Islamist coup in Turkey

Submitted by Petros Houhoulis (Greece), Jul 22, 2016 at 04:23

A few years back, Egypt was on turmoil. The Egyptians were protesting police abuse during "National Police day" at 25 January 2011. Nevertheless, the real uprising took place just a few days later, at 28 January 2011, a day later to be known as "Friday of Anger". Why did it take three whole days for the Egyptians to get angry? Well, they had to wait for Friday...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Egyptian_revolution_of_2011#28_Jan uary.E2.80.94Friday_of_Anger

28 January—Friday of Anger

Tens of thousands filled the streets across Egypt on Friday, 28 January,[26] called by some the "Friday of Anger"(Arabic: جمعةالغضب‎‎ ǧumʿatal-ġaḍab Egyptian Arabic: [ˈɡomʕetelˈɣɑdɑb])[27] and by others as the "Dayof Rage".[28][29] Shortly before 1:00 am, hours ahead of the protests, the Egyptian government shut down Internet services,[30][31][32] although some people communicated using a text-to-speech telephone service set up by Google and Twitter.[33] Text messaging and mobile phone services also appeared to be blocked.[34] According to Vodafone,all mobile operators in Egypt were instructed to suspend services in selected areas. The authorities had prior legislative approval to issue such an order.[35]
Shortly after Jumu'ah (Friday prayers), tens of thousands of Egyptians assembled to protest; within hours the number rose to hundreds of thousands. ElBaradei arrived from Giza,where he had been leading protests, to Cairo.[36][37]Ynetnews and CNN stated that ElBaradei was placed under arrest,[38][39]while AlJazeera English said that ElBaradei was unaware of his would-be house arrest.[40] ElBaradei's detention prompted the U.S. to review its $1.5 billion aid package for Egypt; he was later released.[41]Meanwhile,the Muslim Brotherhood said that twenty members of the banned group had been detained overnight,including Essamel-Erian, its main spokesman, and Mohamed Morsi, one of its leaders.[30]

Another country, another rebellion on another...Friday!

http://www.npr.org/2012/03/16/148719850/revisiting-the-spark-that-kindled-the-syrian-uprising

Damascus Protest By the time he first went to jail, back in February 2011, young Syrian activists were already online, trying to organize some kind of uprising like those in Tunisia and Egypt. They eventually chose March 15 as their start date. Dozens of people turned out for demonstrations in Syria's capital, Damascus.
Protesters shouted one simple word: "Freedom." Many of them were later arrested. In the end, little came of the March 15 protests. The next day, back in Daraa, relatives of the detained graffiti writers like the 19-year-old we met went to the head of the security forces.
"Forget your children," they say he told them. "Just make more children. And if you don't know how to make more, I'll send someone to show you."
Ibrahim Abazid heard the story from his relatives. He says at first they didn't know what to do. The next day was a Friday.
"We went to the mosque and it happened just like this," Abazid says."Nobody — nobody planned it."
A few guys started shouting "Allahu akbar" —"God is great" — then everybody joined in. Next thing they knew, they met up with a group of protesters from another mosque and started marching toward the governor's house. Officials told them to go home. Then the shooting started.
"What's happened? Blood, shouting, crying," Abazid recalls. "It's the first time it's happened in Syria. This is the first time for me,[to] see the live shooting."
Two people who were shot in the chest fell to the ground. Abazid and his friends took them away in cars. A third person who was shot that day later died.

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2060788,00.html

(Isa revolution stirring in Syria?) Assad responded immediately, sending a high-ranking delegation to deliver his condolences to the families of the dead. The governor was cashiered, and the 15 kids released. But according to at least two dissident websites, protesters have given the Syrian government until the morning of March 25 to meet a list of demands that were relayed to the President by his delegation. If the demands are not met, they threaten, March 25 will become the "Friday of the Martyrs"not just in Dara'a and its province, Hauran, which shares a border with Jordan, but throughout the country.

I think we have established a pattern here, all insurrections in majority Muslim states begin on Fridays, because this is the day when all devout Muslims go to the mosques. But there is something else as well:

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-bureaucrats-idUSKCN0ZY1LM

Turkey suspends leave for over 3 million civil servants: government order

Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has suspended the annual leave of more than three million civil servants nationwide until further notice,according to a government order published on Monday.
The order, published in Turkey's Official Gazette, comes amid a wide-ranging government purge of the civil service, judiciary, police and armed forces following an abortive coup attempt by a faction of the army on Friday evening.
Civil servants already on leave will return to their posts as soon as possible, the order said.

I wonder whether he has cancelled the leave of military officers as well — maybe that was the main reason, to figure out who were legitimate leavers and who were conspirators — but one has to wonder, didn't the putchists themselves realize that a coup at a time when many officers are on leave has even more chances of success than usual?

Assuming of course that all of those geniuses who planned the coup didn't realize what happens with Muslims on Friday...

...Assuming that those who planned the coup were military officers in the first place.

But it's all smoke and mirrors. None of these things happened at all,ever, because those who actually planned and executed the coup are in the circle of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and more specifically of Hakan Fidan. They chose a Friday afternoon in the midst of summer, instead of a day within Ramadan when most Muslims are way too hungry to run around the streets in order stop a coup.

The real question we have to answer right now is "why?", and trust me, this coup makes sense only if Erdogan wanted Allah to send him a coup from heaven, which incidentally:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-17/coup-was-a-gift-from-god-says-erdogan-who-plans-a-new-turkey

Coup Was 'Gift From God' for Erdogan Planning a New Turkey

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised "a new Turkey" after Friday's failed coup. Its shape had already been emerging but the amateurish takeover attempt, which Erdogan called "a gift from God,"gives him additional tools to realize it.

Let's see now how the whole story unfolded, starting from the elections which took place one year ago and proved a considerable setback for the Sultan, albeit only a temporary one. I shall not bother to cite sources anymore, since the events are well documented and anybody can find them on the internet.

The opinion polls were giving to the Kurds and Leftists of HDP less than 10% of the votes, something that should have kept them out of parliament, which would result to a 3 party parliament with Erdogan reigning supreme. He was hoping to muster enough votes to change the constitution in order to turn himself "Calife a laplace du Calife" as per the Iznogoud comic series, and as everybody who has seen the Iznogoud comics, there is always someone or something who throws a monkey wrench in the works, preventing the grand visir Iznogoud from materializing his ambitions. In that case,the Kurds did manage to turn to the electoral booths and vote for HDP and bring them to parliament, and even worse for him, the Turks were getting angry at the presence of Syrian refugees all over their country, pushing many of them to vote for CHP and MHP as well, and the election result turned out to be a Turkey into chaos as nobody could muster a parliamentary majority to rule the country. Nevertheless, Erdogan begun a frantic effort to eliminate his political opponents by mustering all possible people and resources to his plan. He got enough results to win a second round of parliamentary elections and form a government of his own within a few months, but the actions he undertook were way too costly for Turkey, even in the short term, and the successive political blunders resulted to a coup nearly a year after the elections of August 2015.

The first political opponent which Erdogan sought to destroy was, of course, the HDP. The Turkish government resorted to nothing less than a civil war and the persecution of every member of HDP they could their hands on,with the accusation of being PKK terrorists, as well as the destruction of HDP party offices throughout Turkey. Those deemed dangerous enough were murdered in open daylight by the "deep state", while Erdogan chose to attack specifically those settlements where the HDP vote was very pronounced. The Kurds were scared enough to drop there support to the HDP, while many Turkish Leftist supporters of the party were pushed away by accusations that the Kurds had instigated a rebellion against the Turkish state, something that doesn't make sense while the Kurds were able to win political victories without the need to resort to violence. Nevertheless,the party did manage to survive above the 10% threshold in the November 2015 elections.

The second political opponent which was pressed really hard were the fascist Grey Wolves of MHP. This political dinosaur which should have been extinct long ago and proved to be the menace of Turkish politics have been the arch rivals of the Kurdish minority, the Leftists, every real or imaginary enemy of Turkey since its' conception. They have a legacy of murdering "enemies of the state", at every possible occasion, including thousands of Turkish citizens, and the occasional Azeri, Greek-Cypriot or even Russian — and went as far as attacking South Koreans (by mistaking them as Chinese) the Dutch consulate (by confusing it with the Russian consulate) and Americans in Turkey, always under the spiritual guidance and protection of the Turkish state.Nevertheless, when Erdogan needed their votes in order to establish a government, they opposed him, despite their past support for him during the 2007 presidential elections and the lift on the headscarf ban.Unfortunately for them, the only other alternative for a viable government would be a grand coalition of CHP, MHP and HDP with Davutoglu (actually Erdogan) and the AKP in opposition, but they ruled out any sort of coalition with their Kurdish and Leftist archenemies. Yet they still sabotaged the candidacy of Deniz Baykal (CHP) for parliament speaker. Consequently, the public punished them for refusing to support any Turkish government as well as their obstructionist attitude towards all other parties,while the Islamist control press pummeled them relentlessly for their refusal to cooperate with Erdogan in order to destroy the "Kurdish menace" together. MHP took the worst losses in the November 2015 elections, but they also managed to stand above the 10% threshold for entering parliament. They were lucky to escape any physical violence against them at that point, but their luck has just run out.

Erdogan was not in position to attack the Kemalists of CHP in any meaningful way, thus the Kemalist CHP of Kemal Kilicdaroglu fared marginally better during the November 2015 elections.
Davutoglu finally managed to become prime minister again, while the Turkish government intensified its' attack upon the Kurds by openly bombarding entire cities in the Kurdish regions of Turkey. The regime adopted an even more hardline approach culminating in the downing of a Russian jet, while the army received a free hand at dealing with the Kurds. Nevertheless,those acting upon these orders were not so much AKP members and sympathizers, but MHP and at a lesser degree CHP members and presumably voters. Take Alparslan Celik for example, the man accused of killing the Russian pilot Oleg Anatolyevich Peshkov who was still parachuting is a member of the Grey Wolves, and thus an MHP supporter. This wooing of the fascists had some success: The leader of the MHP Devlet Bahceli keeps close to the AKP and president Erdogan, while the other prominent members of his party want him overthrown from his position. Not long ago the Turkish police thwarted a gathering of those dissidents who were planning a formal party congress in order to depose Bahceli because the Sultan is aware that the MHP with a new leader could increase its' popularity, while the sons of the founder of MHP, Alparslan Turkes, are alternating each other as members of parliament for the AKP, the eldest one, Yildirim Tugrul Turkes went as far as deputy prime minister of Turkey!!!

Unfortunately for Erdogan, all of that meddling — along with his previous sins — might have returned him to power, but brought an already destabilized Turkey to the bring of collapse. The occasional terrorist attacks intensified in both frequency and severity, since Erdogan was forced to turn his back on ISIS. While the Turkish establishment was alarmed at the gains of the Kurdish minority in Syria, they did their best to support the Kurds' enemies, even if that support brought Turkey at odds with east and west alike. In fact Turkey did never claim to be supporting ISIS, it was merely fooling the United States to believe that all of those anti-Assad forces trained in Turkish soil were not Islamic terrorists... Until they crossed the border and either surrendered their weapons or joined ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria. When General Lloyd Austin admitted that the dozens millions which the US government had spent at training troops against ISIS resulted to"four or five" soldiers still fighting, Obama was left of no other option but to divert all of his efforts to supporting Kurdish or Kurdish controlled military forces, drawing the ire of Turkey in the process. A barrage of negative stories about Turkeys'collaboration with ISIS and al Nusra filled the western media, and Erdogan was forced to accept the outcome, waiting for an opportunity to establish another enemy. Not much later, a Russian jet Su-24 crossed Turkish airspace for 17 seconds, Erdogan ordered it shot down, and the rest is history.

That proved to be a fatal mistake, because the west was in no mood to support Turkeys' shenanigans. Everybody was quite aware by now that Erdogan was creating incidents in order to justify his actions.Everybody heard the plot to attack the tomb of Suleiman Shah in Syria as a pretext to invade Syria, everybody suspected the claims of Seymour Myron Hersh that Erdogan provided his Islamist allies in Syria with sarin chemical gas to be true, everybody saw that Erdogan was desperately trying to draw the west to a war with Rusia over Syria. Erdogan was warned in no uncertain terms that NATO was not to follow any of his military adventures in Syria, while Russia imposed a flurry of sanctions to Turkish products, as well as blocking the flow of Russian tourists to Turkey. Nevertheless, Putin, who had won a contract to built a nuclear plant in Akkuyu, didn't close the door to Turkey, but left it half open in case the sultan repented for his crimes. It took 6 months for Erdogan to return back to reality and grab that offer, but not before ISIS and the TAK took turns at wrecking the Turkish state with terrorist incidents, while the Kurds of PKK finally decided to begin another rebellion in the south east and showed gratitude to the Russians for arming them in the process.

Meanwhile the Turkish economy was taking a turn for the worst since 2015, and 2016 had ominous signs written all over it. While the Turkish economy kept "improving", the increase in GDP was based upon internal consumption, public spending, and was kept artificially inflated by a steady depreciation of the Turkish lira. The actual GDP/capita fell under $10.000 for the first time in many years. The Turkish citizens could not be fooled forever and the collapse in the tourism sector resulted to many Turkish families becoming impoverished. Erdogan had to do something, and he had to do it quickly. That something should have reduced the terrorist threat significantly and improved the economic condition of many Turks, particularly of his voters, or potential voters. Since the terrorist threat was diversified, he had to tackle each terrorist group in a different way.

The Islamists of ISIS could not possibly be tamed in any way. The problem of colluding with extremists, as many people have realized before Erdogan, is that they don't succumb to reason or compromise. They shall keep chasing windmills to the very end of their existence. The only way to minimize their impact would be to increase policing everywhere, turning Turkey into a police state. Not that surveillance of terrorist threats have borne fruit anywhere else in the globe, but Turkey should at least reduce its' impact, because Turkey has been targeted by Islamists as frequently as France, if not even more.

The Kurds of PKK and TAK did not attack tourists, but the Turkish military, and occasionally some Islamic shrine. Any place where the Turkish military had presence was a potential terrorist target. The military should either guard itself or vanish from plain sight. Needless to say that the military failed to prevent terrorist attacks against its' assets, and thus endangered civilians who happened to stroll around military vehicles. Therefore the remaining option was to hide from plain sight, but that was not the worst problem with the military.

Ever since Erdogan decided to turn his back on the peace process with the PKK and follow MHP's lead towards the destruction of the Kurds, the military took an increased role and increased casualties in combat. Naturally they demanded more for their efforts, but they could not possibly be awarded anything more than they already have for two reasons: The first is that the result of their efforts didn't help the Turkish economy one bit, quite the opposite. While the Turkish army was ravaging the Kurdish settlements, it was also causing great devastation to the resources of the Turkish state itself. Even worse,the Kurds are increasingly becoming more radicalized, proving once more that the best way to deal with insurgents is to bribe them out of conflict, not to push more and more civilians to join their ranks. Therefore nothing good was to come out of the war with the Kurds either for Turkey or for Erdogan. Besides, the Turkish army could hardly complain for a lack of resources. It is the second largest army in NATO, and spends billions for armaments alone every year,armaments which Erdogan is unable to use for any purpose, since NATO refuses to support his military adventures in Syria and elsewhere. It shouldn't be to anybodys' surprise that Erdogan convinced the top brass to divert some of their funds for toys for more meaningful purposes, especially the war that Turkey was actually fighting with the Kurds, and those cuts were rather insignificant. Nevertheless, not all of the Turkish military was particularly pleased with the situation. Many generations of Turkish generals were grown with the idea of being the guardians of the Turkish state both within and abroad — notably Cyprus. They considered themselves as people who were paying a high price for their country, and demanded the appropriate rewards. In reality they spent more time overthrowing Islamist — and occasionally Leftist — governments and have stopped sacrificing anything except when fighting Kurds and Leftists since long ago, and those actions would be better handled by whom other? Well, the police...

Erdogan had not picked a fight with the Turkish military for the first time.He had already persecuted them during the "Ergenekon" and"Sledgehammer" trials, supposedly with the collaboration of the"Gulenist movement", because they allegedly planned to "start a war with Greece" in order to "make a coup against the Turkish government" among other accusations. Unfortunately, when the"Gulenists" begun an investigation into the Turkish government and Erdogan himself for corruption, he had to back down, let the harmless generals loose and go after the judiciary which proved a more worthy enemy of his government. If Erdogan went back to accusing the generals or anyone of attempting a coup against him, he would be ridiculed as incompetent since he had dropped similar charges not long ago, and he just couldn't push for much more budget reduction in the military without to risk a real coup.

Meanwhile his voters were in no great mood either. The Syrians continued to multiply and Turkey signed an agreement to keep them from reaching Europe, pushing many fascists and even Islamists with nationalist leanings to claim that the Turks were at risk from Turkey itself, particularly Erdogan. Even though the Kurds suffered heavy losses, their demographic trends pointed out that they would become the majority in Turkey within two generations, even before the arrival of the Syrians. Erdogan who would do anything to increase his voting base decided to grant them citizenship after 5 years of residence in Turkey. Some Turks were so wildly delusional of the situation, they hoped that Turkish minorities in Greece and Cyprus should be repatriated in order to tilt the balance in favor of the Turkish ethnos in Turkey, and in the midst of all this, the Turkish military demanded that they would not face persecution for their butchering of the Kurds.

That was an easy demand for Erdogan, or at least so it seemed. He promised the troops they would not be prosecuted unless if the local authorities approved so, and the officers only by his personal approval. Few realized the implications of that action though. Turkey is a member of the European Court of Human Rights, and that court accepts only those cases where the national courts' verdicts are disputed, even more if there is no legal case allowed to exist in the first place. Turkey has been convicted not quite a few times in the past because of its' horrendous track of human rights, and the ECHR didn't hesitate to remind Turkey of its' obligations soon after Erdogan granted the Turkish troops their wish: A final decision of the court at May 30, 2016, forced the Turkish state to pay 14,300,000 Euros in damages to Mrs Tsiropoulou for a single property a certain Mrs. Giannopoulou owned when the Turkish troops invaded Cyprus at 1974 and refused to compensate her. Try to imagine now dozens of thousands of Kurds who have lost their property when Erdogan decided to confiscate their titles when he declared his reconstruction project for the ruins of what was once Sur, a historic district at the center of Diyarbakir, just a few months after UNESCO declared the fortifications of Sur and the 8,000 years old Hevsel Gardens as a world heritage site, trying to claim compensation at the ECHR. Try imagining the relatives of Tahir Elci, the head of the Diyarbakir bar association who was shot and killed when he toured historical buildings and complained about their destruction by the actions of the Turkish army, only to be shot by the end of his press conference,demanding compensation by the Turkish state for his murder. Imagine each of those dozens of thousands being awarded a few million Euros by the ECHR...

Worst of all, imagine a Turkey where tourism is no more because the government failed to stop terrorism and the war with the Kurds. What merit would Davutoglus' plan to "Rebuild Sur so that it's like Toledo..." if nobody would ever think of going to visit in the midst of a war zone and spend their precious dollar? Thus when Erdogan promised Putin to change policy in order to receive those precious Russian tourists back, he really meant it. Yesterday he prosecuted as members of the recent coup those pilots who shot the Russian jet, who realized just now that they took the decision to shoot at Su-24 on their own, and not because of Erdogans' orders. This is not very certain though, because they might have taken the order to shoot the Su-24 by a senile man in Pennsylvania. Another conspirator seems to be Adem Huduti, the Kossovar born Bosniak who commanded the second army responsible for "the defense of Turkey from threats by Iran, Iraq and Syria" i.e. the man responsible for butchering the Kurds. Tomorrow, the rest of his hapless troops who participated in the destruction of Diyarbakir and many other Kurdish settlements might come to realize they did also participate in the coup, without to be aware of any such thing! One thing is certain though, "...Those who turned their guns on civilians are worst than the PKK", as prime minister Binali Yildirim said. What he meant is that the war between the Turkish armed forces and the PKK is over, because the Turkish armed forces are in the process of being partially liquidated.

Binali Yildirim also said — during the early hours of the coup — that he had given the order to shoot down the airplanes controlled by the rebels. Since no airplanes were ever controlled by the fictional rebels nothing really happened, but then why would anyone pay attention to Yildirim who is nothing more than a stooge filling into the shoes of the previous stooge, Ahmet Davutoglu? Obviously nobody told the poor fella that the whole coup was a ruse. Nevertheless, as president Erdogan suggested "The military needs reforms" and Binali Yildirim shall be more than happy to eliminate the construction of tanks and airplanes from the budget in order to reallocate them, let's say towards the construction of homes for refugee Syrians or Kurds whose homes have been destroyed courtesy of the Turkish army. Hopefully this way the Kurds shall be convinced not to pursue their claims towards the ECHR...

What if they do though, and Turkey gets indeed flooded by thousands of lawsuits claiming a few millions each? Well, Erdogan has already made his plans for ejecting from the European institutions, although he is more certainly bluffing for the moment. First of all he claimed that he would re-instate the death penalty "if the people requested such a thing" which would inevitably destroy Turkeys' path towards the European Union, and if "hypocritical Europe" is unwilling to let Turkey in, why should Turkey continue with the other European institutions, like the ECHR, and doesn't simply eject like it did with Eurovision — which was replaced by "Turkovision" — and follow its' own path? Such an option shall be painful since most of the Turks who are seeing the Middle East being engulfed in flames once again are gradually warming up once more to the prospect of joining the European Union, although the "support" Turkey enjoyed in some European circles was revealed to be a hoax when the most ardent supporters of the entry of Turkey into the European Union distanced themselves from such claims violently — Cameron:"Turkey shall not enter the EU before 3000" — and are planning to jump out of the European ship altogether quite soon. Thus Erdogan might not have a choice at all even if he tried his best — and he won't — and thus he is merely warming up to the idea of a heroic exodus from the European path. He shouldn't push too far though,

Either way, inside or outside the European Union, Turkey shall not cease having problems with its' even worse neighbors in the future,particularly the problems Turkey itself has created. Since 1975 the Turkish dam projects in the south east have made the Turkish Kurds richer, but Syria lost 40% and Iraq 80% of their water resources. This has exacerbated the situation in Iraq and resulted to a civil war in Syria, which the Turks managed to complicate even further when they received an offer of "$600 billions" of investments from Saudi Arabia, as a gift for Turkeys' support towards the toppling of Bashar al-Assad. Thus they blocked completely the flow of water to the Euphrates around April 2011 and helped remove more than 1,000 industries from Aleppo alone and into Turkey, "because they were built with Qatari money"according to some ridiculous claims. The Kurds go even further by accusing Erdogan of collaborating with ISIS in order to destroy the Yazidis and turn the remaining Kurds to Islam. The lack of water in Syria in particular is perhaps the only issue which all fighting factions in Syria agree upon, if you take into account that even an ISIS grunt threatened to "invade Turkey and liberate it, and then release the water from the dams" into Syria, according to a VICE documentary. In any case, there is little chance that the Syrian rebels shall return to Syria if they are unable to cultivate their soil due to a lack of water, and there is little chance of the Turks and Kurds to really appreciate their presence in Turkey, especially if Erdogan plans to resettle them on top of Sur and other formerly Kurdish majority areas. This has become so unpopular that CHP, HDP and MHP managed to agree that a referendum should be held on the question whether the Syrian refugees should be granted Turkish citizenship. That's why Turkey might actually chance course and become more generous with Mesopotamia —a.k.a."The land between rivers", Tigres and Euphrates, both having their springs in Kurdish populated regions of Turkey. As a matter of fact, since both the Christian and Muslim faiths have clauses on their claims for the apocalypse which refer to the waters of the Euphrates "going dry" shortly before the apocalyptic events, and the Muslim version in particular urges the Muslims "not to touch the gold which shall be revealed when Euphrates goes dry", the Sultan might have been more cautious before he meddled with Syria.Nevertheless,he might still utilize Islamic scripture in order to disentangle himself from the Syrian debacle, especially since the collapse on the value of oil has rendered Saudi Arabia unable to follow on its'promises reducing the amount of the promised investments to a mere $3 billions over the next decade. Erdogan has already managed to secure about ten times that amount from the Gulf states during the first decade of his rule, so you can't really say he had a bad run.

Europe itself is growing restless with the massive amount of refugees and migrants reaching its' shores and if resentment so far has been directed towards the European Union, the real obligation stems from the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" as adopted by the United Nations after WWII and is being upheld and enforced by no other than the ECHR in Europe. Thus Erdogan might actually get a respite from other Europeans if he decides to ignore or clash with the ECHR. It is not a coincidence that the most anti-immigration European parties like UKIP, the Conservative Party and the Polish Law and Justice party are together in the same Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists, with Erdogans' Justice and Development Party (AKP) while the Republicans of Donald Trump are"regional partners" in this colorful coalition!!! The only question is how long it's going to take for the others to kick Erdogan and his party from that political club, something which is long overdue. This would be the sign that Europe wants no more relations with Turkey and could possibly coincide with an embargo against Turkey itself for "violation of human rights", although everything shall depend upon Erdogans' willingness to restrict the flow of migrants from Turkey towards Europe. So far he is keeping his side of the deal, although he is making noises about the VISA agreement with the European Union, which he won't get if he amends the counter-terrorism law, because Europe has realized that large swathes of Kemalists, Kurds, Leftists and even Syrian refugees who have just received the Turkish citizenship might rush to take advantage of the free VISAS in order to relocate themselves in Europe. Especially after the recent coup. In any case, Erdogan shall keep blackmailing the Europeans not to undermine his authority in Turkey unless they wish for chaos in their doorstep. How far he is going to pursue that agenda is anybodys' guess, but one thing is for sure: His first meeting with the new foreign minister of the United Kingdom, the man who won the recent contest of Douglas Murray and the Spectator magazine, shall be highly entertaining.

As much funny as Boris Johnson and Jan Bohmermann might want to be, neither of them shall manage to surpass the clowns who couldn't realize they were involved in a coup against their own Sultan. Soldiers who stopped the flow of traffic from the Asian side of Bosphorus but promptly forgot —or were not instructed —to block the traffic from the European side to the Asian, and on top of that thought that they were participating in a "military exercise". Paratroopers who went to capture Erdogan where he resided in Marmaris, but were told that their target was an "important terrorist". Military aircraft which had Erdogan in their sights but failed to shoot at him, but yes, they did fire upon the Turkish parliament instead, the only "coup" in Turkish history to do so — Hell,even a donkey can figure out that shooting at the empty of politicians parliament building won't help your cause, shooting at those opposing you like police or military forces loyal to the government makes more sense, something that did happen after all. Meanwhile none of the plotters made an effort to proclaim he was leading the coup, nobody showed up in the television screens claiming responsibility about the actions of the military, they just left the anchors of the TV shows to speak for them. Several of the putschists in the Turkish military who were accused by "Gulenists" of participating in the "Ergenekon" and "Sledgehammer" legal cases must have just realized in horror that they too are "Gulenists" this time around. By far though, the most bizarre coincidence was the timing of the plot on a Friday afternoon when the mosques are full of Islamists .Although some reports claim that Hakan Fidan received reports of the coup and "forced the plotters to move the timing forward" that is most likely a fabrication no less elaborate than the planned attack on the Suleiman Shah monument courtesy of no other than... Hakan Fidan! In reality the plot "unfolded as planned" to coincide with the presence of Islamist masses who didn't really have to be summoned by Erdogan to the streets, since they were already there. A significant portion of the Turkish military corps were enjoying their summer vacations without a care in the world since Erdogan had just managed to lull them by offering to them a conditional amnesty against their crimes towards the Kurds, and after a short stint of horror which looked like a James Bond movie where the protagonist always escapes in the last seconds, because it was directed as such by Hakan Fidan himself for Erdogan in order to increase the suspense,and as a result the Sultan shall kick all the annoying public servants who were not loyal and presumably not his voters either — remember that the CHP was created by Ataturk who was a military man, and MHP was created by Alparslan Turkes because he felt that CHP strayed from the path of Kemalism — with loyal stooges from his party who want to gain something after an atrocious year since last summer. Military expenditure which was useless in the first place shall decline in favor of public works and perks, while every opposition group in Turkey shall be looking for the exit, especially if they can get a VISA for a European country. Meanwhile a senile man in the other side of the world who condemned the "coup" as quickly as it unfolded shall be blamed for everything, since it is impossible to openly accuse any political party within Turkey of colluding with the military. I bet that the Turkish authorities shall make their best efforts not to file a serious charge for his extradition, since that would deprive them of a very useful boogeyman for their masses.

Unfortunately for the Sultan, his entire venture has a catch-22: It won't work if the Turkish economy does not improve until the next presidential elections. You see, even if he manages to blackmail a few more MHP politicians to vote for his presidential system, by accusing them of colluding with the military apparatus, since the MHP is the fascist party which tends to support the military more than anybody else, he would still be unable to predict the outcome of the next elections because the electorate shall behave just as the Kurds did a year ago in the August 2015 elections: Pretend not to vote for any other party than AKP. The Kurds were afraid to reveal their true intention because of the chronic persecution against them, and thus they managed to surprise the Sultan in the electoral booth. By the next time around a national or presidential election goes under way, the surprise could end up even greater. The Sultan could of course simply proclaim national elections before the presidential elections, and if he manages to turn the Turkish system into a presidential one, the result of those elections won't matter for much, but the electorate could also call his bluff, vote for AKP in the national elections but not for Erdogan in the presidential elections which shall follow. Or maybe they won't vote for AKP at all and then the Sultan shall have to impose a real coup during the presidential elections in order to steal the vote of the public. Either way I think that we have to clarify to our neighbors on the other side of the Aegean that we shall vehemently condemn all of their coups, real or fabricated, as long as they fail to alert us early enough in order to buy the necessary popcorn and nachos that we should be consuming while observing the comedy show opposite from our shores. What they just did last Friday was totally intolerable and, I must say, not a good sign of friendship. You can't just do this and then expect from us to return to you the military and/or political figures who fled from your country to escape the consequences of the coup. Such an atrocious behavior should not be tolerated again...

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