Tense relationship: PM Erdoğan and a Turkish general

A naval sergeant in Balıkesir has been arrested after confessing to preparing a list of verbal passwords for soldiers that insulted the prime minister, private news site CNNTürk reported.

A military court arrested Çağrı Güler after military personnel and police conducted a search of his home in the Erdek district of the western province of Balıkesir. Authorities confiscated documents and CDs during the search.

According to a report in the daily Taraf this week, soldiers used the password “Adi Başbakan” (Vulgar Prime Minister) on Feb. 22, 2010, at their garrison.

Military passwords are used to confirm identity on bases during the night. In this case, a soldier encountering an unknown person would first say “inferior,” while the other soldier would respond with “prime minister.”

The password issue also became a subject of discussion during a meeting between Deputy Prime Minister Cemil Çiçek and Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ.

So, in addition to having an appalling record on women’s rights and an anti-Semitic, terror-supporting Prime Minister who intimidates the media when they don’t toe the line, it’s also possible to get thrown in the slammer for ‘offending’ politicians in Turkey.

Although in the grand scheme of things a fairly petty prank, this incident is perhaps in some ways more significant than the current tit-for-tat diplomatic sanctions currently being levied against Israel by Erdoğan and his government.

It is certainly symptomatic of a mounting (although ever-present to some degree) antipathy and tension between Turkey’s armed forces and the Islamist AK Party Government.

The military sees itself as the guarantor of Republic founder Kemal Atatürk’s secular, reforming values – a man who, whatever his faults, clearly saw the detrimental effect that Islamism had on development, peace and prosperity; and introduced radical measures to curb its influence on the inchoate Turkish State.

It has intervened with several coups d’état since the foundation of the Republic in 1923 – in 1960, 1971, 1980 and as recently as 1997 – although on that occasion it was dressed up to look like something else.

Whether you believe that in Turkey’s case, a ‘watchful’ military is a good thing, standing guard against an increasingly radical Islamist government, or that it should be brought to heel by civilian control regardless of the party that is in government; one thing is clear: Turkey, whether in terms of the behaviour of its military, or of its political masters, in no way conforms to the norms and standards of conduct expected of a modern democratic society.

So why are so many of the political élites, from Obama to a range of other world leaders and pundits, falling over themselves to have Turkey be made a member of the EU?

Anyone else see anything wrong with this picture? Or is it just us?

[Source: Hürriyet Daily News]


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