Last Updated on Monday, 18 May 2009 10:50 by Mehmet Kalyoncu, Today's Zaman Monday, 18 May 2009 08:57
In his piece, titled "Behind Turkey's Witch Hunt: The Ergenekon case exposes the power of a shadowy Islamic brotherhood that controls the Turkish police," Çağaptay alleges that the current Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government is using the Ergenekon court case to suppress its opponents and that the so-called Gülen movement manipulates the Turkish police force to assist the government.
Çağaptay poses a serious allegation in his article's title, and it should certainly be thoroughly investigated. If what he alleges is true, then it means Turkish democracy is under an imminent threat. However, as one continues to read his article, it becomes all too clear that his purpose is to misinform Newsweek readers about the ongoing Ergenekon court case and, at the same time defame the current AK Party government and the Gülen movement by associating them with various unlawful acts.
Today, the readers of Newsweek should be open-minded enough not to readily subscribe to Çağaptay's apparently baseless and conflicting arguments, and hence take a deeper look into the various Turkish media to gain a better understanding of the ongoing "Ergenekon" case. Similarly, the Gülen movement is not an obscure phenomenon that is hard to find out about. By now, there are perhaps countless academic studies and news reports on the movement. Moreover, the schools and other cultural initiatives inspired by the movement have been operating for more than a decade in more than a hundred countries. Surely, these countries' respective governments and security services would have continuously scrutinized the Gülen movement-inspired organizations with respect to whether they are Islamic or not. So, given the abundance of tools to study the Gülen movement, and given Çağaptay's increasingly biased and less scholarly writings, the more he writes, the less credible he will become.
However, the real problem is that despite his apparent distance from scholarly objectivity, Çağaptay is in a position to significantly influence US public and official opinion on Turkey. He is frequently given opportunities to publish articles and opinion pieces in well-known newspapers and magazines. (His latest article in The Washington Post titled "Turkey's turn from the West" and the above-mentioned article in Newsweek are the latest examples.) The lack of objectivity and scholarship in these published pieces raises questions about the editorial objectivity of the newspapers, journals and magazines in which these pieces are published. He is frequently asked to testify before the US Senate and House foreign relations committees. He seems to be directing the so-called Turkish research program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Probably the gravest of all, at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, Çağaptay is reportedly training the US diplomats and ranking military officers to be stationed in Turkey. One wonders with what kind of intellectual background about Turkey and Turkish society the US diplomats are starting their duties in their respective posts in Turkey and how this intellectual background is affecting their attitude toward the country's people.
Çağaptay's art of distorting reality
Anybody who is not even slightly informed about the issues that Çağaptay refers to throughout the piece would easily conclude that his purpose is not to objectively and intellectually address them, but to misinform Newsweek readers about the actors involved with the issues and about some others who are not even distantly related to those issues.
Çağaptay rightly reports: "In an early morning raid on April 13, Turkish police arrested more than a dozen middle-aged liberal women working for the Society for Contemporary Life (ÇYDD), a nongovernmental organization that provides educational scholarships to poor teenage girls. The arrests were part of the Ergenekon court case, in which police have arrested hundreds of people, including Army officers, opponents of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government, renowned journalists, artists and now these women, charging them with plotting to overthrow the government." However, Çağaptay fails to note that the independent prosecutors of the Turkish judiciary have not indicted -- and consequently the Turkish police have not arrested -- those women for doing charity work and providing scholarship to poor teenage girls, but for plotting with the retired army generals to overthrow Turkey's elected government via a military coup d'état. Therefore, not only those women but also all of the others indicted within the framework of the Ergenekon investigation are naturally the "opponents" of the current AK Party government. After all, they are charged with the crime of seeking to overthrow that government. For this reason, one can conclude that everybody indicted in the Ergenekon investigation are the opponents of the AK Party government, but not every opponent of the AK Party government is indicted due to the Ergenekon investigation.
The charges against the claimed Ergenekon terror network are not limited to plotting to overthrow a democratically elected government. It happens to be the latest alleged crime of the network. Retrospectively, the claimed Ergenekon terror network is charged with being responsible for carrying out kidnappings and assassinations, especially in heavily Kurdish-populated southeastern Turkey. Given the fact that in the last several decades a total of 17,000 individuals have vanished, mostly in this region, it is only reasonable and imperative for the prosecutors to indict for interrogation the individuals who are likely to be involved.
Çağaptay somewhat abruptly tries to tie the Ergenekon investigation to the Gülen movement: "[The Ergenekon investigation] is a tool for the AKP to curb freedoms, and more than anything else illustrates the power of the Gülen tarikat (Islamic order) that now controls the Turkish police and, you guessed it, educational scholarships for the poor." Obviously, Çağaptay does not seem to feel obliged to provide a reasonable explanation either to how the AK Party government uses the investigation to curb the freedoms, or to how the investigation illustrates the alleged power of the Gülen movement to control the police and educational scholarships for the poor. Çağaptay rather wants readers to believe what he says. Or he could be simply aiming to produce written material that could later be used against the Gülen movement.
The first thing that strikes one is Çağaptay's description of the Gülen movement as a tarikat (Islamic order) and his allegation that the Turkish police are a part of that Islamic order simply because the police do their job by arresting the suspects as warranted by the prosecutors.
As a civil society movement that promotes interfaith and intercultural dialogue through a worldwide network of NGOs, which involves Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists and others, and which mobilizes the philanthropists to open schools, hospitals and other charity organizations in more than a hundred countries, the Gülen movement looks somewhat different from a tarikat.
If not, then the late Pope John Paul II, who invited Gülen to the Vatican in 1997 as a gesture to promote interfaith dialogue, Chief Rabbi of Israel Eliyahu Bakshi-Doron, who became a champion of the interfaith dialogue initiated by Gülen, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, who publicly joined Gülen in promoting interfaith dialogue, the late Turkish Jewish businessman and industrialist Uzeyir Garih, who reportedly vouched for Gülen-inspired school to be opened in Moscow, and many others who have not seemed quite of Muslim origin should also be the members of the Islamic order alleged by Çağaptay.
Çağaptay's art of labeling
Moreover, it is quite difficult, if not impossible, to discern how Çağaptay links the Turkish police to the Gülen movement. He does not provide a reasonable explanation for this argument, or better to say, "allegation." Nor does he seem interested in doing so. Throughout the piece, Çağaptay uses various key terms and tries to associate them with the Gülen movement, thereby bolstering the suspicion that his intention is merely to produce written material in the media, so that those who think along the same lines as him can manipulate those materials in the future in their persecution of Gülen and those who have been inspired by his thoughts and ideas.
"Most Turks have a sinister view of the spiritual message of this tarikat," says Çağaptay in an attempt to create a view that the Gülen movement is a controversial phenomenon that is not welcomed by the majority of the Turkish people. As a matter of fact, a recent survey by Akbar Ahmed of American University has demonstrated that 84 percent of Turkish society has a highly favorable opinion of Gülen and the civil society initiatives he has inspired. Similarly, "Thanks to missionary and volunteer work, the Gülen tarikat obtained social and political power globally over the decades," says Çağaptay in an attempt to create a view that the Gülen-inspired schools are doing missionary work and seeking political power in the respective countries where they operate. Finally, Çağaptay tries to associate the Ergenekon investigation with the Joseph McCarthy trials in the US, and thereby attempts to create a view that the current AK Party government has created a state of fear by exploiting the investigation.
Çağaptay's true intentions are implicit in his last statement: "There is a way out of this conundrum if the AKP turns Ergenekon into a case that targets only criminals." Çağaptay contradicts himself by acknowledging that the government can and should manipulate the legal investigation by asking the AK Party government to intervene in the Ergenekon investigation. He also appears ignorant of the fact that the prosecutors indict the suspects to find the true criminals.
Mehmet Kalyoncu is an international relations analyst and author of the book "A Civilian Response to Ethno-Religious Conflict: The Gülen Movement in Southeast Turkey."
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