Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 1999, pages 48, 90

Special Report

Long-Simmering Scandals Over Graft, Government-Gangster Ties Bring Down Yilmaz Government

By Jon P. Gorvett

“It is clear that there are no moral values or principles here,” said the leader of Turkey’s opposition center-left party just before the 55th government of the republic fell from power in late November. His angry comment, unfortunately, could also have described much of his country’s ruling political culture over the past two decades: a time when immense social and economic changes have been weighed down by widespread graft.

The no-confidence vote that unseated Prime Minister Mesut Yilmaz and his administration, however, was in many ways a singular affair. For the first time in Turkish political history, the country’s rulers had been brought down as a result of alleged corruption. Ironically, too, Yilmaz himself had come to office on a pledge to clean up graft, yet it was evidence presented by a shady businessman and a known gangster that brought about his government’s downfall.

The vote itself was also the result of a long chain of other events stretching out to the war in southeast Turkey and back, too, to the period around the 1980 military coup. These two have cast long shadows across the Turkish political and business landscape.

The period before the 1980 coup was marked in Turkey by widespread civil unrest. Armed groups from the left and right fought gun battles in the streets of Istanbul and Ankara, and the government of the time, led by the current president, Suleyman Demirel, was deadlocked.

The military intervened in a swift and decisive manner, arresting many and, temporarily, it stressed, shutting down Turkey’s democratic institutions. Although halted by the superior power of the army, the armed left-right struggle left a burdensome legacy.

The ultra-right had formed armed groups of militants, known as the “Grey Wolves,” who were deployed as a counter-guerrilla force, responsible for many shootings and “disappearances.” Among their members were most of the more dangerous characters in today’s corruption scandals.

After the coup, and with the eruption of violence between militants of the separatist Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) and the army in southeastern Turkey, the Grey Wolves were deployed as the nucleus of the Special Teams, another counter-guerrilla force which still operates against the PKK today. Their relationship to the army and to the government has always been hazy, yet there is considerable evidence that during their 14 years of struggle against the PKK, the Special Teams became inextricably bound up with certain groups and individuals within the state itself.

Citizens protested the “dark forces” that had so deeply penetrated the Turkish state.

The first major piece of evidence supporting this came in November 1996. In the small Anatolian town of Susurluk, a fatal car crash revealed that an important deputy in the government coalition’s junior party, a senior police official and Turkey’s most-wanted gangster had been traveling in the same vehicle. Among the gangster’s possessions was a diplomatic passport issued to him by the interior minister.

The gangster was Abdullah Catli, a Grey Wolf leader in the late ’70s who had been associated with Mehmet Ali Acar, the Pope’s would-be assassin, and who had led Special Team operations against the Armenian separatist organisation ASALA in Lebanon in the 1980s.

The deputy, the only survivor of the crash, was a tribal warlord in the southeast, whose clan of 19,000 people were a mainstay of the Village Guards, local militias often press ganged into the fight against the PKK.

The Susurluk scandal first caused widespread outrage. The interior minister resigned, the deputy claimed total amnesia, and Turkish citizens protested via a “switch off at 9” campaign in which many turned off all lights at 9 p.m. to highlight the “dark forces” that had so deeply penetrated the Turkish state.

Mesut Yilmaz’ first statement on coming to office in July 1997 was that his government would finally get to the bottom of this scandal. However, the Susurluk inquiry, despite producing a highly damning report, has led to change in the workings of what is widely described in Turkey as the state-mafia-government triangle.

No “Clean Hands”

In addition, the opposition has not had “clean hands” either. Sitting on the opposition benches during Yilmaz’ tenure, but the deputy prime minister at the time of Susurluk, was Tansu Ciller, hailed previously as Turkey’s first woman prime minister, and only the fourth woman premier in the Muslim world, when she attained the top job in 1993.

Since then, her own and her husband’s business dealings, involving their investments in the U.S., have come under scrutiny, as has her use of the prime ministerial “slush fund.” These are undocumented funds which Ciller is alleged to have used while in office to fund her campaign in the 1995 general elections—and to have paid the “dark forces” for their clandestine activities.

“Those who shoot for the state are as honorable as those who are shot for the state,” she said on hearing of Catli’s death. It was a curious remark for one of the country’s rulers to make about a man on Interpol’s red list.

What was ultimately to prove fatal for Yilmaz’ government—the fourth since the 1995 vote—was the arrest last August in France of another wanted gangster, Alaatin Cakici. In a move prefiguring the arrest by Italian police of the PKK guerrilla leader Abdullah Ocalan in early November, the requests of the Turkish government for Cakici’s extradition were turned down on the grounds that no EU country can send criminals to countries possessing the death penalty. Contrary to its desire to take custody of Ocalan, however, there was a subtext of Turkish authorities being none too delighted at the prospect of the return of a Turkish mobster who obviously knows too much.

Cakici, too, had links to the Grey Wolves, and had at one time been an associate of the late Catli. However, Cakici’s other role seems to have been more in the corporate field.

On his arrest, he began to release a series of tapes he had made of phone conversations he had had with senior government officials. This linked him to a businessman, Korkmaz Yigit, who was then arrested over allegations of irregularities in his bid for the privatization tender of the state Turkbank.

The following day, however, a videotape in which the businessman made serious allegations against Yilmaz himself was broadcast on the two TV channels Yigit owned. On the video, Yigit alleged that Cakici had pressured him over his $600 million bid in the privatization, and that the gangster had been acting on Yilmaz’ orders.

Yigit further alleged that Cakici had been active in “persuading” other bidders to withdraw. The prime minister had allegedly been prepared to look favorably on Yigit’s bid on the understanding that the businessman would then buy up several newspapers and ensure that they took a pro-government line in the upcoming April 1999 elections.

This airing of dirty laundry was too much for the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), Deniz Baykal, to bear. The Yilmaz minority government was dependent on the CHP’s votes in parliament to stay in office, and the withdrawal of CHP support paved the way for the success of November’s no-confidence motion.

However, just prior to the government’s downfall, Yilmaz and Ciller had for once put aside their long history of mutual personal hatred and voted to clear each other on the two parliamentary committees looking into their alleged corrupt practices. Deputies on the committees from both parties voted together, thus ending any further investigation and prompting the remark from Baykal about the absence of morality quoted at the start of this article.

As it happened, this was the second time that Ciller had been “cleared” of all corruption charges as the result of a political deal. A previous investigation into her activities had been quashed when the pro-Islamist Refah (Welfare) party had cast its votes to support her as the price of her party joining the Refah coalition government in 1996. Breaking out of this circle will be by no means easy for Turkey.

The collapse of the Yilmaz government illustrated the difficulties of the country making a fresh start. When the incumbent administration was ejected, the old politicians simply started reshuffling the same cards in order to deal out a new coalition.

Meanwhile, few if any prosecutions of the “dark forces” have taken place, and the conviction remains amongst many ordinary Turks that none of the established parties are better than any others in terms of dealing with this issue. One recent opinion poll even suggested that with a 10 percent national threshold for gaining seats in parliament, fresh elections would see only Yilmaz’s party and the pro-Islamists represented in the legislature, while a hefty third of voters would not vote at all.

In this way, corruption and graft may be eroding another highly important part of democratic life—participation. The benefactors of this, too, may well be the country’s Islamists, whose exclusion from office at least gives them slightly cleaner hands.