Middle East 4 ChangeTurkey 2016: Echoes of July 2013, Egypt
Omar Kassam,
Counterpunch.
The London Guardian opinion pages spin the story that after 22 years and 7 successes in popular elections in a rapidly growing and pluralist Turkey, it is Erdoğan who is perpetrating ‘a slow moving coup’, to use a glaring oxymoron. It is as if the brutal military coup of Friday night is the victim. The Blairite leaning newspaper’s reporters tell us that it is Erdoğan, who ‘unleashed a brutal purge… after heading off an attempted (presumably relatively benign) military coup’.
All this reminds us of Blair’s vehement support for the Egyptian coup, which still sees a president freely and fairly elected in 2012, kidnapped only months into his term, still languishing in jail on trumped up charges. Meanwhile, the Egyptian Junta, installed by the US on the world’s highest security decision-making body, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), blocks condemnation of the Turkish coup attempt, citing that the coup was staged by Erdoğan.
The reported facts, as followed in detail in Middle East Eye, suggest an uncanny prescience of the coup amongst Arab Gulf counterrevolutionary forces and their Western allies, although it plainly took Turkish society and its government completely by surprise. The US government seems of late to have faced terrifying lexical challenges in defining military interventions in the political sphere. It called the coup an ‘insurrection’ just in case, and asked American citizens in Turkey to ‘stay indoors’.