Eavesdropping on Erdoğan
January 3, 2013 § 2 Comments
There is some very strange stuff going on in Turkey and I don’t quite know what to make of it just yet, so I thought I’d do some speculative musing out loud in the hopes of sparking a discussion. In September, Prime Minister Erdoğan completely out of the blue fired his head of security and many of his bodyguards en masse and replaced them with new people. In October, his office went through a complete root and branch renovation. These moves led to speculation that Erdoğan was concerned that he’d been spied on, since they seemed like unusual steps to take absent some evidence of outside parties listening in and monitoring the prime minister’s private communications. Then in December, Erdoğan revealed that his home office had been bugged, and more bugs were found in his parliamentary office and his car. Erdoğan initially blamed the deep state, and then later essentially said he wanted to just put the whole thing behind him, although the MIT (Turkish intelligence) is investigating. Erdoğan also issued special “crypto phones” to all Turkish ministers in order to prevent their communications from being intercepted as well.
A couple of things here are particularly odd to me. First, why did Erdoğan decide in December to publicly reveal that he’d been spied on? The rumors were flying for months, but it seems like a very strange thing to confirm since the benefit of doing so is not readily appreciable. It relays a sense of governmental incompetence, particularly given the scope of devices that were allegedly found, and does not inspire confidence in Erdoğan and his team. The announcement was also not made in an effort to be as transparent and informative as possible, since neither of these things are exactly hallmarks of the current Turkish government. Erdoğan is also a guy who almost never admits he was wrong about anything, and while having your office bugged and phones tapped is not an error on Erdoğan’s part, his letting everyone know that it happened is an unusual admission that something went wrong somewhere.
Second, why did Erdoğan rush to blame the usual suspects in the deep state and then offer to drop the subject entirely? It’s almost as if he geared up for another fight with the military and other deep state actors, and then was somehow frightened off. Certainly it is very much out of character for Erdoğan to publicly back down on anything, and even more out of character to offer not to pursue someone who has spied on him. It leaves the impression that either something or someone spooked him, or that his initial conjecture about the responsible parties was wrong. I can’t recall another instance of Erdoğan giving off the impression that he is ready for battle and then bowing out.
Here are some completely unfounded ideas as to what may be going on here. Taking all of this together, I think that things in Turkey are about to get a lot more unpleasant, with a new round of arrests, prosecutions, and trials. If Erdoğan did not intend to go after someone or something, there would have been no reason for him to announce that his office was bugged. Letting the public know is an effort to get on the right side of public opinion before whatever comes next, much like exposing coup plots, whether real or imagined, was necessary before prosecuting hundreds of military officers. Erdoğan revealing that he is being spied on signaled to me the beginning of a renewed campaign of Ergenekon redux.
The weird part then is his backtracking, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Does whoever bugged his office have information being used to blackmail Erdoğan? Is this whole thing an exercise in paranoid delusion? I have no clue at all. The other question is, who was Erdoğan preparing to go after? It could be the military, which would make sense given his initial blaming the deep state. On the other hand, there are rumors that the party responsible for the bugs is the Gülenists. To my mind, if Erdoğan is preparing to go after someone, it is Gülenists rather than the military, since the growing split between the prime minister and his former cheerleaders has been a long time coming. There is irony in Gülenists banding together with Erdoğan in using shadowy tactics and accusations to bring down the military, to now have Erdoğan turn around and use the same playbook on the Gülen movement. As I said, this is complete conjecture on my part, but something is definitely going on behind the scenes and I think it’s about to get messy. If anyone can shed any more light on this whole strange affair, please don’t hesitate to let me know.
What Is Shas Doing In Turkey? UPDATED
August 20, 2012 § 1 Comment
SEE BELOW FOR UPDATE
Over the weekend, the news emerged that an Israeli delegation of Shas MKs, European Haredi rabbis, and Bar-Ilan University professor of Arabic and Islam Moti Kedar made a secret visit to Turkey last week. According to the reports in the Israeli press, the group was led by Shas MK and deputy finance minister Yitzhak Cohen and had approval from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office, although it appears that the Foreign Ministry was not on board with the trip and even tried to sway Cohen from attending some of the meetings. It also appears as if the group was invited to Turkey by “local interfaith organizations” and met with Turkish parliamentarians, including some from the AKP.
There are a number of strange things going on here. First, I can’t find any mention of this secret visit in the Turkish press. As of last night there were zero references to it in either the English language Hürriyet Daily News or Today’s Zaman, or in the Turkish language Hürriyet, Zaman, or Radikal. The Turkish press might not be reporting the story because the government does not want it to get out that members of the AKP have been meeting with Israeli officials, or it might be that the Turkish press finds this to be a non-story, but it’s odd to me that nobody in Turkey has any original reporting on this and that the Turkish papers haven’t even picked up the story from the Israel press.
Second, I’d love to know the identity of the unnamed interfaith groups that invited the Israeli delegation to Turkey and presumably set up meetings for them with Turkish MPs. The first group that comes to mind, of course, is the Gülen movement, and Gülenists certainly have the sway to set up meetings between Cohen and AKP officials, but then we run into the problem that the Gülenist newspapers – Today’s Zaman and Zaman – have been completely silent about the trip. One would think that if the Gülenists had arranged the trip, their press outlets would be touting it. It’s also a strange mix of people that the unnamed interfaith groups invited, with its combination of Israeli Haredi Knesset members, non-Israeli European rabbis, and Moti Kedar, who is a rightwing academic known for his willingness to tangle with al-Jazeera hosts in Arabic but to my knowledge is not an expert on Turkey. The Shas MKs would certainly have a reason to talk to the AKP and try to improve official ties between Israel and Turkey, but the Europeans and Kedar have no purpose for being there in this regard, and so it almost looks like the point of the trip was indeed about some sort of interfaith dialogue and that any political meetings Cohen had were entire ancillary to the whole thing.
Third, the reported disagreement between Netanyahu’s office and the Foreign Ministry is intriguing. Avigdor Lieberman is a vocal hardliner when it comes to Turkey, and reiterated that Israel has no intention of apologizing to Turkey during his meetings with Turkish journalists in Israel last month. That the Foreign Ministry under Lieberman would not want Israeli MKs traveling to Turkey and meeting with the AKP with no strings attached and without embassy supervision is not at all surprising. This incident might signal a real split between Netanyahu and Lieberman over repairing the relationship with Turkey. In this light, the fact that Shas members are the ones who went to Turkey takes on greater significance, since there is outright hostility between Shas and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, and between Lieberman and Shas head (and Interior Minister) Eli Yishai. If there is any party that would have no hesitation at all over crossing Lieberman and going against the wishes of the Foreign Ministry, it would be Shas. On the other hand, if this was a delegation explicitly sent by Netanyahu, it would strange to send Cohen and Nissim Zeev rather than Likud MKs or even one of Bibi’s personal advisers. Shas is not known for its expertise or even interest in foreign affairs, and using Shas MKs to act as diplomats would be highly unusual.
So in sum, something about this whole thing seems off to me. It doesn’t seem like it was orchestrated or initiated by Netanyahu even though he seems to have had no problem with it, and the veil of secrecy also makes little sense if it was not a delegation empowered to do much of anything. There would be no reason for the cloak and dagger routine over an attempt at interfaith dialogue, but there would also be no reason to have European rabbis and Kedar on the trip if it were anything but that. If the trip was actually planned as an interfaith dialogue but Cohen and Zeev were instructed to carry out a side mission of talking to the Turkish government, then the secrecy surrounding the trip was even more ill-conceived since once the story leaked it would ruin any efforts at plausible deniability. Basically, I can’t quite figure out what is going on here. If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to hear them.
UPDATE:
Somehow I missed that Today’s Zaman ran a short piece yesterday quoting Ynet on the Shas visit to Turkey (thanks to Claire Berlinski for alerting me to that), but after I wrote this post last night, the Turkish language dailies this morning ran with the story of the Israeli delegation’s visit, so ignore my speculation above on why the Israeli press had this story but the Turkish press didn’t. The Turkish press did make a big contribution to our knowledge though by reporting that the Israeli delegation met with, among others, the notorious Adnan Oktar (otherwise known by the honorific Adnan Hoca or by his real assumed name, Harun Yahya), who was presumably the “local interfaith organization” that invited Cohen and his cohort to Turkey. If you’ve never heard of Oktar, take ten minutes and read this right now, and you will have gotten your fill of daily entertainment. For those who want the short version, Oktar is a Turkish televangelist known for being a Holocaust denier and for keeping what is literally a harem. He has also been charged with a bevy of crimes including rape, blackmail, theft, and cocaine possession. He is currently popular with the Israeli rabbinical crowd as he has denounced his former views on Jews and the Holocaust and defends Jews as vigorously as he used to denounce them. He has in the past scored a meeting with Israel’s Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau and has a long-standing relationship with Kedar, which explains how Shas MKs would be coming to Turkey at his invitation but does not even come close to explaining why Israeli rabbis and officials are granting Oktar any shred of legitimacy. Is Israel really so desperate for a friendly face that it can’t find anyone with a more stable background than Oktar? It also sheds some new light on why the Foreign Ministry, which is presumably more familiar with Oktar’s exploits than the prime minister’s office, might have had reservations about the whole thing.
The Gülen Invitation
June 19, 2012 § 4 Comments
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan made a big splash last week with his very public (albeit veiled) call for Fethullah Gülen to leave his self imposed exile in Pennsylvania and return to Turkey, and Gülen made just as big a splash with his tearful video announcing that he is staying right where he is. The entire incident was very strange, as it comes on the heels of an increasingly confrontational clash between Erdoğan and the AKP on one side and the Gülenists on the other. The Gülen movement was an early and important supporter of the AKP, but tension has been building between the two camps and is finally out in the open in the fight over Turkey’s special authority criminal courts, which have been the vehicle used to prosecute military officers and journalists and which are presumed to be controlled by Gülenists. Erdoğan has been annoyed since a Gülenist prosecutor attempted to question Hakan Fidan, his national intelligence chief, and a couple of weeks ago the prime minister opined that the special authority courts have gone too far and need to be curbed, accusing them of acting as if they are above the state. This criticism was unmistakably aimed at the Gülenists, and it prompted a furious backlash from the movement. Today’s Zaman, which is the English language version of the Gülen movement’s flagship newspaper, ran two articles recently that were extraordinary in their criticism of Erdoğan and the AKP, blasting the party as authoritarian and accusing it of endangering Turkish democracy. From a paper that has spent the five years since its founding boosting Erdoğan and the AKP relentlessly, this is a remarkable turn of events.
Against this backdrop came Erdoğan’s invitation for Gülen himself to come back to Turkey. The timing seems strange, and there are a lot of theories flying around as to why he did it. It might have been to demonstrate that, rifts with the Gülen movement aside, Erdoğan is still on good terms with Gülen himself; or to highlight Erdoğan’s self-confidence; or to begin repairing the divide between the AKP and the Gülenists. I, however, have a different theory. Ever since Fidan was targeted, Erdoğan has been pushing back strongly against what he sees as a movement that has grown too big for its britches. In a major show of power, the government last week abruptly removed the chief prosecutors from the Ergenekon, Sledgehammer, and soccer match-fixing cases – all of which have been driven by Gülenists – and reassigned them to different posts. While the three were all technically promoted, the message sent was crystal clear: the AKP, and not the Gülen movement, controls Turkey, and this includes the police and the judiciary, which are Gülen strongholds. Erdoğan also threatened to eliminate the special authority courts entirely, and has recently been standing up for the military, which is the béte noire of the Gülen movement.
I think that Erdoğan’s invitation for Gülen to return was an effort to put Gülen himself squarely in the prime minister’s crosshairs. It is difficult to target a phantom presence, and Erdoğan’s confidence and position as the colossus of Turkish politics leaves him unable to abide the power, whether real or perceived, of a legendary imam who is basically untouchable at this point. If Gülen returns to Turkey, much of his mystique evaporates, and it lets Erdoğan tackle him on more equal footing. Gülen will be out in the open and viewed as a normal (while still revered) public figure, subject to political caricature and debate. Erdoğan knows that he cannot really tangle with Gülen while he is in seclusion in the Pennsylvania woods since it risks debasing the prime minister’s image and won’t get him anywhere, but a Gülen who is back in Turkey is a different matter. This is why Erdoğan wants him back in Turkey, and why Gülen will never consent to returning. Erdoğan’s invitation was a poison pill, designed to mortally wound Gülen if he accepted it. It was a typically clever political move by Erdoğan, and combined with the other shots he has taken recently at the Gülen movement, it puts them on notice that he is not to be trifled with. It is understandable that the Gülenists have been spinning this as a sign of the deep respect that Erdoğan has for Gülen, and the prime minister is smart not to contest that interpretation of events, but viewed in context with chain of events from the past few months, I think that Erdoğan wants to take the leap from criticizing the Gülenists to challenging their spiritual leader as well. If Gülen ever returns to Turkey, it makes that possibility ever so much easier.
60 Minutes On The Gülen Movement
May 14, 2012 § 6 Comments
Another Monday, another post about 60 Minutes. Last night’s segment of interest was on Fethullah Gülen and the Gülen movement, and centered on the growing number of Gülen charter schools in the U.S. The gist of the report was that Gülen is himself a secretive figure whose true motivations cannot be entirely ascertained, but that he preaches a tolerant brand of Islam focused on education and social mobility and that his Harmony Charter Schools are by all accounts doing great work while at the same time stirring up controversy by appearing to skirt immigration laws. On the whole, the segment’s tone was a positive one, and in a lot of ways it painted Gülen as a cleric who fits in well with the general American creed of hard work, education, and capitalist ethos leading to success. The Gülenists, who can be notoriously thin-skinned, have to be happy with 60 Minutes for portraying them in a good light.
Far more interesting to me is not what 60 Minutes reported but what it didn’t report. All Turks of every political stripe would find it inconceivable that a major American network did a profile on Gülen and his followers without one mention of either Prime Minister Erdoğan or the AKP. In fact, someone with no prior knowledge of Gülenists at all would have thought after watching the report that the Gülen movement has little role in Turkish politics and is nothing more than a somewhat shadowy business conglomerate. The reality is that the Gülenists and the AKP have long been intertwined in many ways with their twin rises coinciding with each other, and the AKP’s decade in power has led to Gülenists now filling many high posts in Turkey’s judiciary and police. Gülen and his followers are not easily separated from politics and their many business interests are not the only part of the story. Gülen media organs, such as Zaman, championed Erdoğan’s rise and now consistently back him, and it has been alleged that the Ergenekon investigation is a reward to the Gülenists as a way for them to get back at the military that oppressed them during the 1980s. While recently there have been rumblings of a power struggle between the Gülen movement and the AKP, the fact remains that it is difficult to discuss one without discussing the other, yet this is the very feat that CBS managed to pull off. For someone who studies Turkey, it came off as a very strange omission.
One thing to give 60 Minutes credit for is that it did not give undeserved airtime to those arguing that the Gülen schools represent a secret plot to introduce creeping Islamization or sharia into American society. To begin with, while the Gülenists are controversial in Turkey because they often come off as a personality cult, there is little question that Gülen preaches tolerance, interfaith dialogue, and a distinctly non-confontational brand of Islam. The folks who rail against Gülen and his schools on ideological grounds have a problem with Islam in general and not with anything that Gülen is saying. There is also the inconvenient fact that the schools are all public charters, which means that like any other public school in this country, there is no religious instruction or school-supported religious activity of any kind. Opening a group of public charter schools would be a pretty boneheaded way of trying to carry out a program of religious indoctrination given that there is literally zero space or opportunity for religion to be pushed, and whatever else people may think of Gülen and his followers, stupid is one of the last words that comes to mind.
Most people who saw the 60 Minutes report probably came away with the impression that Gülen is a secretive guy who genuinely believes in promoting math and science education and whose followers are looking for creative ways to come to the U.S. and carry out this message while simultaneously making money. I don’t think this is a bad read on the situation at all, but given the fact that Lesley Stahl went to Turkey to see what was going on for herself, the absence (aside from a few seconds from Andrew Finkel) of any reporting related to the movement’s political activities in Turkey and the intense controversy that it has stirred up surrounding the prosecution of the military and its critics – no doubt Ahmet Şık would have had something interesting to say on the matter – was odd to say the least. Does this mean that CBS and 60 Minutes are naive or guilty of sloppy reporting once again, or is this more fodder for those who conspiratorially proclaim the awesome and secretive power of the cemaat to silence its accusers? Given what we saw from 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, I’d vote for the former, but no doubt the latter explanation will quickly gain currency among those who see Gülen’s hand in everything that goes on related to Turkey.
Some Strange Goings On With Gülenists In The U.S.
April 18, 2012 § Leave a comment
Fethullah Gülen and his followers are a source of controversy and mystery in Turkey. Gülenists are accused of being a cult-like group that holds sway over Erdoğan and the AKP, and there is plenty of evidence that Gülenists in the judiciary and police force are responsible for the Ergenekon investigation, among other things. Much like with the power of Turkey’s deep state, I am of the view that the reality is a mixture of truth and legend, which benefits both sides since the Gülenists get the benefit of being feared and awed while their opponents can chalk up much of their misfortune to shadowy figures with unfathomable behind-the-scenes power.
While Gülen lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, his followers have not been much of an issue in the U.S. until recently. The New York Times last summer ran a series of articles on Gülenist charter schools in Texas that raised questions about immigration law violations and misuse of tax dollars. Yesterday, Tennessee’s legislature passed a law aimed at Gülenist schools that limits the number of foreign teachers a charter school may employ, which is bound to draw increased scrutiny of Gülen’s aims. Then today, the International Herald Tribune published a long front page article on Gülenists in Turkey that rehashed many of the claims about them and included the following sentences: ‘‘We are troubled by the secretive nature of the Gulen movement, all the smoke and mirrors,” said a senior American official, who requested anonymity to avoid breaching diplomatic protocol. “It is clear they want influence and power. We are concerned there is a hidden agenda to challenge secular Turkey and guide the country in a more Islamic direction.” Strangely, the article is nowhere to be found on the IHT website, despite it appearing on the front page of the print edition.
I am not entirely sure what is going on here – possibly it is a simple oversight, possibly the story was retracted for one reason or another, or possibly the Times was threatened with legal action after last summer’s investigatory journalism and thinks that keeping the story in print rather than digital form will not raise any red flags with Gülenists. The bigger issue here is what implications will follow from this “senior American official” calling out the Gülen movement so forcefully and publicly. Nobody questions that Gülenists are powerful in Turkey, and while there is evidence that Erdoğan has begun to push back against their more overt displays of power, the AKP and the Gülenists have a tacit alliance. If the Obama administration actually views Gülen and his acolytes as such a big problem – and to my ears, the quote is a strange one that sounds more like something a House GOPer would say – and it raises the issue with Turkey, there is bound to be some pushback. This is all very mysterious for now, but it definitely bears some close watching down the road.
