Deep state

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The term deep state (Turkish: derin devlet ) is used in Turkey to mean state within the state . It points to a conspiratorial interweaving of the military, secret services, politics , justice, administration, right-wing extremism and organized crime (especially killer squads) that has grown over the course of several decades . The discussion sparked particularly around the so-called Susurluk scandal in 1996, but was already conducted in the 1970s with terms such as counter-guerrilla or Özel Harp Dairesi (Office for Special Warfare). In recent years the officially non-existent secret service of the gendarmerie with its abbreviation JITEM has also been mentioned in this context .

In Turkey, it is widely assumed that the Deep State has secretly played a significant role in Turkish politics to this day and has often had massive influence in recent history. Among other things, the two military coups in 1971 and 1980 as well as a large number of unsolved political murders , torture , human rights violations , numerous cases of enforced disappearance and the course of the conflict with the Kurdish PKK in southeastern Anatolia are mentioned. However, the current level of clarification of the phenomenon, its history and political background can still be viewed as low.

The term is - based on the Turkish situation - also used in other countries as a polemical term to denote actual or supposed conditions.

background

The phenomenon of the deep state is linked to the history of the formation of modern Turkey. It emerged from the Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s through a radical transformation of the political system and society by state founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk . Essential elements of Kemalism were and are democracy, strong nationalism (term of Turkishness ) and a strict separation of religion and state . The Turkish military and parts of the state administration, including the secret services, see themselves as the guardians and keepers of this state model . Any efforts or movements that these institutions viewed as a potential threat to the Kemalist state have been fought with great severity in the past, including the use of clandestine "covert operations" by the secret services and the military. There were numerous human rights violations. Socialist and communist movements in the 1970s as well as Kurdish nationalism up to the present day , the latter particularly in the form of the Marxist underground organization PKK , were seen as a threat . For some time now, the increasing influence of political Islam has also been viewed critically.

The essence of the deep state is seen in the fact that in the course of the conflict with the various currents identified as a threat within the state, structures that were not subject to any democratic control, a kind of state within the state, developed . These also made use of criminal and radical political elements, whereby the lack of democratic control ultimately led to an uncontrollable deformation and interweaving of state structures with elements of right-wing extremism and organized crime . In this context, the actions of the military and various security forces against the Kurds in Southeast Anatolia in the 1980s and 1990s, which are sometimes criticized as the dirty war , are also mentioned.

The Susurluk scandal of 1996, which is dealt with in more detail below, caused a sensation in Turkey because these secret links were first revealed: Hüseyin Kocadağ, a high-ranking police officer, was sitting in a car that had crashed, and Abdullah Çatlı, an internationally sought-after, right-wing extremist drug trafficker and murderer, was shown Intelligence links, as well as Sedat Edip Bucak, a member of parliament who had played an important role in the fight against the PKK .

According to critics, a new Lower State has formed under the AKP government. This new deep state is said to be organized through the infiltration of the entire state apparatus, especially the judicial authorities and the police, through the Fethullah Gülen movement.

Unexplained events

A number of - for the most part - unsolved events have shaped the discussion about the Deep State . Some of them are:

Villa Ziverbey

Ziverbey köşkü (a villa in the Erenköy district of Istanbul ) became a symbol of the systematic torture of opponents of the regime after the military coup in March 1971 . Intellectuals like İlhan Selçuk and Uğur Mumcu were tortured here and confirmed what Lt. Col. Talat Turhan wrote in his book on the Deep State . Accordingly, the torturers introduced themselves to him as members of the counter-guerrilla, who were allowed to kill him at their own discretion.

Taksim Square massacre (Istanbul)

On May 1, 1977, the "Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions of Turkey" ( DİSK ) held a rally in Taksim Square in Istanbul , in which a quarter of a million people took part. Unrecognized people shot into the crowd, killing at least 34 people. The perpetrators were never caught.

In 1987, former Deputy Prime Minister Sadi Kocas told Hürriyet newspaper : “It wasn't just the one incident that happened on May 1st. Since 1968–1969 and the 1970s there has been a series of at least seven to eight incidents per year. ”On May 7, 1977, Bülent Ecevit affirmed :“ In the incidents of May 1, the counter-guerrilla had its fingers. ”

Susurluk scandal

The Susurluk scandal was revealed in a traffic accident on November 3, 1996 near the district town of Susurluk in Balıkesir Province . In this accident, the then deputy police chief of Istanbul, Hüseyin Kocadağ , a well-known activist of the gray wolves , Abdullah Çatlı , and his wife Gonca Us were killed. The Right Way Party (DYP) MP for Urfa Province , Sedat Edip Bucak , who commanded his own army of village guards against the PKK , was injured.

A parliamentary committee of inquiry published a 350-page report on the incident in April 1997. According to the report, state organs had instrumentalized the gray wolves. In this context, state organs initiated violent conflicts between political left and right-wing groups in the 1970s in order to create the preconditions for the military coup of 1980 .

The event in Şemdinli

On November 9, 2005, a hand grenade exploded in a bookstore in Şemdinli county town, Hakkâri province . There was one dead and many injured. Passers-by identified three suspects. Two of them belonged to the gendarmerie and one was a defector from the PKK. Prosecutor Ferhat Sarıkaya, who tried to uncover links between Corporals Ali Kaya and Özcan İldeniz and defector Veysel Ateş with high-ranking military officials, was dismissed from office.

The perpetrators were tried in the 3rd Major Criminal Chamber in Van and sentenced on June 19, 2006 to 30 years, 10 months and 27 days in prison. In May 2007 the 9th Criminal Chamber of the Court of Cassation overturned the judgment. The judges of the 3rd criminal chamber in Van refused to refer the case to a military tribunal. They were then transferred. After the case was handed over to the military tribunal in Van, the defendants were ordered to be released.

Assassination of Hrant Dink

The Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was murdered on January 19, 2007 in front of the office of his magazine Agos in Istanbul. The underage Ogün Samast was caught as a murderer in Samsun. On February 7, 2007, the ANKA news agency reported that the murderer was connected to nationalist circles and indicated that he had worked as a police spy and for the Gendarmerie Secret Service ( JITEM ). Nobel laureate in literature Orhan Pamuk blamed the Turkish government for this murder. The lawyers of Dink's bereaved relatives criticized the Turkish authorities. The real perpetrators of the act were covered and evidence was concealed or destroyed. The European Court of Human Rights presented in 2010 established a shared responsibility of the Turkish state, because he did not protect Dink despite the existence of evidence on plans by right-wing extremists to assassinate critical journalists.

Official comments

In 1974, the then Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit was the first to point out a "state within the state" under the term "contra-guerrilla" (contra -gerilla ). The then commander of the alleged secret organization Office for Special Warfare , General Kemal Yamak , is said to have asked the Chief of the General Staff, Semih Sancar , to ask the Prime Minister to pay one million dollars for his office. Until then, this sum had been paid annually by the USA . In the memoirs of General Kenan Evren , who led the military coup in Turkey in 1980 , he reports on a meeting with the then Prime Minister Suleyman Demirel on May 5, 1980. Demirel asked him to be the Office for Special Warfare in Action against the Terrorists (as it happened on March 30, 1972). Kenan Evren refused because he did not want to hear rumors about counter-guerrillas . Kenan Evren said something similar in an interview with the daily Hürriyet on November 16, 1990.

Prime Minister Tansu Çiller commented on the accident in Susurluk that "everyone who fires or is hit by bullets for the state is honorable". In a channel 7 program on the murder of Hrant Dink , Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said on January 27, 2007 that the “state within the state” (deep state - derin devlet) is an undeniable reality. It has existed since the Ottoman Empire . The aim is to minimize it and, if possible, to switch it off.

Movie

Aspects of the Deep State were thematized in 2009 in fictionalized form in the Turkish political thriller Valley of the Wolves - Gladio , which was very successful there . It is based on the television series Valley of the Wolves .

Polemical use in other countries

The publicist Jürgen Roth dedicated his book, published at the beginning of 2016, to The Deep State. The infiltration of democracy by secret services, political accomplices and the right-wing mob in roughly equal parts, the establishment of stay-behind groups in the post-war decades in the Federal Republic, the connections between constitutional protection offices and other authorities to the right-wing extremist NSU and the campaign against refugees in summer and autumn 2015 .

In the USA, the term deep state is used in the context of a conspiracy theory about a state within a state , an alleged conspiratorial network of the left establishment (see: Deep state in the United States ) .

See also

literature

  • Jürgen Roth : The deep state. The infiltration of democracy by secret services, political accomplices and right-wing mobs. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, Munich 2016. ISBN 978-3-453-20113-2

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Human Rights Foundation of Turkey (TIHV): Annual Report 1997, ISBN 975-7217-22-0 (in the Turkish version the statement is on p. 7).
  2. ^ Peter Althammer: Dirty War - Secret Operations in Turkey. Documentary, Germany, 2009
  3. ↑ Susanne Güsten: Turkey: The murder of the Kurds was "state policy". Nürnberger Nachrichten, August 17, 2010.
  4. ↑ René Althammer, Sabine Küper: Heroin smuggling from Turkey. In: Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. April 17, 1997, accessed October 15, 2008 .
  5. ↑ Die Welt : Turkey Chases a Manuscript , accessed on March 26, 2011
  6. ↑ Internet portal of the US foreign policy magazine Foreign Policy : Whats really behind Turkeys coup arrests , accessed on February 25, 2010, (English)
  7. ↑ Der Spiegel : Drilled Too Deep , accessed on March 14, 2011
  8. ^ The friendly state in the Turkish state , accessed on October 5, 2010
  9. ^ Congressional Research Service: Turkey: Politics of Identity and Power - Fethullah Gulen Movement (PDF; 359 kB), pp. 21 and 22 (English).
  10. ↑ Talat Turhan, “Derin Devlet” (Deep State), Ileri Publishing House, Istanbul, November 2005, ISBN 9756288671
  11. ↑ 1977 1 Mayıs Katliamı Aydınlatılsın ; Bianet on April 28, 2006; Accessed April 24, 2011
  12. ↑ Turkey: Massacre of May 1, 1977 still unsolved , by Sinan Ikinci. May 1, 2003, World Socialist Web Site; Accessed April 24, 2011
  13. ^ News about the dismissal of the public prosecutor Ferhat Sarikaya, April 20, 2006 (Turkish) Turkish television station
  14. ↑ Message in the weekly report 45/2006 of the Turkish Democratic Forum ( accessed on January 31, 2009)
  15. ↑ See weekly report 25/2006 of the Turkish Democratic Forum ( accessed on January 31, 2009)
  16. ↑ See weekly report 20/2007 of the Turkish Democratic Forum ( accessed on January 31, 2009)
  17. ↑ See weekly report 27/2007 of the Turkish Democratic Forum (accessed on January 31, 2009)
  18. ↑ See weekly report 51/2007 of the Turkish Democratic Forum ( accessed on January 31, 2009)
  19. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from August 4, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  20. ↑ Pamuk sees the mentality of lynching . In: Tagesspiegel , January 23, 2007. Retrieved June 21, 2013
  21. ^ Trial in Istanbul Die Zeit, July 25, 2011. Accessed June 21, 2013
  22. ↑ Kemal Yamak: Gölgede Kalan İzler ve Gölgeleşen Bizler (Traces in the Shadow and We as Shadows), Doğan Kitap, January 2006, ISBN 975-293-415-3 .
  23. ↑ Kenan Evren in Anıları (Memoirs of Kenan Evren), Istanbul 1990, p. 431
  24. ↑ See message from CNN Türk .
  25. ↑ See message in Radikal from January 28, 2007 ( Memento from September 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
  26. ↑ Jürgen Roth : The deep state. The infiltration of democracy by secret services, political accomplices and right-wing mobs. Wilhelm Heyne, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-453-20113-2 .