Courcy’s Intelligence Brief

In our 8 January issue, we said of Turkey under its Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan: “The tragedy is that at the very moment when secular pro-Western Ataturkism could have delivered Turkey a central and indispensible role in the post-Arab Spring Middle East, Erdogan has jettisoned this in favour of a failed push for Muslim Brotherhood hegemony and an anti-Westernism that favours Iran and Russia…despite deep-seated differences with these two countries over Syria.  It is the triumph of personal prejudice over national interest, and it is a tragedy for both Turkey and the Middle East as a whole.”  In our 8 January assessment we were concentrating on Turkey’s foreign policy failings, but its failings on the domestic front are also escalating.

Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies are not new.  They have been seen in his curbing of the press, his reaction to the popular disturbances in Istanbul last summer, and in his plans to create an executive presidency which he can inherit after his final term as prime minister.  However, the current problem began on 17 December with the arrest on suspicion of corruption of businessmen linked to the prime minister.  Erdogan’s defence is that this move was instigated by the Hizmet movement led by US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen, whose supporters are strongly represented in the police and judiciary.  This, in turn, has been used by the prime minister to justify the reassignment of nearly 120 judges and prosecutors.  It is also estimated that around 3,000 police officers have been removed from their posts, with some officers being moved as many as five times in the past month.

The perceived threat from the Gulen community has fed Erdogan’s well-developed paranoia and belief in conspiracies.  Erdogan has accused the Gulen movement of masterminding a “judicial coup” and talked about a plot organized by the “Fethullahist parallel state”, all supported (according to one AKP deputy) by a cast of villains including the US, the EU, the Jewish lobby, and Israel.  The AKP is now working on a bill that will increase political control over the judiciary.

The seriousness of what is happening was well summed up by Metin Feyzioglu, chairman of the Turkish bar association, who said this week that “the foundation of the state and the country’s legal order has been shaken”.  Another well-placed source with knowledge of Turkey’s legal system said this week that the damage done to the judiciary and police would take “decades” to repair.

Murat Arslan, chairman of the Yarsav association of judges and prosecutors, concurs.  According to Arslan: “It is quite clear there is political intervention here…they are quite clearly intimidating the whole of the judiciary.  It is sending the message ‘you cannot conduct an investigation which touches me’.”

In other words, Turkey under Erdogan is failing not just on regional leadership but also in the role that Western leaders have for so long wished it to fulfil, namely as a moderately Islamic democratic role model.