Troubles In Turkey

[seahawk]

Always good to catch the coup plotters early on. I hope the executions will follow swiftly.

[Josh]

How does a navy of Turkey’s size have 103 retired admirals? Or is there rank structure very different?

[BansheeOne]

He's on a roll!

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Date 07.04.2021

Turkey convicts dozens in mass trial over failed 2016 coup

One of the last hearings in Turkey's marathon of trials over the attempted 2016 coup has concluded, with several former officers convicted of "violating the constitution."

A court in Ankara sentenced dozens of people, including former military officials attached to the presidential guard, to life in prison over their links to a failed 2016 coup attempt, Turkish media reported Wednesday.

At least six of the defendants received aggravated life sentences for "violating the constitution."

Aggravated life sentences are the most severe punishment possible in Turkey, since the country abolished the death penalty. There is no possibility of parole. 

Nearly 500 defendants faced sentencing during Wednesday's hearing, which looked into the actions of Turkey's presidential guard during the coup attempt. 

Wednesday's mass trial had been underway since 2017, and was part of a sweepingongoing legal process involving hundreds of trials to prosecute those accused of being involved with the coup attempt.

What were the charges?

Several of the defendants in Wednesday's hearing were accused of occupying the headquarters of state broadcaster TRT in Ankara on the night of the coup in July 2016 and forcing the news anchor to read out a statement. 

A judge sentenced former lieutenant colonel Umit Gencer to life behind bars for "violating the constitutional order" by making the TRT broadcaster read the "coup declaration."

Ex-major Fedakar Akca was given an aggravated life sentence for leading a guard regiment on the night of the coup attempt, Turkey's Anadolu news agency reported.

More than 100 other defendants were given sentences of up to 16 years for years for violating the constitution, Anadolu said, adding that more than 100 people were acquitted.

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/turkey-convicts-dozens-in-mass-trial-over-failed-2016-coup/a-57116457

[Mistral]

Indeed  

How dare a woman want to sit near the Sultan!

 

 

Edited April 7, 2021 by Mistral

[BansheeOne]

I don't know what all the complaints are about the sofa thing. If I had been offered that place, I would have hoisted my legs up, reclined, and pointed my soles at the host to show him I really appreciate the comfort. 

[BansheeOne]

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Joining the Wolves

Erdogan's Pact with the Ultra-Nationalists

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is doing what he can to hold on to power – and is following his right-wing extremist coalition partner back to the confrontational style of politics the country saw in the 1990s. Opposition activists are concerned for their safety.

By Sebnem Arsu, Maximilian Popp und Anna-Sophie Schneider

12.04.2021, 17.48 Uhr

Turkish mafia boss Alaattin Çakıcı has spent decades terrorizing rivals and those holding different political views than his own. As one of the leading figures of a right-wing extremist group called the Grey Wolves, which has focused its ire in the past on leftists, Kurds and Alawites, Çakıcı is thought to be responsible for at least 41 political murders. In 2004, a court sentenced him to 19 years in prison, in part for having his ex-wife murdered in front of their son.

A lot of people breathed a sigh of relief when he was locked up. One of the most dangerous enemies of Turkish democracy had been removed from public life for an extended period.

Now, though, Çakıcı is back. Last April, he was released from high-security Sincan Prison as part of an amnesty related to the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, he has increasingly become a voice in Turkish politics.

Power Shift

Shortly after his release, Çakıcı visited his ally Devlet Bahçeli, head of the right-wing extremist party MHP and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's coalition partner. In November, he issued a death threat to opposition leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. "Watch your step," he wrote on Twitter. And when thousands of students took to the streets of Istanbul at the beginning of the year to protest the appointment of an Erdoğan confidant to the position of rector of the renowned Bosporus University, he branded the demonstrators terrorists.

Çakıcı's newly expanded public profile is the expression of a fundamental power shift in Turkey. For many years, Erdoğan pursued a religious agenda. But following the 2016 putsch attempt involving followers of the Islamist cleric Fethullah Gülen, he has turned to the ultra-nationalists. Since the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2018, he has governed in a coalition with Bahçeli's secular, right-wing extremist Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

Just how extensive the influence of the right-wing extremists has become could be seen in mid-March, when the chief public prosecutor, at Bahçeli's insistence, submitted an application to the country's highest court to ban Turkey's second-largest opposition party, the left-wing, pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP).

Erdoğan has been consistent in his efforts to avoid party bans. His own party, the Muslim-conservative Justice and Development Party (AKP), was almost prohibited in 2008. Ultimately, though, he succumbed to Bahçeli's pressure, say observers in Ankara. "Bahçeli has taken the most powerful man in Turkey as his hostage," says Turkish journalist Can Dündar. "Erdoğan carries the drum, but Bahçeli pounds out the beat."

Many Europeans see the Turkish president as a kind of modern-day sultan, who can do whatever he likes in Turkey. In fact, though, Erdoğan has never been strong enough to govern the country on his own.

Early on in his tenure, Erdoğan cooperated with the liberals, taking steps to prepare his country for accession to the European Union and opening Turkey up to foreign investors. Later, he formed a coalition with the Islamist Gülen movement, which shares Erdoğan's disdain for the secular elite. Together, Erdoğan and Gülen locked away hundreds of opposition activists, condemning them as terrorists in a series of show trials. When the Gülen movement became too powerful, he tried to strike a balance with the Kurds, with whom he introduced an historic peace process. Following the success of the HDP in 2015 parliamentary elections, though, he turned his back on them, too. The only partners left for him were the ultra-nationalists.

Covert Ruler

Presidential confidantes report that Erdoğan and Bahçeli actually can't stand each other. Erdoğan's roots are in the Islamist Milli-Görüş movement, which was oppressed in the 1980s and '90s by right-wing extremists and Kemalists in the state apparatus. He, himself, is hardly a passionate nationalist, with the community of Muslims, the umma, consistently more important to him than the nation. When he rose to power in 2003, he pledged to break with the right-wing extremist networks in the military, police and judiciary, the so-called "deep state."

Now, though, the "deep state" is more powerful than ever before. Because Erdoğan doesn't have enough loyalists of his own, he replaced Gülen movement followers in the judiciary, police and military with loyalists from the Grey Wolves following the 2016 putsch attempt, says parliamentarian Mustafa Yeneroğlu, a former member of the AKP leadership who has since switched allegiances to the liberal-conservative Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA). "Erdoğan has made precisely those powers that have fought against us for years into the covert rulers of the country," he says.

[...] 

Erdoğan apparently can't afford to offend the MHP. The Turkish economy is mired in crisis, with the coronavirus pandemic having made the situation even worse. Meanwhile, Erdoğan's AKP has slipped in the polls to just 30 percent. His re-election to the presidency is entirely dependent on support from the right-wing extremists.

Back to the 1990s

And re-election is all that the president cares about, with all of his other political goals coming second – particularly reconciliation with the Kurds. At one point, Erdoğan granted more rights to the Kurds than any Turkish president before him. He loosened the ban on the Kurdish language and invested billions in the infrastructure of southeastern Turkey, where the Kurds are in the majority. In 2013, he was on the brink of finding a political solution to the conflict with the Kurdish terrorist organization PKK.

Driven by the ultra-nationalists, though, the president has now returned to the bellicose policies of the 1990s. The former co-leader of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş, has been in prison since 2016, along with thousands of other HDP members. More than 50 Kurdish mayors were removed from office.

[...] 

Indeed, it looks as though Erdoğan is again pursuing the same strategy that has brought him victory in past elections: The radical polarization of Turkish society.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/joining-the-wolves-erdogan-s-pact-with-the-ultra-nationalists-a-52bf30cd-4431-4af7-b9af-3aa83c141b0e

 

Edited April 14, 2021 by BansheeOne

[Simon Tan]

Turk stronk!

[WRW]

Am planning to go home to Izmir in summer. Hopefully no problems

[JWB]

38 minutes ago, WRW said:

Am planning to go home to Izmir in summer. Hopefully no problems

Do report on what you see and hear.

[WRW]

Hopefully it will be nothing more than a n unkept garden 

[BansheeOne]

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Turkey seeks arrest of over 500 coup suspects: Anadolu

6h ago

Turkish prosecutors have issued arrest warrants for 532 people alleged to have links to a suspected coup mastermind. Critics say such crackdowns aim to quell any political dissent.

Turkey has ordered the arrest of 532 suspects who are alleged to have links with Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric Ankara blames for an attempted coup in 2016, the state-owned Anadolu news agency reported on Monday.

The investigation covering 62 provinces is part of a long-running crackdown that has seen tens of thousands of people brought to trial or sacked or suspended from their jobs since the coup attempt.

Alleged terrorist organization

Anadolu said 459 of the suspects were military personnel on active duty.

[...] 

https://m.dw.com/en/turkey-seeks-arrest-of-over-500-coup-suspects-anadolu/a-57334596

 

[Mistral]

21 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

https://m.dw.com/en/turkey-seeks-arrest-of-over-500-coup-suspects-anadolu/a-57334596

 

Oh its a weekly event, if you do not like someone like your company commander for example, just call his mob from a payphone a couple of times and he is done for.

https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkey-nabs-over-160-wanted-feto-terror-suspects-164269

[BansheeOne]

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Mafia boss’s YouTube claims rattle Turkish government

Sedat Peker accuses senior government figures of crimes including murder, rape, corruption and drug trafficking

Bethan McKernan in Istanbul

Tue 25 May 2021 11.42 EDT

Turkish television shows are popular fare throughout the Muslim world during Ramadan, full of tales of palace intrigue and the criminal underworld.

This year’s surprise hit, however, isn’t fictional.

The notorious real-life mob boss Sedat Peker has electrified Turkey with a series of YouTube videos over the last three weeks in which he has levelled an array of allegations – including murder, rape, rampant corruption and drug trafficking – at prominent Turkish government figures.

The dizzying claims stretch back decades and are unsubstantiated. But the timing of Peker’s hour-long monologues, in which he portrays himself as a whistleblower, is devastating for Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. His party is already struggling in the polls amid Turkey’s economic misery, compounded by criticism over handling of the pandemic.

Peker’s seven episodes to date, of a promised 12 in total, took time to register in Turkey’s traditional media, which since a coup attempt in 2016 has been tightly controlled by the state. On various online platforms, however, the videos have racked up more than 30m views. Sedat Peker vs AKP (Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development party) briefly became the world’s top rated television show on the Internet Movie Database until the entry was removed on Monday.

Peker, 49, rose to notoriety in the 1990s, the peak of Turkey’s political-mafia nexus, when intelligence agencies were revealed to have collaborated with gangsters to carry out political assassinations. He has served several prison sentences.

On his release in 2014 the mafioso appeared to ingratiate himself in AKP circles, but fled the country in 2020 after the interior ministry opened a new investigation into his networks, and he says he is currently in Dubai. His Istanbul home was raided by the authorities in April.

[...] 

Little by little, the gangster has painted a picture of extensive collaboration between organised crime networks and top officials. His main target so far is the powerful interior minister Süleyman Soylu, whom Peker says he protected from rival factions within the AKP. He has also accused a former prime minister’s son of smuggling cocaine from Venezuela as part of a trafficking network stretching through the casino economy of northern Cyprus and a port controlled by the Syrian regime. The former prime minister has said his son went to Venezuela to donate masks and PPE.

According to Peker, a former interior minister who was sentenced to five years in jail for working with gangland figures in the 1990s was directly involved in the unsolved murder of a journalist in 1993, and his son, an AKP politician, raped and murdered a journalist in 2019. The former interior minister said on Twitter that Peker’s claims are “slander”.

Peker has also accused a former lieutenant colonel and a senior official of the Turkish intelligence service (MIT) of ordering the murder of a Turkish Cypriot journalist in 1996.

Peker has even implicated himself in crimes, saying that his men attacked a newspaper’s offices in 2015 and threatened academics calling for peace in Turkey’s long-running conflict with the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) on the orders of AKP officials, and helped seize assets and properties belonging to the ruling party’s enemies.

[...] 

All the men have denied Peker’s allegations, and Soylu has launched slander proceedings against him. But in a three-hour interview broadcast on the government-friendly HaberTürk channel on Monday evening, Soylu struggled to defend himself against the gangster’s claims. Pro-government media were silent on the interview on Tuesday morning, raising speculation that his political career is in serious trouble.

So far, one arrest has been made: of Peker’s own brother, Atilla, after Sedat said he was part of a failed 1996 mission to kill a journalist. But now that the mobster has blown the lid off what was previously a culture of silence, more could be on the way.

“Today’s picture is even worse [than the 90s]. At that time, at least there was a functioning structure. We were doing our duty, we were doing it seriously. We were getting support,” Mehmet Eymür, a former head of counter-terrorism for MIT, told Cumhuriyet newspaper.

“In the 90s there was not this much shady activity. It was not at this level … The end of this is going to be political murders.”

Peker’s next video is due to be released on Sunday.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/may/25/mafia-bosss-youtube-claims-rattle-turkish-government