Turkey: Erdogan plotted Turkey purge before coup, say Brussels spies - by Runo Waterfield

 Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan planned to purge opposition forces in the military before July’s attempted coup, according to a secret EU intelligence report.

The European intelligence contradicts the Turkish government’s claim that exiled cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind the plot to overthrow the Turkish government. Ankara is seeking Mr Gulen’s extradition from the US.

The report by the EU intelligence centre Intcen found the coup was mounted by a range of opponents to Mr Erdogan and his ruling AK Party.

“The decision to launch the coup resulted from the fears of an incoming purge. It is likely that a group of officers comprising Gulenists, Kemalists (secularists), opponents of the AKP and opportunists was behind the coup. It is unlikely that Gulen himself played a role in the attempt,” said the report, dated August 24.

“The coup was just a catalyst for the crackdown prepared in ­advance.”

Mr Gulen’s followers spent decades placing their supporters in senior positions in the police, judiciary and other institutions, building a network that enabled him to “influence the situation in the country and control the activities of President Erdogan”, according to EU intelligence sources

That situation “changed” after Mr Erdogan began purges of the police and state administration in 2014, weakening the Gulenists as well as targeting other opposition tendencies such as Kemalists and civil activists.

In a blow to Turkey’s claims that Mr Gulen masterminded the coup, the European intelligence report noted that his Islamist followers were weak in the Turkish army, which until last July remained a bastion of secularism.

Read more: Erdogan plotted Turkey purge before coup, say Brussels spies

Turkey - Erdogan tightens grip on the country as arrests now hit 6,000 which Erdogan calls "rooting out the virus"

A "coup" which formalized Erdogan's dictatorship

Turkey has arrested 6,000 people after a failed coup, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowing to purge state bodies of the "virus" that caused the revolt. 

At a funeral for one of the 290 victims, Mr Erdogan repeated an accusation that US-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen was behind the plot.

Mr Gulen strongly denies any involvement.

High-ranking military officers are among those held.

One of Mr Erdogan's top military aides, Colonel Ali Yazici, is among those now in custody, Turkish media reported.

The death toll rose on Sunday to more than 290, a foreign ministry statement said. More than 100 of those killed were involved in the coup, officials said.

"We will continue to cleanse the virus from all state institutions, because this virus has spread. Unfortunately like a cancer, this virus has enveloped the state," Mr Erdogan told mourners at the Fatih mosque in Istanbul.

He had earlier suggested parliament might consider a proposal to restore the death penalty.

Tens of thousands of Turks partied into the small hours of Sunday on the main squares of key cities to celebrate the failure of the coup.

A military coup is always to be condemned, but so is a total disregard for Democracy and violations of Human Rights.

Erdogan must be condemned for releasing a "mob" of his AKP people into the streets to commit acts of violence and vandalism in order to quell a dubious  coup attempt, while during the Taksim demonstrations he used  maximum security measures to disperse pro-democracy demonstrators.

Say no to Erdogan's human rights violations

Unfortunately, no official condemnation of Erdogan's Human Rights violations in his dealing with this so-called "coup" have been heard from either the EU or the US.  

Some additional facts about Erdogan's Turkey

• Between August 2014 and March 2015, 236 people investigated for "insulting the head of state"; 105 indicted; eight formally arrested
• Between July and December 2014 (Recep Tayyip Erdogan's presidency), Turkey filed 477 requests to Twitter for removal of content, over five times more than any other country and an increase of 156% on the first half of the year
• Reporters Without Borders places Turkey 149th of 180 countries in the press freedom index
• During Mr Erdogan's time in office (Prime Minister 2003-14, President from 2014), 63 journalists have been sentenced to a total of 32 years in prison, with collective fines of $128,000
• Article 299 of the Turkish penal code states that anybody who insults the president of the republic can face a prison term of up to four years. This sentence can be increased by a sixth if committed publicly; and a third if committed by press or media

EU-Digest

Turkey: Zaman newspaper: Defiant last edition as Turkey police raid

Turkey's biggest newspaper, Zaman, has condemned its takeover by the authorities in a defiant last edition published just before police raided it.

Saturday's edition said Turkey's press had experienced "one of the darkest days in its history".

Turkish police raided Zaman's offices hours after a court ruling placed it under state control, but managers were still able to get the edition to print.

Zaman readers have protested against the takeover outside the offices.

Police dispersed the demonstration, numbering about 500 people, with tear gas and water cannon. The newspaper's supporters chanted "Free press cannot be silenced".

A number of the journalists returned to work on Saturday, but some of them tweeted that:

• they had lost access to internal servers and were not able to file articles
• they were not able to access their email accounts
• the newspaper's editor-in-chief Abdulhamit Bilici and a leading columnist had been fired

One reporter, Abdullah Bozturk, said attempts were also under way to wipe the newspaper's entire online archive.

The European Union's response has been to issue weak statements of concern, the BBC's Mark Lowen says.

It is accused of acting softly on Turkey as it needs the country's support in managing the refugee crisis.

Read more:  Zaman newspaper: Defiant last edition as Turkey police raid - BBC News

Turkey media arrests: Erdogan rejects EU criticism

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has lashed out at the European Union after it criticised the mass arrest of opposition journalists at the weekend.

"The EU should mind its own business and keep its own opinions to itself," Mr Erdogan said, denying that the raids had infringed press freedom.

EU leaders have said the arrests were incompatible with "European values".

At least 24 journalists said to have close links with a US-based cleric are being held for plotting to seize power.

Sunday's raids targeted the Zaman newspaper and Samanyolu TV channel, which are described as close to Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen, the spiritual leader of the Hizmet movement.

A former ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Mr Gulen - who lives in self-imposed exile - is accused of running a "parallel state" within Turkey.

Read more: BBC News - Turkey media arrests: Erdogan rejects EU criticism

Turkey Political Chaos: 'Parallel state' phone-tapped thousands in Turkey says Government - by Orhan Coskun

The network of a U.S.-based cleric illegally tapped thousands of telephones in Turkey to blackmail and concoct criminal cases as part of a campaign of covert influence over government, a top adviser to Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.

A lawyer for preacher Fethullah Gulen, accused by Erdogan of building a parallel command structure in police and judiciary, described the accusations as unjust and contributing to an atmosphere of "hatred and enmity" in Turkish society.

The government accuses Gulen's Hizmet (Service) network of engineering corruption charges against figures including businessmen close to Erdogan that came to light with a series of raids on December 17. The scandal has posed the biggest challenge yet to Erdogan's 11-year-rule.

The government responded by reassigning thousands of police and hundreds of prosecutors and judges in a bid to purge the influence of Gulen, once an ally of Erdogan believed to have helped the prime minister rein in the power of the military.

Hizmet runs a large network of schools, businesses and media groups in Turkey and across the world. Tension with Erdogan came to light when the prime minister moved to close the schools, a primary source of Hizmet's income and influence.

One of the prosecutors named in newspaper reports as being involved in wire tapping denied the accusation.
"There was definitely no monitoring or phonetapping of thousands of politicians, writers, NGO representatives and businessmen in the framework of this dossier in the way that the newspaper stories say," prosecutor Adem Ozcan said in a statement carried by news websites.

According to Star newspaper, Erdogan adviser Yalcin Akdogan and others including the interior minister, the national intelligence agency head and politicians from various parties were among those whose phones were tapped over three years.

"For years they listened to 7,000 people and were going to open a court case against them for being a member of an imaginary criminal organization," Akdogan told Reuters.

"Completely imaginary crimes are created, a scenario is created based on phone-tapping...If you listen to somebody for five years you can construct a crime with imaginary scenarios."

"We are faced with a structure which listens to everybody illegally, follows everything concerning private life, using it when necessary as blackmail and fabricating crimes by people," Akdogan said.

Other senior Turkish officials also described widespread illegal eavesdropping, including of Erdogan himself.

Gulen's lawyer Nurullah Albayrak said in a statement there were "unjust" efforts to attribute the wiretapping to his client, calling for the matter to be investigated and saying such media reports were designed to be exploited politically.


Read more: 'Parallel state' phone-tapped thousands in Turkey: officials | Reuters

Turkey: On The Transformation Of Turkish Democracy - by Shayn McCallum

Istanbul and Aegean Sea

Last week was a rather absurd week for Turkish politics. Events here can often seem mind-blowing, especially if one’s frame of reference is the relatively tame world of European politics (although U.S. politics, at times, puts up a pretty good fight in the race for mind-blowing political insanity).

Last week saw a deepening of the corruption scandal that has shaken the AKP regime, together with a totally new, indirectly related scandal involving a truck supposedly carrying humanitarian aid to Syria but which turned out to be packed with weaponry and munitions. To top off the whole sorry mess, we are now witnessing an attempt by the regime to openly politicise the judiciary and an attempt to create the means to prosecute judges and public prosecutors who “overstep their bounds”. This comes amidst allegations made by former chief prosecutor Zekerya Öz (recently forced out of his position by political pressure) that the PM personally threatened him, allegedly telling him to “call off the investigation or face the consequences”.

It is hard to even know where to begin with the fallout of such an eventful week. As the regime tries to deflect attention from itself by hurling accusations at its opponents and plastering billboards throughout the city displaying photos of the PM with the capitalised slogan “FIRM OF WILL”, as well as (apparently as an attempt to create a political distraction) threatening to re-open the trials of defendants already acquitted from the high-profile Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) cases, (in which a number of prominent military figures and intellectuals were charged with, and, in many cases, subsequently acquitted of, conspiracy against the state) it is also moving to attempt to close down any further possibility of legal investigation into its activities.

Turning firstly to the desultory sideshow of the Syrian-bound truck; what is shocking in this case is not just that a truck allegedly carrying humanitarian aid was actually carrying weapons, but that the gendarmes who stopped it at the border and discovered its cargo were immediately forbidden from further investigation (on the grounds of the contents being a “state secret”) and the officers involved, together with the prosecutor seeking to open an investigation, were promptly reassigned to other duties. The truck, belonging to the I.H.H. organisation (the same ostensibly humanitarian NGO that took the Mavi Marmara ship to Gaza and was violently boarded by Israeli forces just a few years ago) has since apparently disappeared without a trace. 

The I.H.H., although an NGO, is known to have close ideological and organisational links both to the AKP (as well as other Islamist parties such as the Saadet Party) and the Gülenist Movement alike, and comment from the Gülenists, and their allies in the AKP, has been curiously muted. The President, Abdullah Gül, who has tended to be very vocal recently in criticising the actions of his own party, has been visibly uncomfortable in addressing the truck issue. In a single vague statement on the affair he indicated that he was under the impression the truck was “carrying aid to Turkmen refugees” and has refused to say much more than this, even as the story has developed.

Indeed, this embarrassing incident with the truck and its subsequent heavy-handed cover-up, indicative though it is of the “open secret” of Turkish government support for sunni militias fighting in the Syrian civil war, is just one little window into the apparently underhanded and shadowy activities of the administration. As the corruption scandal has come closer and closer to the PM himself (his son, Bilal, has been called in for questioning) he has become openly aggressive towards the judiciary. If the claims of Zekerya Öz are to be believed, the PM has even resorted to direct, personal threats of a shockingly mafia-like nature as he denounces the police and judiciary as belonging to a “parallel state”. To some extent, these accusations may have a degree of truth if the extent of Gülenist infiltration claimed by some commentators is to be believed.

Until recently however, this alleged “parallel state” was something encouraged by the AKP itself although now it seems “Frankenstein has escaped the laboratory” and is running amok.

Certainly, under the AKP watch, there has already been a strong ideological shift in the judiciary. Old Kemalist judges and prosecutors have been slowly pushed aside and replaced by conservatives ideologically more in line with the AKP. We have seen countless examples of what, in most democratic countries, would be considered perversions of justice over the last few years, from the utter miscarriage of justice around the assassination of Armenian journalist and human rights activist, Hrant Dink, to the more recent attempts by the families of youths killed during the Gezi protests to seek legal redress from the police. 

One of the more appalling examples of this latter process occurred at a hearing where the family of Ethem Sarısülük (who had been shot in the head and killed by live ammunition fired by a police officer) were attempting to bring the officer in question to justice. 

The judge hearing the case was photographed sleeping at the judicial bench. The photographer who released the photo was, incredible though it may seem, subsequently charged with the crime of “mocking the judiciary”. This, moreover, is only one of the more recent examples of events of this nature.

Read more: On The Transformation Of Turkish Democracy - Social Europe Journal

Turkey: PM Erdogan's departure could be good for Turkey in the long-term - by Karl Vick

Are PM Erdogan's days counted?

Translation does not do proper service to Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, the full name of the party headed by Turkey’s besieged Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In English, it comes out as “Justice and Development Party.” But in the country it has dominated for more than a decade, the party is known by its all-important initials, AK, two letters that form a word understood as “white,” “pure,” “clean” or, best of all, “unblemished.”

Those qualities constituted the fundamental appeal of the newly-minted party at the moment of its creation, in 2001: More than it ever was “Islamist,” AK Parti (AKP) was a populist effort in a Muslim country where staunchly secular parties just one year earlier had driven the economy deep into the ground, with the gross national product falling into negative territory and the country’s currency, the lira, losing a third of its value.

What AKP promised was reform. Religious piety, too, but chiefly as the quality that informed the character of its leadership — just as it did the surging Anatolian business establishment that lined up behind it, and the heartland Turk to which it made its appeal.

“Are you ready to bring an AK Parti government with your votes as white as your mothers’ milk?” Erdogan asked in his stump speech, the same one that railed against “those who emptied the banks.” The crowd of textile workers and shopkeepers roared their approval, as it has in every election since.

“Everybody’s religious belief is something personal,” a laborer named Nevzer Birtekin told me after the Istanbul rally. “But he’s honest. That’s what determines it for me.”

Today, having overseen the expansion of a Turkish economy that’s triple the size of what it was when he took office, Erdogan staggers under the weight of a corruption scandal that rises directly from the extraordinary success of his no-longer unblemished party: As the most dominant player in Turkish politics, the AKP grew only more powerful and cozy with its business backers.

On Dec. 18, police reported finding $4.5 million in shoe boxes in the home of manager of the state-owned Halkbank. The sons of three ministers were arrested; then eight days later their fathers resigned their government posts. The one said to be closest to the premier, urban planning minister Erdogan Bayraktar, declared on a private news channel that Erdogan should step down too, saying “the majority of the construction plans” at issue in the corruption case were approved on his order.

It was a galvanizing moment, all the more so for what was happening at almost the same instant in Cairo: The Egyptian government was declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization – the same group that, six months earlier, held the presidency and parliament, each won by free elections, until the military coup of July 3.

It’s the kind of thing that used to happen in Turkey: Four times since 1960 the secular Turkish military pushed aside elected governments. But today, the generals remain on the sidelines, defanged in a massive coup-conspiracy case brought by the same prosecutor now knocking on Erdogan’s door.

The prosecutor, Muammar Akkas, has been knocked off the case, as were several hundred police officers.

But it’s all happening in plain view, amid a tumult that can only be described as invigorating. Like the street
protests that erupted across Turkey over the summer (also occasioned by a real estate project), the latest crisis tests not so much Erdogan – whose vainglory appears impervious to events – but the strength of Turkish democracy, which in the space of just months shows signs of maturing. News outlets that ignored the summer protests out of fear of the prime minister – Turkey leads the world in jailed journalists — have been breathless on this story.

Over the past weekend, two papers published a copy of the prosecutor’s summons for Erdogan’s own son, Bilal, on suspicion of “forming a criminal gang.”

Erdogan says his primary tormentors are aligned with a former supporter, Fethullah Gulen, the Turkish leader of a formidable, moderate Islamic movement who lives in Pennsylvania. If the allegation is true, count it as yet another achievement of an AKP teetering under the weight of its success:

The fault line in Turkish public life now runs between two publicly religious politicians (both of them followers of  Islam’s mystical and tolerant Sufi strains). If the focus stays on facts — with the media and judiciary showing their work — the scandal might well leave Turks with what they’ve never quite had: a democracy in more than name.

Read more: Turkey Corruption Scandal Threatens Erdogan, But May Boost Democracy | TIME.com

Turkey: pro-Islamist Erdogan government rattled by corruption charges and arrests

Turkey's Erdogan's pro-Islamist Government is being rattled by corruption involving even the son of the PM.

In a late-night news conference after an unscheduled meeting with President Abdullah Gul, Mr. Erdogan fired a fourth minister and announced a broad new cabinet lineup. He ignored the earlier parting shot from Mr. Bayraktar: "To soothe the nation, I believe that the prime minister should resign, too."

The unusual upheaval in the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, underscores mounting challenges facing Mr. Erdogan ahead of a lengthy election cycle that starts in March.

Though Mr. Erdogan and his Islamist-leaning party often have clashed with traditionally secular institutions such as the military, the latest trouble appears to reflect a power struggle inside the AKP itself, rather than a fight over the country's orientation.

But Mr. Erdogan has been on the defensive since Dec. 17, when prosecutors unveiled a wide-ranging corruption investigation targeting dozens of his allies in politics and business. Prosecutors have said they plan to charge at least 24 suspects still being detained on accusations of bribery, money laundering, gold smuggling and other alleged misdeeds.

The AKP dominates Turkish politics, with public support holding steady at 50% as of October. But the prime minister's supporters seem to have fallen out with a faction loyal to a former ally, Fethullah Gulen, whose millions of followers helped elect Mr. Erdogan three times.

The Turkish cleric who has a "protected status by the US" lives in Pennsylvania, but his influence is widely believed to extend into the rank-and-file in Turkey's police and judiciary.

The government's response to the corruption probe has escalated tensions.

Before quitting as interior minister, Mr. Guler had purged about 100 security chiefs from top posts in the police department, accusing them of having failed to notify superiors about the probe. Mr. Erdogan also pushed through a measure that bars prosecutors from conducting investigations without informing their superiors.

The moves drew a rebuke from Mr. Gulen, the cleric in Pennsylvania, who lashed out in his speech posted online at "those who don't see the thief but go after those trying to catch the thief."

On the corruption scale Turkey scores very poorly. Perhaps the most widely used measure of comparative levels of corruption across different countries- Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2013 version of the index, Turkey ranked the 55th out of 177 and is almost halfway between Sweden (tied for 3rd) and Moldova (tied for 102nd).

With Turkey’s economic growth having in the past few years (although perhaps ticking up in 2013), this suggests that Erdogan’s position could turn out to be quite precarious compared to a PM in a low corruption Nordic country, and he probably should have good reasons to be concerned.

EU-Digest

Islam: Even though Islam and Democracy are secret enemies there is hope for change from within - by RM

Tariq Ramadan

Whatever" the West" wants to believe, the complexities of Islam in the modern world and the currents of fanaticism and radicalism cannot be regulated by Western-style democracy or military intervention.

Change can only come from within.

Alon -Ben Meir wrote in the American Thnker: "Islam is the most recent of the Abrahamic religions to emerge on the world stage. Monotheism in general, and specifically as it developed in the Dark and Middle Ages, in principle reflects extremely authoritarian regimes.

Theologically, it posits a cosmic or heavenly hierarchy with absolute authority in God, angels in go-between positions, and a fallen humanity in need of salvation at the base of the pyramidal power structure.

It is no surprise then that in the centuries wherein the Catholic Church was at its zenith of influence in the West, political power was held by kings, popes, emperors, and powerful nepotistic and despotic elite with huge economic chasms between the people and their rulers.

Obviously, all these structures were not compatible with democracy.

Christianity and Judaism, being monotheistic, are no less inheritors of this stratified and centralized power paradigm, but unlike Islam these religions were effectively secularized and toned down during the century of the European Enlightenment.

Thinkers like Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Kant, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, and Hegel paved the way for Marx, Schopenhauer, Buber, and Sartre to challenge conventional approaches to religious ideologies and political formations.

Traditional monotheism, with its highly categorized view of man and God, may not in itself be wholly compatible with democracy, but modern Western monotheism gradually molded itself to new ways of thinking during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and was certainly forced to do so amid rapid scientific and technological advances."

If we look at the turmoil in the Middle East today we see nothing, or any country in the area that seems to offer any hope which will make the area change for the better when it comes to Democracy or equal opportunities for all its citizens.

Some people claim that the development of democracy in the Islamic world eventually came to a halt following the Sunni-Shia split. But was there ever any democracy to speak of ?

Even  Erdogan's Turkey, which was on the right track when the followers of Ataturk known as Kemalists where in control, is now sliding back into "re-introduced undemocratic Muslim traditions", inspired by Fethullah Gulen a Turkish Cleric who directs a world-wide network from a US sanctified base in Pennsylvania.

The question that obviously arises is, where is the Muslim equivalent of  the Christian  Martin Luther who can steer Islam onto a more modern and democratic course without compromising the basics principles of the religion ? A name which keeps on surfacing when this question is brought up is Tariq Ramadan

Tariq Ramadan  might not a household name in the US, but the Swiss professor is probably one of the most important and knowledgeable intellectuals in the world when it comes to Islam.

Ramadan’s thinking, his methods and his personal history are all connected to the same question: Islam’s encounter with the modern world. Can the youngest of the world’s three great monotheisms co-exist harmoniously with the Western world and its Enlightenment legacy? Or is it fated to be reactionary, closed off from the world, an excuse for terrorism and failure?

Ramadan’s theological inquiries cut to the heart of the motivations of the Sept. 11 terrorists, of the apocalyptic claims of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian mullahs. Above all, however, they are concerned with that disputed terrain where Islamic tradition collides with modernity.

Ramadan has the credentials and credibility to confront Islam’s modern identity on its own terms. Many Muslim scholars recognize that no one is more orthodox in his methods and sources, or more innovative in his conclusions.

He is genuinely radical ub the good sense of the word, rather than reactionary. Quiet, thoughtful and deeply religious, he always closes his e-mails with: “May the Light protect you and go with you and all the people you love.” 

Indeed,  there is hope for Islam around the world, but it won't be coming from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey. or the U.S.A.

EU-Digest

Turkey: "why Europe should be cautious to accepting Turkey into the EU at this point in time"

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan rejected calls by a minister and businessmen to withdraw from the EU customs union negotiated in 1996, which they say crimps Turkey's export competitiveness.

"It's not that easy to say we're angry, and we're out…He who rises in fury reaps damage from his fall. We always have to think strategically," said Mr. Babacan, who also oversees Turkey's economic policy.

The intervention comes after an announcement last week that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan plans to visit Brussels for the first time in three years. That news followed France's move in February to lift a block on Ankara's membership negotiations after years of deadlock, effectively relaunching the EU's strained relationship with Turkey.

To be sure, officials in Brussels and Ankara remain concerned that more than seven years after Turkey's accession talks formally began and with most of the negotiation issues still paralyzed, there may be little time to breathe life into the process. The EU is deeply divided over whether eventually to admit Turkey as a full member. The bloc's attractions for Ankara, meanwhile, have also diminished as a result of the so-called euro-zone crisis.

But one should be honest about it. In reality Europe should continue to be concerned based not only on what the Turkish Government is saying, but on what is really going on Turkey.

It is easy to say that those are internal matters, but when you want to become part of the EU there must not be any hidden agendas.

In Turkey today there are more journalists detained without charge than anywhere else in the world. Many have been detained for years without knowing why. Turkey has recently made itself known for imprisoning journalists and opposition members to such an extent that the country now stands first among countries with state censorship. Turkey, a candidate for EU membership, has even passed dictatorships like China and Iran in the number of imprisoned journalists.

When Turkey's President Abdullah Gül visited to Sweden last March, he spoke on several occasions about the success Turkey has had on the democratization process affecting the country.

Reality is usually boring but sometimes certainly more important. During the Turkish press conference on the occasion of President Abdullah Gül,  two journalists, Murat Kuseyri and Dikran Ego experienced in the heart of Liberal and Democratic Stockholm what Turkish "democracy" and "censorship" really means in practice.

Both journalists were denied entry to a  press conference at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm.where journalists were given the opportunity to direct questions to President Abdullah Gül. The reason for the rejection of the two journalist by the Turkish Press officer that was given was that one of the journalists represented an Assyrian TV channel who represent a minority in Turkey and the other a "libera"l newspaper Evrensel, which the Press officer classified classified as part of the opposition.

Meanwhile in Turkey retired General Ilker Basbug, the highest-ranked defendant in one of Turkey's two coup-plot trials, is among 275 people on trial over charges that they formed a terrorist organization called Ergenekon to spur unrest and prepare the ground for the military to force the government from power.

The Ergenekon trial has gone from enjoying broad-based support in Turkey to now becoming a highly controversial focus of protests as well as a cause of deep splits in the conservative coalition that has helped Mr. Erdogan cement his power over the past decade.

The prosecution's heavy-handed treatment of the defendants—in terms of requested sentences and imprisonment during the trial—is a warning to the prime minister not to sideline old allies, analysts say, as he is taking historic steps to end a three-decade Kurdish insurgency, while also pushing for a constitutional reform that would restructure the state under a strong presidency Mr. Erdogan could occupy until 2024.

Mr. Erdogan is banking on a successful resolution of Turkey's so-called Kurdish issue to also gain enough support for his constitutional reform and strengthening of the presidency, analysts say.

Kurds make up about 20% of Turkey's 75 million citizens.

Mr. Basbug, the former chief of Turkey's military who has been imprison since January 2012 under the Ergenkon case, said the mere selection of witnesses illustrates that the trial is a farce.

"On the one hand, there's the accusation that the 26th chief of General Staff and one-time general in Turkey's armed forces 'formed and operated a terrorist organization,' on the other hand, there's the testimony of a witness, a terrorist with bloodstained hands who is an enemy of the Republic of Turkey and the defendants, who is being heard in a Turkish court," Mr. Basbug had said. "Let the great people of Turkey decide."

To make matters worse, with the military apparently sidelined, analysts say ties are fraying between Mr. Erdogan and Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam based in the U.S. and leader of a movement widely believed to dominate Turkey's prosecutorial authorities.

Mr. Gulen's followers, comprising Turkey's most powerful religious movement, may also not let the premier act alone in dealing with the Kurdish issue and possibly will want to partake in the process, according to analysts.

All by all, and in all sincerity, Turkey's democratic and political environment can presently not be described as one in which the EU can have too much confidence.

EU-Digest