04/10/17 – Conn Hallinan on Turkish President Erdogan’s move toward totalitarianism – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcoming back to the show our friend Con Hallinan.
He writes at Foreign Policy in Focus.
How are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
How about you?
I'm doing great, man.
I appreciate you joining me back on the show here.
And now I'm desperately clicking around in my tabs for your long-lost article here that you wrote about Turkey and about President Erdogan and the upcoming referendum.
When is it?
It's the 16th.
The 16th.
So it's in six days.
Okay.
Erdogan, President of Turkey, big referendum.
What's the referendum about?
Well, what the referendum is is there are 20 sort of amendments, and what it does is it turns the Turkish system, which is a parliamentary system, where in theory the president is kind of a figurehead who gets the right to do ceremonial kinds of things, supposed to be neutral politically, etc.
And it's really a parliamentary system in which the prime minister is supposed to be the person with the greatest amount of power.
So what Erdogan has done is to put forward a constitutional change that would turn the presidency into an imperial presidency.
It's the only way to put it.
It's actually much more powerful even than the American presidency.
He would have the power to dismiss parliament any time he wanted to.
He would have the power to select the majority of Supreme Court justices and judges and things like that.
I mean, it's basically a dictatorship is what people are voting on.
And if he wins it, it will kind of end this process or bring to a head this process where he has slowly not only consolidated power, but also marginalized everybody else.
There are several members of the parliament who are in prison right now.
The head of the third largest party in Turkey, the Democratic Party, which is mainly Kurdish but not entirely, is in prison.
There are 45,000 people that are in prison.
There have been 150,000 people fired from their jobs.
He has used the last year's attempted coup as an opportunity to try and slam this referendum through.
Now, looked at it in terms of past history, it looks like a slam dunk because this is a guy who hasn't lost an election since 1994 when he became mayor of Istanbul.
And he's sort of run the table each time.
He got a little bit of a setback a year ago in an election, but he put another one up and got back his majority, things like that.
Except that there are some straws in the wind, and it's not a certain thing that he's going to win this referendum.
At one point it was something like 60-40.
Well, it's more like 50-51, 49.
It's sort of up and down.
A lot of people are not saying how they're going to vote.
And that's generally a sign, and certainly in Turkey at this time, that they might be voting no since to actually admit that you're voting no just might get you thrown in jail.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I guess there's just no denying the degree to which he's exploiting the coup from last year to just, as you say.
Can you mention those numbers again?
How many people he's rounded up who even might be breathing in the direction of opposing him?
Well, there are 45,000 in prison or jail, and about 150,000 have been fired from their jobs and dismissed from their posts.
The number of teachers are having a real crisis because he's fired the vast majority of professors in the colleges and secondary school teachers as well.
And that's because they're all Gulenists?
Well, you know, that's what it started out as, but this is much more.
I mean, for instance, the numbers of people that have been arrested from the Turkish party.
The Turkish party were the opposite of Gulenists.
As a matter of fact, the Gulenists have always been much more militantly anti-Kurdish than Erdogan's party, and have pressed for military solutions against the Kurds.
So the Kurds have always been very anti-Gulen, but they're using it to basically round everybody up.
That's interesting.
I didn't know that about the Gulenists.
I guess, you know, their very thin image in the West, as much as it's discussed at all, is that, well, they're the softer, kinder Islamists who live in Pennsylvania.
No, no.
You know, Scott, they're very – I'll tell you what they feel like.
And I've really done a lot of work on the Gulenists.
They really feel like a cult to me.
There's some real cultish aspect to it.
And the coup really was their secret plot?
It's not clear.
You know, the only thing I can say on that is that Erdogan has asked the United States to extradite Gulen and also that other Gulenist leaders in places like West Germany, France, and everything, also be extradited.
So anyhow, the German intelligence, because one of the things they were doing was that they were asking the Gulenists in Germany be extradited.
And the Germans and the Americans apparently looked at the evidence that they had, and they don't see it.
I mean, I do think what happened was that people got wind of the fact that Erdogan was going to have a purge.
And what they did was they struck first.
Now, does that mean that the preacher Gulen in Pennsylvania knew about it beforehand?
I don't know.
In any case, it was the gang that couldn't coup straight.
But one thing about the Gulenists is that on the surface, they say we're for everybody getting along, and we're not Islamists.
They are Islamists.
But we get along with everybody, et cetera, like that.
But in practice, what they have done is they've been very militantly anti-Kurdish.
They are for much closer relations with Israel.
And they are much more kind of open market, free marketers, sort of what you think of as the neocom economics.
Erdogans, people are much more state, has a big role to play in the economy, et cetera.
So they're a curious group of people, and they also are very tight-lipped.
And that's why – that's the cultish part of it.
I was reading through the WikiLeaks cables from the U.S. embassy.
And one of the cables – Thank you again, Chelsea Manning.
By the way, no one ever stops and says, Chelsea Manning, run and applause again for the, I don't know, 150,000 news stories that have come out of those cables, Iraq, Afghanistan.
You're absolutely right.
Three cheers for Chelsea.
You're absolutely correct on that.
So I was looking through these cables, and one of the things that comes across is a lot of the people in the American embassy are saying, well, these colonists, they're asking for visas to go to the United States or anything like that.
And they just lie.
They just absolutely don't.
You cannot get them.
You can't pin them down.
They have this little neat patter, and it's just an odd – it's an odd group of people, and they're – it is a kind of a – they did build up a kind of a secret state, not to the extent that Erdogan has talked about it.
And Erdogan has used this excuse of the coup d'etat to just absolutely dismantle democracy in Turkey.
Now, that's going to have an effect on the region because the three big players in the Middle East have always been Iran, Egypt, and Turkey.
I mean, that's going back thousands of years B.C.
And so what happens in Turkey and whether or not democracy really gets dismantled, that's going to have a regional impact.
And of course, since the Middle East is important, it will have worldwide consequences.
Well, you know, one thing that concerns me very much is that over the past year, there's been this group called Brother Turks, and it's really kind of a militia.
In fact, the newspapers refer to it as Erdogan's militia, and it's right-wing nationalists and Erdogan supporters that have been arming.
And they buy – it's very difficult to get a handgun in Turkey, but it's very easy to get hunting rifles and shotguns and things like that.
And these people have been filling up on long barrel guns and shotguns and drilling and getting together for target practice and all this kind of stuff.
The scary thing about it to me is if the referendum fails, as I say, I think if you were a betting person, Scott, you'd probably have to go with the fact that it's going to pass.
But it's, as I say, not a slam dunk.
So if perchance it fails, is Erdogan going to accept that?
And I'm not at all convinced that he is.
I mean he'll still be the president, right?
So he can just take all the power anyway and appoint whoever he wants and who's going to stop him.
And the Turkish army has been pretty much subdued because a lot of the middle-ranking generals took part in the coup.
And so they've dismissed huge sections of the general staff in Turkey, and the army is pretty much under Erdogan's thumb.
Well, if the army is subservient to Erdogan, then an armed militia, even if it wasn't very big, could have a real impact.
And I'm just worried that, as you say, Erdogan is just going to say, well, I'm sorry.
Donald Trump, well, I'm sorry.
That didn't happen that way.
We lost because they cheated.
And so we're going to take it over anyhow.
And the other parties, has he weakened them enough that he's going to – The country is really split.
I mean even when he was winning elections, he was winning like 52 percent, 48 percent.
What you've got is you've got four basic parties.
You've got his Justice and Development Party, his party, which is an Islamist party.
They're very, very close to the Muslim Brotherhood.
In many ways, they're kind of a Turkish variety of the Muslim Brotherhood.
So they tend to be lower middle class, and then some oligarchs, and a lot of rural people.
And one of the things that Erdogan did successfully was to build up the economy of the interior of Anatolia, so the whole kind of center of the country.
Before, the development was largely in the coastal areas, along the Black Sea and also along the Mediterranean.
So there's that.
Then there is the kind of loyal opposition.
They're secularists.
They're the old Kemal Ataturk party.
They tend to be kind of center left, sort of vaguely social democratic.
They traditionally, up until Erdogan came along, they traditionally dominated politics in Turkey.
Then there's the Kurdish party, which is very left, and also attracts a lot of non-Kurds.
As a matter of fact, they got about two million votes that are non-Kurdish votes in the last election.
And they tend to be very progressive, left social democratic, kind of semi-socialist.
And then there's the Nationalist Party.
The Nationalist Party is pretty small at this point.
It's a little bit smaller than the Kurdish party, and it's also deeply split.
The leadership of the Nationalist Party backs the referendum.
The rank and file do not.
They are very nervous about concentrating all this power in Erdogan's hands.
And so they have this odd situation of where some of the leaders of the Nationalist Party are out there pressing for passing the initiative.
And some of the other leaders are going out and giving rallies saying people need to vote no, etc., etc., etc.
So it's a curious thing.
It's about a four-party situation, and the country is just very deeply split.
Even if the referendum passes, it's not going to pass by more than about, I would imagine, 52 or 53 percent.
It's certainly not going to be the 60 percent that Erdogan predicted, say, six months ago.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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And thanks.
Man, yeah, that's really something else.
All right, now listen, I'm sorry.
I know time's kind of limited, but I've got to ask you.
Who all's side is Erdogan for and against in Syria as of right now?
Well, let me tell you, how about schizophrenia?
OK, all right.
Erdogan set out to overthrow Assad.
What he wanted to do was that and he he turned a blind eye to the Islamic state.
He he helped fund and arm the anti Assad opposition.
And his plan was to overthrow Assad and replace it with a variety of the Muslim Brotherhood.
That was what the plan was.
Well, things didn't go quite that way.
And then when the Russians intervened things, the the the it went south.
He shoots down a Russian airplane.
Bad idea.
The Russians proceed to move very sophisticated in aircraft stuff, the S-400 system into the region, which would make any Turkish planes toast if they got anywhere near Assad's people and and cut off agriculture and all sorts of stuff.
I mean, it was it was an incredibly dumb move.
I don't know exactly why Erdogan decided to do it.
So anyhow, he eventually goes to Moscow and apologizes and everything's supposed to be sort of hunky dory.
And then Erdogan agrees with Iran and Egypt and and Russia that they will push for a political settlement.
And that means that he's not demanding that Assad has to go.
Now he's saying Assad has to go.
And even before this last incident, the Turks sponsored a conference in Turkey to build up an army that would fight Iran and the Russians and Assad.
So.
So one hand, he's working for a political settlement with the Russians and Iran and and Egypt to get a political solution.
On the other hand, he's creating this army to fight against the Kurds and the Russians and and Iran.
I mean, it it's like Donald Trump.
I mean, the term erratic is, if anything, an understatement.
All right.
So fast forward, say, I don't know, a few months and then the Islamic State has turned from a place back into just the name of a terrorist militia group kind of a thing.
And then the Syrian YPG Reds that the Americans have been back in this whole time are now a real problem for our NATO ally, Erdogan, who presumably will have inherited these even more dictatorial powers by then.
And who, as you say, has this army sitting there.
And he's terrified.
Right.
That the Syrian Kurds are in such a strong position compared to the, you know, as far as with their power in terms of shared with the national government go at this point.
What's left of it that they have at least guaranteed, it seems, you know, the status quo going forward anyway would be autonomy for them, if not outright independence from Damascus.
And so this is something that would be a huge inspiration, you know, conceivably to the PKK Kurds in Turkey and something that in his imagination is absolutely intolerable and must be crushed.
So he doesn't even need Damascus to do it.
He'll fight Assad's war against the Kurds next.
And he's done badly.
You know, they went into Syria.
The Turkish army went into Syria and they have not done well.
And I think that's partly the result of the post coup situation.
And who exactly are they fighting there?
They're fighting sort of for al-Nusra or what?
No, they're fighting the Kurds.
Well, I thought the Americans and the Syrian army were between them and the Kurds at this point.
They are on one side, but not to the north.
Oh, OK.
And, you know, the thing is that Turkey's foreign policy at this point is just in shambles.
I mean, you said it perfectly.
You know, here you have this situation where, you know, he goes to overthrow Assad.
Now suddenly he's got this powerful Kurdish movement in Syria.
He's got a war going on with the Kurds in southeastern Turkey.
He says that he's going to occupy Iraq if the Kurds try and do anything around autonomy.
You know, he's just made a shamble of things.
When he first got in, he had a slogan.
And he said, no problems with the neighbors.
He's at war with everybody now.
I mean, it's just, it's gone from what was really founded initially, you know, like it was a very progressive kind of step in the direction of getting some rationality into the Middle East.
And now he's in a situation where he's at war in Syria, he's at war inside Turkey, he's at war in Iraq.
You know, he's got tense relations with the Russians, very tense relations with Iran.
And there's even been a falling out between the Turks and Saudi Arabia, because Saudi Arabia is totally focused on overthrowing Assad and replacing it with an extremist regime.
And they think the Turks are sort of dragging their feet.
And the Turks are not helping the Saudis in Yemen, which of course is a complete mess.
And Turks are smart enough not to get involved in Yemen.
All right.
So now this hasn't gotten much coverage, but in Defense News, I think it is, they're talking about how the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was over in Turkey, having these extensive meetings with the Turkish military and the Russian one.
It was all of their Joint Chiefs of Staff, whatever they call them, their counterparts.
These guys were, you know, I don't know, staying at a hotel together for a few days and hashing out a bunch of things.
I mean, I hate to think that that means alliance for more war, but I do like thinking that that represents some kind of real deconfliction effort when it comes to whatever the hell they're doing over there.
I mean, I'm sorry for whoever's collateral damage in Raqqa, but it's better than the whole world getting set on fire, which is what we're actually dealing with.
Yeah, I think the general stance of the military has been that they do not want to get more deeply involved in the Middle East.
They look at that situation and they say, there's no percentage here.
There is no percentage here.
And they're right.
I mean, they're absolutely right.
They want to stay in Afghanistan.
I'm not sure exactly why they want to do that, but they want to stay in Afghanistan.
They want to get ready to challenge the Russians.
But what they're really focused on is China.
And that, Scott, is the most scary scenario of all.
Well, I know the Navy and the Air Force are focused on China, but who else?
Well, the Army, too.
I mean, the Marines, they're now permanently deployed in Australia.
They've upgraded their bases on Okinawa and Guam.
They're thinking in terms of they may have to fight the Chinese.
And we don't want that.
We definitely don't want that, Scott.
You know, I don't know, man.
I've been doing this for so long and it's the same thing over and over again.
But I sort of still, maybe it's what's wrong with me that I can't understand it.
That this line of thinking doesn't stop at, yeah, well, they've got H-bombs.
So what can we do to be friends despite whatever the problems are?
Because H-bombs are H-bombs.
So end of argument.
Scott Hoard already won the argument.
We have to be friends with China forever and ever and ever.
And I don't care what else is the issue.
I don't care if they murder every firstborn little girl over there.
We still can't have an H-bomb war with them.
I don't care if they conquer Afghanistan.
We still can't have an H-bomb war with them.
Yeah.
No, you're right.
You're absolutely right.
The whole thing is crazy.
It is.
It is crazy.
And it is crazy.
You know, I've written a couple of things on this.
And I'm actually in the process of starting another column on this nuclear war stuff.
And, you know, there's a casualness about this that it's just, it's really, it's really scary.
And then you look at India.
India just now, now suddenly they're saying that they have the right to use a first strike against Pakistan.
You know, if there was a nuclear war between Pakistan and India, let me tell you something, it would affect the rest of the world.
Yeah.
Well, I recommend y'all check the archives because we've covered that one in depth, too, on this show.
Yeah, I did.
I did a story.
I did a column about two or three months ago on that.
Yeah.
And we did a good interview about that, too.
Because people think, I mean, I think a lot of people recognize that's actually, well, maybe before recent time, very recent times, that was considered to be the most likely place for nukes to start.
Yeah, well, I do.
I still think it.
I still think it's the one that keeps me up at night.
Yeah.
I mean, it really.
And, you know, we might as well mention here briefly, as you mentioned then, it's a real conundrum where the Pakistanis have these very tactical, small, usable nukes.
But the Indians just have strategic H-bomb, city erasers.
Right.
And so if the Pakistanis see an armored Indian column coming and they use one tiny little H-bomb on it, then it's on.
There's no going back from that.
Now we're talking full scale genocide.
Right.
And we're talking about, you know, affecting weather worldwide.
You would not be able to grow wheat in Canada or Russia.
You know, we're talking about huge holes in the ozone layer.
We're talking about enormous increases in ultraviolet radiation.
Cancers.
I mean, we're not talking about just the people who get killed in between those two countries.
We're talking about worldwide, you know, worldwide impact on that.
And those are small nuclear weapons.
I mean, if they ever got down to the United States and Russia or China.
Wow.
You know, those nuclear weapons are kind of off the charts.
Right.
And, you know, I'm sorry, kind of, to the audience, because I know that alarmism sounds stupid, because the worst case scenario never does come true in any short term anyway.
Right.
Although I can think of a few worst case scenarios that have played out recently.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And all of that.
This really is a real danger.
I mean, these H-bombs, they got thousands of them.
And, you know, I think the real lesson of the 20th century is all of these politicians are just a bunch of George W. Bush's.
None of them know what to do.
You know, you listen to Mattis confuses ISIS with Iran.
And he's not just lying.
Like he actually hasn't thought about this or read a good book or heard of Patrick Coburn before.
And these are the people who are in charge, are people who think it's thinkable to use nukes in real life.
You're right.
You're absolutely right.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
I know you have to go.
Thank you so much for your time.
OK, Scott.
Sure.
Anytime.
I'm sorry there was a mix up.
Yeah.
No, no problem at all.
My fault.
Totally.
But listen, I want everybody to read your article.
I thank you very much for explaining all this turkey stuff to me because it's anytime, Scott.
All right.
Thanks.
All right.
Have a good day.
All right.
That's Colin Hallen.
And, you know, you can find him at FPIF dot org foreign policy and focus.
And this one is called Erdogan isn't as strong as he looks.
That's what makes him dangerous.
And it's a really good one to check it out.
And thanks again, y'all, for listening.
It's Scott Horton dot org for the interview archives slash interviews for the interviews slash show for the questions and answers.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
Oh, yeah.
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Thanks.
I mean, I'll answer them on here, but I'll read them on there.
Yeah.
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