Hard lessons of Turkish politics

Corruption still rife two-and-a-half years after Erdogan came to power, despite pledged cleanup

By Burak Bekdil - Kathimerini English Edition

Ayse Adanir, a 35-year-old widow and the mother of four girls, was living on a Turkish government poverty grant of 100 euros a month. Adanir recently appealed to the authorities for the cancellation of her grant because she had found a job and would now earn nearly 200 euros a month. In a written appeal, Adanir requested her government grant be canceled “because there must be jobless people who need the grant more than I do — now that I have a job.”

But Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister and a wealthy man, lives on a fat salary and off handsome bank accounts. Yet his children’s studies in the United States have been financed by a textile magnate. Erdogan came to power in 2002 with a solid pledge to terminate corruption and install ethics in Turkish politics. Two-and-a-half years after Erdogan rose to power, corruption is still endemic, as evinced not only by empirical and judicial evidence, but also by reports from various international institutions, including Transparency International.

Finance Minister Kemal Unakitan was prosecuted for tax fraud until his parliamentary immunity stalled the proceedings against him. Unakitan defends himself that as a board member (of an Islamic bank that is at the center of tax fraud charges), he could not possibly examine every document that came across his desk for signature. Well, one has to think: How does he, as finance minister, examine and sign the bundles of papers that come across his desk everyday?

It is time that Erdogan’s network of political amateurs learned not to put partisan orders and/or favors to close business associates in writing — they leak. Scores of papers ordering state officials to appoint this or that party favorite and signed by local party chiefs have fallen into the public domain in recent years. Letters with statements as if written by China’s Communist Party: “We request the immediate appointment of X to the position of Y. Signed: Q,” head of the local party organization in Z.

The most recent example of Erdogan’s “fight for ethical politics” is Motif Tekstil AS, a textile producer apparently very well-connected to the prime minister or his party establishment. In 2003, the company had piled up around 900,000 euros in unpaid natural gas bills to the government. Its gas supplies were cut off, and legal proceedings were launched for collection of the debt.

In June 2003, an energy official gave orders to the government’s gas supplier, citing an order from the prime minister himself. An official from the gas supplier was so much alerted to the orders that he not only resumed gas supplies to Motif Tekstil AS, but also (and fortunately) gave a written order to that effect, mentioning the first order. The notoriously slow Turkish bureaucracy finished the job in an hour and a quarter — and between the hours of 10 p.m. and 23.15 p.m...

The end of the story is quite funny. Motif Tekstil AS did not pay its original gas debts, racked up another 900,000 euros in unpaid bills, and one day vanished into thin air. Two tales tell of 1.8 million euros in lost public money vs 100 euros per month in savings from the widow’s unwanted grants.

All the same, Erdogan is a lucky prime minister. The main opposition is one of his primary assets. There must be few opposition parties in the world that come to the public’s attention with corruption charges almost as much as the government. If, without the benefit of being in power, a party can be so contaminated, how much more would it be should it be in power?

Deniz Baykal, the social democrat opposition leader, rarely misses an opportunity to advocate stripping lawmakers of their parliamentary immunities when prosecutors charge them with corruption. An MP under legal accusations should voluntarily agree to prosecution, he argues, as long as the subject is a government MP (in fact, one of Erdogan’s MPs, and formerly one of Baykal’s, recently did so when prosecutors said he had defrauded several energy contracts).

Ironically, Baykal’s party treasurer is now facing legal charges of fraud. As his party boss has argued, Mahmut Yildiz, a contractor and an MP, had said that he would step down as Baykal’s party treasurer and give up his immunity if an indictment was brought against him. But when a state prosecutor indicted him of defrauding a government contract by millions of dollars, involving the construction of a dam, both Baykal and his treasurer changed their minds. Presently, the social democrat team argues that the indictment is legally void. How, one wonders, can an indictment be legally void because a politician has deemed it so?

It clearly is a vicious circle. In Turkey those people like the widow stay away from politics because it’s too filthy, and those like Erdogan, his finance minister, Baykal and his treasurer are always in it claiming to be cleansing it of filth. Sadly, the cleansing never comes.