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Military coup attempt in Turkey (1 Viewer)

RedmondLonghorn said:
Rhetoric getting kinda heated: http://www.businessinsider.com/turkey-purges-coup-attempt-erdogan-us-relations-2016-7
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Also:

Edward ‏@DonKlericuzio Jul 16
Turkeys Labor Minister Soylu: "as long as US doesn't give us F.Gulen, they are responsible of the coup attempt in Turkey."
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Turkey Untold ‏@TurkeyUntold


BREAKING: Secretary of Labor Süleyman Soylu live on news channel Haberturk: "The US is behind this coup"
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Istanbul deputy mayor is in critical condition after a gunman stormed his office and shot him in the head


A deputy mayor in Istanbul is in a critical condition after being shot in the head by an unknown assailant. 

Turkish broadcaster NTV reported that the assailant had stormed the office of Cemil Candas, a Jewish politician in the Sisli district, and then gun shots were heard.
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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3695763/Istanbul-deputy-mayor-critical-condition-gunman-stormed-office-shot-head.html#ixzz4En4v9n7J
 
All of these thousands of judges, finance minister workers, etc who were fired in the last few days ought to be packing their bags and GTFO of Turkey ASAP.

Your name is on this mans list. It is only a matter of time before Erdogen's guys come knocking at your door. Or worse, your name is released publicly to the Islamists.

 
RedmondLonghorn said:
Starting to look that way, isn't it?
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I'm not even a conspiracy guy and it seems to me he at least had a hand in it. Many dictators have done this over the years, basically bait a small group into action and then crush them and anyone else that ever gave him a dirty look. Haile Selassie, Sadaam, The North Korean nuts, Pinochet, Shah of Iran, etc.  

eta: how could I forget Putin, right out of his playbook

 
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Doctor Detroit said:
I'm not even a conspiracy guy and it seems to me he at least had a hand in it. Many dictators have done this over the years, basically bait a small group into action and then crush them and anyone else that ever gave him a dirty look. Haile Selassie, Sadaam, The North Korean nuts, Pinochet, Shah of Iran, etc.  
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Yep.

 
Turkey’s Weekend of the Long Knives



President Erdoğan survived another geopolitical game of chicken—though not without cost


As last weekend began, Turkey was plunged temporarily into violent chaos as troops attempted to overthrow the country’s government. The military’s move was loud and bloody, including bombs dropped on the parliament and presidential palace, but ultimately ineffective. Turkey’s elected government, led by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, reestablished its authority within hours.

As coups go, this was a total flop. The number of troops directly involved was quite small—enough to attempt the takeover of some critical government buildings and infrastructure—but far too few to seriously challenge the government. In the end, the effort reportedly cost the lives of 265 Turks, including 104 coup participants, as well as more than a hundred civilians caught in the crossfire. Most of the short-lived fighting between rebellious troops and police loyal to the government happened in Istanbul and Ankara, leaving the rest of the country largely untouched.

Turkey’s impressive military once knew how to manage a coup d’état. They pulled off full-fledged coups in 1960 and 1980, plus a “post-modern” one in 1997, forcing out a civilian government without actually rolling out the tanks. The military is the core institution of the Turkish Republic since its founding in 1923 out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. The creator of the army and the state, Mustafa Kemal, popularly known as Atatürk (Father of the Turks), wanted a powerful military to act as the guardian of the new republic’s cherished constitutional values—above all, secularism.

Thus, every so often, the Turkish military threw out a government it didn’t like, usually because it felt that the civilians were moving away from Kemalism. Since Turkey boasts the second-biggest army in NATO, the United States generally kept its protests to a minimum, not least because during the Cold War the Turkish military was a strategic necessity to keep the Soviets at bay. Neither did many in the West really mind that the Turkish military was keeping the country’s Islamic extremists at bay, too.

That legacy has been largely undone by President Erdoğan, who has ruled Turkey since 2004. His Justice and Development Party (AKP), while never directly challenging Kemalism—an unthinkable heresy—has gone to great lengths to undermine the military’s political power and moral authority, in order to dethrone secularism.

This is a necessity for the AKP, which is an Islamist party that seeks quasi-theocratic ends through quasi-democratic means. The military has always represented a stumbling-block to Erdoğan’s increasingly overt plans to re-Islamize Turkey. Although the country is 99 percent Muslim, the Kemalist legacy of official secularism meant that for decades Islam was kept out of politics in way that’s seldom encountered in the Muslim world. That the AKP has undone.

To achieve that, Erdoğan has ruled Turkey in a manner similar to how Vladimir Putin has run Russia. There are elections, sometimes of dubious validity. Increasing numbers of officials are appointed by the ruling party rather than elected. The state indirectly controls most of the media, with newspapers and websites the ruling party doesn’t like being shut down unceremoniously. Thuggish police do dirty work as needed. Arrest awaits more forthright regime opponents, real and imagined.

No Turkish institution has suffered more from the heavy hand of Erdoğan than the military. Its senior ranks have been purged several times in an effort to force out secularists in favor of officers of an Islamist bent. The biggest purge came with the so-called Ergenekon trials, which lasted from 2008 and 2013, and posited a vast military-led conspiracy against the government. Even in Turkey, which loves conspiracies in every form, this was far-fetched. Nevertheless, several top generals received extended prison terms for their alleged roles in the alleged conspiracy—which never seems to have existed outside the imagination of the AKP.

After that debacle, which destroyed the morale of secularist officers, many of whom left the service in fear and disgust, it’s difficult to see how the Turkish military could have managed to plan a serious coup against the ruling party. That’s where foreign-based plotters come in, according to the AKP and Erdoğan.

They have fingered an exiled Islamic leader in rural Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gülen, as the real motivator of last weekend’s coup. A 75-year old self-styled educational guru who lives on a compound in the Poconos (for an introduction to this truly bizarre story, read this), Gülen is unquestionably an opponent of the AKP, having been allied with it for years as it rose to power. However, he and President Erdoğan fell out in 2013 and the exiled imam has become Public Enemy Number One in Ankara, despite there being no real evidence that Gülen has anything to do with military coup planning.

Nevertheless, the abortive coup has given the AKP the green light to undertake a thoroughgoing purge of its enemies, real and imagined: secularists, terrorists, Gülenists, plus a wide array of political opponents. In the last couple days, Ankara has arrested more than 6,000 people, including most of the country’s military leadership. Judges are being fired by the thousands, as are civil servants deemed unfriendly to the AKP.

Vowing to “clean all state institutions of the virus,” President Erdoğan has threatened retribution as well as demanded the extradition of Gülen back home to face terrorism and treason charges. His equally vehement demands to restore the death penalty indicate where this may be headed, as has word of mass purges, in the many thousands, of the civil service.

In this, Erdoğan has demonstrated a discipline and planning that was altogether lacking on the part of the coup plotters. Given the speed and scope of this purge, the biggest in recent Turkish history, it’s clear that the AKP had lists of thousands of official enemies ready to go, once the right opportunity to clean house presented itself.

That the abortive coup did nicely. It’s remarkable that Turkey’s military—the second-biggest in NATO—with more than 500,000 troops on active duty, managed to stage a revolt against the government that amounted to not much more than a battalion.

Questions abound about what really happened on the night of July 15-16. Turks with experience of past military coups have noted how laughably small and inept this effort actually was. The plotters’ choice of targets was odd, to put it mildly. They took over very few installations, and weren’t very rapid in any event. They left the biggest media outlets untouched. The coup seemed to have little desire to connect to the public.

To top it off, the plotters made scant effort to seize or harm the president, whose whereabouts they knew. At the height of the short-lived coup, Erdoğan was flying on his private jet, returning to Istanbul from a holiday on the Aegean coast. Rebel F-16 fighters, fully armed for combat air patrol, intercepted the president’s plane, yet mysteriously they made no effort to shoot it down or even force it to land.

Since the first act of any coup d’état is neutralizing the regime’s leadership, that the plotters refrained from doing so, despite having easy opportunity, raises awkward questions about the entire affair.

The notion that the coup was a stage-managed drama—a pretext for the regime to purge its remaining enemies—may seem fanciful to Westerners, yet is entirely within the realm of possibility for Turks. This, after all, is the country that gave us the term “deep state” (derin devlet) to describe the secret forces that really control events. Turkish politics are filled with plots and coups, often of mysterious provenance, including shadowy terrorist groups that may—or may not—be controlled by the government, so it’s worthwhile asking what’s actually happening in Ankara.

This is especially important given Turkey’s outsized geopolitical role. It’s not only a key member of NATO that’s on the frontline of the struggle against the Islamic State, it’s the bridge between Europe and Asia. Serious instability in Turkey would threaten the entire region, from Southeastern Europe to the Black Sea over to the Persian Gulf.

It’s therefore not altogether comforting that President Erdoğan is a risk-taker who sometimes rolls the dice, as evidenced by his gamble last autumn with the Russians, causing an international crisis that easily could have led to all-out war between Ankara and Moscow. He survived that geopolitical game of chicken, though not without cost.

Did Erdoğan roll the dice again with a pseudo-coup to permit him a final settling of accounts with his domestic enemies? Little more than a year after taking power, Adolf Hitler “discovered” a coup plot among top-ranking Nazis, some of them his closest allies. The resulting “Night of the Long Knives” allowed the Nazis to purge the movement of powerful people they no longer needed, several dozen of whom were brutally murdered. This left Hitler as the unchallenged leader of the Nazi party, with fateful consequences.

Has something similar just happened in Turkey? The cultish Gülen movement enabled the rise of Erdoğan and his party to their current power position in Ankara, and it now represents a threat that the AKP wants to be rid of. Purging the military of any remaining secularists is always in Erdoğan’s interests. What’s happening in Turkey is something that NATO needs to ask directly—and quickly.
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http://observer.com/2016/07/turkeys-weekend-of-the-long-knives/

 
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Doctor Detroit said:
So Erdogan set this up so he could clean the ranks of anyone not explicitly behind him? Very Shah of Iran-esque. 
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DD, if we had to evacuate our personnel, how big a job? Is it even possible given we probably have two carrier groups in the Eastern Mediterranean right now?

 
Crackdown Toll Passes 50,000

Turkish media announced that:

  • 15,200 teachers and other education staff had been sacked
  • 1,577 university deans were ordered to resign
  • 8,777 interior ministry workers were dismissed
  • 1,500 staff in the finance ministry had been fired
  • 257 people working in the prime minister's office were sacked
Turkey's media regulation body on Tuesday also revoked the licences of 24 radio and TV channels accused of links to Mr Gulen.

The news came on top of the arrests of more than 6,000 military personal and the sackings of nearly 9,000 police officers. About 3,000 judges have also been suspended.
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50k purged.  This is effing insane.

I spent 2 weeks traveling around Turkey a few years ago.  Lovely people, fantastic sights, and centuries upon centuries of history.  I feel so bad for these people and their country.

 
Teddy Stickles said:
50k purged.  This is effing insane.

I spent 2 weeks traveling around Turkey a few years ago.  Lovely people, fantastic sights, and centuries upon centuries of history.  I feel so bad for these people and their country.
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May as well get it over with and tell the world you are going full blow psycho muslim. Looks like this guy is taking a page out of that fat little toad in North Korea.

 
msommer said:
Pretty much the worst case scenario playing out before our eyes
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Ditto.  We're powerless to stop it.  People are going to be kicking themselves for heeding his call to come out and fight against the coup in the streets.  They probably are already.

 
I haven't posted yet in here and I can only share my depression of seeing military stripped to their underwear or naked and this is supposed to be a civilized country? The pictures were not pleasant and I understand the guy in power is trying to stay there but I never knew him to be a lunatic, I think he has been featured on Charlie Rose and other programs but I am a little shocked it got like this. I'm reading this is Islamic Extremist type in control, how did that happen? We have nukes in Turkey at a base where the power is shut down?...I can kind of understand if America wanted to upend this turkey in charge of Turkey but it doesn't seem like a good situation. 

I'm only asking because we kind of have to this year but...this seems like something that will/would play well into Trump's hands, am I way off? It has to be a pretty incredibly insane environment with an awful lot of turmoil and a major Armageddon type event in play or possibly in play...does this count? 

Some of you are making it sound rather bleak. 

 
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The only hope for Turkey is that democracy survives until the next election and Ergogan is voted out.  Maybe it will mean a return to Kemalist principles which served them well for so long.

 
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Ministry of Pain said:
I haven't posted yet in here and I can only share my depression of seeing military stripped to their underwear or naked and this is supposed to be a civilized country? The pictures were not pleasant and I understand the guy in power is trying to stay there but I never knew him to be a lunatic, I think he has been featured on Charlie Rose and other programs but I am a little shocked it got like this. I'm reading this is Islamic Extremist type in control, how did that happen? We have nukes in Turkey at a base where the power is shut down?...I can kind of understand if America wanted to upend this turkey in charge of Turkey but it doesn't seem like a good situation. 

I'm only asking because we kind of have to this year but...this seems like something that will/would play well into Trump's hands, am I way off? It has to be a pretty incredibly insane environment with an awful lot of turmoil and a major Armageddon type event in play or possibly in play...does this count? 

Some of you are making it sound rather bleak. 
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If you like Ergogan, you're going to love Trump.

 
cstu said:
The only hope for Turkey is that democracy survives until the next election and Ergogan is voted out.  Maybe it will mean a return to Kemalist principles which served them well for so long.
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It would be awfully silly to expect Erdogan to leave something as important as his future employment prospects to the vagaries of a truly democratic election.

 
cstu said:
The only hope for Turkey is that democracy survives until the next election and Ergogan is voted out.  Maybe it will mean a return to Kemalist principles which served them well for so long.
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Linked below is an interesting theory as to why this Turkish secularist, military coup failed while others succeeded, and a theory as to why we probably won't see a return to Kemalist principles in Turkey.

Turkey Coup: Undone by Demographics (Unz Review)

 
Gary Coal Man said:
Linked below is an interesting theory as to why this Turkish secularist, military coup failed while others succeeded, and a theory as to why we probably won't see a return to Kemalist principles in Turkey.

Turkey Coup: Undone by Demographics (Unz Review)
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While the author tends to denigrate trends, it is disturbing to me that improved economics for Turkey's more religious Muslims are not translating into more tolerance. There are those wo thought the problem was all about economics - that if certain groups had good jobs and relative financial security, they would back off on fundamentalist tendencies. Doesn't seem to be the case, at least in Turkey.

 
On Wednesday, Turkey discharged close to 1,700 officers and junior officers from the military, including 149 generals and admirals.

The government also ordered dozens of media organizations closed down, according to a decision printed in the Official Gazette. They included 45 newspapers, 16 television stations, 23 radio stations, three news agencies and 15 magazines. The list comprised many regional media outlets as well as several Gulen-linked media that had already been seized by the state.

Earlier, authorities issued warrants for the detention of 47 former executives or senior journalists of Turkey's Zaman newspaper for alleged links to Gulen, who denies any involvement in the coup attempt. Such detentions have raised concerns that people could be targeted simply for criticizing the government.

The media watchdog Reporters Without Borders condemned Turkey's purges of journalists, saying they have assumed "increasingly alarming proportions."

"Criticizing the government and working for media outlets that support the Gulen Movement do not constitute evidence of involvement in the failed coup," said Johann Bihr, who heads the organization's Eastern Europe and Central Asia desk.
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http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f1f5752056e7430eba4af64a5be4dd18/turkey-orders-47-newspaper-journalists-executives-detained

 
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/turks-can-agree-on-one-thing-us-was-behind-failed-coup/ar-BBv9UOt?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=iehp

ISTANBUL — A Turkish newspaper reported that an American academic and former State Department official had helped orchestrate a violent conspiracy to topple the Turkish government from a fancy hotel on an island in the Sea of Marmara, near Istanbul. The same newspaper, in a front-page headline, flat-out said the United States had tried to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on the night of the failed coup.
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woah

Given the widespread sentiment that Mr. Gulen was behind the coup, a failure to extradite him would probably provoke a popular backlash in Turkey against the United States, and would confirm for many that the Americans had conspired against Turkey.

“If they don’t give him back, that is the end of our relationship with America,” said Osman Arsan, a waiter in Istanbul. “They are backstabbing and insincere. They must show their true colors. If not, they should prepare themselves for the response of the Turkish people. We are all united for this cause. We will not forgive them.”
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Turkey & Russia normalize ties.

Part of this or related:

- Turkey & Russia will now cooperate in Syria.

- Turkey and Russia could cooperate on a major energy pipeline from the Crimean coast to the Euro side of Turkey just below Bulgaria. This would be a major wedge in the EU energy balance of power and it probably suggests Russia has made a massive bribe to Turkey to separate itself from US & EU/NATO influence.

Which might be what is going on here.

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
Turkey & Russia normalize ties.

Part of this or related:

- Turkey & Russia will now cooperate in Suria.

- Turkey and Russia could cooperate on a major energy pipeline from the Crimean coast to the Euro side of Turkey just below Bulgaria. This would be a major wedge in the EU energy balance of power and it probably suggests Russia has made a massive bribe to Turkey to separate itself from US & EU/NATO influence.

Which might be what is going on here.
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Alas,  the "soccer"  analogy strengthens.  Seriously, though,  :goodposting: .  Quite frightening.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Turkey & Russia normalize ties.

Part of this or related:

- Turkey & Russia will now cooperate in Syria.

- Turkey and Russia could cooperate on a major energy pipeline from the Crimean coast to the Euro side of Turkey just below Bulgaria. This would be a major wedge in the EU energy balance of power and it probably suggests Russia has made a massive bribe to Turkey to separate itself from US & EU/NATO influence.

Which might be what is going on here.
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More on this emerging relationship with some Iran mixed in:

Bildt also warned that it would be a “disgrace for Europe” if Russian President Vladimir Putin was the first leader to meet Erdogan after the attempted coup. That is indeed what came to pass, when Erdogan met Putin on Aug. 9 in St. Petersburg, rejuvenating the ties between Ankara and Moscow that had long been frayed by their rivalry in Syria. Erdogan thanked Putin for personally calling him right after the coup, much before most Western leaders, saying the call “meant a lot psychologically.”

Moreover, Putin isn’t the only American rival who seized this crucial moment to improve ties with Turkey. Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif traveled to Ankara on Aug. 12, paying a visit to the bombed parliament building and congratulating Turkish citizens “for the defiance they showed against the coup plotters.”

What does all this mean? Is Ankara drifting away from the West and turning its face toward Russia and Iran?

Here’s How to Stop Turkey’s Anti-American Turn ;Turks are wondering if the United States was behind the coup to overthrow Erdogan. And Washington should realize they have good reasons to worry.
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Meanwhile Obama is content playing go fish...I thought Bush was horrific, but Obama's foreign policy is turning out just as bad.

 
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