I hope they were. I hope that in 1997 the U.S. and Israel had a clear enough realization of what the triumph of Sharia would have meant in Turkey that they took steps to prevent it. Certainly they’re doing nothing, or nothing effective, now to stop Turkey’s re-Islamization.
“US, Israel behind Feb. 28 coup d’état, claims Çandar,” from Today’s Zaman, April 16 (thanks to Joshua):
A veteran journalist who suffered greatly during the Feb. 28, 1997 coup d’état after newspapers — under orders from the coup generals — manufactured false news stories about him, claiming that he was being paid by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), has alleged that both the US and Israel supported the coup.
In an interview with the Taraf daily on Monday, journalist Cengiz Çandar, who was a target of the Feb. 28 generals along with several other journalists, said that in addition to the media, employee unions, some professional unions and businesses supported the intervention, but that the US and Israel were also involved.
“The US did not support a direct intervention, but supported Feb. 28,” which was an unarmed intervention that forced the government to resign after a National Security Council (MGK) dominated by the military issued a series of threatening resolutions. Çandar said he was an eyewitness to US involvement in the Feb. 28 project.
“I was in the US in 1999 and 2000. I was co-authoring a book about Turkey. We had meetings with the other writers of the book. The editor was former US Ambassador to Ankara Morton Abramowitz. Alan Makovsky, the head of the Turkey department of the Washington Institute, a think tank of the Israeli lobby in the US, frequently came to Ankara and visited the General Staff. At the meeting of the writers working on the book on Turkey, he asked me why I wasn’t at the meeting “on the seventh floor.”
I was really curious. It turned out there was a meeting called by then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright on the seventh floor of the US State Department building on March 12, 1997, about Turkey. The meeting was held two weeks after the MGK meeting of Feb. 28. Recall that the Refah-Yol government stepped down in June.
Bernard Lewis, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle — they were all in that meeting. They talked about what to do about Turkey. The general trend in the meeting was that “this government should go without a direct intervention.”…