This was originally going to be a comment on a post. As you can see, it sort of got out of hand, so I decided to turn it into a blog instead. I am partly Turkish myself, so I thought that I might have something to contribute on the subject. Turkish politics can be a bit Byzantine (ha, ha) and I have no doubt the Trump administration has about as much understanding of it as they do of, well, just about any other subject you could think of.
Let me start by saying that nothing I type here should be read as a defense of the current Turkish government. I’m on neither side of this, both Erdoğan and Gülen being equally guilty of weaponizing religion in the service of politics and as far as I’m concerned they can share a bunk in hell for that. I do have to disagree with a couple of aspects of the discussion around this issue. Namely, the whole “Omg! Sending a man to his death!!!” thing, for starters. I will state straight up that there is virtually no chance of it ever happening in the first place and that it is highly unlikely the Turkish government would actually be able to kill Gülen if they even got their hands on him. If it does happen, I will post a video of myself eating my hat (note to self: order steak hat, just in case). This is, in short, another Trump brain fart that in any other government would have been the product of a particularly obtuse junior staffer and shot down before he was done even articulating it. Here it gets run up the flagpole, see if anyone salutes it.
While it might seem like Turkey has an unusually brutal and repressive regime going at the moment, they have, so far at least, shied away from outright murdering their opponents. Brutalizing and imprisoning, yes, bombing the ever loving s**t out of the Kurds, sure (and in this they are not substantially different from any other Turkish government but that’s a debate for another day), but no state sanctioned murder for quite some time. Even torture seems to have fallen out of favor with them somewhat. Hell, by Turkish government standards, they would barely enter the top five of most repressive regimes we’ve had. Both the military juntas, for example, actually did condone state sponsored murder, complete with lavish helpings of death squads. I did not personally live through that period, but my uncles tell me that you could not wear red outside for fear of being mistaken for a communist and shot by a roving fascist gang. They’re probably very barely exaggerating.
Let’s talk about what happens if the US were to extradite Gülen. If he were to be formally extradited the Turkish government would have to put him on trial. International pressure from Europe alone would ensure that. You do not want to piss off your largest trading partner when your economy is already teetering on the brink. There they run up against the problem that Turkey does not currently have a death penalty. Erdoğan has made various noises about bringing it back, but the Turkish public has been pretty squarely against that for some time now. Theoretically, Erdoğan could pretty much unilaterally bring capital punishment back, but that would risk serious backlash. His position while on paper politically secure is not quite as unassailable as the MSM makes it out to be. His own party is at it’s core a coalition (a running gag in Turkey is that if you start a bar fight with three Turks, within two minutes there will be twelve sides and thirty-six alliances), many members of which are against bringing back the death penalty, probably because they remember that the few times it was used, it was used against inconvenient politicians like them by the military junta. Rather tellingly, despite promising to “immediately” bring back the death penalty in campaign speeches before the constitutional referendum, Erdoğan has seemingly dropped the matter entirely since then.
Secondly, I would argue that Gülen is far more useful as alive than he would be dead. Alive he is a handy political prop to rile up Erdoğan’s base. Dead he would become a martyr to a not insignificant portion of the electorate. With the economy the way it is, Erdoğan knows he cannot afford to lose a whole lot of support. He may seem superficially like Trump, and his paranoia has clearly increased over the last couple of years, but he does not function on pure instinct the way Trump does. A nice kangaroo court and a life sentence is probably the best Erdoğan can hope for should he get the chance, and he knows it.
That too runs into a bit of a snag. Gülen considerably aided Erdoğan’s rise to power. He is said to be the main financial backer of the AKP in it’s early years and deeply embedded in all levels of the government thereafter. The Hizmet network stretches far and goes deep. It’s probable that he knows where a lot of bodies are buried, so having him in an open courtroom might prove to be embarrassing at best and a disastrous legal liability at worst. The Iranian gold scandal would be one thing under the microscope, not to mention RTE’s various spalpeens shady real estate deals (is any of this starting to sound familiar?). Erdoğan controls a good portion of the media, but by no means all of it. Gülen is conceptually to the Turkish government what George Soros is to Republicans. A far away, nice juicy threat that they can wave at their supporters to get them good and riled. The minute he steps into a courtroom and starts spilling the beans the spell will be broken. Fundamentally, I would argue the Trump administration has misread the situation (insert shock meme here), and is sending up a trial balloon full of lead.
Erdoğan can confidently wail on Gülen until the cows come home, in full confidence that no sane US government will ever hand him over. As long as Gülen is alive and out of his reach, this is sound strategy.
Whoops.
Turns out that sanity is a commodity somewhat lacking in WH circles these days. Still, I am fairly confident that the US would not hand Gülen over. As to the reason why, beyond legal concerns, and here we sort of have to get into a bit of quasi conspiracy theory territory, but it’s not too terribly far fetched, so I’ll go ahead.
(Ahem)
Legal disclaimer: The Paragraphs that follow are conjecture on my part and should be taken with a grain of salt. Sea, Himalayan, Bath. Your call, I don’t judge.
Fetullah Gülen is widely considered in Turkey to currently be a CIA “asset”, and has been for decades now. More specifically, it is alleged that the Islamic network (Hizmet), that he directs serves an auxiliary function of spying upon other, more militant, Islamic organizations and warning the US of imminent threats or people of longer term concern. Given Mr. Gülen’s status and success in the US, should this be the case, this might seem to indicate that he is and continues to be be a high value asset for US intelligence.
Interestingly the HuffPost article on the breaking news had this to say:
“NBC said career officials at the agencies had pushed back at the White House requests.”
Translation:
“Langley went fcking bananas”
Good night...