The new Turkey |
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31-Mar-2019 |
................. Turkish kidnappings go globalYou 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. 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. 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. 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) James Carey is journalist and editor at Geopolitics Alert. He specializes in Middle East and Asian affairs.
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