Unconstitutional change has no place in a democracy

Christopher Charamba : The Interview 

CC: Mr Ambassador, your country recently experienced an attempted coup. Could you take us through the events of that day? KE: I was in Turkey, I had left for my annual holiday on July 6 and had been in Istanbul for almost 10 days. Istanbul is a city of almost 16 million people. It is a huge metropolitan city, right between Europe and Asia and connecting the two. I’m sharing what I witnessed. My wife and I were watching TV and all of a sudden on Friday evening around 10pm we saw some tanks being broadcast on the TV. There are about 70 private channels in Turkey and most of them were showing us what was going on.All of a sudden on a Friday evening when people were out on the streets, eating at restaurants and at discos, there were tanks on the roads. They then closed the bridge which connects Asia to Europe. Some air force F16s were also flying at low altitude. We understood immediately that something was going wrong. The whole night we struggled to sleep. We were anxious to know what was going on. We could also hear gunshots in the distance. What happened as you know it was an attempted coup d’etat by some part of the military, a faction. It was not in the total chain of command.

CC: What was the main cause of the coup attempt?

KE: It was sparked by a group known as FETO which stands for Fetullah Terrorist Organisation. It comes from Fethullah Gülen, who is a so-called preacher who lives in the United States of America. He fled Turkey towards the end of the 90s while awaiting a court decision and settled in Pennsylvania.

Since that time, almost 20 years now, they formed a sort of missionary movement in disguise really. They have opened schools and some business associations especially in Africa and in central Asia. In Africa, places such as Malawi, Zambia and South Africa there are schools of this Fethullah Gülen movement.

Luckily, I must tell you in Zimbabwe the Government was quick to react and didn’t allow this guy to open kind of school here.

This FETO looks like a charity organisation but on the inside, we have quite strong evidence that shows there it has some powerful support from some countries in the West. With the secret organisations they want to destabilise not only Turkey but other powers under this motto of moderate Islam. Islam today is now considered very fundamentalist with all these groups like Boko Haram, Al Shabaab and Al- Qaeda.

Turkey, however, is a secular state. So for the last 20 years or so this group has been infiltrating certain state organisations starting with the military. The security forces were the first target, the military, the police, the judiciary, some educational institutions and other government institutions such as Foreign Affairs.

They organised connections with this group and put in their people one by one and continued to recruit. The current Turkish government was not aware of the danger. Consider an iceberg under the water there is a huge part but on the surface you only see a small part.

The main intention or the motive of this FETO terrorist group was to act when the time comes. In the past two decades they have been planting their people in the military with this intention.

When we saw this coup unfolding in Istanbul, in Ankara and in other cities, some generals were put under custody and they have since lost their stature. We understood that some one-star or two-star generals were also involved and got direct orders from this preacher.

Of course, the way it works in the military is that your superior says to a unit “take your tanks over there,” they have to obey. Some of the military personnel involved in this coup were just following orders.

The full chain of command, however, was not fully established and it did not work. In the early morning hours, around 5am or 6am, it was all over. During the (abortive)coup, however, President Erdogan, who was on holiday in the southern part of Turkey, was able to communicate with the people.

This modern technology that we have is very important, the cellphones and the 3G connectivity allowed the president to communicate with the media. CNN Turkey was broadcasting what the president was saying which was that the people should stand against this coup.

The tanks couldn’t open fire on the civilians. Some did unfortunately, there might have been some sort of clash. One hundred and seventy-three civilians died, around 67 security personnel were also killed which came to 240 people who lost their lives and then the 24 coup organisers as well.

The most tragic part is the cost of the human life, the 173 civilians or the total 240 people killed. What we believe in Turkey is a long tradition of democracy. There is a democratically elected government and president. When the elections come if the people are not happy with it or him and vote him out then he will leave. The constitution is also there as it is with every other place including Zimbabwe.

No one wants people out in the streets cheering on the military. Law and order should be followed and, of course,, the constitutional regulations and measures should be applied. Luckily, the Turkish people, who are about 76 million in number, stood against this. The left, the right, all the opposition parties in parliament stood against this coup attempt. Part of the parliament was actually bombed during the

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‘Military coups are not the solution . . . ‘

 

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coup.

What we learnt from this, as you know democracy stands on three pillars – the legislature, the judiciary and the executive. There is a fourth actually and that is the media. In this Turkish example, the media showed its power.

If people were not able to receive any news, then the situation could have been different. As we witnessed in my childhood times, in 1960, when there was a coup d’etat and then there was no technology as we have now to communicate.

In 1980s there was another coup attempt and this was now the third one by some faction of the military. The Turkish army is the second biggest army in Nato, so if they really wanted to do something they could have finished it.

CC: What is the situation in Turkey currently, following the coup attempt last month?

KE: Today, the state of emergency is running and has been running since July 16, the following day when it was declared. It is to run for a period of three months. I hope it will not be longer than three months, perhaps we can even stop it earlier.

CC: There are some commentators suggesting that President Erdogan is trying to consolidate power following the coup and is using the state of emergency as a means to do so.

KE: Yes, there are these arguments but let me tell you this, we have the parliament, and of course the ruling party has the majority with 315 odd seats, but the main opposition, the Social Democrats, have about 140, the Nationalist Party have about 40, the Kurdish Party has about 40, all these political parties want to work within the framework of the constitution.

In our system, the presidency has powers but it is limited within the confines of the constitution. Therefore, it is not just up to Mr Erdogan to make decisions. There is a parliament and these suggestions must pass through the parliament and they must decide and at the final stage, the President has to approve.

CC: Even within the state of emergency?

KE: In the state of emergency, they can operate like this for instance, if they want to arrest some bureaucrats or some teachers or some lawyers or judges, and then there are the generals, 140 roughly of about 350 were arrested, the ones who were involved.

But whatever is going to happen even within this state of emergency period, at the end of the period, there will be functioning, normal civilian laws back. The rule of law will prevail. There is no room for having the president consolidating his situation or position.

I don’t think that such will happen in Turkey because there is very strong opposition in parliament and the civil society organisation and the press. There are also commitments with the EU, with the European Council and the OECD.

CC: How does the coup attempt influence or affect Turkey’s standing with the EU and the ongoing negotiations?

KE: Let me start with the fact that capital punishment, hanging people, does not exist in our penal code. But that night, perhaps due to the emotional reflection of the people or whatever, there was gathering of a million people at the Istanbul airport, and they were saying that the perpetrators should be hanged.

The president then said, okay we will bring it first to the parliament. The EU, however, made it very clear that if we bring this back it could be a problem, because the gravest punishment in the penal code is life imprisonment.

So if the parliament passes the Bill for the capital punishment, it will have a very negative impact for us. I don’t think, in a couple of months or so, the Turkish republic will resort to this measure. We witnessed this in 1960. The prime minister and two ministers were hanged and it was like a nightmare for ages. Some 30 or 40 years later, it still had a negative impact on society.

CC: What has the Turkish government been doing to root out all the individuals who were planted by FETO and who took part in the coup?

KE: Currently, the number is around 70 000 people all in governmental institutions including the military. All of these are under custody but I am sure that later most of them will be released and some will be allowed to come back to their duties.

For some of the people it might have been a case of sympathy because this FETO group, in the beginning, started as a missionary organisation and a sort of good face of Islam so people may have believed in that and had sympathy towards them.

But they are not the main culprits or organisers of the coup. Those who were will suffer whatever penalty they will face.

CC: How was this infiltration allowed to continue for so long without being detected by the government?

KE: Well, even the prime minister or the president I think it was said that these things happened with good intention. They did not expect something so serious or monster like to secretly build this capacity in these organisations. It is a secretive organisation which was in disguise. But now there is a lot of concrete evidence that shows that they had infiltrated.

This is a good lesson that we should learn that in a democracy there is always a chance for the opposition, for the other way of thinking or whatever, but within the constitution and the law, everything should go in a specific manner. Having the military taking over is unacceptable neither there or here or in any other part of the world.

CC: How has the coup affected your relations with neighbouring countries and also vis-a-vis the situation in Syria?

KE: This is a good question because about five years ago around 2011, we were in a better situation. Terror has, however, now been on the rise. A month before the coup we had an airport attack in Istanbul where 45 people died. Three ISIS terrorists organised an attack, before that in Ankara and before that in Istanbul there was an attack.

Terrorism has been on the rise, stemming from the situation in Syria. There is an internal war going on there. Similar to if there was something in Mozambique, Zimbabwe would have to be more vigilant and keep its eyes on the borders, monitoring who is coming in and who is going out.

Turkey’s situation is not that easy though. We have 945km of border with Syria and in Syria there are multiple opposition groups especially since Assad lost control in 2013. There are many groups under the umbrella of Islam, both moderate and radical like ISIS. There are also Kurds in different factions.

Syria is a real point of instability. There are also other actors in Iran, Russia, and also the USA. These things all started with the so-called Arab Spring, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and the Syria was the next stop. When it spread to Syria we had to be careful.

Turkey was always distant to the ongoing situation and conflicts between these countries but since around 2011 or 2012, this became something we could not get rid of easily and so this way or that way we were involved.

Our main cities near the border, Antep and other cities, were the pillars of the Anatolian economy. When the situation in Syria started, the small to medium enterprises started to suffer. In another attack a Russian plane was downed after a violation of the airspace.

This caused us to lose our neighbour after 600 years of relatively good relations. Russia is also our main trading partner. The relations with Russia are now getting better though. We apologised to them and apologised to the family of the pilot and are ready to offer compensation, of course one cannot bring his life back.

The two presidents are supposed to meet in St Petersburg on August 9, and hopefully this will help our relations to get better.