This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen
on .
It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
ISTANBUL — Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said in comments reported Thursday that he believed that he was the ultimate target of a bribery and corruption investigation that has plunged his government into one of its worst crises since he came to power a decade ago.
ISTANBUL — An Istanbul prosecutor who had been overseeing a sprawling corruption investigation of the prime minister’s inner circle was removed from the case on Thursday, in a new sign of a profound power struggle within Turkey’s judiciary and police forces.
In remarks published in the newspaper Hurriyet, Mr. Erdogan said those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned from a visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.
In leaving his position under pressure, the prosecutor, Muammer Akkas, issued a condemnation of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government, accusing it of interfering in the judiciary and preventing him from carrying out his work.
Mr. Erdogan reshuffled his cabinet late Wednesday, replacing 10 ministers, after three top ministers whose sons had been detained as part of the investigation abruptly resigned. One of the departing ministers shook the Turkish political establishment by calling for Mr. Erdogan to step down, a defiant move that underlined the growing fissures in Mr. Erdogan’s governing Justice and Development Party.
Mr. Akkas said that the government had prevented the police forces from pursuing a new round of suspects — including, according to several Turkish news media reports, Mr. Erdogan’s son, whose name was on a summons to appear as a suspect that was leaked to the press on Thursday evening — in the widening inquiry.
Turkey’s opposition on Thursday accused Mr. Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state” following the cabinet reshuffle, in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry. The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey, and alludes to a murky group of operatives linked to the military who operate outside democratic structures.
“The judiciary has clearly been pressured,” he said in the written statement, charging his superiors with “committing a crime” for not carrying out arrest warrants, and saying that suspects had been allowed to “take precautions, flee and tamper with evidence.”
The government has dismissed more than a dozen high-ranking police officials as part of a purge of those it believes are driving the investigation, prompting criticism of Mr. Erdogan from people both within and outside his party who accuse him of interfering in judicial affairs.
The prosecutor’s removal from the case came a day after the resignations of three ministers whose sons had been implicated. One of them, the environment and urban planning minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, broke precedent by calling for the prime minister to resign, too.
Mr. Erdogan “is trying to put together a cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the biggest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, said in remarks reported by Turkish news media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”
Soon afterward, Mr. Erdogan announced a broader overhaul of his cabinet. Though some of the moves had already been planned, so that certain ministers could stand for mayoral elections in March, the shake-up was widely seen as an effort to install loyalists around him.
The resignations on Wednesday, coming only hours after the ministers welcomed Mr. Erdogan at the Ankara airport as he returned from Pakistan, were enough to inspire new talk of a deepening crisis, which Mr. Erdogan has repeatedly denounced as a foreign plot.
The unfolding scandal has already done significant political damage to Mr. Erdogan, who has been in power more than a decade and was widely considered a likely candidate in next summer’s presidential election, which for the first time will be determined by a national vote.
But the call for Mr. Erdogan’s resignation by one of the departing ministers was considered stunning, coming from within a political party known for silencing dissent. That instantly raised the significance of the entire inquiry and left members of the Turkish public wondering if they were witnessing the collapse of their Islamist-rooted government of the last decade.
The corruption allegations are centered on allegations of bribery involving vast real estate projects, many of them in Istanbul, that have become a hallmark of his time in power. No one has been convicted, but several people, including two sons of government ministers, have been arrested, and one of the departing ministers on Wednesday said that the prime minister himself had been involved in the real estate deals being subject to scrutiny.
“Now it seems the situation has changed completely,” said Kerem Oktem, a Turkey expert and research fellow at the University of Oxford. “It seems the ring around Erdogan has gotten tighter.”
As the crisis has deepened, Mr. Erdogan has taken to suggesting that the inquiry is a foreign plot, and in remarks published on Thursday he said that he believed that he was the ultimate target of the investigation.
As a dramatic day came to a close on Wednesday, Mr. Erdogan emerged from a meeting with President Abdullah Gul in Ankara, the capital, and announced that seven other ministers would leave his cabinet, some of whom are departing as part of a long-planned reshuffle so that they can run in mayoral elections. One of the seven departing officials is the the European Union minister, who has been implicated in the corruption investigation.
Mr. Erdogan told the daily newspaper Hurriyet that those who tried to embroil him in the investigation would be “left empty-handed.” He made the comments to reporters on a plane as he returned from a visit to Pakistan on Tuesday.
The investigation became public a week ago with dawn police raids on the offices of businessmen and others close to the prime minister. But Wednesday was the first time that someone who had been in Mr. Erdogan’s hierarchy — a confidant, no less, — strongly implied the prime minister’s entanglements in some of the real estate deals at the heart of the case.
After the prosecutor, Mr. Akkas, went public with his allegations of judicial interference, Istanbul’s chief prosecutor, Turhan Colakkadi, made his own remarks, saying that Mr. Akkas had been let go because had been leaking information to the news media.
The crisis is in sharp contrast to the image that Turkey has projected as an exemplar of a prosperous, Muslim-majority country based on democratic principles. A NATO member, Turkey has been embraced by the United States and Europe as a force for stability in the tumultuous Middle East, and the country has sought to play an important role in shaping the outcome of crises in Syria and Egypt and over Iran’s nuclear program. With Mr. Erdogan now preoccupied with political survival, Turkey’s role in the region and its relationship with the West are in question.
Meanwhile, a higher judicial authority, the High Council of Judges and Prosecutors, which appoints judges and prosecutors and also oversees disciplinary actions against them, supported the ousted prosecutor. The council also condemned a recent government decree that required prosecutors to receive permission for investigations from ministers, calling it a blatant attempt to rein in the inquiry. The organization said that the new decree “violates the Constitution, and those who govern the country are subject to the supervision of the judiciary.”
The turmoil has taken a toll on the Turkish currency, the lira, which fell to a new low against the dollar on Thursday. Turkish stocks and bonds also fell, a further reflection of nervousness among investors about the political upheaval and its potential effect on the economy.
The prosecutor’s removal on Thursday was the newest and most direct step yet in a government purge of police and judiciary officials responsible for the inquiry.
The corruption inquiry has targeted the ministers’ sons, a construction tycoon with links to Mr. Erdogan and municipal workers, and it centers in part on allegations that officials received bribes in exchange for ignoring zoning rules and approving contentious development projects. No one has been convicted, but the issue has struck a nerve among the Turkish public, especially Istanbul residents. They have become increasingly resentful over the dizzying pace of development and riches amassed by a new, pious economic elite, with a strong hand in the construction industry, which rose to power alongside Mr. Erdogan and his associates.
Many officials within Turkey’s police and judiciary establishments are followers of Fethullah Gulen, an Islamic spiritual leader who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania. Mr. Gulen and Mr. Erdogan represent competing Islamist traditions and once were partners in dismantling much of the structure of Turkey’s secular state, which ruled for decades with the military as the ultimate power. Now, the same police and judiciary that pursued the generals — and won, through a series of court cases that put many officers in prison — appear to be pursuing Mr. Erdogan’s government.
Mr. Erdogan has responded to the crisis by blaming foreign powers, appealing to the religious sentiments of supporters, and evoking the ghosts of Turkey’s past by likening the crisis to the war for independence it fought after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire. Analysts have questioned whether such an approach will suffice to weather the storm.
The investigation became public last week with a series of raids, and subsequent leaks to the media, and the government has already dismissed dozens of police chiefs and many other lower-level officers.
“We can see the prime minister is trying to take precautions against something that could be bigger,” said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, the head of the Ankara office of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research organization. Mr. Unluhisarcikli said that as the investigation inched closer to Mr. Erdogan personally, he would “have more difficulty containing the damage.”
Turkey’s opposition on Thursday accused Mr. Erdogan of trying to rule via a secretive “deep state,” following the cabinet reshuffle in which he moved to cement his control over the police by installing a key ally at the powerful Interior Ministry.
The public has been riveted by a flow of sordid details of the investigations leaked to the news media — with photographs of piles of cash in the bedroom of a minister’s son and reports that the chief executive of a state-owned bank had $4.5 million in cash packed in shoe boxes.
Mr. Erdogan “is trying to put together a cabinet that will not show any opposition to him,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, said in remarks reported by the Turkish news media. “Erdogan has a deep state.”
Another major worry for Mr. Erdogan now is that anger with his administration will spread to the streets, as it did in the summer with the violent suppression of demonstrators trying to protect a beloved Istanbul park from development. On Wednesday night sporadic protests erupted in some neighborhoods of Istanbul and other cities, with people calling on the government to resign and shouting: “Everywhere bribery! Everywhere corruption!”
The term “deep state” has a sinister connotation in Turkey, and alludes to a murky group of operatives once believed to be linked to the military that many Turks believed carried out operations outside democratic structures.
On Wednesday morning, Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, whose sons are among 24 people arrested in the corruption investigation, stepped down. A few hours later the environment and urban planning minister, Erdogan Bayraktar, closest among the three to Mr. Erdogan, said in a live television interview that he had resigned under pressure. He also said Mr. Erdogan was personally involved in unspecified property deals that are a focus of the investigation.
Dan
Bilefsky reported from Paris, and Mahmut Kaya contributed reporting from Istanbul
“The prime minister has the right to work with the ministers he prefers,” Mr. Bayraktar said. “But I can’t accept this pressure on me to resign. The prime minister too has to resign.”
Soli Ozel, a columnist and professor at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, said: “This is extraordinarily dramatic. Bayraktar was someone who was very close to the prime minister. This is someone you’d expect to fall on his sword without question.”
The investigation has been linked to Fethullah Gulen, a popular Muslim spiritual leader in exile in Pennsylvania who has millions of followers in Turkey, including some who hold high positions within the police and judiciary. Mr. Erdogan and others have called them a “criminal gang” and a “state within a state.”
In a televised speech on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Erdogan used some of his strongest language yet to denounce his former allies in the Gulen movement and promised to dismiss them. “We will root out the bad apples or whatever is necessary,” he said.
Dozens of high-level police officials, and hundreds of other officers, already have been removed in the government’s attempt to purge the police of those it believes are behind the investigation. Reports emerged in the Turkish news media on Wednesday that prosecutors were pursuing other high-level officials, but that new police officials installed by the government had resisted pursuing them, suggesting a power struggle within state structures.
Although Turkey has faced many upheavals, with coups and power struggles that sometimes turned violent, the current crisis is a new phenomenon: a clash between two Islamist rivals who were once united in overhauling the political system by pushing the military out of politics.
Once governed by secularists backed by powerful military generals, over the last decade, Turkey has seen the rise of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party. Its origins lie in political Islam but it has also had liberal and nonreligious rightist partners.
Most of the liberals and secular rightists no longer support the party, and now that Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gulen, who represent different Turkish Islamist traditions, are basically at war, the party is at risk of collapsing, analysts said.
In another setback for Mr. Erdogan, a prominent Justice and Development lawmaker and former interior minister resigned from the party on Wednesday — not because he was implicated in the corruption investigation, but because of how the government was handling it, dismissing police officers and attacking the judiciary.
“It seems that within the A.K.P. things are spiraling out of control,” said Mr. Oktem, the research fellow at Oxford.
More broadly, the clash is seen by some as a test of the viability of political Islam, and comes after Islamist movements have struggled to maintain power in post-revolutionary Egypt and Tunisia. “What we have seen in Egypt and Tunisia was a fight between Islamists and non-Islamists,” Mr. Oktem said. “What we are seeing in Turkey is between two Islamist movements.”
The question is whether the clash will upend the Turkish political system. “This kind of power struggle between two different Islamist groups might make the non-Islamist, secular groups more powerful, in Turkey’s case,” Mr. Oktem said.
Mr. Erdogan’s assertions of a foreign plot, implying American and Israeli subterfuge, have angered the United States and damaged his once strong personal bond with President Obama. The State Department, in a statement issued Tuesday, said attacks in the pro-government Turkish news media against American officials were “deeply disturbing.”
Dan Bilefsky reported from Paris. Mahmut Kaya contributed reporting from Istanbul.