Nearing the end of the Erdoğan system

Failure in the legislative elections

The results of the Turkish legislative elections not only pose a threat to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s personal projects, since he already viewed himself as the new Sultan, but the very power of his party, the AKP. Each of the three other parties (MHP conservatives, CHP socialists and HPD left-wingers) made it clear that they refused to form a coalition government with him, and preferred, on the contrary, to form a coalition between themselves. In case they were unable to reach an agreement within 45 days, they would give the socialists the job of forming a governmental coalition - an option already rejected by the AKP – or else to convene a new round of legislative elections.

This scenario still seems improbable, just as the election results seemed impossible to almost all political commentators until the ballot of the 7th June. However, by signing, on the 1st December 2014, an economic agreement with Vladimir Putin which would enable Russia to circumvent the European Union sanctions (Turkish Stream), Mr. Erdoğan defied the implicit rules of NATO. By doing so, he has become a public enemy both for Washington and Brussels. As a result, the United States have secretly used their influence during the electoral campaign to make make the downfall of the AKP possible.

For this election, Mr. Erdoğan had decided that he needed 400 seats out of 550. In reality, in order to impose the adoption of a carefully-designed constitution which would allow him full executive powers, he hoped for 367 seats. Failing that, he would have accepted 330 seats, which would have enabled him to convene a referendum which would have adopted his project for a constitution by simple majority. In any case, he needed 276 seats in order to enjoy parlementary majority, but will only gain 258, which is insufficient for him to hold on to power alone.

The domination of the AKP since 2002 may be explained by its positive economic results and by the division of its opposition. But the Turkish economy is now collapsing – its growth rate, which remained close to 10 % for a decade, dropped during the war on Libya, and dropped again during the secret war on Syria. It currently stands at 3 %, but could rapidly become negative. Unemployment has grown rapidly, and has now reached 11 %. These wars have been waged against allies of Turkey and its indispensable economic partners. Concerning the division of the opposition, the CIA, who had worked hard in the past to encourage it, is now busy trying to repair the damage.

This was not a difficult task, given the many griefs created by Mr. Erdoğan’s authoritarianism. The union of the opposition was already a fact established at the base, in June 2013, during the demonstrations at Taksim Gezi Park. But the movment failed, first of all because at the time, Mr. Erdoğan was supported by Washington, and also because the demonstration was restricted to urban areas. At that time, the demonstrators were of course protesting against a building project, but mainly against the dictatorship of the Muslim Brotherhood and the war against Syria.

Since it was clear that the movement had been unable to overthrow the AKP, the party wrongly thought it was undefeatable. It therefore attempted to force through its Islamist programme - headscarves for women, prohibition of cohabitation between members of the opposite sex, etc. At the same time, the virginal image of the Sultan was suddenly compromised by the revelation of his family’s corruption. In February 2014, via what seems to have been a telephone interception, Mr. Erdoğan was heard asking his son to hide 30 million Euros in cash before a police search [1].

All this goes without mention of the purge against those who remained faithful to his ex-ally Fethullah Gülen [2]

, the massive incarceration of Turkey’s generals, lawyers and journalists [3], the non-respect of the promises made to the Kurds, and the construction of the largest Presidential palace in the world.

This failure is the consequence of his foreign policy

The failure of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is not due to his interior decisions, it’s the direct consequence of his foreign policy. The exceptional economic results of his early years would have been impossible without the secret assistance of the United States, who wanted to make him the leader of the Sunnite world. They were stopped in 2011, by Ankara’s alliance with the operation launched to destroy the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, which, until then, had been his second economic partner. Turkey revived the historic links it had with the Misrata tribes, mainly the Aghdams, in other words Turkish Jews who had converted to Islam and settled in Libya during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Turkey was aware that by attacking Libya, it would lose a very important market, but it hoped to take control of the governments held by the Muslim Brotherhood, already present in Tunisia, then probably in Libya, Egypt and Syria. This in fact came to pass in the two former states in 2012, but did not last.

Ankara joined the war against Syria, and NATO based its headquarters for the coordination of operations on Turkish soil. During the first war (the 4th generation war), dating from February 2011 to the Genva Conference of June 2012, NATO transferred its al-Qaïda fighters from Libya to Turkey in order to create a « Free Syrian Army ». Mr. Erdoğan supplied rear bases disguised as « refugee camps », while the blind Western press saw nothing other than a « democratic revolution » (sic) along the lines of the « Arab Spring » (re-sic).

In June 2012, the electoral victory of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt might have seemed to predict a radiant future for the Brotherhood. So Mr. Erdoğan followed the programme designed by Hillary Clinton, General David Petraeus and François Hollande to re-launch the war against Syria, but this time on the Nicaraguan model. It was no longer a question of supporting a secret operation by NATO, but playing a central role in a classic war of huge proportions.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, coordinator of international terrorism

When, in July 2012, the Axis of Resistance reacted to the assassination of members of the Syrian National Security Council by attempting to assassinate Saudi prince Bandar ben Sultan, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan siezed his opportunity, and substituted Turkey for Saudi Arabia in the manipulation of international terrorism .

In the space of two years, more than 200,000 mercenaires arrived from all over the world and transited byTurkey in order to wage jihad in Syria. The MIT, or Turkish secret services, set up a vast system for the circulation of arms and money to feed the war, mainly paid for by Qatar and supervised by the CIA.

Mr. Erdoğan installed three al-Qaïda training camps on his soil at Şanlıurfa (Syrian frontier), Osmaniye (next to the Nato base of Incirlik), and Karaman (near Istanbul), where he organised a terrorist academy in the tradition of the School of the Americas. [4] [5].

The Turkish police and Justice system have shown that Mr. Erdoğan – like ex-US Vice President Dick Cheney - was a personal friend of Yasin al-Qadi, the « al-Qaïda banker ». In any case, that was how he was described by the FBI and the United Nations until he was taken off the international terrorist list in October 2012. During the period when he was being hunted all over the world, Yasin al-Qadi took a secret trip to Ankara in a private plane. Mr. Erdoğan’s bodyguards came to pick him up at the airport, having first de-activated the surveillance cameras. [6].

On the 18th March 2014, a recording broadcast on YouTube featured a director of Turkish Airlines, Mehmet Karataş, who complained to one of Mr. Erdoğan’s councillors, Mustafa Varank, that his company had been used by the government to secretly transfer armament to Boko Haram in Nigeria. This highly-placed civil servant was not particularly worried about having violated international law, but deplored the fact that these weapons might serve to kill not only Christians, but also Muslims.

In May 2014, the MIT transferred to Daesh, by special train, a quantity of heavy weapons and new Toyota pick-ups offered by Saudi Arabia. The Islamic Emirate, which at that time counted only a few hundred combattants, developed in the space of one month into an army of tens of thousands, and invaded Iraq.

During the last four months of 2014, Turkey prevented the Kurds of the PKK from rushing to the aid of their own people in Kobane (Aïn al-Arab) when the town was attacked by Daesh. On the contrary, many journalists attested to the fact that the jihadists were able to cross the fontier with impunity [7].

On the 19th January 2015, at the request of the public prosecutor’s department, the police intercepted a convoy transporting weapons intended for Daesh. However, the search was interrupted when it was discovered that the convoy was being led by agents of the MIT. Following that, the public prosecutors and the police colonel were arrested for « treason » (sic). During the preliminary investigation, a magistrate made it known that the MIT had chartered a total of 2,000 truckloads of weapons for Daesh [8].

The core of the Turkish terrorist system is easy to identify - in 2007, the Military Academy of West Point revealed that men from the Islamic Emirate in Iraq came from al-Qaïda in Libya (GICL). These same mercenaries were used to overthrow Mouamar el-Kadhafi in 2011 [9], and then to create the Free Syrian Army (the « moderates ») [10]. The Syrian members of the Islamic Emirate in Iraq created al-Qaïda in Syria (al-Nusra Front). Many of the Libyan and Syrian combattants came back to join the Islamic Emirate in Iraq when it renamed itself « Daesh » and sent senior personnel to Boko Haram (Nigeria).

The public implication of Turkey in the conflict

Turkey made a huge profit from the war against Syria. Firstly by organising the pillage of its archeological treasures. A public market was even set up in Antioch so that collectors from all over the world could come and buy the stolen objects and place orders for works to be stolen. Secondly, by organising the industrial pillage of Aleppo, the economic capital of Syria. The Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Aleppo revealed how their factories had been systematically dismantled, and the machines-tools transferred to Turkey under the vigilant eye of the MIT. The Syrians lodged a complaint with the Justice department, but their Turkish lawyers were immediately arrested by the Erdoğan administration and are still in prison.

The Turkish Army has for a long time been sending its Special Forces troops into Syria – several Turkish soldiers have been taken prisoner by the Syrian Arab Army. However, it coordinated the attack on the Christian village of Maaloula, in September 2013 – a village which has no strategic interest, but is the oldest site of Christianity in the world. Above all, in March 2014, the Turkish Army entered Syria in order to escort jihadists from the Al-Nusra Front (Al-Qaïda) and the Islamic Army (pro-Saudi) as far as the Armenian town of Kassab, with the mission to massacre the inhabitants whose grand-parents had fled the genocide perpetrated by the Ottomans [11]. Unsurprisingly, France and the United States opposed a condemnation of this aggression by the Security Council. Following that, the Turkish Army entered Syrian territory several times, but without joining any other battles.

The weight of the crimes of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

The Turkish press has widely dealt with the crimes of the Erdoğan administration, which has definitively alienated the Alevist populations (close to the Alawites) and the Kurds. The former massively support the CHP, and the latter support the HPD. But this was insufficient to defeat the new Sultan.

The error was made on the 1st December 2014, when Mr. Erdoğan signed a gigantic economic agreement with President Putin, whom he perceives wrongly as a Tsar, and therefore as a model. Perhaps he feared that the United States would turn against him once Syria had fallen, just as they had turned against Saddam Hussein once Iran was exhausted. In any event, by pretending to play on both sides, the East and the West, Mr. Erdoğan has lost the support with which the CIA had been providing him, unfailingly, since 1998.

The career path of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan

As an adolescent, Mr. Erdoğan thought of undertaking a career as as professional footballer. A leader with a charismatic personality, he lived in the streets at the head of a group of delinquants. He quickly joined Necmettin Erbakan’s movement, Millî Görüş (literally « National Vision », to be understood in the context of censorship as « Political Islam ») whose project was the re-Islamisation of Turkish society. He was a militant of an extreme-right anti-communist group, and participated in various anti-Jewish and anti-Masonic demonstrations.

Elected to Parliament in 1991, he was forbidden to occupy his functions because of a coup d’état and the repression to which the Islamists were submitted. Elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994, he execised his functions without imposing his Islamist vision. However, at the moment when his party was banned, he was condemned for having recited a pan-Turkish poem during one of his speeches. He served 4 months in prison and was forbidden to present himself in the elections.

Once released, he claimed to have broken with his past errors. He abandoned his anti-Western rhetoric, provoking the division of Necmettin Erbakan’s movement. With the help of the US embassy, he founded the AKP, a party which was at the same time Islamist and Atlantist, into which he integrated not only his friends from Millî Görüş, but also the disciples of Fetullah Güllen and the ex-partisans of Turgut Özal. The latter was a Sunnite Kurd who was President from 1989 to 1993. The AKP won the 2002 elections, but the results were cancelled. He also won the 2003 elections, which enabled Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, finally, to become Prime Minister, since his political exile was now over.

Now in the seat of power, Mr. Erdoğan forgot to impose his Islamist views. He developed the economy with the help of the United States, then, from 2009, applied the theory of professor Ahmet Davutoğlu (a disciple of Fetullah Güllen) - « zero problems with our neighbours ». The aim of this theory was to resolve, a century late, the conflicts inherited from the Ottoman Empire. Amongst other things, he set up a common market in 2009 with Syria and Iran, causing a regional economic boom.

The AKP and the Muslim Brotherhood

Although they have a different history, Millî Görüş had always manifested an interest for the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. They translated the books of Hassan el-Banna and Saïd Qotb.

The AKP officially drew closer to the Muslim Brotherhood during Israel’s war against the people of Gaza in 2008 - 2009. This led Erdoğan’s government to support and participate in the Freedom Flotilla project organised by the Brotherhood under the cover of a humanitarian association, the IHH, and under the vigiilant eye of the CIA [12].

From the first days of the Arab Spring, the AKP supported Rached Ghannouchi in Tunisia, Mahmoud Jibril in Libya and Mohamed Morsi in Egypt. The party furnished the Muslim Brotherhood with specialists in political communication and advised them in order to impose their common vision of Islam in their respective societies.

In September 2011, as a sign of this alliance, Mr. Erdoğan helped to create the Syrian National Council in Istanbul, which was slated to become the Syrian government in exile - an instance which was entirely under the control of the Muslim Brotherhood [13].

In 2012, Mr. Erdoğan welcomed to the AKP congress the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood now in power, the Egyptian Mohamed Morsi and the Palestinian Khaled Meschal. He also organised a conference for the Brotherhood on the 10th July 2013, among whose particpants were Youssef Nada, Mohammad Riyad al-Shafaka (the Brotherhood’s guide in Syria) and Rached Ghannouchi. By precaution, it was his old friends from Millî Görüş, and not the AKP, who delivered the invitations.

When, in September 2014, Qatar avoided war with Saudi Arabia by inviting the Muslim Brotherhood to leave the Emirate, Mr. Erdoğan seized the opportunity and became the Brotherhood’s only « godfather » on the international stage.

The future of Turkey

It is only by facility that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is considered to be a neo-Ottoman. His project was never to rebuild the Empire, but to create a new Empire abiding by his own rules. He believed that he could rely alternatively on the fanatism of the Califate (with the Hizb ut-Tahrir, then with Daesh) or pan-Turkism (« the valley of wolves »).

It is also a mistake to describe him as an authoritarian politician. In truth, he has always behaved like a leader of the pack, and nobody labels a mob boss as authoritarian. Whenever he has been caught red-handed in numerous criminal affairs, he has always reacted by denying the evidence and sacking or arresting the policemen and magistrates who were applying the law.

Even if Recep Tayyip Erdoğan manages to bribe the MHP, or at least 18 of his deputies, to form a governmental coalition, his party will not remain in power for long.

In order to be certain that they will no longer have to deal with the AKP, the United States will probably favour its division by encouraging the disciples of Fetullah Güllen and the partisans of deceased President Turgut Özal to form their own party.

The government which succeeds the AKP will have to quickly release the political prisoners, prosecute the corrupt Islamist leaders, and then abrogate various Islamist laws in order to satisfy public opinion. It will put an end to Turkey’s implication in the war of aggression against Syria, but will have to facilitate the exfiltration of jihadists, by the CIA, from Iraq and Syria to another destination. It will benefit from the financial support of the United States as soon as it questions the Treaty signed by President Erdoğan with President Putin.

The fall of the AKP should provoke the retreat of the Muslim Brotherhood to Qatar, the only state which still supports them. It should also clear the horizon in Tunisia and Libya, and favour peace in Syria and Egypt.