Category: World

The failed coup in Turkey in 2016 transformed its internal politics and EU relations.But two and half years later, evidence is trickling out to support what the EU initially suspected – that president Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew what was going to happen and let it go ahead as a pretext to create one-man rule.

 

The new evidence recently came in the form of a document written by a Turkish prosecutor on 16 July 2016, and obtained by an investigative journalist, Ahmet Donmez, who lives in exile in Sweden.

The document is a detailed record of events which took place between the start of the coup and 5AM and 7AM that morning.

It said that putschists in the Turkish air force had bombed the parliament and the garden of the presidential palace, for instance.

They did so. But oddly enough, the prosecutor who minuted the events, Serdar Coskun, dated his record as having been written at 1AM – four hours before it all happened.

Coskun at first kept silent about the revelation.

He then gave an interview to a pro-government journalist in which he confirmed the authenticity of the document, but in which he also said he had made a mistake on the timing.

He had started writing at 1AM, he said, but finished at 7AM and indicated that he forgot to change the time.

Coskun’s explanation lacked credibility because some of the things he minuted as having just taken place never did take place, however.

The non-events he recorded included a siege of the MIT (the national intelligence service), the bombing of the special forces command HQ, and the bombing of the police intelligence bureau.

The Turkish embassy to the EU in Brussels declined to comment when asked by EUobserver.

But for one Turkey expert, the minutes indicate that Erdogan’s people knew exactly what was going to happen, let some of the events unfold in a controlled way as a pretext for the ensuing crackdown, and even began drafting papers beforehand that they would later use in trials against his political opponents.

“Finally, we now know how Erdogan exploited the so-called coup so quickly and ruthlessly … my suspicions are even more aroused,” Andrew Duff, a British former MEP who now works at the European Policy Centre, a think-tank in Brussels, told this website.

Recalling the events of July 2016, Duff said that even back then the coup appeared to contain bogus incidents.

“From watching on TV and social media the events of that night, I was suspicious that all was not as it seemed. I couldn’t understand, for example, how the seizure of the Bosporus bridges by the armed forces could fit into the pattern of a genuine coup d’etat,” he said.

The fact that Erdogan himself was not captured or harmed also looked odd, Duff added.

“In a proper coup, he [Erdogan] would have been the main and possibly only target of the plotters,” he said.

“On speaking to several very well informed sources after the event, I am more than ever puzzled why the coup – if it was a proper coup – failed. The Turkish military have never failed in a coup before…why would they do so now?,” Duff asked.

He is not alone in his suspicions.

The leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), Kemal Kilicdaroglu, has called the failed putsch “a controlled coup”.

The former president of the European Parliament, German politician Martin Schulz, has said that while the preparations for the coup looked amateurish, the measures taken against it were extremely professional.

The EU foreign service’s intelligence branch, IntCen, which compiles information from EU states’ spy services, also echoed the politicians.

Erdogan blamed the coup on Fethullah Gulen, the head of a religious movement who lives in exile in the US and who is one of his main political opponents.

But the IntCen report on the coup, dated 24 August 2016, and seen by this website, said it was “unlikely that Gulen had the abilities and the capacities to take such steps”, even if some individual Gulenists were involved in the attempted overthrow.

“According to available information, a far-reaching purge of the GM’s [Gulen movement’s] followers in the armed forces and the gendarmerie was planned for early August 2016 based on lists produced by the MIT. Some arrests were already planned for 16 July, the day after the coup attempt”, the EU report added.

“The coup was just the catalyst for the crackdown prepared in advance,” the IntCen report said.

Much has happened since Coksun drafted his fateful minutes back at 1AM on 16 July 2016.

Erdogan has detained over 70,000 people, including opposition MPs, 110 journalists, and human rights defenders.

He has sacked 150,000 public officials and shut down all government-critical media.

He also rammed through constitutional changes under a post-coup state of emergency that gave himself new powers amounting to one-man rule.

Drilling into the events of 16 July and into Coksun’s minutes might seem like political archeology two and half years down the line.

But those events transformed Turkey in ways which continue to shape its foreign relations and the lives of Turkish people to this day.

The idea that Turkey might one day join the EU has evaporated no matter how much it helps Europe to control flows of refugees.

Erdogan’s decision, last weekend, to expel three German journalists, shows that his contempt for Europe has continued to deepen.

“The Turkish government managed to more or less silence the national media, and they are now trying to do it with the international media,” Joerg Brase, the head of German broadcaster ZDF’s Istanbul bureau, who was given 10 days to leave the country, said.

“It cannot be ruled out … that the Turkish government will take further action against representatives of German media and civil society organisations,” the German foreign ministry added in an update to its Turkey travel advice.

“Statements, which are covered by the German legal understanding of the freedom of expression, can lead in Turkey to … criminal proceedings,” it also said.

Meanwhile, Coskun has been promoted to become a member of one of Turkey’ highest courts, the court of cassation.

At the same time, many military officers are behind bars on the basis of trials which referenced his strange minutes in official court records.

Erdogan has also instituted 15 July as a national holiday, called the Democracy and National Unity Day of Turkey, in commemoration of the national resistance against the coup.

But documents such as Coksun’s minutes help suggest that holiday is a gross falsification of Turkish history.

“Deploying the coup as a pretext, Erdogan … rammed through his own version of a constitutional coup d’etat to aggrandise and protect himself, to weaken the armed forces and to silence or force into exile Turkey’s intelligentsia,” Duff said.

Source: EU Observer , March 11, 2019

Olcay Kara, the wife of teacher Engin Kara, who was arrested in February 2017 and received a liver transplant a few days ago, has called for a postponement of his sentence due to health concerns, the MedyaBold news website reported.

“He may die if he is not treated in a hygienic and stress-free environment. They keep 44 people in a ward designed for 20. My husband shouldn’t go back to jail,” she said, invoking a law governing the execution of sentences for sick inmates.

A teacher of 22 years, Kara was arrested in February 2017 based on an accusation by an informant. He was sentenced to six years, 10 months in prison for alleged links to the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government accuses of orchestrating a failed coup in 2016.

After scars appeared on his body, he was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and required a transplant.

The operation was successfully performed, using parts of his son’s liver.

Kara’s wife said four members of the gendarmerie are constantly on watch at the entrance to the intensive care unit, where her husband is being treated.

“Prison conditions aren’t appropriate for people who have just undergone surgery,” she said, adding that there are cases where inmates who were returned to prison after receiving a liver transplant developed cancer or died.

“We requested a postponement of one year. The doctors say the slightest complication may end up in death,” she said.

Julian Assange is to be expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy within hours or days, according to a “high level” source quoted by WikiLeaks.

In a tweet sent on Thursday, WikiLeaks claims the Ecuadoarian state has an agreement with the UK for his arrest.Assange has been living inside the London-based embassy since 2012 seeking refuge after a British judge ruled that he should be extradited to Sweden for sexual assault allegations.

Sweden dropped the case in 2017 but Mr Assange remains in the embassy following accusations of espionage.

He fears being extradited to the US to face charges over the WikiLeaks website’s release of sensitive US government files.

The US wants Assange after Wikileaks hacked documents on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

In 2010, Wikileaks released footage from the Iraq war reportedly showing footage of soldiers shooting civilians. In the same year, the UK was on the verge of extraditing Assange.

Back in 1995, Assange was let off with a fine and escaped prison for hacking attempts in Australia.

He set up Wikileaks in 1996, protecting anonymous sources with highly encrypted devices.

Ecuador last year posed new rules for Assange’s behaviour while in the embassy, which required him to pay his medical bills and clean up after his pet cat.

He challenged the rules in local and international tribunals, arguing they violated his human rights. Both courts ruled against him.

Assange has not stepped out once from the embassy, for fear of arrest by British police.

Judges in Turkey evaluating appeals after last Sunday’s local elections must be free to work without political interference, said the Council of Europe’s congress of local and regional authorities in a statement on Thursday.

Turks headed to the polls on March 31 to elect their local governments. The unofficial results showed the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) facing a major blow after losing in four out of five major provinces in Turkey, including Istanbul and Ankara.

The AKP has requested recounts of votes in Istanbul and Ankara, while the Supreme Election Board (YSK) rejected similar appeals by the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party in the eastern province of Muş and in several predominantly Kurdish districts.

“We acknowledge the challenging or recounting of votes in the case of tight election results. Such challenges are rare and normally only involve a handful of votes in very few places,” the Council of Europe’s Bureau of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities said on Thursday during its 36th plenary session in Strasbourg.

“When challenges are made relating to many thousands of votes in many places questions inevitably arise about the integrity of the entire election process,” it said.

The bureau said it had decided to take the exceptional step of continuing its oversight of the Turkish local government elections while challenges are ongoing, and called on Turkish authorities to ensure that the YSK and its district level boards carry out their work in an open and transparent manner.

“We expect their work to be fully in compliance with international norms and standards, free from any and all inappropriate political interference and consistent with the rule of law. Their work must be lawful, open and transparent and their adjudications fair reasonable and honest. The judges must be free to work without interference,” it said.

A 22-member delegation from the Council of Europe monitored Turkey’s March 31 local elections with observer missions at 140 polling places and presented its preliminary conclusions on Monday at a press conference in Ankara, urging the Turkish government to encourage freedom of expression, unfettered media access for political candidates and a stronger electoral legal framework.

The spokesperson of Turkey’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Hami Aksoy, said on Wednesday in a written statement that the congress’s election mission should refrain from commenting on Turkey’s political issues that are outside its mandate.

The Bureau of the Congress said on Thursday that sovereignty of the people meant that the public could vote in a reasonable and fair political climate and see that their political and democratic choices and decisions were fully respected.

“This means that, whenever the Congress observes an election, we are interested in far more than the organisation and mechanics of voting on the Election Day including the media landscape, the campaign and political environment and freedom of expression in general,” it said.

The Party of European Socialists (PES) also urged the AKP on Thursday to accept the result of the local elections .

PES President Sergei Stanishev said there was no reason to challenge the results in Istanbul, adding that 16 million people living in the province had made their voice and elected opposition candidate Ekrem Imamoğlu as the new mayor.

“We call on the Turkish government to refrain from any political pressure on judges,” Stanishev  said. “The government must recognise the results the YSK has already announced, rather than looking for ways to distort the results, which are clear for the international community.”

Belgium apologised on Thursday for the abduction of thousands of children born to mixed-race couples during its colonial-era rule between 1959 and 1962 of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, and Rwanda.

The apology was the first time Belgium has officially acknowledged responsibility for the forced removals.

Belgium took away thousands of mixed-race children, known as “metis,” born to white settlers and black mothers in these Central African nations towards the end of its colonial rule under a policy of segregation, which took the children and put them in schools and orphanages in Belgium run by the Catholic Church.

“In the name of the federal government, I present my apologies to the metis of the Belgian colonial era and their families for the injustices and the sufferings they have endured,” Prime Minister Charles Michel told Parliament as dozens of former abductees looked on.

“I hope that this solemn moment will be an additional step toward an awareness and knowledge of this part of our national history.”

The Catholic Church apologised for its role in the kidnappings in 2016 and in February a report by a UN Security Council panel urged the Belgian government to also issue an apology, for what it called “atrocities committed during colonization”.

The report added: “The root causes of present-day human rights violations lie in the lack of recognition of the true scope of violence and injustice of colonization.”

Belgium’s rule in Central Africa lasted from the 1800s to 1960 where King Leopold II exploited rubber and other resources, which led to slave labor that cost between 10 million and 15 million lives. euronews

ABDULLAH BOZKURT-Nordicmonitor.com

Turkey secretly launched criminal investigations into subscribers of the nation’s one-time most popular children’s magazine because the parent company’s corporate owners were aligned with critics of the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

According to documents obtained by Nordic Monitor, the head of a counterterrorism police unit in Antalya province requested detailed information about subscribers of the Gonca children’s magazine from a prosecutor in Istanbul on March 21, 2017. The magazine was published monthly and was the highest-selling children’s publication in Turkey before the government unlawfully seized it along with other companies owned by Kaynak Holding.

 

 

Kaynak Holding owned dozens of companies and maintained diverse business interests including the largest publishing house in Turkey. The government unlawfully seized it in 2015 over claims that its corporate owners were aligned with US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen, a vocal critic of the Erdoğan regime. Gonca was selling around 50,000 copies on a monthly basis.

Ilhan Murat Kulalar, the head of the counterterrorism unit, was at the time investigating several suspects who were accused of membership in the Gülen movement. He asked the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office to determine whether the person(s) in question had subscriptions to Gonca, and if they were subscribers, he wanted  to know the dates of their subscriptions, where it was delivered and how many copies were sold to them.

 

 

In addition to Gonca, the police officer also asked whether the suspects under investigation had subscriptions to national newspapers such as Zaman and Bugün, two major dailies that were critical of the Erdoğan government on issues such as corruption and Erdoğan’s aiding and abetting of terrorist groups. Sızıntı, an educational magazine that was selling 527,000 copies on a monthly basis and was also published by Kaynak, was also listed in the police officer’s request. Both publications were shut down by the government in 2016 along with some 180 media outlets.

 

 

The documents also show how judicial investigations are driven by the police or the executive branch. It was against established rules in the code of criminal procedure for the police to ask a prosecutor to furnish information in a police investigation. It is supposed to be the other way around. However, since the rule of law is effectively suspended in Turkey, prosecutors and judges have become tools of oppression in the hands of the Erdoğan government, which abuses the criminal justice system to hunt down critics.

 

 

In document No. 46914323-66715 (81380)/6173, a victim was identified as Selbi Baştimar, about whose subscriptions to the children’s magazine and other critical media publications the police were asking. The probe was part of coup investigation No. 2017/14482, which means the government associated subscriptions to a children magazine with coup plotting — hard to believe but unfortunately true in the case of Turkey. The file was coordinated by Antalya prosecutor Cemil Ceylan.

 

 

The government has rounded up over half a million volunteers of the Gülen movement since 2016, mainly on coup, terrorism and defamation charges. The witch-hunt aimed to suppress civil society, silence critical voices and stifle the right to dissent, while Erdoğan continued to transform Turkish democracy into a dictatorship.

 

 

In another document, No.46914323-66715 (81380)/6105, Turkish national Kadir Çil was also listed in the police request that asked Istanbul to provide detailed information about her subscriptions to Gonca, Zaman, Bugün and Sızıntı. The prosecutor’s case file was No. 2016/64567, which means his case was separately investigated from Selbi’s case above.

 

 

In a third document dated March 20, 2017 and numbered No. 46914323-66715 (81380)/285, a suspect identified as Mahmut Kodan was listed, and the police requested his subscription information to these publications as well. The prosecutor’s case file was No. 2016/71967, which is also separate from the two listed above. The fourth document was numbered 46914323-66715 (81380)/3933, and that was filed on the same day, showing a man named Hakkı Bağrıyanık was also investigated over his possible subscriptions to the publications in question as part of the prosecutor’s investigation file No. 2016/7454.

Turkish national Bekir İbiş was listed as a suspect in the fifth document, No. 46914323-66715 (81380)/23400, and the police asked for information on subscriptions to same publications as well. He was investigated by the prosecutor as part of case No. 2016/59440. The fact that all the names come from separate investigation files confirms that the criminalization of subscriptions to a children’s magazine and mainstream critical dailies have become systematic, routine and deliberate in Turkey.

Murat Kaya, the managing editor of Gonca, was arrested on fabricated terrorism charges. Osman Kaplan, the chief editor for the children’s publication, was also arrested on similar charges but later released pending trial.

A court in İstanbul ruled on Thursday for a continuation of the pre-trial detention of Harun Çümen, the last responsible managing editor of the Zaman daily.

Çümen is standing trial on terrorism charges.Attending the hearing from Balıkesir Prison via a video conferencing system, the journalist asked to be released on bail, noting that he has been jailed for 330 days.

The Zaman daily, which was seized by the government in March 2016 and then shut down by decree in the wake up a July 15, 2016 coup attempt, was considered to be linked to terrorism by the Turkish government due to its affiliation with the faith-based Gülen movement. The regime in Turkey holds the movement responsible for the failed coup and has designated it a terrorist organization, although the movement denies any involvement.

The next hearing will be held on June 19, and Çümen will remain in jail along with hundreds of other journalists.

According to 2018 report by Reporters Without Borders, Turkey is the largest jailer of professional journalists in the world. Most were arrested on trumped-up terrorism charges in the wake of the abortive putsch.

Two women jailed in Turkey over links to the faith-based Gülen movement were this week returned to prison immediately after delivery.

Beyza Demir, who gave birth this week and was immediately sent back to prison in İstanbul to serve a seven-year sentence, became news on Twitter. Cemre Birand, wife of the late journalist Mehmet Ali Birand and a vocal protester of jailing children, tweeted about the imprisonment of a one-day-old baby.

The second incident took place in the eastern province of Erzurum. Human rights activist, medical doctor and opposition deputy Ömer Faruk Gergerlioğlu tweeted on Thursday that a jailed woman named Şeyma Tekin was awaiting delivery in prison. According to her relatives, Tekin had her baby on Friday and was expecting to be sent back to prison.

According to Turkish law, it is illegal to imprison pregnant women even if they have been convicted of a crime. Exiled lawyer Nurullah Albayrak told TR724 news that there are over 700 children in Turkey’s prisons along with their mothers in open violation of the law.

He added that despite the impunity in Turkey under the current political climate, those who infringe on human rights will be accused of violation of international agreements in the future.

Jailing pregnant women and sending them back to prison after delivery has become a common practice in Turkey especially after a failed coup attempt of July 15, 2016. A majority of these women have been jailed over links to the Gülen movement, which the government holds responsible for the failed coup.The movement denies any involvement in the abortive putsch.Liked it? Take a second to support Turkish Minute on Patreon!

One Afghan and three Turkish teachers linked to the faith-based Gülen movement were detained by Afghan intelligence officials on Tuesday, Reuters reported.

The move against Afghan Turk CAG Educational NGO (ATCE), the organization that runs the schools, appeared to be part of a witch-hunt being waged on followers of Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen, accused by the Turkish government of masterminding a coup attempt in July 2016.

The ATCE, which says it is an independent organization, runs schools in several cities including the capital, Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif, Kandahar and Herat and has been in Afghanistan since 1995.

“Around 7 am, four of our teachers traveling in two different cars were picked up by [Afghan intelligence],” said ATCE Chairman Numan Erdoğan.Other intelligence officials later went to the group’s girls school nearby looking for another teacher, he said.

He said the men presented themselves as members of the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, according to Reuters.

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani was on his way to Istanbul on Tuesday to attend an Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit.

In March Afghanistan ordered the schools to be transferred to a foundation approved by Ankara.

Last year, shortly before a visit to Islamabad by the Turkish president, Pakistan ordered Turkish teachers at schools run by a body called PakTurk International Schools and Colleges to leave the country.

Gülen, a former ally of Erdogan who now lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, promotes a moderate form of Islam, supporting inter-faith communication and Western-style education and inspiring schools in various parts of the world.

He and the group he inspired have denied any involvement in the failed coup attempt of 2016..turkishminute

The Turkish media on Monday reported that more than 70 militants of the Hizbullah terrorist group were released from prison based on a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).

According to the reports, the ECtHR ruled that Turkey had violated the right to fair trial of a Hizbullah militant, who was tried by the now-closed State Security Courts in Diyarbakır and subjected to torture during interrogation.

In 2011 some high-ranking Hizbullah militants were released after the enactment of a new regulation that shortened the upper limit for pre-trial detentions, although they were given life sentences by the local court.

After their release from prison pending trial, the militants reportedly fled Turkey.

Well-organized in the predominantly Kurdish southeastern region of Turkey, Hizbullah was responsible for the assassination of former Diyarbakır Police Chief Gaffar Okkan in 2001.

The terrorist group is also accused of brutally killing 188 civilians during the 1990s.

As Hizbullah has “bad blood” with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorist group, some experts claim that the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has secretly been supporting Hizbullah.

In the Southeast, the Free Cause Party (HÜDAPAR), a political party that allegedly has ties with Hizbullah, supported AKP candidates in the June 24 general election.