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Samizdata quote of the day

· Middle East & Islamic · Slogans & Quotations

It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.

– Stephen Green, writing about Turkey.

August 18th, 2016 |

13 comments to Samizdata quote of the day

  • Michael Jennings
    August 18, 2016 at 7:29 pm

    It was both.

  • Marcher
    August 18, 2016 at 7:59 pm

    It was both.

    Perhaps you missed the point that he’s suggesting it needs to be seen differently. And given the obvious pre-drawn up lists of people, makes you wonder if it was actually a genuine coup at all.

  • Alisa
    August 18, 2016 at 10:46 pm

    Perhaps you missed the point that he’s suggesting it needs to be seen differently.

    Or perhaps it is possible to get the point, but still disagree with it.

  • Alisa
    August 18, 2016 at 10:54 pm

    And given the obvious pre-drawn up lists of people, makes you wonder if it was actually a genuine coup at all.

    Every politician worth his salt has such a list – if not an actual written one, at least one he holds in his head, and can recite by heart if you wake him up in the middle of the night. So that in and of itself does not imply A Plan. Although it does not imply the absence of A Plan either.

    That said, I agree that the whole episode is curious, to say the least. What stands out, at least to me, is how inept the Turkish Army was going about the whole thing. But given the purges which its higher ranks underwent in the recent years, maybe it’s not so curious after all.

  • Perry de Havilland (London)
    August 18, 2016 at 10:58 pm

    I think I’m sort of with Marcher on this one. In fact I wonder if Ergodan might have done this anyway even if the coup had not happened at all, given what a few folks I spoke with in Istanbul said about the JDP and how they were cooking the courts in preparation for “something”. I suppose we will know in a decade or two.

  • Alisa
    August 18, 2016 at 11:05 pm

    Everyone who talks to actual Turks reports this kind of talk. But the reason why I think Michael is more correct than Marcher is that even if Erdogan was planning something (a supposition not at all fanciful) still does not mean there was no actual coup.

  • JohnK
    August 18, 2016 at 11:20 pm

    There was an inept coup. Normally the Turkish army does a good coup, but Erdogan hollowed out its top brass. I suspect the remnants were thoroughly infiltrated. It provided a good excuse for a mega crackdown. Erdogan is doing nothing Sir Francis Walsingham would not have recognised as good tradecraft.

    That whirring sound you can hear is Attaturk, rotating rapidly in his mausoleum as his vision of a secular state crumbles into dust.

    Allah B. Praised.

  • Eric
    August 19, 2016 at 4:57 am

    If you were Erdogan you would never risk having a pretend coup get out of hand and become a real coup. It was either an inept project or (more likely, IMO) Erdogan’s success in placing allies in important military positions led to an act of desperation.

  • Stephen K
    August 19, 2016 at 10:33 am

    Erdogan’s success in placing allies in important military positions led to an act of desperation

    This. I believe some Army officers could see that the purge was coming and their coup was an attempt to forestall it – knowing that they were marked men anyway. But the Army was no longer (unlike on previous occasions) capable – the leadership was no longer a coherent group (and probably most of the officers who remembered how these things are done are no longer on the scene). Hard to see how Erdogan’s ambitions can be impeded now by any forces within Turkey, which is bad news for Europe, for Turkey’s other neighbours, and (above all) for Turkey itself.

  • Michael Jennings (London)
    August 19, 2016 at 8:14 pm

    Of course Erdogan was waiting for an excuse to carry out his purge, or at the very least he had plans to continue removing his perceived enemies from power in the army, judiciary, universities, and everywhere else he saw them. (He may not have planned to take them all out at once). But the way the coup attempt unfolded makes me think it is unlikely that it was any kind of false flag operation. Too many people were involved, and events unfolded in a sufficiently unpredictable way that things could easily have gone disastrously for Erdogan. (He was in an aircraft that could very easily have been shot down, for instance). Was the attempted coup carried out by people who were afraid that Erdogan would further consolidate his power and/or purge them if they did not act? Well, very likely yes, but I still think it was a genuine coup attempt.

    I tend not to believe in conspiracies of this kind unless there is very clear evidence. (The Russian apartment bombings of 1999 being such an example).

  • Michael Jennings
    August 20, 2016 at 8:53 am

    “It was either an inept project or (more likely, IMO) Erdogan’s success in placing allies in important military positions led to an act of desperation.”

    I think I will once again say “probably both”.

  • Paul Marks
    August 23, 2016 at 8:41 am

    What is happening in Turkey is terrible – both domestically and the new alliance with Putin (and Iran – against the Kurds).

    The West encouraged democracy in Turkey – forgetting who most of the demos are.

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