ISTANBUL, 2 October 2007 — The Turkish military said yesterday it would oppose any attempt to alter the country’s secular system and warned that neighboring Iraq is heading for disintegration, threatening Turkey’s security. “No power can transform Turkey from the republic founded by Ataturk into something else, no one can change the republic’s secular structure,” Chief of General Staff Gen. Yasar Buyukanit said, referring to modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Protecting Turkey’s unitary and secular system “is our raison d’etre and will continue to be so,” he said in a televised speech at a military academy here. His comments came amid a raging debate over a new constitution drafted by the ruling Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which is accused by opponents of seeking to water down the country’s secular principles.
The row was fueled last month when media reports said the AK Party considered abolishing a ban on the Islamic head scarf in universities and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke in favor of ending the ban, arguing that it breaches the right to education and freedom of conscience. Secularist forces, including the army, the judiciary and part of the academic elite, remain mistrustful of the AK Party, even though it has disowned its roots in a now-banned Islamist movement and pledged commitment to secularism.
In comments on the ethnic and sectarian turmoil in Iraq, Buyukanit said Turkey’s southern neighbor was “advancing fast” toward becoming a loose confederation. “We are greatly concerned that... Iraq’s disintegration is a strong possibility,” he said. “Should an independent state emerge in (Kurdish-populated) northern Iraq, it would constitute a major risk to Turkey in both political and security terms.”
Meanwhile, a lawyer claimed Turkish police covered up the killing of ethnic Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, by withholding and destroying evidence as the second hearing in the murder trial began here yesterday. “Evidence and information is being hidden from prosecutors... A lot of evidence was destroyed and lost,” Fethiye Cetin said in an interview with the Radikal newspaper.
Several suspects in the Jan. 19 murder said in their testimonies that “they believed they were acting on behalf of the state,” she said. Dink, 52, a prominent member of Turkey’s tiny Armenian minority, was gunned down on Jan. 19 outside the offices of his bilingual Turkish-Armenian weekly Agos, in central Istanbul.
Although he campaigned for reconciliation, nationalists hated him for calling the massacres of Armenians under Ottoman rule during World War I genocide, a label that Ankara fiercely rejects. The charge sheet says police received intelligence as early as 2006 of a plot to kill Dink organized in the northern city of Trabzon, home of self-confessed gunman Ogun Samast, 17, and most of his 18 alleged accomplices.
Cetin said tape from a security camera outside a bank near Agos disappeared after being taken by police who, she said, also tapped telephone conversations between two key suspects before the murder.
When prosecutors learned this, she said, they were given incomplete records.
“Something is being covered up — maybe certain relationships” between the suspects and members of the security forces, she said, adding: “The gunman and his close entourage have been uncovered, but not the real perpetrators.”
