The interview with Orakoglu in Radikal was used by columnists and writers to reinforce their arguments. Nearly a year later, Ergenekon was again on the media agenda, and its frequency has increased day by day.
However, it was not the main topic in the media in the latter half of and was discussed only in the context of operations conducted against armed gangs by the police. Even though there was a The term was used for the first time in an article in Hurriyet. Hurriyet itself first used the term later. The confiscation of twenty-seven hand grenades in a slum house during a police raid in Umraniye, Istanbul, on 12 June was a turning point, and there is a consensus that the Ergenekon investigation was started after that event.
After they alleged that Oktay Yildirim, a noncommissioned officer, brought the grenades to their house, the police arrested him too. Tekin was an important figure, not only because he had close rela- tions with some people whose names were associated with gangs, but because his title connected the investigation with the military. The other figure who was taken into custody was retired noncommissioned officer Mahmut Ozturk, who had taken Tekin to the hospital after he attempted suicide following the Council of State attack.
In these computers the police discovered some encrypted files that included plans of an organization named Ergenekon. Although it did not give up the claims that Ergenekon was the offshoot of Susurluk and national- ist gangs, the Kemalist and secular media partly accepted that Ergenekon could be an organization conducting its activities at the civil society level with some civil actors. For them, the links were enough to accuse the gangs of being part of a wider campaign against the ruling Islamist party.
Since their campaign was against an Islamic party, Ergenekon was not a rightist or Islamist organi- zation but a secular one. The First Ergenekon Operation and the Media As a part of the Ergenekon investigation, the police detained thirty-nine peo- ple, including former army officers, lawyers, and journalists, in an operation called Ergenekon on 23 January They were accused of being behind many assassinations and other illegal activities in the recent past. According to reports in the press, the Ergenekon network was also behind the Council of State attack, the slaying of famous Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in , the murder of Italian priest Father Andrea Santoro in , and several bomb attacks on the offices of Cumhuriyet.
In November , a new newspa- Those changes were impor- tant because both Taraf and Sabah-atv became principal proponents of the Ergenekon investigation in the media. Taraf especially grounded its argu- ments on its opposition to any military interference or involvement in the civilian sphere and to organizations that aimed to change the composition of parliament using undemocratic methods.
Although there were some differ- ences between the two camps, Islamist newspapers gained new supporters among liberal groups with a focus on Ergenekon. Allegations against the Ergenekon network narrowed the gap between descriptions of its activities in different media groups.
Dun- dar wrote two articles in which he quoted phrases from his book to connect a tradition dating from counterguerrilla movements to the Susurluk incident and eventually to Ergenekon. First, the Islamic press sustained its claim that Ergenekon was a product of the late s and that it had no strong relations with rightist movements in the s and the Susurluk incident.
Second, the Islamists writers criticized the secular media because of their silence on Ergenekon operations and accused secular writers of previously ignoring the left wing of armed gangs. The detainees included famous writers, academics, and politicians, all of whom were known as fierce critics of the JDP government. Those well-known names ended the silence of secular columnists about Ergenekon and triggered a skeptical and critical stance regarding the investigation.
They accused Ergenekon opera- tions of crushing opponents of the JDP government. The Islamist press and columnists based their approaches on three pillars. For them, the closure case was filed to derail the investigation by those who had close relations with the Ergenekon gang, because a copy of an indictment bill against the JDP was found on the computer of one of those arrested during the Ergenekon operation.
For example, Ekrem Dumanli, editor-in-chief of Zaman, argued that the secular media harbored ill motives and aimed to distort the investigation and the relevant facts. For him, those who had strongly supported the unmasking of the Susurluk gang chose to hide infor- mation related to the Ergenekon investigation. The Dogan Media Group, the biggest media conglomerate in Turkey, Ilhan Has to Answer. The Islamist media, Zaman and Yeni Safak, strongly supported the investigation and criticized the Dogan Media Group on the grounds that it had ignored the facts about the Ergenekon probe.
Other newspapers that have relatively low circulation in Turkey took various posi- tions. For example, the daily Vakit, an Islamist newspaper, was one of the most ardent supporters of the March operation. This distinction is important because those newspapers maintained their position on the Ergenekon investigation until the time of this writing spring Retired general Sener Eruygur, the former head of the gen- darmerie forces; retired general Hursit Tolon; Ankara Chamber of Commerce chairman Sinan Aygun; and journalist Mustafa Balbay were among those detained.
The arrest of two high-ranking former generals linked the investi- gation with alleged coup attempts against the JDP government by a secular and nationalist cabal. The newsweekly Nokta had published lengthy excerpts from a diary allegedly written by Admiral Ozden Ornek, former Navy Forces commander, in March Unfollow Follow Unblock. I graduated from the Dep I visited the University of Manchester, and Columbia University as visiting scholar respectively.
Turkish Foreign Policy. Why the weaker Ottoman Empire preferred to attack on Russia, one of the great powers at the time, in , leading to the Crimean War? Despite the gigantic literature on the Crime-an War, it is still unclear why the Ottomans declared war Despite the gigantic literature on the Crime-an War, it is still unclear why the Ottomans declared war on the Russians in 22 October This paper will focus on changing naval and military balance between the Ottoman Empire and Russia throughout the year as a casual variable in explaining the war decision.
Accordingly, it looks at three factors, the defense of the straits against a sudden Russian attack, the naval balance in the Black Sea, and military balance in the Danube and Caucasian fronts. Afterwards, it is examined two different periods, the period between and This study, which deals with Turkey-EU relations in the first decade of the s, interrogates the way in which relations between Turkey and the EU have shaped relations between domestic actors in Turkey. This paper assumes that foreign This paper assumes that foreign policy is not independent from domestic affairs and therefore asks how we can understand Turkish-EU relations in terms of relations among secular, Islamic and Kurdish power blocks in Turkey.
The report was adopted by the Commission on Global Governance, composed of prestigious public figures from well over 20 countries, in October Yousef Al-Hassan, in his introductory chapter, argued that …we are encouraging here dialogue between cultures and civilizations instead of clash or conflict… The dialogue between civilizations that we are seeking would prevent cul- tures from viewing one another through a broken mirror [by admitting] the validity of all civilizations, and [eliminating] the siege mentality existing in some cultures Dia- logue does not mean forgetting about or ignoring the differences between cultures After this panel, an international conference focusing on the topic of conflict or cooperation among civilizations was held in London on June , The transformation was mainly semantical because although the words changed, their contents remained the same.
As shown before, some scholars fol- lowing Said succeeded to escape from this dichotomy by advocating that the clash of civilizations is an ahistorical argument or a strongly structured myth because there is no clear distinction between civilizations.
These features not only determine the identity of the AoC initiative but at the same time expose the existential problems of the initiative. This creates a dilemma which suggests that the more the clash threatens to spread all around the world, the more the world needs the alliance. That attack was the reason why he strongly advocated an alliance between the Western civilization and its Muslim counterpart.
For Zapatero, the lesser the clash threatens to spread in his country, the lesser Spain needs the alliance. The immediate motivation behind the establishment of the AoC initiative was the Madrid train bombings. This kind of discourse shows that the alliance was mainly estab- lished as a body between the two civilizations and also explains why other civiliza- tions remained silent about the AoC initiative.
After its foundation, the AoC gained the most widespread popularity during the cartoon crisis. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist were printed in Magazinet, a Norwegian Christian newspaper, on January 10, , and stirred a great crisis between the West and the Islamic world.
Reactions and coun- ter-reactions deepened the crisis. Numerous publications around Europe reprint- ed the cartoons to demonstrate their support for freedom of the press while the outcries in the Muslim world turned into violent protests targeting Western em- bassies and fast-food chains.
Political leaders underlined the im- portance of the AoC in preventing such tensions or clash-based movements. This episode serves as the most vivid example to expose the dependency of the initia- tive on the spread of clash-based behaviors and discourses.
The dichotomy has limited the scope of the initiative in terms of membership as well. The AoC embraces mostly the West and the Muslim world while pay- ing little attention to other civilizations such as Judaism, Buddhism, and Confu- cianism. Many conflicts have religious overtones all around the world, including, but not limited to, the Tibet question, the Kashmir problem, and the Palestinian question. This has resulted in a situation whereby other civilizations have at best remained silent about the AoC initiative from its beginning to this date.
Such a distribution of roles is partly an inevitable result of the motivation behind the AoC. This is also clear in the statements of Zapatero who claimed that terrorism is ultimately a product of the clash of civilizations and, more specifically, assumed that terrorism originated from the other side, i. Islamic civilizations because the clash is One can see how the AoC, mostly perceived to be taking place be- through its institutional tween these two civilizations.
A close examination of the main motivations behind the AoC shows that it indirectly legitimizes the argu- ments of the new Orientalist scholars. The declared objective of the AoC, which is clearly reflected in the statements of the co-presidents of the AoC, is to prevent the clash, which suggests that the initiative takes the existence of a clash as reality.
At a time when a discursive process for the de-mythization of the clash of civilizations thesis was underway at the intellectual level, the emergence of the AoC delivered an important disservice.
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