This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 002823 
 
SIPDIS 
 
 
E.O. 12958: DECL: 05/14/2014 
TAGS: PREL PGOV PINS ECON EFIN TU
SUBJECT: TURKISH POLITICAL STABILITY: TENSIONS BREAK THE 
SURFACE 
 
 
REF: A. ANKARA 2663 
     ¶B. ANKARA 2600 
     ¶C. ANKARA 2204 
     ¶D. ANKARA 0348 
     ¶E. ANKARA 1842 
 
 
(U) Classified by Ambassador Eric Edelman; reasons: 1.4 (b,d). 
 
 
¶1. (C) Summary: Turkey has entered a period of increased 
political tension as a result of the education reform 
controversy.  PM Erdogan will remain under constant pressure 
from within his AK Party and from the Turkish military. 
Erdogan and AKP are showing strains as even relatively 
"liberal" members of the "secular" Establishment again 
question AKP's agenda.  Erdogan's ability to use political 
capital has decreased and U.S. objectives with Turkey face 
the prospect again of being manipulated in the domestic 
arena.  We will need to avoid being seen either as pursuing a 
"moderate Islamic" vice truly secular Turkey or as giving 
even a yellow light to the military in its domestic 
maneuvering.  Turkey's EU candidacy remains the major 
constraining force in this struggle.  End summary. 
 
 
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NO AGREEMENT EVEN ON REASONABLE SOLUTIONS 
----------------------------------------- 
 
 
¶2. (U) Throwing down the gauntlet to the "secular" Turkish 
Establishment, PM Erdogan has insisted on passing 
education-reform legislation seen by the Establishment as a 
sign of an Islamicizing agenda threatening what the 
establishment defines as the core values of "secular" Turkey 
(refs A,B).  His approach has brought to the surface the 
traditional Establishment's deep underlying distrust of, and 
visceral distaste for, Erdogan and his Anatolia-oriented, 
Islam-influenced AKP.  We expect President Sezer to veto the 
law; if Erdogan insists on passing it again (further 
sharpening the State's animosity) we expect Sezer to work 
with main opposition CHP to take the issue to the 
Constitutional Court. 
 
 
¶3. (C) As refs (A,B) point out, the reform law in question 
tries to address problems of making higher education more 
accessible and relevant and eliminating discrimination 
against high school grads (principally graduates of preacher 
schools) who want to study fields in university different 
from their high school concentrations.  The route pressed by 
AKP could serve to make religious high schools more 
attractive but would likely lead to no improvement of either 
the current uneven quality of religious education or quality 
and availability of higher education. 
 
 
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ERDOGAN AND AK PARTY OFF BALANCE 
-------------------------------- 
 
 
¶4. (C) The AKP leadership refuses to make its intentions and 
goals clear, either to the electorate, to its own 
parliamentary group, or in a coordinated way through 
consistent dialogue with other loci of State power, however 
difficult such a dialogue has proven to be so far.  The 
broadest range of our AKP contacts readily, if passively, 
admits that this failure of public relations is a problem. 
The reasons AKP is pushing this reform now after withdrawing 
it in Oct. 2003 are not clear.   Some speculate it is 
motivated in part by a desire to respond to pent-up 
expectations of Islamist elements of its base after seeing an 
increase in Islamist Saadet Party's vote in the March 2004 
local elections. 
 
 
¶5. (C) Erdogan has cut himself off both from his party and 
from a broad flow of timely, accurate information about 
political developments, the intentions of the TGS and other 
core elements of the State, and economic/financial 
developments; a recent column by "Aksam"'s Ankara bureau 
chief -- "Erdogan's Strategic Isolation" -- has been widely 
read and accepted as on target by key party insiders. 
Erdogan has compounded his problems by publicly humiliating 
the AKP parliamentary group: MPs are insulted by his 
arrogance that they are "just filler".  He has alienated even 
those Cabinet members who are close to him.  In this latter 
regard, two contacts have told us that at the May 10 Cabinet 
meeting Erdogan belittlingly told Transportation Minister 
Yildirim to stop accepting rides in corporate jets and 
derisively ordered Finance Minister Unakitan to fix the 
financial situation by saying, "It's not like your little 
corn deal" (an allusion to the inside information Unakitan's 
son used to make a windfall profit by importing corn just 
before a rise in an import tax). 
 
 
¶6. (C) Erdogan sometimes evinces an aura of someone who 
believes he has a mission from God to rule Turkey (ref D). 
He still has a thirst for absolute power (ref E).  He and his 
party have failed to deal intelligently with the reality that 
the armed forces retain significant influence and are a 
political power to be reckoned with (ref C). 
 
 
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THE TURKISH MILITARY EXPLOITS AKP'S WEAKNESS 
-------------------------------------------- 
 
 
¶7. (C) CHOD Ozkok's mid-April warnings about military red 
lines (ref C) were followed by a blunter General Staff (TGS) 
warning in response to Erdogan's insistence on challenging 
the status quo through his draft education reform bill.  The 
TGS seems constrained by Turkish public opinion's support for 
the potential of EU membership and aversion to coups.  Thus, 
in seeking to manipulate the political scene, TGS is looking 
beyond either a coup or something equivalent to the 
post-modern coup ("February 28 process") the military used to 
engineer the removal from office of Islamist PM Erbakan in 
¶1997.  In what commentators are beginning to call a 
post-post-modern approach (ref C), retired and some active 
senior officers appear to be working both to create 
alternative power centers, to accentuate existing fissures in 
AKP, and to provoke Erdogan's further isolation within the 
party. 
 
 
¶8. (C) Justice Minister Cemil Cicek confided to "Aksam" 
Ankara bureau chief Nuray Basaran that the military is aware 
of and complicit in his and his faction of 30 MPs' attempts 
to egg Erdogan on to more confrontation.  AKP chief whip 
Salih Kapusuz, one of FonMin Gul's closest allies, 
acknowledged to us what we have heard from other contacts: 
that he and, he strongly implied, Gul are in direct contact 
with retired four-star NSC SecGen Tuncer Kilinc.  Gul, who 
has a carefully-controlled but competitive relationship with 
Erdogan and who was preferred by the TGS over Erdogan until 
the TGS concluded that, underneath his reasonable facade, Gul 
is a much more committed Islamist, has tried to manipulate 
Erdogan in a more accommodative way than Cicek.  However, 
Gul's and a group of 25 like-minded MPs' reported attempt on 
May 10 to remind Erdogan of the costs of Erbakan's 1997 
dismissive attitude toward the military fell on deaf ears. 
 
 
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WHERE DOES THE LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT STAND? 
------------------------------------------- 
 
 
¶9. (C) We are seeing more and more that pillars of the 
relatively enlightened segment of the secularist 
Establishment are realizing both how serious the gap is 
between the military and AKP, how AKP can't or won't improve 
its timing or focus constructively on big issues, or how AKP 
has lost its momentum. 
 
 
¶10. (S) MFA spokesman Namik Tan, a rigid secularist but no 
supporter of the hard-core Kemalist line that the military 
should intervene, acknowledged to us May 13 that the 
AKP-military tensions are very serious.  A group of prominent 
moderate secularists who have had hopes that AKP would be the 
engine of long-needed reform and who have long advocated open 
society (TEB Bank chairman Hasan Colakoglu, academic and 
columnist Soli Ozel, former ambassador and leading NGO figure 
Ozden Sanberk, former Treasury undersecretary Faik Oztrak, 
Central Bank deputy chairman Sukru Binay) concluded at their 
periodic confidential meeting May 12 that Turkey's future -- 
especially on key foreign policy questions such as NATO's 
future and Iraq -- no longer depends on AKP but on how close 
the Turkish military's relationship with the U.S. will be. 
Ertugrul Ozkok, editor of mass circulation "Hurriyet", which 
belongs to a media group dependent on the Erdogan 
government's good will to avoid corruption investigations, 
used his May 9 column to satirize Erdogan's wife Emine by 
figuratively stripping her bare for wearing stiletto heels 
under her Islamist dress during the Erdogans' recent official 
visit to Athens. 
 
 
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READING THE TEA LEAVES TO SEE WHERE THE U.S. STANDS 
--------------------------------------------- ------ 
¶11. (C) It is clear to us from our contacts with AKP and the 
military that both sides are trying to understand where the 
U.S. stands and to pull the U.S. to their side.  At the same 
time, one thing that all our contacts outside AKP agree on 
adamantly is that foreign observers should rigorously avoid 
any public comment, since any comment could be interpreted as 
taking sides.  Namik Tan was particularly acerbic on this 
point in a comment to us May 13, dismissing EU ambassador 
Kretschmer's criticism of the military's intervention on the 
higher education reform law as inept, unbalanced, and 
counterproductive. 
 
 
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COMMENT 
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¶12. (C) This tension between the military/traditional elite 
and AKP is not merely spring fever.  It will not go away.  On 
one side Erdogan and his party are convinced nothing can stop 
them.  This conviction seems to have some validity as long as 
Erdogan and AKP maintain a constitutional majority in 
Parliament and strong public support.  On the other side 
Erdogan's failure to organize his government and party into a 
coherent whole with advisors clued in to the news cycle and a 
process for analyzing domestic and foreign developments and 
projecting a consistent vision leaves him vulnerable. AKP's 
ineptitude in public relations, and the Islamist past of many 
AKP officials feed TGS's suspicions of AKP's intentions, 
intensifying the military's search for alternative political 
forces. 
 
 
¶13. (C) The resulting struggle is not equal.  First, AKP is 
weighed down by lack of clarity about its intentions, and the 
Erdogan government's inability to take sensible, rapid 
decisions, including on issues of direct and material 
interest to the U.S.  Second, the weight of fear and 
intimidation as tools of State power has not diminished as 
much as Erdogan, Gul and the brotherhoods and lodges in AKP 
assert.  And third, TGS has powerful allies in the judiciary, 
bureaucracy, and business community and has the ability to 
play on the personal ambitions and rivalries of politicians 
within and outside AKP.  The military does not accept that 
there is a contradiction between stating that it sees 
Turkey's membership in the EU as important and reiterating 
that it has a duty to defend the "secular" nature of the 
Republic.  This is a duty the military is once again 
forcefully declaring it will not be deterred from defending. 
The problem is that the military has no viable political 
alternative to turn to and has a history of poor judgment in 
choosing political champions. 
 
 
¶14. (C) Bottom line: Turkey is entering a period of 
uncertainty which it has to resolve itself, and where 
attempts to influence the direction from outside will have 
unpredictable and unquestionably negative effects.  The one 
governor over the next six months will be Turkey's search for 
a start date for EU accession talks. 
EDELMAN