Clearly the Erdogan government doesn’t consider what Ibrahim Sahin did to be a crime. Why is Turkey still considered an ally of the United States? Why is it still in NATO?
“Turkish police officer involved in terrorizing non-Muslims, extrajudicial murders, is getting off scot free,” by Abdullah Bozkurt, Nordic Monitor, July 28, 2019:
A former senior police official who was involved in terrorizing Kurds and extrajudicial killings was effectively given a get-out-of-jail-free card when a Turkish court ruled for his acquittal on terrorism charges in a scandalous decision.
Former Police Department Special Ops Unit head İbrahim Şahin was accused of organizing “death squads,” which investigators claimed planned to assassinate a large number of people as part of the activities of a clandestine network nested in the security, military and intelligence apparatus of the Turkish government in 2008. He was tried, convicted and received a lengthy prison sentence, but the case was overturned when the government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan intervened, securing the release of Şahin and most other convicted neo-nationalists in the Ergenekon case. In a new trial with judges and prosecutors who were hand-picked by the Erdoğan regime, Şahin was acquitted of terrorism charges.
In the original case investigators found that in 2009 Şahin, who already had a criminal record, set up elite murder units called S-1 made up of special ops officers selected by him. The modus operandi of the murder units resembled that of gangs which carried out assassinations between 1991 and 1996, in which he was a major suspect.
Wiretap intercepts submitted to the court show Şahin was in communication with people in a bid to recruit loyalist operatives from the Turkish police, military and National Intelligence Organization (MIT). In a phone conversation on March 20, 2008 Şahin told Taylan Özgür Kırmızı, a suspect in the Ergenekon case, that the General Staff had set up a special unit that would be commanded by him and would report to no one. “We will be responsible for domestic cleansing,” he said, in an apparent reference to what he did in the 1990s with extrajudicial killings. He was seeking men with a hundred percent “Turkishness” who would take orders directly from him.
He met with Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ, who provided him with a special line for communication, indicating that Şahin’s operation was being supported by the top leader of the Turkish military at the time.
On December 1, 2008 Şahin asked in a phone conversation for the name of an Armenian jewelry trader who had moved to Kayseri province. He proceeded to put the murder plot into action, and the target was Minas Durmazgüler, reportedly a spiritual leader of the Armenian community in Sivas. In a text message sent to a person named Fatma Cengiz, a suspect in the Ergenekon case, on December 28, 2008, he said there was a mission order and that Armenian must be killed.
The prosecution claimed that a hitman identified as Garip İrfan Torun was given a Glock pistol by Şahin to kill Durmazgüler. The police also arrested Şahin’s two men, identified as Bekir Çelik and Erhan Gönenci, part of the plot to kill the Armenian. The police found that Gönenci had gathered intelligence about would-be victim Durmazgüler under Şahin’s instructions and relayed the information to the former police official….
A cache of documents seized from his home during the execution of a search warrant indicate that Şahin was profiling Armenians, Kurds, Jews, Christians and people who he thought supported those groups. Among the people he made a note of were Nobel laureate novelist Orhan Pamuk, author Elif Şafak, journalists Ece Temelkuran and Burak Bekdil, slain Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink and many other writers and journalists. In his notes, US academic Henry Barkey was described as a CIA agent and the European Union as a Christian club. One of his notes listed the names of journalists who asked for police protection because of threats….
Angemon says
“ In his notes, US academic Henry Barkey was described as a CIA agent and the European Union as a Christian club.”
I’m starting to get the feeling this guy is not very fond of Americans, Europeans and Christians in general…
SAFI says
Or Kurds for that matter. Nothing particularly “islamist” in his views if you asked me. Most turkish “Kemalists” do in fact share these same sentiments despite western delusions about the turkish reality. Turkey had been a hell for its minorities long before Erdogan and his party took over. Turkey becoming more openly anti-western in recent years in my opinion could have more to do with the shifting geopolitical realities (after all everyone now agrees that the world’s becoming increasingly what’s the fancy technical term? ah, yes… “multipolar”) than it has to with the islamic ideology per se.
Crusades Were Right says
“In his notes, US academic Henry Barkey was described as a CIA agent and the European Union as a Christian club”
I suppose in a way it is a “Christian club”…
…though not exactly like the “Christian clubs” with which Mohammedan Turks used to club Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christians to death.
gravenimage says
Turkey: Cop who plotted to murder non-Muslims gets off scot-free after Erdogan’s government intervenes in case
…………………..
He wants to finish the work of the Armenian Genocide–and Eedogan is down with that.
SAFI says
To answer Robert Spencer’s rather naive question of “why Turkey is still in NATO?”… well to begin with it’s “legally” impossible to kick them out, since NATO’s charter makes no provisions on how to expel a member, not to mention that NATO requires complete unanimity for every important decision and I’m pretty sure that Turkey can always at least bribe Albania to block any such decision by the other members. And that is all supposing that the US would in the first place want to commit what seems like geostrategic suicide by driving out of NATO and likely straight into Russia’s arms the country which controls the Dardanelles and just so happens to possess the second largest armed forces in the alliance. Plus lets be honest it’s not like so far the US has always picked their allies based on their human rights record, and Turkey itself has done in the past much nastier things than this without there ever being any real consequences for its relationship with the US.
What’s more there’s the broad tendency in the west of personifying the Turkish Problem and treating it as if it’s a problem of just one man or just one party which translates into the delusional hope that things will become less toxic as soon as Erdogan is kicked out of office or just dies of natural causes and which then leads to the pathetic western policy of doing everything to keep Turkey as close as possible and letting it run circles around you while you just sit and wait, expecting that once Erdogan is finally dead then the “kemalist” who’ll replace him will turn things “back to normal”.
All this does not mean that Turkey could never itself decide that it wants to ditch the western alliance and seek a different path if the turkish elites deem their ambitions and interests to be incombatible with it but if any such thing happens it will be entirely Turkey’s choice just like so far the worsening of relations between Turkey and the West has been entirely the result of turkish initiative and not in any way something which the west itself tried to pursue.
Eric Jones says
I do not regard Turkey as a reliable guardian of the Dardanelles because of Turkey’s Islamist tendencies. Turkey will be interested in projecting Islam. Not protection of NATO. Russia also has problems with Islamist in Chechnya and will not welcome Islamist Turkey with open arms; for fear that Turkey will have a bad influence on the Muslims in Russia. No Erdogan and Gulan did not radicalize Turkey by themselves. Turkey is no longer a secular state,;and should be removed from NATO and never be allowed in the EU.
Eric
SAFI says
“Reliable” or not they still control the straits and that translates to huge leverage over Russia even if the arctic thaw open up new routes. Especially now that Russia feels cornered by NATO they’ll take any “allies” they can get. I think recent developments have already demonstrated that, plus we’ve already got enough experience from Venezuela, Iran and other examples to know that Russia (as well as China) will hurry to support anyone who’s considered anti-american whatever their ideology may be, communist, fascist, democratic, islamist, nationalist it doesn’t matter geopolitics tends to be blind to these things. Conversely the more paranoid America becomes about the Russian “threat” the more Turkey’s value increases in their eyes and the less likely they are to ditch it and let it become a Sunni version of Iran (as if having to deal with one Iran isn’t enough of a headache for Washington.) Plus even if the Dardanelles weren’t there, still, Turkey’s geostrategic importance cannot possibly be overstated. It silmutaneously borders Europe, the Cacausus and the Middle East, sharing a many thousand miles long border with Syria, Iraq and Iran and has established military bases either through diplomacy or invasion in places such as Syria, Iraq, Cyprus, Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, Albania and I may even be forgetting some all the while also pulling the strings in places like Libya. Furthermore it has a very upward dynamic with a large and very young polulation (average age is around 30 while in Europe its more like 45) and a rising economy (already 17th largest globally) having hundreds of billions worth in trade with Germany, the US and other western countries. Add to that the second largest armed forces in NATO including one of the biggest navies globally, active not just in the Mediterranean and Black Sea but also in the Red Sea and the Gulf through the bases they’ve been setting up in places like Sudan, Somalia, Qatar, etc. and with plans to become a nuclear power already in motion. Not to mention that Turkey’s “soft power” can’t be overstated either. And it’s not just the influence it has over Muslims through the funding of Mosques and the promotion of “neo-ottomanism” throughout the Muslim world while at the same time posing as the leader of all turkic speaking nations and peoples throughout Asia but also through the turkish minorities that exist in most neighboring countries as well as the millions of Turks(and other Muslims) living in Europe and voting in the elections of Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, etc and which the Turkish State does everything in its power to prevent them from assimilating into the host nations through its funding of turkish schools, mosques and other organizations. All the while possessing an additional method of blackmailing the european governments and extorting money from them through the control of migrant flows to Europe while also maintaining a “special relationship” with the EU and receiving extra hundreds of millions of developmental aid each year without however being a full member and thus without actually being bound by the Union’s rules.
All the above is well known to Washington’s policy makers and its what makes it very unlikely that the US establishment will choose to actively antagonize a country as strategically impoprtant and powerful as Turkey as long as they hold onto the delusional hope that they can bring it back into their fold through appeasement. But the Turks do not interpret appeasement as a sign of goodwill but as a sign of weakness and it only makes them push even further to test the limits of the West’s patience and see if it’s really patience or just cowardice.
mortimer says
It is a continuation of the Sultan’s Fatwa of 1915 which gave Turks the moral duty of exterminating all non-Muslims in the Ottoman empire.
SAFI says
Or a continuation of the ethnic-cleansing policies of successive “secular” “kemalist” governments. Kemalists were in power in the 90’s when the turkish army was hunting down Kurds in the southeast provinces as they were in power in the 50s and 60s when Greeks were being terrorized and forced to leave the country or in the 70s when Cyprus was invaded and ethnically cleansed. And Kemal himself in the flesh was in charge when Armenian and Greek civilians were being massacred at Smyrna and elsewhere at his orders.
There’s no “good” secularist/kemalist Turkey vs “bad” fundamentalist/ottomanist Turkey, there’s just Turkey the one and only. Westerners must give up on their delusions that a “kemalist” savior will arise and fix things or else Turkey will keep running circles around those kuffar idiots. I remember before the 2000s many believed in the opposite delusion. That the lack of democracy in Turkey was the fault of the authoritarian kemalist establishment and that once the islamists took control they’d bring real democracy to Turkey. In fact turkish authoritarianism, genocidal tendencies and power politics have much deeper roots than most assume and are not contingent on whether the tyrrant at the top happens to be a secularist or a fundamentalist.
Pal says
SAFI, very true.