BY MURAT YETKIN
RADIKAL- The joy of our national team's unforgettable victory against Croatia has become the top issue for most of us. Our team reaching the Euro semifinals for the first time is of course a great success. I hope this will continue. Now let me discuss other important issues. The purported July 2007 General Staff action plan recently published in Taraf daily proposed an intervention by the staff in civilian life, including the judicial branch and the media, in order to direct political and social life. The General Staff said that no such plan had been approved by its command echelons. The closure case against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is pushing a fight within the state to its highest level. As long as the government faces new problems with the judicial branch, either government officials or other units acting autonomously on the government's behalf want to make the military a direct party to this fight and also want other countries to see this as a conflict between the military and civilians. Efforts to wear away at the military's honor are part of this, but other efforts which paint the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) like a political party also help.
Yesterday I wrote this: 'More documents or other papers which haven't yet become official documents started to be released from General Staff headquarters without notification from the command echelons. The General Staff now looks like a sieve. People are saying that if these documents on domestic developments are being released so easily, could other documents concerning the country's security, anti-terror efforts or delicate intelligence issues also be released or fall into the hands of rival countries or organizations?' Before these words were even published, an important development occurred. The General Staff's Military Court prohibited broadcasting images of 'momentary intelligence' recorded by drones in northern Iraq. Apparently this ban stems from a recent border incident in which a police station was suddenly attacked by terrorists and soldiers were killed. The ongoing investigation and documents related to state security were also cited to support the ban.
If the document found by Taraf daily had been found by another media figure, it still would have been published. The problem is the General Staff looking like a sieve due to this atmosphere of conflict and the campaign against it. Now there's the impression that anti-TSK campaign and elements within the TSK started to go outside the chain of command and went into action against the command echelons.
It's clear now that certain non-commissioned and commissioned officers within the TSK whose identities have been hidden expose all the documents they receive, like suicide bombers, thereby endangering the future of their profession. We might also see the discharges of large numbers of officers by the annual Supreme Military Council meeting as a result of this. But certain question marks started to emerge about the General Staff's response to this. It would be helpful if the General Staff focused on the security of buildings and confidential documents, rather than its work on civil society and media. It's important that the military not interfere in the democratic operation of politics. It's equally important that the military fix national security weaknesses, because we should ensure transparency not through scandals, but through democratic control mechanisms. The operation of democracy and national security concerns everyone.