Between the 9 and 10th November
1938 a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany was perpetrated using the
excuse of the assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by
Herschel Grynzpan, a 17 year-old Polish Jew. The night of the 9th
November came to be known as Kristallnacht, from the amount of shattered
window-panes in Jewish-owned shops that were attacked, and what seemed like a
spontaneous civilian abreaction in the very anti-Jewish atmosphere of the times
was in fact part of a carefully pre-planned and orchestrated campaign devised by Heinrich Himmler and put into operation by the
Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Nazi party internal intelligence agency, led by Reinhard Heydrich.
Turkey is now suffering its own night of
retribution, or as I would like to codename it: The Night of the Black Amber!
In 2007 President Recep Tayyip Erdoĝan
(then Prime Minister) of Turkey and Fethullah Gülen, founder of the Gülen
movement known as the Cemaat or Congregation, were Islamic orientated political
allies in the purging of the ultra-nationalist secular movement known as
Ergenekon, a purging aided by Güelenist members of the judiciary and police,
and which as a consequence helped place officers, civil servants and judges who
were supporters of Gülen in the higher ranks of the military and judiciary.
In a subsequent power-play for the
“Islamic” political control of Turkey, Erdoĝan and Gülen’s association was
shattered by the same Gülen supportive judiciary launching a corruption
investigation against Erdoĝan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and members
of his own family. This investigation against Erdoĝan has stalled and he has seized the
opportunity afforded to plot an eradication of his former allies before they
could do any more to get him.
Turkey sits astride any number of fault
lines. Below its surface the Anatolian plate continues to move westwards along
the North Anatolian Fault and ultimately, threatens Istanbul with destruction. Above
ground level, in "international" air space as it were, the fault line is that of resolving a
Middle-Eastern or European outlook for Turkey, and again this appears to be moving
westwards. On ground level, however, on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara
there is a more restless, a more eruptive fault line between the civilian and
the soldier, between the Turk and the Kurd, and between secular and religious
orthodoxy.
Where the conflict between soldier and
State is concerned, in a legacy that stretches back to the unruly Janissary army
units of the Ottoman Sultanate, the Turkish military officer appears to have a
genetic pre-disposition to trying to throw off civilian oversight and control.
In modern times this has occurred in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 and an alleged
coup attempt named Operation Sledgehammer was also identified and countered in
2010.
It is into to this heady atmosphere of
recurrent tectonic conflict that the most recent coup attempt falls and fails.
History has shown that for every coup there is retribution, and that for every act
of retribution there is the genesis of a future coup. It is also into this
space that Efkan Ala, the Turkish Minister of the Interior strides.
To explain!
Mountain Valley north of Oltu, NE Turkey.
In October 2007 while touring the
north-eastern part of Turkey with the primary intention of visiting Ani (See:
http://deworde.blogspot.ie/2009/10/ani-on-my-mind.html) the former capital of
the Armenian Kingdom, I passed through the town of Oltu on my way back to the
airport at Erzurum, having detoured to visit the ruins of the Georgian
monastery complexes of Ishan and Osk in the valleys north of Oltu.
Oltu is famous for its Oltu Stone, a form
of Jet, mined in the mountains northeast of the town. The polished gemstone is
called, Oltutasi in Turkish or alternatively as Kara Kehribar: “Black Amber”.
Five years later, in April 2012, having
travelled by road from Konya, I visited Diyarbakir, a city on the frontline between the Turkish State and the aspirations of
Kurds for an independent Kurdistan (See Rihla 45 – July 2, 2014). The tensions in the city were and are
palpable and reminded me of Belfast in the 70s.
Four-Legged Minaret of Sheikh Matar Mosque
Diyarbakir, Turkey
The person that links the small town of
Oltu to the city of Diyarbakir is Efkan Ala, Turkish President Recep Erdoĝan’s
most trusted lieutenant and Turkish Minister of the Interior since November
2013. Efkan Ala was born in Oltu and at the time of my passing through in 2007 had just
finished his stint as Governor of Diyarbakir before moving back to become
Undersecretary during Erdoĝan’s second term as Prime Minister.
Efkan Ala appointed Minister of the Interior by Erdoĝan in 2013
It is my supposition that, in a career
almost imitating that of Himmler as Reich Commissioner for the Strengthening of German Nationhood and later Minister of the Interior in Nazi Germany, Efkan Ala when
first appointed by Erdoĝan as Minister of the Interior without being first elected
to Parliament, was almost certainly brought in and mandated by Erdoĝan to secretly
establish mechanisms to deal with the Gülen Cemaat influence on the Turkish
State in general, and their opposition to Erdoĝan in particular.
I also surmise that the current highly efficient and systematic crackdown (codename "Black Amber"!) against
judiciary, civil-servants, and academics associated with the Gülen Cemaat
movement, which has been put into operation within one day of the badly led and supported
coup of the 15th July, had been carefully pre-planned and honed by Erdoĝan and Ala over the past
two years and probably has been facilitated by a newly-created, ultra-secret and Ala-controlled AKP internal intelligence agency, like the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) Nazi internal
intelligence agency led by Reinhard Heydrich, and drawn from loyal and perhaps
fanatical Erdoĝan members of the Gendarmerie Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism
Bureau (JITEM).
All that was required to put “Black Amber”
into operation was a pretext (like the assassination of vom Rath), and in Turkey’s
case this was the recent threat to “State democracy” by the Peace at Home Council, a very small part of
the armed forces (for example it did not include the Navy) whom I also further suspect were duped by counter-intelligence double agents into believing they had more support than
they really had, all highly convenient for the subsequent initiation, brutality and efficiency of the
subsequent pogrom. I am not implying that Erdoĝan and Ala indirectly planned the coup as a "false flag", because even they could not be entirely certain if personally confronted by coup participants as to what might happen (although coup-associated F1 jets broke off engaging with his Presidential jet!) in any given circumstance. No. In a gamble that has paid off handsomely Erdoĝan confronted the military by appealing to citizen opposition... and won.
The similarities of the remit and intent of the current "State of Emergency" in Turkey, declared by Erdoĝan with the the Reichstag Fire Decree of the 28 February 1933 by Hitler, are as uncanny as much as they are unwelcome in a supposed democracy.
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk
Diyarbakir 1916.
Erdoĝan will now firmly entrench the monopoly of power in his hands and nominally the hands of his AKP party. The secular vision for Turkey of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, former commander of the 2nd Army in Diyarbakir, is well and truly buried. In addition to the purges against individual military officers, Erdoĝan has also exploited the opportunity to suppress any journalist or any media source who opposes him.
Efkan Ala has also prospered. Since the attempted coup the Gendarmerie have, as a consequence of its failure, now been removed from the Army command and brought under his direct
control as Minister of the Interior. Ala's next task (a.k.a Heinrich Himmler) will be to develop and implement a gulag or concentration camp system to incarcerate all Erdoĝan's supposed enemies.
As a
final observation on the recent events in Turkey, it is also worth noting that
when Oltu Stone, the gemstone Black Amber, is first mined and extracted it is soft. It
is only when it is exposed to air that it becomes hard enough to be polished. A
bit like the current pre-determined repression in Turkey! Having being brought
to the surface above the fault line, the former buried and “soft” planning for the eradication of Gülen
has now hardened enough to be polished into a pogrom of political genocide.
