. They're given proper educations, jobs, business connections, in return for their service of course. Perhaps the Gulen schools in the US don't engage in that, probably because they know that won't fly there, and Gulen is relying on the US's protection against the Turkish government. Also not mentioned is that they worked with the Erdogan government when it was dismantling supporters of secularity from branches of government. What makes you think that these people would make for a better leadership than the current one?
More about Gulen recently:
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/thinking-gulen-is-a-peacefu...
and also
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/07/turkey-cou...
Don't get me wrong, I don't like Erdogan and his group one bit, but a coup would not have been better by any measure.
To further this point, this is a nice US-based analysis from the Middle East Quarterly in 2009 of Gulen and presumably the folks who participated in the coup seeing as the Kremelists (secularists) had already been removed by him). http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition. It sounds like secular proponents of democracy in Turkey are up the proverbial creek no matter who prevailed.
Someone on reddit told me the Gulen movement was comparable to Scientology in the eyes of the Turks. I didn't have more details, your comment is clearer. Thanks.
What do you think about press being cleaned ? in the west it's seen negatively obviously, but is there other details that may explain, like in the Gulen movement case, the decision ?
Is Erdogan feeding the people populist lies in order to rally them ? Some people have said he's starting to look like Germany pre WW2 politic style.
Well, yeah - at least in the eyes of my social circle, but I doubt that he'd gather so much influence if everyone thought the same.
Well, I have very mixed feelings.
Someone made a point that a lot more people were complicit in the nazi atrocities than were indicted in the Nuremberg trials, and that makes sense. So the ones directly involved with the coup plot, yes, absolutely prosecute and punish them swiftly. The rest is trickier.
Obviously Gulen and his supporters need to be dealt with. But how can we be sure that the trials will be fair and equitable, and not a mockery of the justice system, like the Sledgehammer case that Erdogan participated in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sledgehammer_(coup_plan) )? How does a government prosecute thousands upon thousands when its courts and prosecutors can barely hold under the current case load?
How can we ensure that the tens of thousands accused are actually guilty? Of course a trial is done to test exactly this, but there is no right to a speedy trial in Turkey, and people routinely die in detention waiting for their court date. How many are genuinely suspected to be guilty rather than merely detractors who are being conveniently removed? They've done it before, and they'll do it again. This makes me extremely uncomfortable, because who's next?
Especially with the press, I think it's important to preserve free and unrestricted speech. But it's also true that that ship long sailed under Erdogan, when news organizations would get fiscally investigated if they dissented loudly. So given that I don't think it'll improve, should the Gulenist reporters go to jail? Perhaps - if their only crime is to write articles supporting backwards views, then probably not. I'd rather them ousted and judged in the court of public opinion.
So, mixed feelings and no good answers.
That's the kicker - he doesn't have to. This situation benefits him greatly, and fell conveniently on his lap. Some people of course accuse him of organizing the coup as a false flag, but I think that's too much of a conspiracy. All he'd have to do would be to notice it a tiny bit in advance, prepare for it, and allow it to happen. Or even just get lucky enough to narrowly escape, but then make use of the situation fully.
So if I understand correctly, most the people arrested (teachers, journalists, police, etc) were Gulen activists or supporters ? Not just neutral or opposing the current governement ?
Yeah passively playing the victim seems to be more efficient.
Well, it's unclear. Of course the Erdogan government claims they are, but we don't know - there could be a lot of innocent people in there too. And that's exactly the issue and source of contention.
Alright thanks a lot. Not easy to understand what happens in country I don't hear often about.
Thanks for adding some sanity to the discussion.
"It's never mentioned, for example, that his organization in Turkey runs "houses of light" (isik evleri) which serve..."
And here is the problem that I personally have, it could be that the whole organisation is like Scientology, Opus Dei or they spend their evenings with prosecuting chickens, but regarding the coup the world still need to see some solid evidence. Where is the proof and preferably something that has more value than Erdogan's word for it.
It doesn't matter if somebody is a not a nice person. When there isn't any evidence of a crime you don't prosecute them, simple as that. Also don't tell me that of all that is going on after the coup, that these are the results of proper investigations or a good functioning justice system.
Meanwhile in this European country we are confronted by Turkish (even third generation) people that threatening other Turkish people, arson or destruction against buildings of people they clearly don't like and that mainly because some egomaniac in a country far away is throwing blind accusations like there is no tomorrow.
We are even at the point that the Turkish embassy is calling all people to report anybody who "insults" Erdogan, because the world clearly needs more LOTR comparisons or poems. Hell, this week the president of this region needed to make the comparison with nazi's because that was the last time we were confronted with a foreign power trying to meddle in our local affairs. In the end the ambassador needed to apologize, but we are seeing more and more of those incidents.
I agree completely with your sentiment regarding conviction without proof, but want to comment on this thought one part for a second, in isolation from the rest of the discussion. First of all, that the world doesn't see evidence on gulen's shady dealings or extreme islamist tendencies at all is a measure of the world's own ignorance. I don't mean this in an accusatory way - it's not your fault.
Outside observers, especially those who do not understand Turkish, are excluded from huge swathes of news, discussion, court cases and information. What you're getting is the gist. It's second hand information at best, and the foreign media often gets it wrong, misses historic context, or glosses over the nuances.
Just like all the people here (and in western news organizations) who didn't know Gulen existed up until very recently - an deficiency in knowledge so huge that it should scare you away (and perhaps disqualify you) from holding a strong opinion on Turkish politics immediately.
So when outsiders ask for "evidence" - really they're asking for a New York Times / Economist / Wall Street Journal / Foreign Policy op-ed. Because that's considered a respectable news organization, but Turkish sources aren't considered respectable, never mind that they probably share most of their sources on Turkish news.
So, demands for "solid evidence" in this sense are a measure of privilege that's so monumental that people don't even realize they're subject to it.
So when I try to make an argument with someone who isn't from Turkey, the best I can do is point to sources like these, which all have surface-level milquetoast reports on gulen, painting him a "reclusive cleric", an islamic scholar and "supporter of interfaith dialogue" - all true to some degree, but definitely not the whole story.
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As a more concrete example, let's look at the progression of Gulen profiles in the nyt over the years:
2000 http://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/25/world/turkey-assails-a-rev... 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/world/asia/04islam.html 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/us/12iht-gulen.html 2012 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/25/world/middleeast/turkey-fe... 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/17/us/fethullah-gulen-turkey-... 2016 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/world/europe/fethullah-gul...
It's amazing to see how the language and the detail in the account of his activities change across the years. The 2000 article gets the part about the prosecution, but misses the point on Gulen completely. Nor a single bad thing about him. Anyway, recently, they gave the soapbox to gulen himself twice:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/opinion/fethullah-gulen-tu... http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/26/opinion/fethullah-gulen-i-...
Luckily, they also gave a smaller soapbox to Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist, who presents many great counterarguments:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/opinion/who-was-behind-the...
Again, I don't think this is some conspiracy, but just ignorance. The 2000 article was ignorant of basic, common knowledge in Turkish politics. The more recent ones are less ignorant.
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Of course this is changing: for example here's a 2014 article from the Carnegie Endowment, which points fingers to shady activities but doesn't make accusations about islamism: http://carnegieendowment.org/2014/02/04/g-len-movement-and-t...
Turkish sources are also starting to publish english language news - here's an analysis of the Gulen movement through wikileaks cables:
http://www.dailysabah.com/politics/2014/04/04/cia-fbi-divide...
Here are some of the actual cables - I hope these are considered reliable to draw your own conclusions from:
https://www.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05ISTANBUL1336_a.html https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09ASHGABAT491_a.html
See Centicosm's comment here for another well researched article:
http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition
It also comes from the Middle East Forum which is a conservative think tank, so take that as you will. But this is what I mean - they have a huge incentive to badmouth islam, so they actually bother to engage in research. Impressively, most of the sources on the bottom are Turkish language sources.
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Anyway, my point isn't about gulen, but the attitude and the cultural notion that facts exist when they exist in the western media, and anything else is unreliable conspiracy theories and bunk. And this coming from people who barely knew Gulen - a central figure in Turkish politics - a few months ago.
Yes, things do suck in Turkey, and are nonfunctional in many ways. Many things are wrong, many sources are unreliable and corrupt, but we're not completely stupid either, and the sneering sense of superiority I so often encounter is counterproductive, surprising and tiring.
One thing to keep in mind is that Turkey has had at least 4 successful military coups in the last century, so the people are traumatized in that regard and you won't find many who would support any military-led coup at all, even if it were to remove a full-on dictator.
Not to mention, if the first 4 coups didn't work out in the end, what's to make people feel like the 5th coup will wind up better.
Turkey had 2.5 successfull military coups.
1960 and 1980: Old school military colonel - generals. They thought they should show these puny civilians who the real boss was, hanged a few people including a prime minister, oppressed free speech and media.
1998 was different, it was a half coup, they disbanded government, created a huge vacuum of authority, caused the biggest economical depression in Turkish history, oppressed majority of people (Those pesky conservative people, why do they want to go to university?)
2016: They failed miserably regardless of their motivation. I hope this would be a lesson to them, Turks had enough of this crap.
You may be right and just for the record here's what I've included in the count:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_Turkish_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1971_Turkish_military_memorand...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Turkish_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Turkish_military_memorand...
The people behind this coup is also islamists and most of the people in Turkey support Erdoğan so I doubt it. A civil war is quite possible in that scenario.
Really? Why? What do you think would happen if it was successful?
No, it's not. There never was a coup.
What kind of coup has a fighter jet with the President's plane in its sights, and then doesn't shoot it down, and instead allows it to land? What kind of coup doesn't bother actually capturing the leaders, and instead goes and captures a bridge? What kind of coup ignores the leaders but then shoots at protesters from helicopters? What kind of coup shoots at an empty parliament building?
If this was a coup, it was the most incompetent coup ever conducted in the history of the world. Turkey has had a bunch of coups over the years, and none of them looked anything like this one. When you want to conduct a coup, you do it in the middle of the night and you capture the nation's top political leadership first and foremost, and you definitely do not harm civilians.
Best explanation I have about what happened is this;
The attempt was real. It was actually planned pretty well. Their plans were exposed. They panicked, couldn't really follow through with all their plans. Generals that weren't part of the coup took the chain of command pretty fast to stop the attempt.
1) Parliament building was not empty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM_Qt55kJVk
2) Apparently there were other jets that were actually following Erdogan's plane
3) They kidnapped almost all high ranked military personnel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--bCuv6G5I0. The ones that escaped actually took back the chain of command and was able to stop the attempt.
4) Does anything look staged in these videos; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTEbX7kvZ6E or this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkfIbfnZt_Y. Some of these people on the floor are 50-60 year old generals. What is their role in your scenario?
I'm thinking maybe it was a hybrid of false flag and genuine - Erdogan fearing a coup gets some of his general friends to try to foment a coup. Most of the followers think it's for real. Then everyone gets arrested. Erdogan's friends do a year in jail and then are released, the others treated harshly.
A possible friendly general is Mehmet Dişli, Erdogan's friends brother. https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-eas...
More like a false-flag operation designed to cement his leadership by allowing the execution of anyone critical of the great leader.
It would have been hard for a real coup to be as damaging as more time with Erdogan will be. It'll look like Syria in a year or two. We might as well just remove the name Turkey from the map and wait until the flames die out.
Why? Do you want to have these coups in your own country every 10 years, destroying economy, killing people and setting back the progress another 20 years?
Italian newspapers published emails from desperate Turkish academics stationed abroad, available to work for free on anything, just to avoid answering the call they got from national authorities to go back. People with PhD literally begging for a few months more, just so that they can find a job and make a new life out of Turkey. It's the sort of thing you read in German or Italian letters from the 1920s and 1930s, almost verbatim.
There is a lot to be said for people abusing words like "dictator" and "fascism" when this or that ruler does not agree with them, but when the situation gets to this level, you have to reach for those words in no uncertain terms. This is how a fragile democracy dies.
Anybody in a position to help these people today, should do that.
Similar to what happened after June, 1989 in Beijing.
Source? How do I find such people in the UK?
Italian, but one of the emails is in English: http://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2016/07/22/turchia-la-resa-d...
This has been going on for years under Tayyip unfortunately. Around the time of the Gezi protests, I had several renouned journalist friends with high-profile jobs (hurriyet etc) that were immediately axed: their publishers were given the 'choice' of purging or being shut-down.
The only silver-lining is that Tayyip is now under the international spotlight; even if he doesn't seem to care, at least more people are aware.
Are you on a first name basis with Erdoğan?
I suspect it's a way of showing less respect. Some people in the US referred to President Clinton as "Billy", for another instance of (I suspect) the same thing.
Yup, it is exactly that.
Most of my turkish friends refer to him as Tayyip. The habit stuck, I guess.
You do know that not every country/culture has the same first name/last name etc calling practices, right?
My comment may have come across as snide, my apologies for that. But I stand by my point; if we want to discuss something we shouldn't stoop to derogatory use of names. In English it is permissible and customary to refer to officials by their last name (e.g., 'Obama', 'Hollande', 'Merkel'). Using their given names, unless done in an obvious tongue-in-cheek fashion, laces your opinion with weasel-speak. It detracts from a sensible exchange of ideas, views, and standpoints.
If we all resort to using whatever we feel is most applicable for Erdoğan (or any other demagogue) I would be very surprised if half of the pseudonyms used did not hint at the alleged illegitimate consummation of those of the caprid persuasion — let's not venture there.
You're overselling your point. For example, in the 2016 presidential primaries, many of the candidates were using their first names preferentially: Hillary, Bernie, Jeb, Rand, Carly. Of course, some candidates focused on their last names: Trump, O'Malley. And others used their full name: Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Marco Rubio.
This purge is really something, even cabin crew for Turkish Airline have lost their jobs as part of this. The real coup seem to be going on right now. Its starting to look like "Night of the Long Knives."
It's tempting to make parallels with 1930s Germany, but that was just such a unique situation. These are usually "all unhappy families are different" situations.
I think the parallel is pretty close to the Reichstags fire - apparently it is (still) disputed if it were orchestrated by the nazis themselves or not - either way it opened the door to dictatorship. Much as there's been no credible evidence about the who or why of the coup -- it's clear it's being used as an excuse to tighten the iron grip.
If you believe that the coup was staged then yes.
Either way. Even if the Reichstags fire was indeed the work of a single man - and not orchestrated - the Nazi party used it for what it was worth. Similarly with this coup; if it wasn't staged, it still seems clear that Edrogan is using it for what it's worth in order to usher in/cement his dictator powers?
Indeed. I completely agree.
It's pretty clear that Erdogan has been moved closer to being - metaphorically - a "mob boss" than what we consider an "elected official" in the US ( assume a sort of spectrum between those). Your thinking changes when you deal with the possibility of assassination. Guys like Putin can't simply resign; they'll probably be hunted down and killed if they leave power. They're riding the tiger.
The general pattern in the Arab Spring has been to assassinate people like Q'daffi - who remind me more of the heads of crime families than political leaders. But here I sit in the US, where we can afford to have ... separation of concern for those roles. And to an extent, the meritocratic myth even in the US is just that - a myth. It's not like we don't have a presidential pretender running on the idea that it doesn't really work.
I can't imagine a modern politician actively embracing Sharia for any reason other than simply wanting to stay in power.
I totally agree and I didn't mean in the literal sense but rather in the sense of its immediacy and fervor. It probably wasn't the best historical comparison.
It takes a lot more than people losing jobs to make it "Night of the Long Knives"...
Sure, you mean like academics and journalists jailed without a trial? Torture?
The real "Night of the Long Knives" was death, not jail or even torture.
Well, historical events should be compared within their context. 90 years after in a country still in NATO, one can not kill the other easily. But arresting and expecting them to die in jail or commit suicide should be equal to Night of long knives.
Yes, it could come to that. I fear that it will. But at this time, the comparison is inappropriate.
Yes and I admitted it probably wasn't the best historical comparison. But given that that less than five years ago this country was being touted as a model for democracy, religious moderation and pluralism for the region, I don't that it's that it's entirely inappropriate.
You mean, the abrupt change rather than the actual details of the event? Yes, I guess I can see that...
Turkey is not a free country any more.
One thing to do is actually voting with your wallet. For example, stop flying Turkish Airlines which is currently flooding the market with cheap tickets.
Hm... but still buy iPhones and other cheap Chinese stuff? Seems like a very intellectually dishonest proposition (edit: to clarify: as China is no more free than Turkey)...
In addition, if we've learned anything from the past decade, it's that economic problems breed political instability. So maybe Turkish population is better off (in the long run) if we support them economically.
I honestly don't think that boycotting a country or company for reason x can be called "dishonest". Where did you read that I encouraged people to by iPhones and "other cheap Chinese stuff". Hint: I haven't.
Perhaps your parent feels like they owe more to Turkey, or that their choices have more influence in Turkey, which is a far smaller country than China?
"Economic problems breed political instability..." - yes, but popular/populist political systems seem to also breed these economic problems. A strategy for leadership is to stop trying to align with any economic theory ( such as it is ) and appeal to popular discontent based on one or more fallacies in economics, or abandon any pretensions to that and use something else to gain power.
Isn't this essentially the Arab Spring come to Turkey? In that case, the democratizing influence of the Web and smartphones seems a critical element.
We, the oh-so-enlightened in the US face a 2% growth target and can't maintain that. Kemalism in Turkey was stable for a long time, but is now at risk.
The US Too.
I'm not sure how much you know about Gulen movement. It is an identical copy of Opus Dei. They have been building their secret network since 1970s. Gulenist people have all critical positions in Turkey. 50% of high-ranked officers in military accused of being part of this group and now arrested. Even though I'm not a supporter of Erdogan, this coup thing is very serious and unfortunately I have to stand with Erdogan. Because it is about our national security. Gulenist people have schools not only in Turkey but also all around the world. Russia passed a law to close all the schools related to Gulenist Movement. Guess what? Because these schools are gateway for CIA. Turkey and USA have contradictory strategies across the middle east. Fethullah Gulen is the leader of Gulenist Movement and now lives in USA. He born in Turkey and he is primary school graduate in this context. There is no way for him to get a green card in US. Anyway, He is supported by invisible government in US or by someone or some groups. How's that possible a turkish guy who has primary school diploma can build schools all over the world and gain thousands of supporters ? I have never seen this entrepreneurship spirit in TR.
As we are turkish people, we want him to be extradited to Turkey. He will come and defend himself in the court.
Can you try to cite some actual evidence here instead of parroting what basically sounds like an insane conspiracy theory?
None of this justifies persecuting academics for conducting science and/or having not great opinions of their government. None of this is an excuse to throw away rule of law, and none of it justifies treating humans without basic dignities https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.independent.co.uk/ne...
The Gulen charter schools have been up to all sorts of no good in the US, see http://www.nola.com/education/baton-rouge/index.ssf/2013/12/...
If you really want to understand the mentality of people that would lead them to submit to an organization like that, I suggest reading "Black Book" by Orhan Pamuk.
(As an aside, we met 2-3 years back in Portland a few times at some of those New Relic meet ups, I hope neocities is still doing well!)
I'm certainly not ruling out that this could all be true. What I'd love to see is a compilation of evidence.
There's a great site on Neocities that's been doing this with Scientology since our foundation and is regularly updated https://scientology.neocities.org
(Neocities is going strong, thank you!)
Posted this earlier in another thread, but this is an interesting, well-referenced, and us-based analysis supporting his claims: http://www.meforum.org/2045/fethullah-gulens-grand-ambition
Does far fetched, however most of Turkish people believe this. If the media is controlled by the government, conspiracies is what you believe in
This coup thing is very well organized and trust me. I'm secular and not following mainstream media. Mainstream media didn't say anything about US or who's behind this. But I'm telling you the truth, these people or gulenist people whatever you call are supported by some organization or people residing in North America.
Eh, all things considered, the coup seems very badly organized in retrospect. Not nearly enough support from the army and therefore doomed to fail.
“Battles have been won against greater odds” John Snow.
Jokes aside, most of these generals were already getting arrested or getting kicked out of the military in the following weeks, they just decided to actually do the crime they are getting arrested for
I can only see a timing problem.
One thing I'd like to understand is if some of the improvements like less discrimination of minorities and getting rid of the death penalty were purely for EU relations and never supported by the AKP. Considering to reinstate the death penalty now is something I don't understand. Can someone who grew up and lives in Turkey explain? I recall that when they snatched the PKK leader they didn't terminate him, and he's jailed. So how come the death penalty is seriously considered an improvement in 2016?
This is primarily to make it difficult to oppose Erdogan. Earlier, an opposition would mean - jail time and potential release sometime in the future. Now, an opposition would mean - you have to sacrifice your life. Basically, the government has upped the stakes against dissent.
But Erdogan can be subject to the same penalty, especially now that they're getting rid of political immunity.
The difference being that Erdogan has all people who would announce such a penalty neatly tied up in his pockets.
I haven't been following very closely but don't think they got rid of political immunity in general. They only removed immunity from MPs, where Erdogan is the president.
I'm less sure of this but I don't believe they lifted immunity for all MPs, I think the bill listed the exact MPs they were going to target.
It doesn't seem Erdogan has plans for retirement any time soon.
My personal theory is that a death penalty applied selectively will be a sweet way to get rid of people who know too much (generals etc), while looking magnanimous for pardoning everyone else.
It's actions like this by Erogan that do tend to make him look like a dictator in action and indeed I ask myself if he was not an Islamic leader then would he have public support by the mass majority of Islamic people in that country and are the supporting him or their religion. As for me if you remove religion from the equation then you equally remove his support and that is very much the crux. More so when he has pushed thru more religious schools, curtailed and closed down free schools and very much done everything possible to drive things in the name of religion protectionism in many eye's. Which is and has been an issue with turkey in the past and indeed, seen the military rise up to curtail it as per the mandate they have. But this time, was very messy and over the years Erdogan has been making sure key people in the military are very much onboard with his religious party line and that in itself would explain the lacklustre mess of a coup. Previously they have had the military step in without any action and been civil, was this impossible in the current time I wonder and I'm tending to learn towards yes as I do not see any request from the military being listened too and indeed when the controlling political party is so embedded, near on impossible.
After all when they label political opposition as terrorists and dissent and then somehow use this as a tool to remove political opposition and control education, is that going to end well democracy wise one seriously wonders.
The best argument for the death penalty is about legitimacy of the government. Given the choice between revenge killings and the death penalty sentence in fair courts, we should choose the death penalty. Of course, this presumes fair trials, etc., so if the trials themselves are non-existent or unfair, the calculus changes. And if the impulse for violent revenge does not exist among a people, then the calculus changes as well.
To be clear, the argument isn't that repaying murder with death is just. The argument is that to maintain a stable government, the government needs to respect popular opinion on the issue.
All that being said, I don't have any particular insight into Erdogan's changes. But changing rules just after a traumatic event can lead to regrets and overreach, as the U.S. found post 9/11.
Popular opinion in many Western countries also supports the death penalty even where it's outlawed. In general, it's not difficult to find unpopular policy that governments pursue nonetheless, and this does not necessarily result in instability.
Another pro-death penalty argument is its deterrent effect. While criminologists found that murder may not be deterred by the death penalty, we would expect other crimes requiring more deliberation and intelligence, to be deterred by the prospect of state killing. There is scope for innovative and beneficial use of the death penalty. For example, serious white collar crime, political corruption, and to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
I would love to see some reliable statistics that prove support even anywhere near 50% in major European countries for a reintroduction of the death penalty, especially since your remark about "popular opinion" seems to suggest widespread public support for the death penalty that is subsequently ignored by politicians.
The UK public until very recently had decisive majority support for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Last year the NatCen British Social Attitudes Report found 48% of the 2,878 people it surveyed were in favour of capital punishment. This is the lowest figure since the survey began in 1983, when around 75% of people were in favour. Capital punishment for murder was abolished in Great Britain in 1965.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-32061822
Thank you for the link. I guess I should never count out the Brits when it comes to these things! ;) The last reliable thing I found for Germany was an article that cited a rise to 25% after something or other in 2014, which is why I didn't quite expect those numbers. But in these days...
This isn't unique to the UK.
Germany: http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article134799279/
USA: http://www.people-press.org/2015/04/16/less-support-for-deat...
It kind of is, though? The US don't count, they have the death penalty and are not a European country, but the UK, just like basically all other European countries (not just EU countries) excluding Belarus & Kazakhstan are members of the Council of Europe, where membership requires abolishing the death penalty. Also, the article for Germany showed, as I said, a rise to 25%, which is really rather far from anything approaching a majority, while the BBC article talked about a decline to 50%. So there is quite a difference.
If you look at the actual legal outcome of the financial crisis, Goldman Sachs cooking of Greece books, Euribor Fraud, revolving doors between government a sweet consulting jobs, Panama papers, recurrent "tax" amnesty, ... it seems there is very little in common between what people think is illegal and what actually is. So what kind of deterrent would introducing death penalty actually achieve ? The fall guys would fall harder ?
Even just Bernie Madoff and the Libor crooks being executed would probably have a socially beneficial effect. But of course, you could equally say there is no point in having any laws if they are not enforced.
The point is that the severity of the punishment must match the severity of the crime. Crooked people getting off easy is a different example of the same issue. In both cases, the legitimacy of the government is eroded. Sometimes this looks like people ignoring even more laws or voting for candidates that ignore the existing checks and balances. In more volatile cases, you could see the rise of tribal forces (including mafia and gangs), more revenge and honor killings, a full-on coup, or any number of other things.
The legal cost of committing a crime is something like (severity of punishment * likelihood of punishment). I suspect that the latter term is far, far more important to the legitimacy of a government, since it indicates competence whereas the former indicates stringency or leniency, and people respect a competent but lenient government far more than a harsh but incompetent one.
Besides, life in prison is a harsher punishment than death.
I'm sorry, WHAT?! You seem to have a gross misunderstanding about the permanency of death.
I would absolutely choose death over lifetime sentence in US prison system, absolutely and without hesitation,.
It is you who seem to have a gross misunderstanding about time and suffering. The dead don't suffer.
At least with respect to the 2008 financial crisis, there was actual fraud going on there. People were lying about lots of things. Doing it a little may be subject to breach of contract lawsuits. Doing it a lot is fraud, and can be prosecuted.
Sadly, hardly anyone was indicted, so there's no point (yet) to debating the usefulness of the death penalty for white collar crimes.
Lots of fraud in China where the death sentence is used.
Your position is unsupported by facts and unsustainable.
In the US, death penalty is popular but tolerated extrajudicial killing is not. In Middle East, extrajudicial killing is more common and tolerated.
Extrajudicial killing is very popular in the US, by drone (against Muslims), by gun owner (Stand Your Ground laws) and by cop (against minorities).
Death penalty would make it impossible to send illegal immigrants back to Turkey. Right now there is a deal with EU and Turkey has to accept them.
Technically, no, not unless asylum seekers themselves are threatened by the death penalty in Turkey which is not the case for migrants in transit.
But of course politically it would make any deals with Erdogan more difficult.
I'm waiting for reactions on how long you can sell cars made in Turkey in the EU market (e.g. Toyota, Renault).
Here you can read the article on one page instead of three: http://www.zeit.de/wissen/2016-07/turkish-academics-human-ri...
Thanks, we updated the link.
Brain drain is a great way to improve your country's future prospects
Dictators don't care about their country's prospects, only their own, their kin and their lackeys. Mugabe, Kim Jong-Un, those of the *stans - all are doing very well for themselves.
"those of the *stans" is a slur against the population of entire linguistic family
I read somewhere that the Turkish ruling party said it themselves: "The higher the education level, the less they vote for us." How can you expect them to educate people modernly after that?
You read it wrong: the ruling party has the highest percentage of PhDs, Masters and undergraduates than any party.
Do you have any source for this? In my personal experience, most well educated people are not voting AKP.
That was in the past... This is a new century. That is why these academics are so uneasy-- they are not doing science, instead, hoping salvation from military coups.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfTxE4w322U
Are you aware of killing people at that attempt by soldiers who support Gulen ? This is not about an issue for only AKP or Tayyip Erdogan, this is also about 90% percent of people who lives in Turkey. No one sees after-coup plan of gulen supporters like executing of more than 20.000 anti-gulen people . If so , why should academics be silent ? If they work in this country, they have to help their country for democracy
I've been in Turkey for the last 2 years. There are so many things to say against that article but it won't be read or put some importance on.
Here you see how Western media discriminates cultures and manipulates the news. It's just I am constantly shocked by how hard the Western media tries to impose its own views for its own citizens.
Maybe in all modern history of Turkey, there hasn't been such a huge agreement about the failed coup but still Western media gives the message that even coup would be better...
That day guys, 246 people have died for democracy. Even this fact can change everything, but it's not even mentioned.
I don't know what the hell you've been reading, but the consensus in western media about the coup appears to be, in order of best to worst:
no coup at all > failed coup > successful coup
Sometimes the latter two are switched, but the former is always presented as the best outcome.
So that's why the coup against Morsi was never called a coup?
Literally the title of the Wikipedia article [1]. Every reference I checked in that article, including this one from CNN [2], called it a coup. "Coup" and "revolution" aren't dirty words in Western lexicon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Egyptian_coup_d%27état
[2] http://www.cnn.com/2013/07/05/world/meast/egypt-coup
Western media manipulates the news? Maybe some things are not 100% correct but what does Erdogan then?
You put the things wrong way around. Erdogan abolished democracy from Turkey. Maybe you are already brainwashed by his censorship?
We have many Turkey discussions here in germany and the Erdogan people don't have any arguments. Sometimes they just lie so hard that it's just ridiculous.
Some would doubt that even half of those really care about democracy as there friends are willingly following the current government into what is increasingly indistinguishable from a dictatorship.
For democracy it is not sufficient to implement the will of the majority: There also has to be a well-educated majority, freedom of the press, a working justice system and so on. Otherwise you might just get a tyranny of the (manipulated) masses.
An atheist, lefty dev from Turkey here. Never voted for Erdogan and never will. I'll dance when he legitimately GTFO, be it election, sickness, his death, legal trial, anything normal in life.
But not via a bloody coup. That night, half of the military elite turned against their own people, ordered opening fire to crowds and National Assembly. Some people died on the street in pajamas, think how impulsive people's response was against the coup.
Mentally, Turkey is a very separated country. There's almost no way to unite Erdogan followers with left wing secularists and Kurds. But we are all united against the coup and there are almost no doubt that Gulenists are behind this bloody adventure. For the last 17-18 years, various layers of Turkey came against Gulen and realized how brutal he is against any idea criticizing him. The last layer left was Erdogan's followers and they also saw the truth in the last 3 years in two different occasions.
Erdogan is still Erdogan, he was on his way to dictatorship and shows signs of using the situation in that way. His past actions makes us believe that. But we still can hope to overthrow him with an election, as we nearly did in June 2015. But there's no way to get rid of any general in power because of a bloody coup. Turkey got 3 successful coups in history and we can see clearly how those times held us back in the world scene. We don't want any more of that.
how safe are you in turkey as a self described atheist?
Turkey is a secular nation with no official state religion.
Not for much longer.
(The rating on the above comment has been fluctuating wildly for that last two hours, from -1 to +3 and back.)
Atheists in Turkey are safe but I wouldn't recommend going out into a city square touting atheism. I think a lot of people don't realize that you can live a western life in some Turkish cities without major issues. The risks come from being an activist against Erdogan.
But maybe the coup would have been the best that could happen.
Now you're probably facing a Third Reich like Turkey :(
As a Greek I’m glad that Erdogan prevailed. At least with him in power we’ve been through a long period of relative peace of mind. I’m not sure that would be the case if the coup had succeeded.
Nice observation!
Is there any real proof that Gulen is behind the coup? I'ved heard a number of Turks both here and on Quora saying he is, but I've never seen any proof presented. It seems like it shouldn't be too hard to find given that the movement is supposedly huge.
I am not saying you are asking the wrong question of anything, and I am sorry if it reads as a snarky comment, but if it quack like a duck, walks like a duck and looks like a duck... it's shadowy politics after all, not physics. Would you expect the coup organizers to have written paper notes saying "yes, we did it"?
Given that all of the previous military coups in Turkey were carried out by the secularist military establishment, you need to present evidence beyond accusations that the Gulenist movement, an Islamist movement, is behind this one. Show us the quacking and walking.
For quacking, http://www.city-journal.org/html/who-fethullah-gülen-13504.h... check paragraph of quotation from a Gulen's leaked speech.
For walking, multiple sources confirms that for years, they stole questions for army and police college entrance exams.
Of course also the statements of coup officials.
Again, given that the all previous military coups have been conducted by secularists, you're gonna need to provide specific evidence that the coup was planned by the Gulenists.
The quotation you point to has nothing to do with the coup at all, it's from the 90s and describes a totally different hypothetical situation, one in which his supporters have seized control of all state institutions. That is clearly not the case. It's Erdogan's AKP that has gradually seized control of all institutions in Turkey.
The events of 2013-2014 that solely aimed overthrowing Erdogan were undeniably controlled by Gulen movement. However they lost the battle big time.
One or two weeks before the coup, some army officials in Izmir were detained linked with a previous army spy case and they were linked to Gulen. The supreme military council was about to be happening with the agenda of sacking multiple army officials related with him.
IMO, coup was not solely planned by Gulen, but they were involved significantly.
Lastly, again, check multiple coup officials' statements.
The confessions of a few captives, under duress from a dictator that's purging both public and private sectors of all opposition under false pretenses and threatening to bring back executions, carry very little weight in my book. There's a long history of compelled false confessions in similar circumstances.
The 2013-2014 protests consisted of just about everyone who opposed Erdogan.
If you mean investigating the corrupt for corruption then I'd say that was closer to legitimate democracy than a coup.
Very valid question and I tried to explain it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12189296
Basically, few police chiefs dismissed for Gulen affiliation were caught inside the tanks involved in the coup and there are videos of it.
Sorry, but you have not provided any proof in the linked comment. It is just hearsay.
Fair enough. Here is an article with a video: http://www.mynet.com/haber/guncel/emniyet-muduru-vatan-cadde...
If you were a Gulenist you would have claimed that this video is not what it isand try to be likeable so people who don't speak Turkish would choose to believe you.
A proper Gulenist would say that this video just shows a guy in a military uniform. What you should do is to google the name of the guy and find old articles with photos about him being dismissed from his job as a police chief.
There are reports about him committing suicide.
From reading a few articles with help of Google Translate, the current purge of Gulenists seems to be similar to persecution of Falun Gong in China. Just another case of history repeating itself.
The subject is incredibly complex. Google Translate would not help you.
I would suggest reading articles by foreigners living in Turkey.
Try Claire Berlinsky, a British national and the biographer of Margaret Thatchet. She is living in Turkey since a decade and closely following the political science.
https://mobile.twitter.com/ClaireBerlinski
Though that just shows there were some alleged Gulenists involved and I gather Gulenists are about 10% of the population. It doesn't prove Gulen himself was involved.
That's the spirit.
10% is a major over estimation. I would say 2-3%. Also you clearly have no idea on how this kind of structures work.
I admit to confusion. However considering who was behind the coup there are two leading hypotheses - Gulen or Erdogan, both widely suspected of being responsible by the Turks.
A main instigator was "General Mehmet Dişli, the brother of a long-serving MP with the ruling AK party, allegedly gave the order that set the coup in motion, sending army special forces officers to arrest the military’s senior command." (Guardian).
He's "a two-star general who happens to be the brother of Saban Dişli, a former vice president of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Saban is a close confidant of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan."
So that's a fairly direct connection for Erdogan being linked. Is there anything like that for Gulen? Like a coup leader being a brother of one of Gulen's mates? Also Gulen has preached peace throughout whereas Erdogan seemed quite happy to go kill Kurds when he felt it would help him politically.
Turkish media had overwhelming evidence on this (all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and many high ranking generals had been incapacitated by their subordinates during the coup attempt). Sadly, none of the communications, testimonies, or sequence of events even superficially surfaced on the Western media.
This coup attempt was unusual to Turks in that for twelve hours we didn't know who was behind the coup. Contrast that with the coup in 1980 where the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared on state TV, and informed the public of their action.
Edit: Search & translate hurriyet.com or sozcu.com.tr's archives for details. The Hurriyet newspaper is more mainstream, trustworthy, and has been critical of Erdogan. Sozcu is vocally critical of Erdogan (and usually for good reason).
From the German newspaper FOCUS:
"Half an hour after the shooting started the British intelligence service GCHQ intercepted phone calls, e-mails and SMS from within the Turkish government apparatus saying that the purges would start next day and that Gülen should be presented as the mastermind of the coup"
Still too early to confirm since it's the only publication that claims this.
It'd be unusual for GCHQ to leak that kind of thing.
Do you think you'd be alive as an atheist in Turkey if the past coups had not happened?
I would be in a much better condition.
Coup of 1980 destroyed Turkish left and opened the door to rightwing extremists. In 14-15 years after the coup, fundamentalists and nationalists pretty much seized the bureaucracy, which led to the raise of Erdogan and deterioration of secularism.
What makes you so confident it was Gulenists?
I think this is a very valid question. For me, the undeniable fingerprint of Gulenists is the fact that police chiefs dismissed for affiliation with Gulen were caught inside the military tanks. There are videos of it and I don't see any other logical explanation for catching suspicious civilians in military vehicles during a coup.
For people who followed the last 10 years of the Turkish politics, the Gulenist affiliation is obvious but I think it is still very hard to explain it to people who are exposed for the first time. Before Erdogan, the Turkish military was actively cracking down on the Gulenist infiltration and it is 40 years old subject with hard to believe but proved multiple times conspiracies.
Gulenists always abuse the benefit of doubt and as a secretive cult usually the evidences against them have some kind of explanation and all these strange coincidences are tagget as normal. After all, there is nothing stopping the Lottery from winning on the 1 2 3 4 5 6 numbers every time, its just improbable so it is not 100.000000% guarantied to be fraud.
And what happens if Erdogan refuses to give up power, despite any elections?
Will you still support "democracy" then or will you be in favor of a coup?
How likely do you think it is? To me extremely low.
You would need a military who's primary mission is to uphold democracy in a non partisan way, much like the Turkish army since Ataturk's Reforms.
In a normal democracy, he'll get arrested for doing that, no? :) Of course, if he refuses than he'll sure have a military power backing him, be it the police force or a part of the military or both. And that's just another coup, I expect the same response we showed against Jul 15th coup attempt: uprising and sane part of the military's action.
What Western citizens do not know is that the military coup often has many legs: Military, Media, Financial institutions and Academy etc. This military coup killed around 250 people wounded 2000 people. Moreover, the senate and the citizens were bombed by the military. What would do if your academics are in bed with those criminals?
All the academics? How many people have been arrested, detained, or lost their jobs in the aftermath (I'm actually asking)?
Also, "in bed" is pretty ambiguous. Sympathy is not a crime in the West, no matter how terrible the recipients of that sympathy.
"All" described in the article is not true. There were some arrested because they were advising criminals (in fact, one of them was caught at the military airpot that launches F16 against people). Some were dismissed from critical positions. Don't forget that many of those are government employees.
I'm not sure about who did what in the coup but a couple of years ago 2000 academics signed a petition asking for peaceful negotiations with the Kurds rather than military action and Erdogan branded them terrorists and fired them for that which kind of shows his attitude.
Yes, that was the time when PKK terror organization destroyed 5-10 Kurdish cities and killed hundreds of Kurds. Those so-called academics were labeling the government as "terrorist" because Erdogan was defending Kurds and the country. Erdogan of course labeled them as terrorists. Remember that those academics do not do science-- see the scientific publications--instead doing politics.
I don't know the specifics in Turkey, but academics elsewhere are often expected to be the front-line defenders of free inquiry and equality. This is because free speech, free thought, etc. are necessary to do honest research.