War, drugs and money corrupt Turkey's political system

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): There is a coup coming in Turkey, and it will not really be about 'saving' the secular Turkish state from militant political Islam (though that is what the soldiers will claim). It will really be about saving Turkey from the unholy alliance between the mafia and the politicians -- but how can a coup stop that?

"If you're going to sink, you grab at snakes." Turks love proverbs, and that was the dominant reaction last year when Tansu Ciller, Turkey's first woman prime minister, agreed to join a coalition with the Islamic revivalists of the Refah (Welfare) Party. But it was her decision that set the avalanche in motion.

Tansu Ciller stepped down as prime minister, and agreed to serve as deputy to Refah leader Necmettin Erbakan in a new coalition, because she needed his help to abort two judicial inquiries into her family's financial dealings. (An inquiry into accusations that Refah had misused funds intended for Bosnian Moslems was stopped at the same time). But the corruption does not stop there: the whole state has been infected.

In December, President Suleyman Demirel wrote bluntly to Prime Minister Erbakan: "Murderers are working for the state." He was referring to a lethal mixture of war, drugs and money that has been eroding both democracy and legality in Turkey for a decade.

It was a car crash on the Susurluk road six months ago that started to bring the whole ugly business into the open. When the coup happens, pundits will blame it all on the 'fundamentalists', but the problem is really the gangsters.

I once nearly got killed on the Susurluk road myself -- with the twins, then eight years old, in the back of the car -- but the grinning cretin who nearly did us in drove his truck away into well-deserved obscurity. The truck driver who pulled out onto the Susurluk road without looking on Nov. 3, 1996, however, is now a famous man. In fact, he is a folk hero for many Turks.

Why? Because a Mercedes traveling at an estimated 135 kph (85 mph) and carrying Very Important People smashed into his truck. The Merc was ripped open as it slid under the truck, killing a police academy chairman, a wanted gangster, and his moll (a former beauty queen), and injuring a senior politician who belongs to Ciller's True Path Party. So what were they all doing in the same car?

This was '100 Watergates', as a Turkish political analyst put it. The gangster, Abdullah Catli, had been wanted by Interpol for 18 years -- for the torture and murder of seven leftwing Turkish students in 1978, for involvement in the 1981 assassination attempt on the Pope, and for escaping from a Swiss prison where he was being held on heroin-smuggling charges in 1990.

Western intelligence agencies also tag Catli for killing left- wing extremists and Kurdish separatists, and for taking part in a failed coup in Azerbaijan in 1994. So there he was, dead with his girlfriend in a car that also contained a senior police officer (deceased) and a senior politician (injured) -- plus the thug's diplomatic passport, false identity cards, and a gun license bearing the signature of the interior minister, Mehmet Agar.

Just to make sure nobody missed the point, the car also contained unlicensed guns, silencers, surveillance equipment, and traces of cocaine. If you had any illusions about who really runs Turkey, Susurluk is where you would have lost them. Turkey has become a gangster state where many, maybe most politicians are entangled in a web of illegal violence and corruption.

If you just read the news reports, the growing crisis in Turkey seems to be about the inexorable advance of political Islam. Every month or so Prime Minister Erbakan is called in by the army to hear new warnings that he must stop trying to 'Islamise' Turkey.

Rumors of coups abound, and the country is in perpetual turmoil. But the truth is that Erbakan's Refah Party only managed to get 21 percent of the Turkish vote in the last election, even with no rivals to split the Islamist vote. Four-fifths of Turks voted for strictly secular parties, and Erbakan's party could never have formed a government if it weren't for Ciller's legal troubles.

The real problem is that all the parties in Turkey have been deeply corrupted by the huge amounts of illegal money sloshing around in the system as a result of the long war against Kurdish separatists in the south-east.

It began with simple pay-offs to local Kurdish chieftains who could keep their people in line -- but this was money never entered in the books. Then the Kurdish bosses loyal to Ankara were given tacit permission to earn more funds by exporting heroin to Europe, and their financial clout grew as fast as their ambitions. By now, the war has corrupted the whole political system.

Sedat Bucak, the politician who survived the car crash at Susurluk, is a member of parliament for Ciller's True Path Party. But he is also a Kurdish warlord who receives US$1.3 million a month from the Turkish government to pay off his supporters in the south-east -- and he probably pays out as much in bribes in Ankara and elsewhere to protect his friends in the drug trade.

Bucak is just a simple man exploiting the opportunities that fortune has put in his way. He belongs in jail, but that wouldn't put a dent in Turkey's real problem, which is that the war against the Kurds is steadily destroying the integrity of the state.

The right solution is to end the war. It would probably not harm Turkey to grant the Kurds -- who are about one-fifth of the population -- equal rights in every sphere, including education in their own language and official bilingualism in Kurdish- majority areas. Most Turkish Kurds have little love for the time- warp Maoists of the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) rebels, and would gladly ditch them if their rights were recognized within Turkey.

Unfortunately, what is happening instead is a steady drift towards a military coup. Whatever the soldiers' merits may be in terms of incorruptibility, that is the circumstance least likely to lead to an early peace with the Kurds. On the contrary, the war may be intensified -- and the army itself may be corrupted. Turkey is in deep trouble.