|
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com The corruption probe in Turkey: yet another political battle for Erdogan Turkey is going through another tumultuous period six months after the Gezi Parki protests that shook the country. The de facto dispute between the Gulen Movement (GM) and the AK Party that began with the MIT (National Intelligence Agency) crisis last year has gone public. On December 17 the police took into custody scores of suspects including the sons of three government ministers and some well-known businessmen as part of three separate corruption probes combined for no sensible reason. Since then three ministers and seven MPs from the AK Party have resigned. The government saw a politically-motivated operation behind the corruption probes, intended to bring down the government and eventually arrest Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The government countered the operations by dismissing police officers in Istanbul and Ankara Police Departments, changing police regulations concerning judicial investigations, taking prosecutors, believed to be affiliated with the Gulen movement, off these corruption probes, and assigning new prosecutors to the investigations in their stead. During the operations, Today's Zaman, the Gulen Movement's mouthpiece in English, had somehow "guessed" with near-perfect precision the subject of the operation and the list of the suspects. Secretive content of the probes is being leaked continuously to the opposition media; tapes are leaked from both sides; and mutual accusations between both sides all demonstrate an unprecedented battle being waged in public between former allies the AK Party and the Gulen Movement. To make sense of what is happening we need to understand the peculiar nature of the Gulen Movement and the political context of this battle. The Gulen Movement The Gulen Movement (GM) differs drastically from the rest of jamaats or civil society organisations in Turkey. It has become a messianic group headed by a leader believed to be "infallible" by his followers. Gulen himself preaches the message that, "Providence gave them [its members] a mission." The destiny gave only them that mission and only they know its content and the right method to fulfil it. In a blatant deviation from the Sunni codes that characterise Sunni Muslim groups in Turkey, the movement somewhat ironically adopted the Shia policy of taqiyya (dissimulation), which means in practice that one should pretend embracing dialogue, negotiation, alliance and reconciliation until one is strong enough to impose one's will. Because the GM believes that it has the monopoly over the knowledge of its holy mission, it would like Turkey's domestic and foreign policies to toe the movement's line on domestic and foreign politics. As Duran explains, "Its [the Gulen Movement's] exponential spread all over the world made it an international actor and rendered relationships with power centres such as the US and Israel inevitable. Such relationships forced the movement to follow its own political agenda independent of Turkey at times. Its preference for a different foreign policy approach than the government is an example. Moreover, the movement's opposition to the Shia plays a role in its convergence with Israel, which has its own concerns due to the rise of Iran in the region. The movement reads the international system differently than the AK Party. It therefore does not want any tension with the US and Israel and lately criticises the government for entering a dangerous road for this reason." In the mind of Gulen's followers, the AKP government that defends ousted President Morsi at the expense of antagonising the junta administration in Egypt (and the US that backs the coup regime) or that protects the Palestinians at the cost of eliciting Israeli fury acts short-sightedly. That's why a columnist at Zaman newspaper, the GM mouthpiece in Turkish, had advised the ousted Muslim Brotherhood (MB) to be aware of its weakness, reconcile with the junta and work silently until it gets strong enough to avenge later1, the classical method of the Gulen Movement. Gulen followed the same policy when his back was against the wall during the 1980 and February 28, 1997 coups in Turkey. When the secularist state elite preyed on its religious citizens and banned, for instance, women wearing headscarves from attending universities after the 1997 coup, Gulen did not fight the junta on behalf of Muslims. He rather saved himself by claiming that wearing a headscarf was only a minor detail of Muslim practice, asking the Islamic-oriented Refahyol government at the time to resign, praised the military-bureaucratic junta and offered to transfer his schools to their control if they wished. When Erdogan did not heed this advice and continued to use the Rabaa Al-Adawiyya symbol everywhere and the Brotherhood went on with its legitimate protests against the junta but was later declared a terrorist organisation and banned, the same columnist blamed both PM Erdogan and the Islamic movement instead of the Egyptian military junta2. For the GM, such "lofty" moves by the MB or the AK Party rest on a short-sighted vision. Yet, the movement makes long-term projections; even if it may make a conscious decision to refuse to speak out against cruelties done to their fellow Muslims today, it is sure that the movement will be so powerful in the year, say, 2150 that it will be able to appoint a governor to, for example, Yakutia Republic in today's Russia. Such a messianic zeal combined with the idea of sacred "chosen-ness" justifies any means and acting against anyone as long as the means serve the ultimate purpose of earthly glory promised to this movement. Erdogan-phobia The reason why the GM has a problem with PM Erdogan is that he jeopardises the movement's narrow interests by his steps in domestic and foreign policy. The GM's narrow interests include maintaining at all-costs good relations with Israel, avoiding any serious fall-out with the United States, where Gulen himself has opted to reside since 1999, and never opting for an instinctual and rash response when it comes to any type of assault on Muslims. Take the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010 and the following break-up in Turkish-Israeli relations. Why would the leader of a religious movement criticise the flotilla and its organisers instead of Israel? The reason is that the breakdown in the relationship between Turkey and Israel that followed gave the Gulen movement a headache in its dealings with the United States. The Gulen Movement worked hard on a positive public relations campaign in the aftermath of the 9/11 atmosphere in the United States through such buzzwords as "moderation", "dialogue", "negotiation", and "reconciliation", and by sponsoring movies such as the Turkish Passport3 in the US to cosy-up to Israel. The GM, therefore, cannot stand anything that may tarnish its good image or limit its room for manoeuvre abroad, even if that is the prime minister of its native country. It may endanger the sacred mission assigned to its members but unknown to the rest of us ignorant people. To the movement, PM Erdogan's behaviour and policies in domestic and foreign politics look too erratic, too bold, too honest and straightforward so that at times Erdogan has become a liability4. Were Erdogan to become Turkey's President in 2015 and enjoy even wider powers than he does today, the GM would never be able to steer Turkish politics again and exert as much influence as it has so far. It is for this reason that there is immense effort in the opposition media these days to associate the government with Al-Qaeda and Iran at one and the same time. These attempts became most noticeable when a truck heading to Syria was stopped in Hatay by the police on another public prosecutor's search warrant on January 1. Either the prosecutor himself or someone from the police must have called the media because the incident made it onto the news unusually quickly. It was claimed that an officer from Turkish Intelligence was on board the truck and did not allow the police to search the load. The rumour spread that the truck belonged to the IHH (Humanitarian Relief Foundation), which had organised the Mavi Marmara flotilla in 2010. It became clear within hours that the truck did not belong to the IHH and the government described the load as a "state secret". More recently, the police raided IHH offices in six cities in Turkey, which Zaman newspaper described as "an Al-Qaeda operation"5. The primary aim of these moves against the IHH has been to show to the West that the AKP government is an Al-Qaeda supporter and link it with international terrorism. It is hoped that the West will evaluate the AKP not only as an Al-Qaeda supporter but also in the same category as Iran in the international arena. The GM also suffers badly from an anti-Persian hysteria. In its view, the government's economic dealings with Iran in the face of international sanctions are unacceptable. The top circle in the GM thinks seriously that an Iranian cabal infiltrated the AKP's ranks, surrounded PM Erdogan and is overpowering him from within. One of the latest charges made in the opposition media is that the AK Party government is after nuclear power. A columnist at Zaman claimed that the reason behind the AKP's projects for building nuclear energy centrifuges is not only to provide for Turkey's growing energy needs but also to become a nuclear power6. These operations echo, as intended by the GM, "well" with the power centres abroad7. Political suicide It appears that open political engagement in front of the cameras and public eye proved to be tough for the GM. Two video recordings of Gulen's speeches after the start of the operations were almost enough for him to destroy his credibility as a religious scholar. In an awkward defence against accusations that his movement was behind the leaking of videotapes of some politicians, Gulen said that there have been several times within the last decade that he was "informed" prior to some politicians' intended promiscuous behaviour, that he warned them and therefore saved them from being videotaped. In a second recording, Gulen was seen as cursing the purge of police officers by the government and those who blamed his movement for the corruption probe instead of letting the investigations go ahead to find out the guilty parties. However, his curses were perceived by the wider public to be against a Muslim government, particularly against Erdogan and hence they resonated badly with the largely conservative public. Indeed, public outrage ran so high that perhaps for the first time since 2002 Gulen had to release follow-up videos and explanations immediately to retract and reframe what he said and meant. The second recording went viral and became the subject of pranks. Gulen has not appeared in a video recording since that debacle. The recent row also widened the gap between the Gulen Movement and the rest of the Sufi groups (tariqahs) in Turkey. All tariqahs threw their open support behind the government after the battle broke out. To make things worse for the GM, the rest of the Nurcu community took a stance against it as well. A cursory glance of discussions on social media demonstrates the widening rift within the Nurcus now, so much so that many Nurcu groups including Said Nursi's students accuse Gulen of betraying the non-political ideals of Bediuzzaman Said Nursi. Perhaps the most important outcome of the recent controversy will be that the Gulen Movement will no longer be immune from criticism. The conservatives and Islamists have now joined the Kemalists, leftists, liberals and nationalists of all shades as critics of Gulen. What happens when the AKP itself joins in the chorus of criticism and Erdogan likens the GM's methods to that of the Hashashins during the Seljuk Empire? Moreover, Turkey's dominant conservative public may not buy the support that the Republican People's Party (CHP), in any case a strange bedfellow, is giving the Gulen Movement. Such an odd alliance between the CHP and Gulen may be deceptive for two reasons. First, the movement will find it very hard to convince its grassroots to vote for the CHP, which had been cast as the chief evil for them for decades. Secondly, since all political actors will know the role of the movement if the AKP falls, no political party will ever trust Gulen from now on. It is unlikely that any government will forget for a moment what Erdogan says so often these days: "the parallel state". A recent survey sums up all these implications: 48.9 per cent of respondents said that the AK Party should be in power in 2015; 47.5 per cent said that Erdogan is the most charismatic leader in Turkey; 73 per cent think that the GM is behind the operations; 73.9 per cent believe that a "parallel state" exists; and 94.3 per cent said that they would not vote for a CHP-GM alliance. The question that begs an answer therefore is not, as some assume, whether the Gulen Movement or the AKP will win this war; the question is, why has such a powerful movement as Gulen's attempted something that is akin to political suicide? The writer is a PhD Candidate at Bilkent University, Ankara Footnotes 1. "Moses went to the Pharaoh", zaman.com.tr 2. "Responbility", zaman.com.tr 3. The movie tells the story of the Turkish ambassador to Germany who saved Jews from extermination by handing them out Turkish passports during the Holocaust 4. todayszaman.com 5. "Al-Qeda Operation in Six Cities", zaman.com.tr 6. "The aim is making nuclear weapons", zaman.com.tr foreignpolicy.com; huffingtonpost.com; economist.com
|
_0102_-_Turki-Al-Hamad.jpg){kind=link}
