Political violence, the ‘War on Terror’ and the Turkish military

Abstract

This paper looks at the impact of the ‘War on Terror’ on political violence in Turkey. It begins by tracing the role of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the management and support of Turkey's militarised government since Ankara joined the Alliance in 1952. Here, it is suggested that a triangular concert of agents from the Turkish state's intelligence and special-forces organisations, operatives from Washington, and right-wing activists and paramilitaries have been an important feature of regime formation and maintenance. By the mid-1990s, these covert structures came under increasing social pressure, leading to a period of considerable reform. However, the War on Terror and the West's subsequent turn towards a greater emphasis on security has, it is argued, begun to undo, enervate or obstruct the implementation of many of these reforms. The result, it is concluded, is that elements of the Turkish state unhappy with recent policies have been emboldened and, since the collapse of the Partiya Karkareni Kurdistan's (PKK) unilateral ceasefire in 2004, have started to exert a growing influence.

Keywords:

• nationalism
• terrorism
• fascism
• Kurds
• United States
• Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP)
• reform

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to Dr Ayla Göl and Dr Robert Jacoby for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The literature on the West's ‘good offices’ is broadly divided between studies emphasising what might be called ‘the shared struggle’ (Mango 2005, Aras and Toktas 2007) and ‘the civilising influence’ (Heper 2005, Sarigil 2007).

2. As such, Turkey, like NATO's founding signatories (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the United Kingdom), agreed that should one of its allies be attacked, it would take ‘individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area’ (Article 5).

3. Güres, who served as Chief of Staff from 1990 to 1994, founded the infamous Mountain Commando Brigades and has reportedly admitted to circumventing civilian authorities in the formation of their operational mandate (Bila 2007). For an official acknowledgement of US policy in the establishment of Gladio networks, see US Department of State (2006b).

4. This dual purpose was institutionalised (and encouraged) by the signing of a military accord between Turkey and the United States in 1959 which extended the geo-political focus of NATO's collective security to include direct assistance ‘in the case of an internal rebellion against the regime’ (Fernandes and Özden 2001, p. 12).

5. The attack on Kemal's home, which only succeeded in breaking a window, was greatly exaggerated by the Turkish press. It occurred shortly after the Greek government had appealed (in 1954) to the United Nations for Cypriot self-determination. The renowned Byzantist, Speros Vryonis, suggests that officials from Turkey's ruling Demokrat Parti helped to organise the subsequent disturbances in order to increase popular antipathy towards the prospect of a unified island (Vryonis 2005). Indeed, the British Embassy in Ankara was convinced that Prime Minister Menderes ‘knew all about the business’. Although following an intervention from NATO, the British response was limited to a mildly disapproving letter from Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (Holland 1998, pp. 75–77). Accusations of government involvement in both the bombing and the rioting persisted and eventually made up an important part of Menderes’ trial in 1960 (Kuyucu 2005, p. 362).

6. It seems likely that General Gürsel (as Chief of Staff), would have sought the permission of NATO before allowing the coup to proceed. Indeed, plans for such an operation may have been leaked to the US Embassy as early as 1957 by an informant named Major Samet Kusçu (Yalçin and Yurdakul 1999, pp. 91–97).

7. The MHP has also been able to organise and fund itself in Belgium, the Netherlands, the UK and, especially, Germany, where, as Jurgen Roth notes, ‘protection is particularly strong’ and where ‘right-wing politicians … gave support to the party in the 1970s’ (cited in Fernandes and Özden 2001, p. 12).

8. Plans for a coup appear to have been discussed during a meeting between the Chief of the Turkish Air Force, Muhsin Batur, and his American counterpart, General Ryan, during a trip to Washington shortly before the takeover in March 1971 (Gürkan 1986).

9. Later investigations have pointed to the central role of the former head of the CIA in Turkey, Paul Henze, in the organisation of the coup (Kürkçü 1997).

10. See the methodological caveats in the note to Figure 1.

11. Murat Somer finds that in 1988, for instance, Turkey's highest circulation newspaper, Hürriyet, published only 65 articles on domestic Kurds compared with 473 in 1998. This, he suggests, ‘facilitate[d] the expression of Kurdish interests and the bargaining, deliberation, and voting processes that are necessary for democratically determining Kurdish rights’ (Somer 2005a, p. 618). This was despite the deaths of 49 journalists between 1988 and 2000 and the world's highest proportion of journalists serving prison sentences (Oberdiek 2007).

12. Both parties had been seriously compromised by corruption scandals during the 1990s. Dogru Yol's Interior Minister, Mehmet Agar, was, for instance, implicated in the illegal supply of weapons to Grey Wolf operatives following the discovery of Ministry documents in the wreckage of an infamous car accident near the town of Susurluk in 1996 (Yörük 1996). The Party's leader, Tansu Çiller (who had recently been accused of misusing the Prime Minister's Discretionary Fund) badly misjudged the public mood and ‘became the ardent defender of those involved in the death squads saying some of these people were heroes who had fought against the enemies of the state’ (Çevik 1997, p. 1). Anavatan faced similarly damaging charges over the privatisation of the power generation and financial sectors (particularly Mesut Yilmaz's involvement in Türkbank and Energy Minister Cumhur Ersümer's management of energy tendering deals) during the second half of the 1990s – allegations compounded by the Party leadership's perceived role in the catastrophic economic crash of 2001 (Gorvett 2005).

13. A fact sharpened by the party's enduring popularity (it won an unprecedented 42% in the local elections of 2004 and then 47% – up from 34% in 2002 – in the 2007 general election) and the accession of its Foreign Secretary, Abdullah Gül, to the Presidency in 2008.

14. Evidence from the Turkish Parliament's Commission on Unsolved Murders suggests that operatives from the so-called Kurdish Hizbullah organisation had been trained by the Turkish military within the province of Batman and equipped through the illegal importation of around US$2.8 million of weaponry during the early 1990s (Human Rights Watch 2000, Aras and Bacik 2002, p. 153).

15. Zeyno Baran, for instance, has argued that the AKP is ‘concerned first with uniting people – Turks and Kurds alike – under the umbrella of Islam, and then only second with safeguarding the integrity of national borders’ (Baran 2008, pp. 60–61).

16. Notable events in this regard include President Sezer's official visit to Syria against US wishes (March 2003), Prime Minister's Erdogan's description of Israeli policy in Gaza as ‘state terrorism’ (April 2004), Turkey's successful application for ‘permanent guest’ status at the Arab League (September 2004), and Turkey's leadership and reinvigoration of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (from January 2005) (Robins 2007).

17. Washington was also clearly concerned by negotiations between Turkey and Iran over the formation of a counter-PKK commission (the completion of which was announced in November 2006).

18. Long forgotten, clearly, is the fact that during the mid-1990s these planes had been singled out by Congress as American weapons used in operations in which human rights abuses occurred (Stanton 2006). Indeed, overall US military assistance to Turkey appears to be growing significantly – from US$26.8 million for 1998–2001 to US$169.4 million for 2002–2005 – which, when considered alongside Ankara's new arms deal with Israel (expenditure on which has been US$256 million since 2001), is certainly reminiscent of the 1990s (SIPRI 2008a).

19. Defence relations between Israel and Turkey stretch back to memoranda signed in 1992. Since then, the two states have agreed to share intelligence on Syria, Iraq and Iran. Halutz's meeting in 2005 appears to be related to their reciprocal rolling five-year military-training arrangements first established in 1996 and came just after similar visits from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Federal Bureau of Investigation Chief Robert Mueller, Director of CentralIntelligence Porter Goss, and NATO Secretary General Jaap De Hoop Scheffer. It was reported that Halutz offered enhanced intelligence reports in return for participation in a winter training programme at Bolu and supported Goss's claims that Iran (with which Turkish trade had risen by 400% between 2000 and 2004) was supplying logistical support to the PKK (Athanasiadis 2006).

20. Giogio Agamben defines a ‘state of exemption’ as a ‘situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible’ (cited in Öktem 2006, p. 10).

21. The four men were identified as Ali Kaya, Tanju Çavus, Özcan Ildeniz and Veysel Ates (Bese 2006, pp. 186–188). MIT's 25-page report into the killing suggested that the murders were carried out by the PKK and that the presence of the officers at the scene was a ‘coincidence’ – a conclusion supported by future Chief-of-Staff Yasar Büyükanit, who described Kaya as ‘a good boy’ (Tugal 2007, p. 29).

22. Despite this, Kaya, Ildeniz and Ates received long prison sentences, while Çavus was released (although he has since been charged with the murder of another man in Isparta). In 2007, however, the Appeals Court overturned their convictions and, rejecting the argument that ‘throwing bombs at a citizen's shop is not a military activity’, ruled that the case should be heard by a military tribunal (Korkut 2007). At the time of writing, the three sergeants remain serving members of the gendarmerie. The owner of the bookshop was arrested for maintaining his links with the PKK (Park 2008b, p. 56).