…The exhumed body of Turkey’s late President Turgut Ozal, who led the country out of military rule in the 1980s, contained poison but the cause of death was unclear, local media reported an autopsy as showing on Wednesday. There have long been rumours that Ozal, who died of heart failure in 1993 aged 65, was [...]
On September 21 a court in Istanbul has sentenced three retired generals to life imprisonment in the “Balyoz” (Sledgehammer), then reduced the sentence to 20 years. Air Force Cmdr. retired Gen. İbrahim Fırtına, retired 1st Army Cmdr. Gen. Çetin Doğan and retired Navy Cmdr. Adm. Özden Örnek were convicted to life on charges of “attempting to overthrow the [...]
Publication date is early November. The excitement (well, my excitement) is mounting. Here’s the publisher’s website with a pdf of chapter 1.
The trial against the two generals who carried out the 1980 coup who are still alive, Kenan Evren and Tahsin Şahinkaya, has opened a public discussion of the brutality of the coup and its aftermath as witnesses around the country step forward and submit their accounts of torture and killing to the court. Given the [...]
In a recent interview (click here), journalist and author Taha Akyol made the important point that the trial of the 1980 coup generals now occurring obscures the overall “authoritarian and conflict-based nature” of Turkey’s political system, both in the time before the coup and now and in so doing absolves those whose violence created the [...]
The landmark trial over the 1980 coup opened yesterday in the absence of the two ailing defendants, coup leader Kenan Evren and then air force commander Tahsin Şahinkaya, as some intervening lawyers demanded that the pair be brought to court in a cage… Evren, 94, Chief of General Staff during the coup and President until 1989 [...]
This article by Dexter Filkins in the New Yorker about Erdoğan and the Deep State has been causing a lot of chin-wagging, with people e-mailing me and asking whether it was true. True enough, I say, although we can’t be certain of the details. You can read it for yourself here.
An article in the pro-Islamic Today’s Zaman criticized the AKP government’s recent move in parliament to grant MIT (Turkey’s CIA) officials immunity from prosecution unless approved by the prime minister. (See my posts on this below.) The newspaper then examines who else is immune from prosecution. It seems a whole lot of people are! (click [...]
The MIT (Turkey’s CIA) Istanbul regional chairman has been removed from office and replaced. This is a post in line for moving up to MIT Deputy Undersecretary. The MIT Undersecretary, deputy undersecretary, and former undersecretary were all called to give statements as subjects of an investigation into support for PKK-related terrorist groups (see my previous [...]
The orgy of arrests continues with over a hundred new people hauled in across the country, accused of being active in the Kurdish Communities Union, which lawmakers believe is the civil/urban wing of the armed Kurdish separatist group PKK, and of giving armed or logistical support to the PKK. Rounded up this time were predominantly [...]