Not Ignorance But Deliberate Distortion
The Ergenekon case has become a witch hunt. If you have doubts, call a friend in Turkey and ask for an opinion of the case. Your friend will respond with details of the weather, wrote the author of an article published in the US weekly newsmagazine Newsweek.
In response to the question why he writes that there is a huge campaign similar to the McCarthy trials in the US, he says police are arresting innocent people and a group of women who have no intention other than to provide an education for poor young girls and notes that by police, he was referring to government workers affiliated with a certain religious order.
This is a short summary of the article.
A case related to an organization established to limit democratic rights and freedoms and which people in Turkey see as a hope of eliminating the deep state, is, according to the Newsweek author, a tool to arrest women struggling to provide an education to young girls and the pressure on these women is part of intentions to incorporate the girls into the same religious order.
The "religious order" reportedly wanted its member police officers to clamp down on the women, whom it saw as competitors, and the officers, eager to follow orders, did what they were told and arrested the women. If the author of this article was an ignorant person or an American who was unfamiliar with Turkey's current legal system, I would laugh it off, but the name on it belongs to a Turkish diplomat who graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, Soner Çagaptay. He is not an ignorant man nor is he unfamiliar with Turkey's legal system.
Then how is it that he does not know that in Turkey the police can't take the initiative and make an arrest? And why does he use sentences in his article that make it seem like the police are making these arrests on their own? My guess is that he knows the truth but he is doing this deliberately to confuse American readers and prepare their minds for a witch hunt and McCarthy comparison.
Any Yale graduate or person who has some knowledge of religious issues would know that the community associated with Fethullah Gülen is not a "religious order." Yet, Çağaptay writes about a religious order, tarikat, in almost every paragraph of his article.
His interest in Turkey stems from his career and his audacity to distort events from an organization called the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy (WINEP), where he worked. WINEP is based in America's capital but closely linked to the Israeli government. Most will recall WINEP from its one-sided article on Turkey during the Feb. 28 process.
But Çağaptay is so audacious that he is willing to contradict WINEP's work and published report. In his aforementioned article in Newsweek, he claims that Feb. 28 was actually conducted against Fethullah Gülen and his community.
In an article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) to assess Turkey after the July 22, 2007 general elections, again Çağaptay presented odd theories to American readers. When I went back and read the article for a second time I couldn't stop myself from laughing. He is described as an expert, but he writes two conflicting theses on the same topic.
While in his article in the WSJ he did not write about a link between the election results and the Gülen community, not even indirectly, in his article in Newsweek he claims the community supported the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and in return community members received government contracts and took charge of the police.
Having encountered American media at different levels in the past, I know how difficult it is to publish these kinds of articles. Ambitious writings are not published without undergoing fact-checking, and information is confirmed with different resources. The article published in Newsweek is riddled with problems. Even those who oppose Gülen and his activities, including the judiciary, in Turkey don't claim that he is the head of a religious order. The Ergenekon case is not a frivolous trial as he claims it to be, but rather Turkey's only chance, perhaps, to obtain democracy.
Whether they care or not, I am not as confident about Newsweek's accuracy as I used to be. I have a proposal for Çağaptay: He should call not just anyone but his own brother, who works as a manager for an important news station and ask him about Ergenekon. I will validate the response Çağaptay will get from him.
This article was published in the Yenişafak daily on May 18.
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