The issue that rankles with Erdogan centres around a man that has been a thorn in his flesh for much of his time as leader – Muhammed Fethullah Gulen. Gulen was once one of the main spiritual leaders of Erdogan’s political party, the AKP, preaching a blend of moderate, business-friendly Islam that helped the party rise to power. Erdogan now regards Gulen as his mortal enemy, and ever since 2014 has demanded time and again that the US extradite him to Turkey to stand trial. Washington has consistently refused to comply.
Erdogan’s most recent effort stems from a Turkish court ruling on November 26. It decreed that Gulen is to be charged with master-minding a coup attempt back in 2016. However Gulen, who has been living in the US since 1999, has been granted a Green Card which allows him to live and work there indefinitely. As President Biden is most unlikely to hand the 79-year-old cleric over to the tender mercies of the Turkish president, the trial ‒ if it goes ahead ‒ will have to be held in the absence of the defendant.
Gulen had followers at high levels in the Turkish establishment, including the judiciary, the secret service and the police force. Early in December 2013 Erdogan was furious to discover that, for more than a year and unknown to him, the police had been engaged in an undercover inquiry into corruption within the government and the upper echelons of his AKP party. By the end of the year Erdogan’s own son had been named in the widening corruption investigation. Erdogan denounced the police investigation as a plot by the Gulen movement to discredit his government.
In December 2014 some 20
journalists working for media outlets thought to be sympathetic to the Gulen
movement were arrested, and a Turkish court issued an arrest warrant for Gulen himself. He was accused of establishing and running an
"armed terrorist group”.
Then came the confusing
sequence of events of 15 July 2016, amounting to what was
apparently a coup against the government by political opponents who had been
able to mobilize elements within the army and the air force.. Whatever the truth behind it, Erdogan’s
reaction was to accuse Gulen of having orchestrated the whole coup attempt with
the backing of the US administration. At
the time, be it noted, Joe Biden was vice-president.
Erdogan instituted
retribution of unprecedented severity on people in all walks of life suspected
of opposing the regime. More than
110,000 people were arrested, including nearly 11,000 police officers, 7,500
members of the military, and 2,500 prosecutors and judges. 179 media outlets
were shut down, and some 2,700 journalists dismissed.
Erdogan has returned again and again to the coup to justify ever more stringent clamp-downs on political opponents and the media, accompanied by continuing condemnation of Gulen, and repeated demands that the US extradite him to stand trial in Turkey. Those demands may have lost something of their validity since 2017, when Erdogan removed Gulen’s Turkish nationality.
Erdogan’s accusations
against Gulen are just as unlikely to impress Biden as his recent posturings on
the world stage. The most provocative,
perhaps, was Erdogan’s decision to purchase the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft
system, which is designed specifically to counter fighter aircraft like the
US’s most state-of-the-art multi-purpose F-35. He then attempted to acquire the
F-35 itself. In short Turkey, a member
of NATO, was proposing to let Russia in by the back door. As a result the US
ejected Turkey from the F-35 programme, but when Congress voted recently for
sanctions against Turkey, Trump blocked them.
President Biden is quite likely to be in support.
Another bone of
contention is Turkey’s intervention in Syria against America’s allies, the
Syrian Kurds, whose valiant Peshmerga troops led the fight against Islamic
State. When Trump turned a blind eye to Erdogan’s partial takeover of northern
Syria, and then reduced the US troop presence there, both Democrats and
Republicans in Congress opposed him. Biden is on record as saying “Turkey is
the real problem,” and that he would tell “Erdogan that he will pay a heavy
price.”
Biden is equally unlikely
to favour Erdogan’s recent military interventions in Libya or in the
Nagorno-Karabakh dispute, both pretty obviously regarded by him as
opportunities to extend Turkish influence in the Middle East. In both cases he said his rationale was to
protect people of Turco-Ottoman descent. Then in mid-August 2020 he sent an oil and gas
exploration vessel, escorted by warships, into what has always been regarded as
Greek territorial waters, accusing Greece of trying to grab an unfair share of
untapped resources. None of this is calculated to endear him to Biden or his
new administration.
With all this simmering in the background, US-Turkish relations are scarcely set fair.
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2020/12/04/are-biden-and-erdogan-on-a-collision-course/
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