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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (835)	2/22/2001 8:52:03 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

I think you underestimate the power of secular militarists within the Turkish army. If you look back through recent Turkish history, it is the military that overturned the Ottomans and brought Turkey into the western economic sphere. They simply have no desire to permit the fundamentalists to seize control. These military folks in Turkey draw their secularist beliefs from Ataturk and his fellow "young turks", stout pro-western secularists. I highly doubt that any fundamentalists have reach a position of power and authority within the Turkish army to the point where they can publicly proclaim their fundamentalist leanings, let alone raise a secret fundamentalist cell network that would have the power to take control. Since 1983, the military has been essentially standing by the sidelines, always acting as a "coercive mediator" between political factions. It has been this implicit threat of overthrowing the elected government, and returning the nation to military rule, that has usually kept the parties from becoming too unruly. As for the fundamentalist elements in the Turkish army, few of them are in the circles of powers, such as the Turkish National Security Council. And given the historic Turkish distrust of Iran (suspecting they are formenting fundamentalist subversion), I feel pretty confident in predicting that the Turkish security apparatus knows who is, and who isn't, linked even indirectly to fundamentalist activities. Now what could occur is a repeat of what happened to Anwar Sadat, namely an assasination of Ecevit, or some other catalytic event that demands the army restore order. This could spur a state of emergency and martial law.. and I betcha the military secularists are licking their lips at the prospect of cleaning house and dealing with the secularists, and the PKK all at the same time. Regards, Ron