General

How Turkey Uses Kidnapping and Hostage Negotiations As Diplomacy

By James
Carey, Mint Press News, March 21st, 2018

Most U.S.
allies would likely understand that, as a member of NATO, every nation is
subject to the will of the U.S. Yet Erdogan is not your average U.S. ally and,
instead of pleading to deaf ears in Washington, he has decided to take his
purge global and use every method available to secure his power.
Top Photo
| Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, holding an olive branch arrives
to deliver a speech at an event in Ankara, Turkey, Feb. 20, 2018. (Pool Photo
via AP)
ANKARA,
TURKEY — Ever since a failed coup in July of 2016, the increasingly
anti-democratic policies of the Turkish government under the leadership of
President Recep Erdogan have become an embarrassment for the NATO member’s
Western allies. While many people may be aware, at least to some extent, of the
ongoing crackdowns inside of Turkey, few recognize that the government led
purge is quickly expanding beyond the nation’s borders in numerous ways.
Even if
you don’t regularly follow Turkish politics, it’s still likely you’ve
encountered some form of news media covering at least something about Turkey
since 2016. It is also likely that at least some of what you saw, heard, or
read concerned the ongoing social media
crackdowns
, mass arrests
of journalists, and the post-coup
purge
that has resulted in dismissals of 151,967 academics, public
servants, and journalists (as well as 64,998 arrested).
These
purges have sent shockwaves throughout Turkey, crushing nearly all viable
opposition parties and civil-society groups seen as enemies by Erdogan’s
Justice and Development Party (AKP). This has, in turn, caused some obvious
public-relations headaches for NATO (in which Erdogan may be reconsidering
his membership
) and the European Union (which Erdogan has all but
abandoned his bid to
join
) — but nothing that classic empty Western platitudes, apologia,
and excuses can’t sweep under the rug.
While the
crackdowns inside of Turkey usually only warrant weak critiques from
sympathetic media such as Foreign
Policy
or Reuters,
unfortunately for Washington, there are more expansive controversies unfolding
that are bound to put a strain on U.S.-Turkey relations. Even with US support
during
and since the 2016 coup under Obama (despite Erdogan’s
claims that the US was behind it
) and further
concessions by Trump,
Ankara still has an endless list of demands,
grievances, and political targets in the diaspora — most notably the exiled
cleric, alleged coup
mastermind
, and former
Erdogan ally
Fethullah Gulen.
Most U.S.
allies would likely understand that as a member of NATO (even if Turkey has the
second largest military in the alliance), every nation is still subject to the
will of the U.S. Yet Erdogan is not your average U.S. ally and, instead of
pleading to deaf ears in Washington, he has decided to take his purge global
and use every method available to secure his power.
If this
sounds bad, it only gets worse, and even the U.S. is reconsidering
its relationship
with Turkey, as Erdogan turns to increasingly
controversial practices (often involving U.S. nationals) that look a lot like
hostage negotiations and kidnappings.
Hostage
Diplomacy

Aggiungi didascaliaPresident
Donald Trump meets with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at the Palace
Hotel during the United Nations General Assembly, Sept. 21, 2017, in New York.
(AP/Evan Vucci)
Much as
with other brutal states allied with the West, recent history shows that
Washington likely would have provided the necessary cover for Erdogan’s purges,
much as they did for Saudi Arabia’s ‘anti-corruption
chaos. As a NATO member — and home to U.S.
nuclear weapons
— Turkey would likely have had even more of this
kind of political leeway than have other non-NATO U.S. allies.

A dilemma
for Erdogan, however, is that he is now seemingly past the point where the U.S.
and EU can credibly craft excuses for him. There are many factors that
contributed to this state of affairs, but one stands above the rest: time.
This July
will mark two years since the failed coup and, even with Erdogan securing his
rule and consolidating power through a series of
constitutional changes
, the purge goes on. This, in turn, has become
a source of tension between Ankara and the West, as the AKP has begun to run
low on suspected ‘traitors’ and has begun sweeping up employees of U.S.
agencies and even U.S. nationals.
Despite
having pulled a lengthy list of purge
targets
together before the coup even happened, Erdogan has
continued to arrest thousands, now including a variety of Turkish nationals
who work as U.S. diplomatic staff. The real tension, however, has been caused
by Ankara’s arrest and illegal detainment of foreign nationals.
In the
never-ending quest to see Gulen returned to Turkey, Ankara has attempted to use
everyone from terror
suspects
to United
Nations human rights judges
as bargaining chips to secure the exiled
clerics extradition. But, there is one case of an arrested U.S. national that
is probably most embarrassing for Washington: the Christian pastor Andrew Brunson.
Brunson —
a missionary in Turkey for 23 years, who was ordered to leave Turkey in late
2016 — was illegally detained for 63 days by Turkish immigration authorities
and denied access to an attorney. Following this two-month period, between when
he was arrested and when he was slated to be sent back to the United States,
Brunson was brought before another Turkish judge, who took him from immigration
detention and placed him in a Turkish prison on charges of “gathering state
secrets for espionage, attempting to overthrow the Turkish parliament and
government, and to change the constitutional order,” and membership in a
terrorist organization. The information that led to Brunson’s arrest and that
is being used as state’s evidence is primarily derived from a single undisclosed
witness
— one whose testimony seems to be open for interpretation,
as its scope seems to randomly expand to impound everything from proof of
support for Gulen to support of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). As of March
20th, the charges have
officially been filed
to include both of the aforementioned claims.
Brunson faces up to 35 years in prison if convicted.
Arrests
like Brunson’s are fairly run-of-the-mill in Erdogan’s Turkey, but the fact
that Brunson is a citizen of the U.S., and not a dual Turkish, U.S. citizen,
has caused headaches for the U.S. Earlier in 2017, the Trump administration made attempts
to secure the return
of Brunson which they likely hoped Ankara would
quietly ignore (as both countries often try to downplay the
others indiscretions
), what happened instead made the situation even
worse.
Rather
than quietly moving on from the Trump administration’s request, Erdogan went
public with a set of demands for the return of Brunson, essentially making the
pastor a hostage. In September of last year, it was published in the Turkish media
that Erdogan had apparently told the U.S. he would exchange one pastor for
another (Gulen) and that this should “be easy for the U.S..” Erdogan also made the
hostage negotiation seem generous
, as he was willing to trade
Brunson, a man who had already been proven to be a terrorist in Ankara’s
opinion.
The U.S.
hasn’t taken Erdogan up on its offer for Brunson, and both Washington and
European capitals have rebuffed a multitude of other demands by Turkey in the
last year and a half. That’s not enough to deter a man like Erdogan, who has
instead decided that if he can’t have Gulen (for now) he still has a long list
of targets in diaspora and a host of methods to reach them, methods that just
so happen to look a lot like kidnapping.
Turkish
kidnappings go global
   

Until an
open clash in 2013, Fetullah Gülen (left) was the éminence grise behind Recep
Erdo
ğan’s AK Party; Gülen is widely branded in Turkey as
a CIA asset and has been the target of a long-running extradition campaign.
You may
have heard of one Turkish kidnapping plot last year: allegedly cooked up
between
former Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, his
son Michael Flynn Jr, and the Turkish government. The plot was alleged by
former CIA director James Woolsey (and denied by Flynn)
and apparently involved a $15 million
offer from Turkey to illegally kidnap and extradite Gulen from his compound in
Pennsylvania.

While the
existence of the Flynn kidnapping plot remains unproven, other extraditions of
“terror suspects” to Turkey happen regularly at a much lower level. The Western
media may have been excited about a potential scandal involving the Flynn
kidnapping plot, but have remained largely silent on other criminal
extraditions to Turkey taking place around the globe.
Gulen may
be the primary target of Erdogan’s ire, but other kidnappings taking place from
Sudan
to Georgia involve
alleged associates of the cleric.
In the
case of Sudan, authorities in the African nation were aided by Turkish
intelligence in locating Memduh
Cikmaz,
a supposed ‘money man’ for Gulen, and then picking him up in
a joint raid that led to Cikmaz’s extradition to Turkey. Sudan and Turkey
clearly worked out the groundwork for these kinds of raids in their
intelligence agreements, making them technically legal under international law;
but other cases that seem much shakier.
Of the
more legally questionable extraditions is the case of journalist Afgan
Mukhtarli, who disappeared from his home in exile in Tbilisi. The Georgian
authorities were apparently unaware of any operations within the city and had
no idea where Mukhtarli had gone until he mysteriously appeared in
an Azerbaijani courtroom
days later.
Leyla
Mustafayeva, wife of an Azerbaijani journalist Afgan Mukhtarli, who was
abducted in Tbilisi on May 29 attends a rally in Tbilisi, Georgia, May 31,
2017. (AP/Shakh Aivazov)

The
examples of Cikmaz and Mukhtarli show a very stark contrast between technically
legal and very clearly illegal extraditions of Turkish citizens, but Turkey
also uses a third option that often walks a blurry line of legality: INTERPOL’s
“Red Notices.”

INTERPOL,
the global organization that coordinates cross-border law enforcement, describes Red
Notices
as “a request to locate and provisionally arrest an
individual pending extradition. It is issued by the General Secretariat at the
request of a member country or an international tribunal based on a valid
national arrest warrant.” INTERPOL also specifies that Red Notices are “not an
international arrest warrant” and, while “INTERPOL cannot compel any member
country to arrest an individual who is the subject of a Red Notice,” handing
over suspects on these international lists is often seen as a regular part of global diplomacy.
Turkey
may be able to persuade countries like Qatar
and Pakistan
to mass-deport suspected Gulenists but, when it comes to Western countries,
INTERPOL is the preferred channel for Turkish witch hunts. The Red Notices,
along with clever diplomatic pressure, often lead to extraditions of figures
like leftist writer
Dogan Akhanli
, who was extradited from Spain under a Red Notice
despite supposedly being protected by UN charters for the safety of political
asylum seekers.
Turkish-born
German writer Dogan Akhanli followed by his lawyer Ilias Uyar, enters his
lawyer’s office in Madrid, Spain, Aug. 21, 2017. Akhanli was detained in Spain
on a Turkish warrant, and accused Turkey of abusing the international system
used to hunt down fugitives. (AP/Paul White)

However
less cooperation by intelligence agencies in European countries leads to
Turkish intelligence using illegal methods to identify political refugees. One
striking example of this was recently exposed in Germany, where agents of
Ankara infiltrated
the immigration system
— primarily under the guise of translators —
to finger suspected Gulenist and Kurdish allies seeking asylum, to be later
targeting by international bodies to which Turkey is a party.

This
shocking behavior coming from a NATO ally may seem hard to believe until you
remember that Turkey is a forward operating post for Western troops and a key
to U.S. and EU strategy as the “gateway to the Middle East.” Erdogan may no
longer be the hoped-for example of a pro-Western leader who embraces both
democracy and Islamism, but the stakes of Ankara’s alliance with the West
remain high, especially as the war in Syria continues to rage on. That said, it
is still very likely that Turkey and the West’s irreconcilable differences will
bubble over at some point and, when they do, all of these bold moves by Turkey
in pursuit of its global purge could possibly bring an end to a key US
alliance.