Sara Aktaş
“When the Susurluk scandal blew up in 1990s, relations between politics, the mafia and the state were revealed in their most naked form, As a result, with the statements of Sedat Peker, once again we see that these deep criminal structures within the state have spread all over the state’s body like the arms of an octopus, and the mafia has become the state itself.” writes Sara Aktaş for Yeni Özgür Politika.
It would not be wrong to assert that the development of the deep state structures and the unconventional network of dirty relations in Turkey have been fed by three historical processes.
The first of these is closely related to the activities of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), a conservative political party of the Ottoman Empire. The CUP is known as the organisation with the most secretive network in Turkish history. They have organised secret service activities since way before 1905, when they officially formed their party. Their dark activities continued until after the decay of the Ottoman Empire and they were actually still active in the first years of the young republic.
Secondly, the activities of the Turkish state elites. Military-bureaucratic elites have always been effective in the ruling of the state, starting with the Tanzimat period of Ottomans [a period of reform in the Ottoman Empire that began in 1839 and ended with the First Constitutional Era in 1876]. Especially after the last 40 years of the empire, they had taken full control of the state administration and institutionalised the bureaucratic tutelage.
The Turkish Gladio, established in 1952, took the name of Special Warfare Agency (SWA) in 1960. The contra-guerrilla trained by the SWA have become a resource of personnel for the Turkish national intelligence MIT and gendarmerie intelligence JITEM.
The mentality of such structures was based on hostility against the Kurds and a genocide strategy that caused thousands of murders and massacres throughout Kurdistan.
Meanwhile, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) [the current government coalition ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party] and the Grey Wolves, a neo-fascist youth organisation mainly linked to the MHP, have conducted the dirty business of the state as the civilian wing of the state.
When the Susurluk scandal blew up in 1990s, relations between politics, the mafia and the state were revealed in their most naked form.
As a result, with the statements of Sedat Peker, once again we see that these deep criminal structures within the state have spread all over the state’s body like the arms of an octopus, and the mafia has become the state itself. Paving the way for this is a strategy based on Kurdish genocide. The illegal structures within the state have formed institutionalised relations with different groups of interests within the state.
In this network, where the mafia have taken control over the state, dirty alliances have been protected by the politicised judiciary and the legal system, which cannot act independently from the political power. When the mob boss Alaattin Çakıcı was released from prison like a hero, with a special presidential amnesty, this was the most striking example of such relations.
We have, therefore, reached a stage in which it is impossible for the people of Turkey to breathe if the political, economic and social system on which these alliances depend is not changed.
Undoubtedly, to wage a struggle against this state structure, which has turned into a crime organisation, is to strive for a life for the peoples and especially the women of this country.
All political parties, unions and democratic organisations are responsible for playing a key role in revealing the truth in order to bring about the social rejection of this corrupt system.
