Ferda Çetin
‘Millions of people, including politicians, intellectuals, writers, academics, teachers and religious leaders, all watch the state-mafia relations, like watching a TV series,” writes Ferda Çetin for Yeni Özgür Politika.
And the term ”millions” is real. Turkish mafia leader Sedat Peker’s YouTube videos have gone viral and watched by more than 10 million people in 24 hours. This huge audience eagerly awaits new episodes with curiosity and excitement. (…)
Sedat Peker who was involved in all kinds of illegal work for the last 40 years, is having difficulty understanding the sudden change of the state’s attitude towards him. He defines the disruption of this mutual relationship (between him and the state) as a betrayal.
He states that this attitude is not caused by the state, but by the Minister of Internal Affairs Süleyman Soylu (Fancy Sülo).
The Kurdish people, Saturday Mothers, socialists and democrats have known the state-politics-mafia relationship well in advance. They also know that the serious accusations of Sedat Peker is only but a small part of this relationship.
The importance of this “fight” is that those confessed against overlap with their ‘knowledge’ of the dirty history of the state.
That relationship between the mafia and the state had not started with right-wing extremist mafia boss Alaattin Çakici and Sedat Peker.
Other mafia figures has been found to have links with state officials in the past too. The legacy of this tradition began during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Its roots go back to the Ittihad-i Osmani Society, which was founded in 1889. The Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa, alleged to have been founded in 1911 for Turkist-Islamist purposes, was also a mafia organisation. (…)
According to Sedat Peker’s confession, we learned that Mehmet Ağar and his team confiscated Bodrum-Yalıkavak Yacht Harbour belonging to Mübariz Masimova; and also Alaattin Çakıcı, Korkut Eken and Engin Alan whose photos in the press in Yalıkavak ensured to make this confiscation publicly well-known.
The murder of the Cypriot journalist Kutlu Adalı by a gang headed by Korkut Eken …
On August 22, 2020, 119 kilograms cocaine seized onboard a ship carrying ‘cheese’ from Venezuela to Turkey. The cheese import organisation is carried out by Erkam Yıldırım, the son of Binali Yıldırım, one of the former prime ministers of the Republic of Turkey.
Uzbekistan citizen Nadira Kadirova was “found dead” in the house of AKP Istanbul Deputy Şirin Ünal. Yeldana Kaharman, a reporter on a local TV channel, was raped after she did an interview with Mehmet Ağar’s son Tolga Ağar. One day after she reported the rape to the police station, she was found dead at her home. All are the usual practices of the state-mafia relations.
The ties between high-ranking state officials and criminals are sometimes called the “parallel state” and sometimes the “deep state”.
Their existence are sometimes accepted by state officials and sometimes denied and it all depends on the conjuncture.
Kenan Evren once said there is no such thing as a deep state, while Turkish President Demirel said the deep state is the state itself.
Tansu Çiller, the former Prime Minister of the Republic of Turkey, openly defended the mafia-state-parliament relationship in her speech referring to Susurluk in 1996 ”Those who shot and were shot for the sake of this state are always remembered with respect. They are honourable.” (…)
Today’s governance based on the AKP-MHP-Mafia organisation, which does not recognise any law is coming to an end.
When it comes to the case of the Kurds, there is an understanding that the mafia-state relationship as justifiable and reasonable and it is even more dangerous, more threatening than the mafia itself. CHP and Cumhuriyet Newspaper carry the virus of this disease very strongly and transmit it to the other generations. After Peker’s recent statements, the “excitement and courage” of CHP MPs, especially Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, is not sincere.
Sedat Peker sent hundreds of bullet proof vests and hundreds of land cruiser cars to the ISIS gangs in Afrin, and everyone knew that these were used against the Kurds. It was well known by CHP executives and Cumhuriyet Newspaper. Now they are asking questions to Sedat Peker and Süleyman Soylu about mafia state relations today.
But they never asked such questions at that time: What is the reason for your hostility towards the Kurdish people at a level to cooperate with ISIS? What are we doing in Afrin? From where and how did Sedat Peker get such a large of money? Today, CHP administration, Kılıçdaroğlu, and Cumhuriyet Newspaper are asking questions supposedly questioning the state-mafia relationship.
Come on! Liars, two-faced and bluster team!
The US and European media including New York Times, Le Monde and the Washington Post, are also reporting the videos of Sedat Peker. The west have once again seen the dirty relations of the Turkish state and the mafia.
While Turkey was providing arms and money for cross-border gangs such as al-Qaeda, ISIS, Al Nusra and FSA, at the same time it is governed by mafia gangs, cocaine traders, gangsters and criminals inside of the country as well. All kinds of relations with ISIS came to light and it is clear what kind of a state the Kurds are fighting against.
Those who accuse and label the struggle of the Kurdish people, the PKK and Kurdish guerrillas as “terrorism”, and those who support the Turkish state directly are actually assisting the mafia gangs, cocaine barons and ISIS.
