Some foreign press analyses on the resignations of Chief-of-staff General Isik Kosaner and the commanders of the land, air and naval forces
Some foreign press analyses on the resignations of Chief-of-staff General Isik Kosaner and the commanders of the land, air and naval forces.
Mass resignations may mark end of era for Turkey military
The shock mass resignation of Turkey's top brass could mark the end of an era when the country's military, which ousted four past governments, played a key political role, analysts said Saturday.
"The old military guard gave up," said analyst Ahmet Insel, the co-author of a book on the Turkish army's role in politics.
"It is a turning point in relations between the military and politics, a sharp turning point," said Murat Yetkin, the editor-in-chief of Hurriyet Daily News, though he added it was too soon to declare the end of the army's role in politics.
NATO member Turkey's entire military command resigned Friday in a row with the government over officers jailed for alleged coup plots -- the latest episode in a long-running battle between the staunchly secularist army and the Islamist-rooted government.
Chief-of-staff General Isik Kosaner and the commanders of the land, air and naval forces all resigned.
Kosaner stepped down after several recent meetings with Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ahead of an early August gathering of the army's high command that decides on promotions for senior officers.
Media reports blamed tensions between the military and Erdogan over army demands for the promotion of dozens of officers being held in a probe of alleged plots to oust the government led by the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the moderate offshoot of a banned Islamist movement.
About a 10th of the army's generals are in jail over the alleged 2003 coup plot -- dubbed "Operation Sledgehammer" and allegedly drawn up shortly after the AKP came to power. The suspects are facing 15-20 years in jail, though the case has been marred by serious doubts over the authenticity of some implicating documents.
By resigning, "the generals implicitly accepted that the accusations are grounded," Insel said.
Tensions between the country's political and military leaders have been building to a head for years and analysts said the AKP, in power since 2002, may have been emboldened by a June election victory that saw the party score its best performance yet.
Friday's mass resignation is a clear sign of the "definitive impact of the June elections on relations between the government and the army," columnist Derya Sazak wrote in the daily Milliyet on Saturday.
"This crisis is the inevitable result of the power struggle between the army and the government that has been ongoing since 2007," Sazak said.
A parliamentary vote in 2007 saw the AKP's candidate Abdullah Gul elected president despite fierce opposition from the military, who see the presidential office as a key guarantor of the country's secularism.
Gul's history of political Islam and the symbolism of his wife's decision to wear a headscarf saw the military use its influence to initially block his election. The AKP called snap general polls and was returned with a stronger share of the vote, after which Gul was elected.
"The government does not want to work with those commanders who tried to suspend the election of the president and were involved in 'coup attempts.' It wants to eliminate them," Sazak said.
Some analysts hailed the resignations as a step toward the further democratisation of the country.
"The period of coups (in Turkey) is coming to an end... Turkey is proceeding toward democracy and bringing an end to military guardianship," wrote Ahmet Altan, the editor-in-chief of the daily Taraf, the newspaper whose exclusive stories paved the way for the coup probes.
Still, others are cautious about declaring an end to the tension between government and the military, which carried out coups in 1960, 1971 and 1980, and in 1997 led a campaign that forced the resignation of the country's first Islamist-led government, headed by Erdogan's mentor Necmettin Erbakan.
"Until this 'Sledgehammer' case, which seems to be extended over years, comes to an end, the relations between the government and the military will always be tense," said Sedat Ergin, a columnist with Hurriyet.
"What if those officers will be acquitted?" he said.
AP
Turkey's resignations, a sign of military decline
In past decades, the Turkish military showed displeasure with civilian leaders by overthrowing them. This time, the upset generals quit, a move that only strengthened the hand of an elected government that has in turn been accused of targeting opponents at the expense of democracy.
The decline of military clout in Turkey, a NATO member with a robust economy and an activist foreign policy, is welcome for many Turks who believe any political role for commanders is a throwback to the era of coups and instability that once sullied their international image. It's also key to Turkey's bid to join the European Union, though the candidacy is adrift because of mutual skepticism on a host of issues.
"The military has been largely pushed to the side. They're not going to be able to implement a coup d'etat," said Howard Eissenstat, a Turkey expert at St. Lawrence University in the United States. "The police force is thoroughly under the control of the (ruling party) and has been militarized over the last 10 years, and the opposition is weak and divided."
President Abdullah Gul said Saturday that the sudden resignations a day earlier of the nation's top four military commanders, who were troubled by the arrests of dozens of generals in alleged coup plots, would not cause a crisis even if their departure was unprecedented.
The subtext of his message was: the government is in firm control and there's no danger of a coup. The government sought to gloss over the controversy, saying the generals had merely asked for retirement, but some observers speculated the brass miscalculated by believing their radical step could force their civilian masters to make concessions.
Merve Alici, a member of Young Civilians, a non-governmental group that promotes democracy, described the resignations as "passive-aggressive" behavior and said she was happy to see that had not created a "crisis" in the old sense of the term in Turkey. The Turkish currency dipped in value, as nervous traders reacted, but the government was poised to fill the leadership vacuum by appointing Gen. Necdet Ozel, the military police commander, as chief of staff.
"I believe that it's a good development in the sense that this untouchable image of the military is just decaying one step at a time," Alici said. "They are not these people who come and stay there and never leave."
On Saturday, Labor Minister Faruk Celik tried to reassure the country ahead of the formation of a new command structure at a key military meeting that begins Monday.
"I believe that what happened last night would contribute to the normalization of Turkey as well as putting the military-civilian relations on the right track," he said.
The military contributes troops to NATO operations in Afghanistan and Libya, though they are not directly involved in combat, and is fighting Kurdish rebels concentrated in southeast Turkey. The resignations of Gen. Isik Kosaner as chief of staff, along with the commanders of the navy, the army and the air force, are unlikely to have an immediate effect on operational matters.
But the military has seemed increasingly archaic in political terms, clinging to its self-appointed role as guardian of the hardline secular values of national founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk long after the ruling party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a devout Muslim whose grand vision sometimes draws comparisons to Ataturk, came to power in 2002 on a platform of democratic reform.
The conflict between Turkey's old and new elites partly played out as a debate over the role of Islam in society, but Erdogan cast it as a struggle for transparency and accountability when police rounded up hundreds of retired and active-duty military officers accused of plotting against his government. The trials were widely welcomed at first, but long imprisonments without verdicts and alleged irregularities in the handling of evidence have stirred claims that the government is manipulating the legal process.
The resignations of Kosaner and his peers came after a court ordered the arrest of seven more active duty generals and admirals along with more than a dozen other officers on charges of carrying out an Internet campaign to undermine the government. In his farewell message, Kosaner said he was quitting because he could not protect the rights of his staff and he sharply criticized the wave of arrests.
Kerem Oktem, author of "Angry Nation: Turkey since 1989," a book about the country's transition from military to democratic rule, said that while there is "no doubt" that the military has tried to subvert elected governments, there are "serious shortcomings" in the coup plot trials that point to long-standing problems in the Turkish justice system.
More broadly, Oktem said, accusations that the government has amassed too much control stem from an authoritarian tradition of power that "does not represent or encapsulate liberal views" in Turkey. In his view, the ruling Justice and Development Party followed electoral rules but was compelled to fight off non-democratic challenges by similar means.
In 2008, the Constitutional Court, then a bastion of secularism, narrowly ruled against shutting the ruling party on the grounds that it had violated the country's secular values but still gave the party a warning against leading the country toward Islam. Ruling party leaders viewed the crisis as a political attack, and much of the national debate has since focused on the coup plot trials that they back.
The trials "started out as positive things, but they've grown so unwieldy and they seem so political that this doesn't look to me like the creation of a neutral bureaucracy," said Eissenstat, the St. Lawrence academic. "It looks to me like the assertion by a single party over more and more parts of the apparatus of the state."
Reuters
For Turkey's political leaders it was business as usual on Saturday, denying any crisis, or
simply not mentioning the resignation of the country's four top military commanders.
Chief of General Staff General Isik Kosaner stepped down on Friday along with the commanders of the army, navy and air force in protest at the detention of 250 officers on charges of conspiring against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government.
More than 40 serving generals, almost a tenth of Turkey's senior commanders, are now under arrest, accused of various plots to bring down Erdogan's AK Party government.
Relations between the staunchly secularist military and Erdogan's socially conservative Justice and Development Party (AK) have been fraught since it first won power in 2002, due to mistrust of the AK's Islamist roots.
The departure of the generals has caused turmoil in the military and dampened sentiment on financial markets, but could prove an opportunity for Erdogan to extend his authority over the once-dominant armed forces, the second biggest in NATO.
President Abdullah Gul, himself a former senior AK Party member, played down the significance of the resignations. "Nobody should view this as any sort of crisis or continuing problem in Turkey," Gul told reporters on Saturday. "Undoubtedly events yesterday were an extraordinary situation in themselves, but everything is on course."
Erdogan said in a pre-recorded speech broadcast on Saturday his priority was to press ahead with plans for a new constitution which he said would boost democracy and made no mention of the top brass quitting.
"I believe our biggest duty is to prepare a new constitution, democratic and liberal, without shortcomings and meeting the needs of today," Erdogan said in the 'address to the
nation'. It was not clear when the recording was made.
In a farewell message to "brothers in arms", Kosaner said it was impossible to continue in his job as he could not protect the rights of his men who had been detained as a consequence of what he called a flawed judicial process. "It is impossible to accept their detention as being in line with principles of universal law, justice and moral values," Kosaner said.
FOUR-STAR EARTHQUAKE
While the resignations are embarrassing, they could give Erdogan a decisive victory over a military that sees itself as guardian of the secularist state envisioned by the soldier
statesman and founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Analysts perceive little political threat to Erdogan's supremacy. AK won a third consecutive term, taking 50 percent of the vote, in a parliamentary election in June.
In years gone by, Turkey's generals were more likely to seize power than quit. They have staged three coups since 1960 and pushed an Islamist-led government from power in 1997.
Erdogan, Gul and other founders of the AK Party, were members of an Islamist party whose coalition the military forced from power 14 years ago. Erdogan himself was jailed for four months in 1999 for inciting "religious and racial hatred".
But as prime minister, Erdogan has ended the military's dominance through a series of reforms aimed at advancing Turkey's chances of joining the European Union.
But the Turkish bid to join the EU is now floundering with Ankara only having completed one of the 35 so-called chapters it needs to finish in order to join the bloc -- 12 are under
discussion and 18 have been blocked by Cyprus and France.
"Four-star earthquake," the Sabah newspaper called the generals' resignations, while papers also highlighted Kosaner's criticism of media reporting on the military.
"They tried to create the impression that the Turkish Armed Forces were a criminal organisation and ... the biased media encouraged this with all kinds of false stories, smears and allegations," Kosaner's statement said.
"We've got a situation in Turkey where we've had over the last few years almost a de-institutionalisation of the Turkish state, where everything has become more politicised and it is a danger for any state," said security analyst Gareth Jenkins.
On Istanbul's streets, opinions were polarised between government supporters and opponents.
"This is a move to place AK Party supporters in the army. There was only the army to protect secularism but they took that as well," said retired 54-year-old Perihan Guclu.
"This has been a good development. We have got one of the biggest numbers of generals in the world but we are becoming a democracy slowly," said a 52-year-old who gave his name only as Dursun.
The subordination of the generals was starkly demonstrated last year when police began detaining scores of officers over "Operation Sledgehammer", an alleged plot against Erdogan's government discussed at a military seminar in 2003.
The officers say Sledgehammer was just a war games exercise and the evidence against them has been fabricated. About 250 military personnel are in jail, including 173 serving and 77 retired staff. Most are charged in relation to Sledgehammer.
MILITARY MORALE SAPPED
A court on Friday accepted an indictment in another alleged military plot, known as the "Internet Memorandum" case, and prosecutors demanded the arrest of 22 people including the Aegean army commander and six other serving generals and admirals.
Aksam newspaper described this as "the indictment which triggered a crisis" in a case where the military is accused of setting up anti-government websites. Papers said disagreements over senior appointments also prompted the generals to quit.
The detentions have sapped morale and spread mistrust and suspicion among the officer corps, and many had been looking for Kosaner to take a stand since his appointment last August.
The main opposition CHP said the army should stay out of politics, but warned against the AK Party exploiting its power. "It is not right to draw soldiers into politics but there is
no benefit in vilifying, smearing or undermining their dignity day and night," senior CHP deputy Emine Tarhan told a news conference.
A government statement said the four commanders had retired and made no mention of the reasons why. It said a meeting of the Supreme Military Council, which meets twice-yearly to make top appointments, would go ahead as planned on Monday, showing
Erdogan is in a hurry to restore the chain of command and present an image of business as usual.
Al Jazeera
General Isik Kosaner, the head of the Turkish armed forces, has quit along with the heads of the ground, naval and air forces.
The country's state-run Anatolia news agency said on Friday that the military chiefs wanted to retire because of tensions with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the recently re-elected prime minister.
Anatolia reported Kosaner as resigning "as he saw it as necessary".
In a written statement released after the news of the generals' retirement, Erdogan said that the armed forces would continue to do their duty in a spirit of unity.
Erdogan also named General Necdet Ozel, head of the gendarmerie paramilitary force, as both the commander of the ground forces and acting chief of the armed forces. Abdullah Gul, the president, approved the appointment.
Ozel was the only one among the top commanders not to ask for retirement.
He was expected to be appointed as chief of the military's general staff in place of Kosaner, as tradition dictates only the ground forces head can take over the armed forces.
Speaking to Al Jazeera, Yusuf Kanli, a columnist with Hurriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, said that Kosaner was quitting his post as an act of protest against the court cases jailing military officers, which meant he could no longer defend the rights of his staff.
"However, I do not think that this shows that there is a deepening rift between the government and the army because resignation means leaving the seat to the government. By resigning, they opened the door for the government to make the appointments they would like to make. And indeed, the government immediately stepped in and appointed new army commanders.
"It seems that, in the past, when the military expressed dissatisfaction with the government, the government would leave. Nowadays, when the government expresses displeasure to the top generals, the top generals are leaving. There is a change of rolls," Kanli said.
This is the first time so many top commanders in Turkey have stepped down at once.
Al Jazeera Turk's Elif Ural said Erdogan, Gul and Kosaner met for 50 minutes in the morning, which was the last time the three could meet before next week's Supreme Military Council meeting, where key posts for next year are to be decided.
There were hopes that leaders of the government and the military could reach a compromise about the postings, but the retirement announcements showed the rift could not be bridged, Ural reported.
CAMPAIGN
The mass retirement notices came hours after a court charged 22 suspects, including several generals and officers, with carrying out an internet campaign to undermine the government.
The unprecedented departures come ahead of the annual spring meeting scheduled for August 1, where leaders of the government and the military come together to discuss key appointments for the next year.
Reports say Friday's news signals a deep-rooted rift between the military and the government, amid an ongoing trial accusing dozens of generals and officers for plotting to overthrow the government.
In a 2003 case called the "Sledgehammer", 17 generals and admirals in line for promotion have been jailed along with nearly 200 officers on charges of plotting to over throw the government.
More than 400 people - including academics, journalists, politicians and soldiers - are also on trial on separate charges of plotting to bring down the government.
That case is based on a conspiracy by an alleged gang of secular nationalists called "Ergenekon".
The government denies the cases are politically motivated and says it is just trying to work to improve democracy.
MILITARY VS. GOVERNMENT
Erdogan's ruling AK party, which won a third term in elections on June 12 in a landslide victory, has said its key goal is to replace a military-era constitution with a more democratic one.
But critics say AK has a secret Islamist agenda, an allegation it denies.
The Turkish military has staged three coups between 1960 and 1980 and forced the country's first Islamist-led government out of power in 1997.
Coup leaders drew on the support of Turks who saw them as saviours from chaos and corruption, but they were often ruthless.
In the 1960 takeover, the prime minister and key ministers were executed and in a 1980 coup, there were numerous cases of torture, disappearance and extrajudicial killing.
Such intervention is no longer regarded as feasible, as the power of the military has been curbed sharply under reforms carried out by Erdogan's government.
Kosaner, who took over as head of the armed forces in August 2010, is regarded as a hardline secularist, but he has kept a lower profile than previous chiefs of the general staff.
The announcement comes amid an upsurge in fighting in southeast Turkey between the military and the separatist Kurdistan Workers Party guerrillas.
Haaretz
The change in military top brass following the wholesale resignation of the top military commanders may subordinate the military to civilian rule, reversing the army’s traditional predominance.
For the first time in the history of modern Turkey, the military leadership quit over a disagreement with the government, rather than the government being the one to go. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan grabbed the historic opportunity that fell into his lap with both hands. Now he can definitively impose civil rule over the military, destroying one of fundamental principles of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's regime. That principle gave the army the authority to defend the foundations of the constitution, and thus also to remove governments that did not comply with Ataturk's principles.
The wholesale resignation of the top military commanders will have minimal impact on military performance, but the political implications are vast. It would not be an exaggeration to describe it as a revolution in Turkey's power structure.
The timing of the resignations are tied to the annual August meeting of the country's military council to decide on appointments and dismissals in the army. Last year, Erdogan rejected the majority of the recommendations made by Chief of Staff Gen. Isik Kosaner on the grounds that some of the candidates were connected to one of the alleged conspiracies against the government.
Kosaner accepted Erdogan's position and waited a year to put forth his candidates. But in preparation for the meeting, scheduled for Tuesday, Erdogan told Kosaner, "I don't want to see any surprises on the nominations list." The premier was thus implying he would not approve the appointments of any senior officers implicated in the incidents under investigation.
Erdogan, who was reelected in a landslide in June and now seeks to advance the constitutional reforms supported by the majority of Turks, is completing his transformation into today's Ataturk. Just like the father of modern Turkey, Erdogan controls a one-party regime, with no meaningful opposition.
The New York Times
Turkish Prime Minister Climbs a Higher Perch in Wake of Resignations
Fifty years ago, when a populist prime minister tangled with the Turkish military, he ended up on the gallows, the mandate of three election victories little consolation. This time around, the rivalry climaxed with most of Turkey’s military command resigning simultaneously, its leader complaining of powerlessness and bad press.
As Turks grappled Saturday with the shock of the resignations — and an extraordinary moment in modern Turkey’s history — officials scrambled to project a facade of business as usual, even as their critics warned of a creeping authoritarianism engineered by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has governed since 2003.
But in broader ways, the resignations on Friday delivered Mr. Erdogan a perch to reshape a military bound by civilian control, pursue a foreign policy emboldened by the decisive victory of his conservative and populist party in elections in June and pursue constitutional changes that could transform politics here.
The struggle that has posed the most serious danger to Mr. Erdogan — a powerful military willing to act above the law — in many ways appears to have come to an end.
“The days of Turkey’s military calling the shots are over,” said Cengiz Candar, a prominent columnist. “There’s a new equation in the politics of the country, and anyone depending on the military to score points on a political issue has to forget about it.”
In a move that officials acknowledged took them by surprise, Turkey’s top commander, Gen. Isik Kosaner, together with the leaders of the navy, army and air force, asked to retire Friday to protest the arrests of dozens of generals as suspects in long-running conspiracy investigations that Mr. Erdogan’s critics contend are politically motivated.
“Four-star earthquake,” declared a headline in Sabah, a pro-government newspaper. But Mr. Erdogan quickly promoted Gen. Necdet Ozel, the commander of the military police, as the projected replacement for General Kosaner. And while the prime minister said nothing publicly, perhaps in an attempt to stay above the fray, other government officials played down the idea of a vacuum or a future confrontation, in what appeared an effort to assure the country’s population of 73 million that a coup was not in the offing.
“It shouldn’t look as if a crisis, a problem still continues,” President Abdullah Gul said Saturday. “Events of yesterday were extraordinary in their scope; however, everything is back on track.”
The most immediate cause of the dispute between the military and civilian leaders was the arrests of military commanders in a series of investigations, given intensive coverage in the press, in which they and others were charged with conspiring to topple Mr. Erdogan’s government. More than 40 serving generals, almost a tenth of the country’s commanders, are under arrest on charges their supporters call flimsy.
But the battle runs far deeper, pitting a party with religious roots against an institution that has considered itself the guarantor of secular traditions, which underpinned the founding of the modern state in 1923 amid the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire. Suspicions ran deep enough that when asked to explain a murky sequence of events this year, Mr. Erdogan’s officials tapped their shoulders, signifying a general’s epaulets. The gesture was meant to cast blame on a military that his officials deem unduly unaccountable.
Officials said Saturday that there was growing frustration on their part over the military’s fight against a Kurdish-led insurgency in the southeast, which has claimed as many as 40,000 lives and seems to have escalated in past months. On July 14, 13 Turkish soldiers were killed in a clash with guerrillas in Diyarbakir Province, and the issue of rights for the Kurdish minority has proven almost as nettlesome as Mr. Erdogan’s contest with the military.
“The military is not really doing enough from a purely military point of view to prevent these attacks and these losses,” one senior official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy of the issue. “Something is missing in the planning in our fight against terrorism.”
In some quarters, there was a sense of triumphalism over the resignations, serving as a sign of a military whose influence pales before the past, when it carried out three coups, beginning in 1960, and just 14 years ago drove from power a government that shared some ties with Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known as the A.K.P.
“In the old times when the military and politicians could not get along, politicians used to be given notice and they would be forced to quit,” Mehmet Barlas, a columnist, wrote in Sabah. “Now, the reverse is happening. It is not easy to get used to change.”
But the country’s intelligentsia seemed divided, perspectives shaped by venerable cleavages between liberal and conservative, religious and secular and nationalist and Islamist. Those divisions were highlighted in the resignations themselves. To Mr. Erdogan’s supporters, the generals’ departure underlined growing civilian control over the military, in a healthy sign of a democratic order. But the prime minister’s detractors say he managed his victory by deploying the justice system against the military, in another example of his party’s mounting hold on state institutions.
“Those who believe the A.K.P. is a party with a democratic agenda are now applauding it and believe we are moving abruptly toward democracy,” said Ersin Kalaycioglu, a professor of political science at Sabanci University. “Others believe the A.K.P. is another conservative party with a conservative agenda trying to consolidate power in a new form of authoritarianism or even the dictatorship of one man.” “There’s a split in opinion, completely,” he added.
Mr. Erdogan, a 57-year-old former mayor of Istanbul, has emerged as perhaps the most compelling political phenomenon here in generations. His party won 50 percent of the vote in June, its third victory since 2002. Mr. Erdogan has spoken of plans to overhaul the Constitution, drafted under military tutelage after a coup in 1980. Among his ideas were articles that would curb the power of certain judicial bodies and introduce a system that enshrines more power in the president than the prime minister. His clear majority in Parliament will help him carry out his agenda, though his party lacks the two-thirds majority to do it with relative ease.
In a prerecorded speech that was aired Saturday, Mr. Erdogan vowed to press ahead with the constitutional changes, describing the task as “our biggest duty.”
Buoyed by a thriving economy, Mr. Erdogan has been working for years to transform the country, building it into a decisive power in a region long dominated by the United States.
But since the election, he has become more forceful in foreign policy, combative and, some say, aggressive in his statements directed at neighboring Armenia, with which it has long been at odds.
Relations with Israel, which once enjoyed warm ties with Turkey, have yet to markedly improve; they deteriorated badly in 2010 when Israeli troops boarded a Turkish boat that was trying to break the blockade of Gaza, and killed nine activists. This month, he took a harder line on the divided island of Cyprus, ruling out more concessions in negotiations to reunite the island’s Greek and Turkish regions.
“You have a completely different change of atmosphere in just two months,” said Hugh Pope, an analyst with the International Crisis Group in Istanbul. “It’s extraordinary. One assumes that the prime minister feels very strong and very powerful.”
General Ozel may offer Mr. Erdogan his most immediate impact. Though not considered an ally of the prime minister, he may have an attribute more valuable for a civilian leadership long dogged by the ambitions and sensitivities of generals. General Ozel appears to have neither, according to one newspaper profile of him a year ago.
“Up until today, he has never had a political stance at any time or on any basis,” wrote Namik Cinar, a columnist in the newspaper Taraf, which is critical of the Turkish military. “He will not become a middleman of a certain interest or political group.”
Cumhuriyet