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Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

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  • Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...overnment.html

    This would be a perfect time for a military coup in Greece. With G.Pap and the PASOK looking for cover for their brutal austerity plan, A war with turkey would justify all kinds of "pacification" internal and external.

    Turkey's entire top brass quit on Friday night leaving one America's strongest military's allies leaderless as the country's Islamic government confronts senior officers for conspiring against the prime minister

    Gen Isik Kosaner, the head of the Turkish armed forces, quit his post along with the heads of the ground, naval and air forces in protest over government pressure to sack scores of serving officers they wished to promote.

    The generals had been preparing for a confrontation with Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan at next week's annual promotions board.

    Gen Kosaner resigned because he "deemed it necessary," according to a report on NTV. Mr Erdogan had signalled he would block promotions for officers he believed were part of a conspiracy to destabilise Turkey and undermine his government.

    The first elected prime minister from an Islamic movement was targeted by a conspiracy known as Sledgehammer, prosecutors have alleged.

    Police have drawn up a list of 195 suspect, all retired or active duty members of the military, who had been party to the plot since 2003, the year Mr Erdogan took office.

    The authorities are holding 42 senior officers as part of the investigation into the alleged plot to overthrow the ruling Justice and Development Party.

    Senior officers in the army had been trying to get the imprisoned officers promoted despite their incarceration, but the government has insisted that they be forced to retire.

    Officials have also hinted that they wish to seek charges brought against two former chiefs of staff, Gen. Büyükanıt, who has been accused of involvement in a 2005 bombing, while retired Gen Ilker Başbuğ has been accused of ordering subordinates to run subversive websites.

    Turkey's military regards its role as guardian of the secular state established by Mustafa Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. The second biggest military in Nato has steadily lost ground as Mr Erdogan is rewarded by voters for presiding over an economic boom.

    The Turkish Lire fell more than one per cent on foreign exchange markets as analysts warned that the escalation of tensions and a protracted power struggle could derail Turkey's progress.

    "Things in Turkey look chaotic," Suha Yaygin, deputy chief of emerging markets at Toronto-Dominion Bank said. "This has never happened in Turkey."

    The Turkish military serves in Afghanistan and has been battling an upsurge in Kurdish terrorism. More than 20 conscripts have been killed in recent attacks.

    Its defenders rubbish the government claims of a vast deep state conspiracy believing the evidence presented so far is built on assumptions not hard evidence of wrong doing.

    The government said that Turkish democracy will lack credibility and be vulnerable to security service plotting if the cases are not prosecuted.

    More than 400 people, including high profile academics, journalists, politicians and soldiers, are separately on trial for participation in another project – known as the Ergenekon Plot – to bring down the government.
    Last edited by globaleconomicollaps; July 29, 2011, 12:30 PM.

  • #2
    Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

    Good thing for the Turks they're not sitting on large oil reserves

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    • #3
      Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

      Originally posted by don View Post
      Good thing for the Turks they're not sitting on large oil reserves
      With the greatest of respects; this may be disastrous. Turkey, militarily, trumps anything else here in Western Europe. The UK are not going to take them on; past history taught us a lesson never to be forgotten. So the likelihood is that we end up with a Turkey, militarily, in the hands of an Islamic government, at war with a split from that military; that has a long track record of doing as it will; with whomever it will.

      This is not good. - Possible Black Swan?

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

        Greece and Turkey form the bottleneck between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It's a major shipping channel for goods and liquid fuels. A war between the two would be almost as serious as closing the Suez Canal. The global powers don't want that. It's no coincidence that both Greece and Turkey are part of NATO - that's some serious geopolitical real estate that needs to be managed.

        By the way, both China and Russia have expressed interest in investing in Greece due to this geostrategic importance. Germany and the US are not exactly thrilled with such plans.

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        • #5
          Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

          ISTANBUL — Turkey’s top military commanders resigned en masse on Friday, a move without precedent in Turkish history that many analysts saw as a failed effort by a beleaguered institution to exert what is left of its dwindling political power.

          In the surprising series of events, Turkey’s top commander, Gen. Isik Kosaner, together with the leaders of the navy, army and air force, simultaneously resigned in protest over the sweeping arrests of dozens of generals as suspects in conspiracy investigations that many people in Turkey have come to see as a witch hunt.

          Hours later, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accepted the resignations and elevated his own choice to become the senior military commander: Gen. Necdet Ozel, who was until Friday the commander of the military police. The decision stamped Mr. Erdogan’s civilian authority on the country’s military, which has long regarded itself as a protector of Turkey’s secular traditions.

          The news stunned Turkey and left many people wondering whether they were witnessing the end of the power the military has long exercised over the nation’s political system.

          “This is effectively the end of the military’s role in Turkish democracy,” said Asli Aydintasbas, a columnist for the Turkish daily newspaper Milliyet. “This is the symbolic moment where the first Turkish republic ends and the second republic begins.”

          Mr. Erdogan has rolled back the military’s political power substantially since he took office in 2002, in part through legal reforms that assert civilian control. But the single biggest blow to the military’s clout has been a sprawling series of investigations and trials in which a number of senior military commanders, as well as journalists and others, were charged with conspiring to overthrow Mr. Erdogan’s government.

          The resignations were the culmination of a year of frustrations, in which more than 40 generals — approximately a tenth of the senior military command — were taken into custody, an assault that has infuriated the military but left it essentially helpless to fight back.

          A more immediate spark may have come in the form of new arrest warrants for 22 more people, among them two top generals, which were issued Friday, the semiofficial Anatolian News Agency reported.

          “This is the first time in the history of the republic that we are seeing something like this,” said Gursel Tekin, vice president of the main opposition political party, who was speaking in the seaside city of Canakkale. “Honestly, this situation is not good.”

          Historically, the military has wielded immense power in Turkey. The modern nation was founded in 1923 by Gen. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the military remained involved in politics after the country went to a multiparty political system in the 1950s.

          Military leaders have deposed elected governments four times in Turkish history, beginning in 1960, when they went so far as to execute the country’s first democratically elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes. But the Turkish political system has gone through profound changes in recent years, and many analysts argued that resigning was the only weapon left in the military’s arsenal. Few people interviewed on Friday thought that a coup was likely, both because Turkey’s democracy now has deep roots and because the military appeared diminished.

          “Besides this one act, the military doesn’t really have that much left in the tank,” said Steven Cook, an expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. Mr. Cook argued that the resignations also said a great deal about Turkey as a democracy, because its citizens — even those who dislike Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly powerful Justice and Development Party — were no longer willing to accept military rule.

          “Turkey has grown out of that,” he said.

          http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/wo...ef=todayspaper

          Time will tell . . .

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          • #6
            Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

            Update on Turkey's senior military leadership:

            http://www.smh.com.au/world/army-off...805-23nt7.html

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            • #7
              Re: Turkey's entire military command quits over row with government

              Originally posted by lakedaemonian View Post
              Update on Turkey's senior military leadership:

              http://www.smh.com.au/world/army-off...805-23nt7.html
              considering that they're all already in jail, i'm not sure of the impact of announcing their retirements.

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