The arrest of Aydin Engin, Turkish journalist, playwright, writer, politician, in the raid of 12 leading staff of Cumhuriyet. November 1, 2016.\u201cIs Brussels
\nasleep, or just ignorant?, asked the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister
\nof Sweden Carl Bildt in an
\nop-ed in Politico, lambasting European
\nleaders\u2019 \u201ctepid response\u201d to the failed July 15 coup in Turkey. \u201cIt took some
\ntime for the EU to condemn the events\u201d, wrote
\nBildt; instead, \u201cEurope\u2019s leaders immediately began to question measures
\ntaken by the Turkish authorities to cleanse from power any elements thought to
\nbe associated with the G\u00fclen movement\u201d. <\/i><\/p>\n
For him, there was
\n\u201cno question that Turkey has the right to, and indeed must, take measures to
\nsafeguard itself against forces trying to topple its constitutional order.\u201d Of
\ncourse, \u201cthere is a severe risk these measures will go too far\u201d, but the
\nCouncil of Europe and the European Court of Human Rights could assess this when
\nthings calm down. In any case, \u201cit is hard to know at this stage if the
\ngovernment is casting the net too wide or not wide enough, but erring in either
\ndirection will only create new problems\u201d.<\/p>\n
This is also the main
\nthrust of a report published by the European Council on Foreign Relations
\n(ECFR) Carl Bildt co-chairs. Penned by the Senior Policy Fellow Asl\u0131
\nAyd\u0131nta\u015fba\u015f and dubbed \u201cby far the best you can find on the G\u00fclenist movement
\nand its dangerous role in Turkey\u201d by Bildt, the report takes the official
\nnarrative for granted and claims that the coup was indeed the G\u00fclenist
\nofficers\u2019 doing \u2013 turning a blind eye to the many inconsistencies, indeed
\ncontradictions, in the statements of the captured putschists and the factual loopholes
\nin the narrative which have led many observers to argue that what transpired on
\nthis fateful night was much more complicated than the AKP government would have
\nus believe. <\/p>\n
To be fair, the
\nreport does mention the post-coup \u201ccrackdown\u201d in its concluding pages, yet
\nblames it on \u201cover-zealous investigators\u201d, worrying more about the threat this
\nposes to Turkey\u2019s \u201cimage at home and abroad\u201d than its actual victims.<\/p>\n
How can we make Is it simply a Or is he an If it were a genuine concern or passion for democracy, why has our maverick Or perhaps he is too busy trotting the globe to keep up with the dizzying As anyone following the news in Turkey would readily notice, this list is And it does not On the other hand, Too pessimistic? Oh, and Bildt? He * While this The arrest of Aydin Engin, Turkish journalist, playwright, writer, politician, in the raid of 12 leading staff of Cumhuriyet. November 1, 2016.\u201cIs Brussels asleep, or just ignorant?, asked the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Sweden Carl Bildt in an op-ed in Politico, lambasting European leaders\u2019 \u201ctepid response\u201d to the failed July 15 coup…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1234\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nsense of this sudden and, to the best of our knowledge, unsolicited Erdo\u011fanophilia<\/em> (Bildt\u2019s above-mentioned
\narticle is entitled \u201cEurope, Stand up for Erdo\u011fan\u201d, not for Turkey or for
\ndemocracy)? <\/p>\n
\nshow of solidarity on the part of a fellow conservative politician whose career
\nis (equally?) embroiled in controversy \u2013 a diplomat who, when he was the EU\u2019s
\nspecial envoy to the former Yugoslavia, \u201cblocked airstrikes that could have
\nprevented the massacre of 6000 men in Srebrenica\u201d according to declassified
\ndocuments published by the Clinton Presidential Library; a foreign minister who
\nwas questioned by Riksdag\u2019s Constitutional Committee for his membership of the
\nboard of Vostok Nafta, an investment company with holdings in the Russian
\ncompany Gazprom (Bildt left the company two months after he became foreign
\nminister); a foreign minister who was also a board member of Lundin Petroleum,
\nan oil company which was accused in a 2010 report by
\nthe European Coalition on Oil in Sudan, in addition to several NGOs and human
\nrights organizations, of being complicit in war crimes and crimes against
\nhumanity?<\/p>\n
\nold-school Eurocrat, perhaps a romantic maverick, who is seeking to defend the
\n\u201cpolitical ideal and democratic values\u201d of Europe which he claims were not
\nreflected in EU\u2019s response to the failed coup in Turkey? Does he really believe
\nthat a stronger engagement with Turkey could improve the prospects of democracy
\nin Turkey?<\/p>\nA \u201cdemocracy\u201d like no others<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nbeen watching Turkey\u2019s rapid transformation into a fully-fledged dictatorship in
\nthe three and a half months that followed the botched coup silently? Does he
\nthink that the measures taken by the Turkish government have still not gone too
\nfar? Is the net still cast not wide enough to be worthy of one single critical
\ntweet?*<\/p>\n
\npace of political change in Turkey. Well, then, let us do him a small favour
\nand provide a quick roundup of the events of the last few days, for a fuller
\naccount of the post-coup crackdown would require no less than a novella:<\/p>\n\n
\ntwo new emergency decrees issued on 29 October, 10,158 civil servants have lost
\ntheir jobs overnight, in addition to the 100,000 who had already
\nbeen sacked or suspended for being part of or sympathetic to the G\u00fclenist network, the PKK and various
\nleftist organizations. A further 37,000 have been arrested on similar
\ncharges since July 15. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\ntheir universities by the same decrees, bringing the total number to over 2000
\n(the exact number remains unknown!). This also includes several members of the
\n\u201cAcademics for Peace\u201d who have signed a petition asking for the
\ncessation of hostilities in Southeast Turkey. According to the New York
\nbased charity Scholar Rescue Fund, there has been an \u201cunprecedented\u201d increase
\nin the number of requests for help from Turkey \u2013 65 applications for funding
\nsince July 15. The decree of 29 October also abolished rectorship elections,
\ngiving President Erdo\u011fan the
\nright to directly appoint rectors.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\nthe same decrees, including Jinha, a news agency staffed solely by women.
\nOverall, 168 media outlets have been shut down and around 100 journalists
\narrested since July 15, bringing the total number of journalists in jail to 133,
\nmore than Russia, China and Iran combined as P24, Platform for Independent
\nJournalism, and several others commentators have noted. According to www.engelliweb.com, access to 114.264 sites
\nis blocked at the time of writing. Turkey also dominates Twitter censorship
\ncharts. Only in the first half of 2015, hence before the coup attempt, 72% of
\n1003 requests for content removal by courts and government agencies came from
\nTurkey, followed by Russia which filed a mere 7% of the requests.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\nordered the recording of conversations between lawyers and the detainees, with
\nthe additional proviso that they be made available to the prosecutors. Earlier decrees
\nhad extended the maximum length of police detention without judicial review
\nfrom four to thirty days. Detainees can be denied access to a lawyer for up to
\nfive days. The decrees also allow the authorities to cancel or confiscate the
\npassports of those under investigation and their spouses or partners.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\non 24 October, documented 13 cases of alleged abuse, including sleep
\ndeprivation, severe beatings, sexual abuse and rape threats since the coup
\nattempt, revealing the extent to which the state of emergency conditions
\nnegatively affect the rights and conditions of the post-coup detainees. This
\nled the Justice Ministry and the Ministry of Internal Affairs to issue a joint
\nstatement which accuses HRW of being \u201cunder the influence of people associated
\nwith the G\u00fclenist terror
\norganization, FET\u00d6\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\nmunicipalities, most of them in the overwhelmingly Kurdish southeast, have been
\nremoved from office and replaced by government-chosen trustees. The last
\ncasualties of this \u201cmeasure\u201d were G\u00fcltan K\u0131\u015fanak and F\u0131rat Anl\u0131, the mayors of Diyarbak\u0131r (the largest
\nKurdish city in Turkey), who were arrested on 31 October.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n
\ngovernment\u201d to use Bildt\u2019s terms, has extended to mainstream opposition
\nnewspapers with the recent raid on the daily Cumhuriyet<\/em> and the detention of 13 of its writers, including its
\neditor-in-chief, for \u201ccommitting crimes\u201d on behalf of the G\u00fclen movement and the PKK.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\u201cIt's real, but it ain't
\nexactly there \u2026 democracy is coming\u2026\u201d<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\nonly the tip of a massive iceberg \u2013 yet apparently not large enough to be
\nnoticed by Carl Bildt and his colleagues at ECFR who prefer to stick to \u201cthe
\nview from Ankara\u201d as the title of an
\narticle by \u0130brahim Kal\u0131n, advisor to President Erdo\u011fan and a close friend of
\nBildt, published on ECFR website, indicates. Would they have issued a comment had
\nthey noticed it? I doubt it. Certainly not Bildt, notorious for his arrogance
\n(\u201cReviewing Carl Bildt is not for beginners\u201d he said to reporters
\nfrom Aftonbladet <\/em>on one occasion),
\nand his ability to always \u201cget off the hook\u201d (as he did in the Riksdag
\ninvestigation into his private dealings). \u201cI have strong opinions. I stand out.
\nI am demonized. But I never read it\u201d, he famously told magazine
\nCaf\u00e9<\/em> in 2014.<\/p>\n
\nmatter. Carl Bildt is chosen as a conversation partner here as he was the first
\npolitical figure of some repute to come to Erdo\u011fan\u2019s rescue in the aftermath of
\nthe failed coup, and the first to use the trope of \u201cevil G\u00fclenists\u201d (the very people the ECFR cooperated with
\nback in 2011) versus \u201cgood, democracy-loving people\u201d. Alas, Turkey was not a
\ndemocracy either on July 14 or 16, and the fact that there has been a bloody
\ncoup attempt in between \u2013 the details of which still remain shrouded in mystery
\n\u2013 does not alter this simple fact. Turkey was not a
\ndemocracy either on July 14 or 16, and the fact that there has been a bloody
\ncoup attempt in between \u2013 the details of which still remain shrouded in mystery
\n\u2013 does not alter this simple fact. <\/p>\n
\nthe argument that closer links between the EU and Turkey, perpetrated by Bildt
\nand his colleagues is plain wrong since i. the EU has already been engaging
\nwith Turkey for the last two years when it suits its interests, e.g. to bring
\nthe refugee flow to a halt, without any scruples about the increasingly
\nauthoritarian character of the regime; ii. the EU is no longer in a position to
\nspeak from a moral high ground given its own ongoing slide into the dark side;
\nand iii. Erdo\u011fan has proven time and again that he is not someone to yield to
\nexternal pressure, which he normally uses to his own advantage to stoke the
\nnationalist fire. <\/p>\n
\nIndeed. Could there be a crack in the wall through which democracy can come to
\nTurkey \u2013 to paraphrase the lyrics of Leonard Cohen\u2019s famous song? Perhaps, but
\nnot in the near future. <\/p>\n
\nwill probably repeat the remarks he made when the majority of the world\u2019s
\ndemocratic leaders condemned
\nGaddafi when he attacked demonstrators with fighter jets in 2011: \u201cIt has
\nnothing to do with supporting one or the other, it has to do with obtaining
\nstability and reasonable development.\u201d Then he will hop on a plane and set out
\nfor his next destination.<\/p>\n
\narticle was being written, Carl Bildt has finally descended from his pedestal
\nand posted his first \u201ccritical\u201d tweet in three and half months, expressing his
\nworry about the raiding of Cumhuriyet<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"