Why the sanity of Erdoğan’s actions is a big question

After Russian and American presidents reached an agreement on cease-fire in the Syrian conflict zone, Turkish leaders’ position excite apprehension. This apprehension is caused by the latest inadequate actions of the Turkish government, from the day when a Russian plane in the Syrian sky was downed to the recent threats from Ankara to start a ground military operation in northern Syria.

The key role in these events is played by Turkish president Erdoğan. His family and clan’s business interests are strongly tied to the zones on the Syrian territory, which can be used human trafficking, for smuggling oil, drugs and weapons from Asia to Europe. Such zones are under control of radical Islamic terror groups. That is why Erdoğan’s statements about the successes of the Russian aviation, Syrian army as well as about Kurd units’ operations in Syria don’t look sane. All of these are threats for his personal interests. Moreover, the Turkish leader’s accusations against Washington of supporting “Kurdish terrorism” and against Moscow and Damascus of collaboration with ISIS show that no sanity can be expected from him.

Some experts connect this insanity not only to Erdoğan’s character and to the fear for his future in case the current profit schemes collapse but to the consequences of cancer treatment. Four years ago, the media reported that Erdoğan had rectal cancer. Publishing this information, they referred to the leaked e-mails from Stratfor intelligence company. According to some sources, now Turkish president suffers from leukemia caused by chemotherapy. With such health problems, it’s easy to lose sanity and become “unpredictable.”

Turkey to openly undermine the cease-fire process

Despite the Russian-American efforts on lowering the degree of the civil war in Syria, Ankara is doing all its best to undermine the peace process. Recently, Turkish artillery shelled Kurds’ positions by Aleppo to kill several people amid the fact that Kurds are the only major force except the Syrian army, which is really tackling the terrorists. Meanwhile, Turkey declares that the strikes were made in response to the alleged shelling of its territory organized by the Kurds. The USA expressed dissatisfaction at Erdoğan but for now has taken no real measures to prevent such incidents in the future. However, Washington states that it supports the Kurds.

Damascus declared the shellings of the Syrian territory to be a direct support of terrorist groups. The Syrian government also called all sides of the conflict to conclude a peace treaty and sit down at the negotiating table.

Several days before that, the Syrian Kurds reasonably ignored Ankara’s demands to leave their positions in the areas by the Turkish border despite the fact that they were shelled. Moreover, Turks shelled the Menagh air base to the North of Aleppo. And again Turkey’s prime-minister Davutoğlu said that the strikes over the airport were delivered in response. In response to what? To the takeover of a strategic object from terrorists?

All these events take place at the background of the Syrian army and militia’s successes in Aleppo: they seized strategically important heights by al-Tamura village and in Dahra-al-Kara and dahra-al-Kandila regions.

Erdoğan knows that he’s got nothing to lose as if Assad stays in power his political career would come to an end. The Turkish government’s actions look like a gesture of despair. He understands that his plan of overthrowing Bashar Assad by coercive means failed.

Erdoğan’s gone mad. Any volunteer to rely on him?

Recently, Erdoğan has undergone a course of chemical therapy; it’s no secret, really, just look at him. And the therapy seems to have affected his psychic state.

Recently, his policy has witnessed a series of strange and inadequate steps. He attacked the US. He keeps confronting Russia. He goes on with bombing the Kurds. His rhetoric becomes crazier and crazier from day to day, from hour to hour. Erdoğan is falling into a mad world of his fantasies where he is a sultan and everyone else – i.e. the whole world – are just his servants, his slaves, his puppets.

It looks like the man has been driven mad by Syria, the Kurds and his imaginary “parallel state.” Who would dare to negotiate with a crazy politician who is obsessed with the ideas of world supremacy, who would rather start a World War III than lose his power? Any volunteers?

Turkey can’t calm down

Turkish leadership prepares another provocation against Russian aircraft.

According to Syrian intelligence Turkish Air Force has increased its flights along Syria-Turkey border. Moreover they transmit massages in English, Russian and Turkish languages warning Russian pilots to keep away from Turkish airspace at a distance of 20 kilometers.
These massages are transmitted on the radio frequencies which are used by Turkish Air Force and Air defense troops to obtain the information about the air situation. However Russian pilots don’t use these frequencies and can’t hear these massages. And it goes without saying that Turkey scrupulously records its parleys.
It’s obviously that the Turks try to make reliable “Alibi” to shoot down Russian aircraft. After that they want to present fake warnings to the world that no one physically could hear and to tell: “We warned Russian pilots but they did not respond!” And of course it is hard to believe that Russia will receive any apologies.
By all appearances Erdogan is dissatisfied with the progress of Syrian army which is supported by Russian Air Forces. He will try to provoke Moscow to response and then accuse it of aggression. After that he will get “legal” reason for land invasion of Syria to safe his oil business.

Here are the links to the file hosting website to download leaked radio messages:

http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6q/001_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6r/002_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6t/003_turk.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6v/004_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6x/005_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6z/006_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6A/007.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6B/008_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6C/009_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/ev6D/010_rus.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/mToJ/011_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/mToK/012_eng.mp3
http://www.megafileupload.com/mToL/013_eng.mp3

And the archive with all of these records:

http://www.megafileupload.com/mTp2/records.zip

 

Source: Turkey can’t calm down

The “Golden age” of corruption in Turkey

It is not unusual to see the combination of words “Turkey” and “corruption” in one line nowadays. All you need is to open any Turkish news website without direct connection to ruling Justice and Development Party, and there will always be a couple of stories on this relevant topic, all dated no older than past week. How about an investigation of 15 mayors at once, which started on January 26? Civil servants were exposed to having some additional and not quite legal incomes! Though, only the ruling party has the right to expose – for example, a Philosophy professor Orsan Oymen, who has published a critical article with an interesting proposition to put the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on trial for corruption, is facing a 4-year imprisonment himself.

These incidents could be just a typical socioeconomic and political life of a country – all in all, such mishaps are not uncommon in any developed country. But only in Turkey all these are shaping into a gloomy system, which pierces through the whole Turkish society. And all the ruling circles don’t seem to control corruption. But they definitely seem to do everything the wrong way out by encouraging corruption. Or, at least, making a negative example of themselves.

A pretty representative demonstration: at the end of the previous year the leader of The Republican People’s Party Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu presented a document, which showed that the Foundation for Youth and Education in Turkey (TÜRGEV) had received a donation from Saudi King Abdullah, the former head of the Saudi royal family. And we are talking about the sum of 99 999 999 liras! And it is definitely not a simple coincidence, that this organization is controlled by Erdogan’s family. However, head of TÜRGEV didn’t dissociate himself from this money, having told that all the operations had been completely legal and had taken place two years before (as if it changes anything). He didn’t specify where this enormous sum money was at that moment, though.

And the government dares to report on victories over corruption against such a background! For example, on January 7 Deputy Prime Minister Mehmet Şimşek announced a huge progress in this area. It’s quite curious that he proved it with the results of the so-called corruption perception index, issued by “Transparency International” annually. According to Deputy PM’s words, the 10 years of AKP ruling the country have resulted in Turkey moving from one-third most corrupted countries to one-third least corrupted. By the way, Turkey’s position in the list didn’t change in such a dramatic way – from 65-th to 64-th. So, it’s unclear whether deputy PM actually believes that adding even more corrupted countries on the register helped improve our own results. But it’s clear that Turkey is getting farther and farther from EU, as experts from “Transparency International” concluded – our economy is getting less and less transparent. Experts have also noted, that authorities’ struggle to get things right is ineffective. Taking into account the infamous corruption scandal of 2013, we can make a conclusion too: nothing is done at all!

With all these in mind, Şimşek’s words aren’t just unconvincing – they simply have nothing to do with truth. Especially considering that for the past two years there wasn’t a single campaign against corruption. Demonstrative trials against minor officials and political opponents may keep an illusion of some efforts being made, but as long as corruption is encouraged and widely exploited by highest authorities, things will only become worse. And according to statistics, this process is flourishing. Well, we still have hope that a new corruption index will include a couple of new outsiders.

 

Erdoğan: just a man, not Allah or a Sultan

In this article I would like to return to 2014 and 2015 when during the presidential and parliamentary elections we were deeply deceived yet another time. It’s no secret that the Turkish government uses electoral fraud and violence to “win” a victory at any domestic elections. They frighten the opposition, the mass media, they block Twitter and YouTube, they even cut electricity. We, being the people of Turkey, have tried to stop them. We’ve been blocked. We’ve been jailed. We’ve been killed. But this fight isn’t over yet.

It was the hot summer of 2014 when everyone in Turkey, and not only there, knew who would become president. And of course, Erdoğan was elected for his first turn in office to begin a “golden age” in the Turkish world of corruption, violence and opposition suppression. And now, a year after, he is still due to become a new Stalin, a new Mussolini, a new Hitler for Turkey; that is inevitable if we don’t stop him.

According to the Times, he was exploiting his power over the governmentally-controlled media to sky-rocket his own popularity and plummet his rivals’ positions. He bribed observers and forged the opinion polls’ results. He was aiming at suppressing the opposition and pluralism in Turkey and still keeps doing this. This sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A politician willing to gain absolute power – we all know how it ends.

The same went on in 2015. Erdoğan gained absolute power but wasn’t able to shut his own people’s mouths in June and AKP failed at that elections. Obviously, that outraged Erdoğan and made him take bloody, violent measures. Two blasts killed over 102 and injured more than 400 people in Ankara on October 9. He initiated an operation against the Kurds in Eastern Turkey to kill hundreds of innocents and breed discontent among this nation which had been getting used to peaceful life. The authoritarian policy created an iron fist that is slowly strangling the throat of the Turkish people. As we can figure out from the words of an AKP member, the party was acting according to a special plan which envisaged the following:

• The use of bogus opinion polls
• The intentional miscalculation of votes during counting, resulting in incorrect results being recorded and sent to the electoral council
• The bribery or threatening of returning officers to stop the miscounting being reported to the authorities
• The misleading announcement of the AKP’s scale of victory early on in the election night to demotivate opposition counting observers and incentivize them to abandon the ballot boxes
• The use of fake addresses and persons who were actually dead as voters

The role of Erdoğan at the parliamentary election was enormous. According to the Constitution, he must have exercised political neutrality but he never did that. Yet again he used the biased mass media to push through his own line and to blame the opposition for they never did. Erdoğan banned Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to mute those disagreeing with his position and those who could really oppose his corrupted politicians. He ordered to print more ballots than needed just to make the fraud process even easier.

Who can oppose him? Who can stand against him? Who can show him that he is not invincible and that he is but a man, not a new sultan or Amir al-Mu-minin?

We can do it. We, the people, must do it, there is no dictator who would be able to endure people’s anger and people’s will. And I hope we’ll be able to wake up in the morning and say: “We are free.”