The Third Party in Roboski

Ten years ago, on 28 December, 34 of our citizens lost their lives as a result of an air operation on the border line near the town of Ortasu in the Uludere district of Şırnak. Much has been written and said about this incident, and it is still being written and talked about. Ten years on, I too want to analyse this grave incident by projecting back onto that period from the conditions of the new Türkiye, in which the balances and the actors of power have changed.

When we read the articles and commentaries written about “Roboski” to date, we see that two different views stand out in them.

The first view is that it was a deep state operation, disguised as an accident, carried out to derail the opening process that was just beginning.

The second view is that this grave incident was caused by an air operation carried out by the TSK following intelligence that a group including a senior PKK militant was crossing the border.

At this point I want to open a parenthesis and stress that, as a former soldier who knows the region, I find the possibility of an accident weak. Smuggling in Uludere is a routine activity carried out out of concern for livelihood, including by village guard villages. It is done on routes the PKK does not prefer to use. Moreover, it is almost always done in large groups of at least 30 to 50 people using many mules, because the main smuggled goods are petrol or cigarettes and this load is carried by mules. The probability that military units in the region would ‘misunderstand’ is therefore very low. In addition, the fact that some of these people were village guards makes it much easier for intelligence units to confirm incoming reports. In short, I close the parenthesis by saying that, unlawful as it may be, the villagers were doing that night a routine activity they had been doing for 100 years and felt as safe as ever.

First, let us examine on a timeline the important developments before and after the incident, starting in 2009, the year of what is called the first opening process.

Year: 2009

• 10 March – The second Ergenekon indictment was accepted by the court.
• 24 March – On his way to Baghdad, Abdullah Gül, chatting with journalists on the plane, used the word “Kurdistan” for Northern Iraq, firing the signal flare of a planned process. Two months later, on 9 May, Gül declared that “The Kurdish question is Türkiye’s number one problem and must be resolved” and officially launched the opening process.
• 31 May – The PKK announced that it had extended its unilateral ceasefire.
• 31 July – Interior Minister Beşir Atalay announced to the press the contacts made within the Kurdish Opening. “The talks and meetings I held over one month were extremely positive for the process,” he said.
• 5 August – Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan met DTP leader Ahmet Türk on the Kurdish opening.
• 19 October – At Abdullah Öcalan’s call, 34 PKK members entered through the Habur border gate and surrendered. About 50,000 people gathered in the Silopi district of Şırnak to welcome them.
• 15 November – Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said: “Our project of national unity and brotherhood is a goal. We will reach this goal through the democratic opening process.”
• Just then, the Constitutional Court took an interesting decision. On 11 December it unanimously decided to close the DTP. It was decided that the parliamentary seats of party chairman Ahmet Türk and Aysel Tuğluk be revoked.

Year: 2010

• 16 January – Beşir Atalay announced the headings of the “Human Rights Package”, prepared in line with the solution process and consisting of four separate mechanisms. Accordingly, meetings in prisons in different languages and dialects such as Kurdish were made possible. Private channels were allowed to broadcast 24 hours in different languages and dialects. The Council of Higher Education decided to allow institutes and research centres in different languages and dialects. The “Institute of Living Languages” was founded. A circular was sent to governorships to reduce road checks and minimise highland bans.
• 8 February – AK Party Deputy Chairman Hüseyin Çelik said of the solution process: “Either we solve this problem, or this problem will dissolve us.”
• 25 February – CHP Istanbul MP Nur Serter said: “At Habur the state was taken to the feet of the terrorists. At Habur the AKP surrendered to terror.”
• 27 March – Ahmet Türk, former chairman of the closed DTP, was punched in an attack in Samsun.
• 1 May – Four soldiers were killed and seven wounded in a PKK attack on a gendarmerie post in Tunceli.
• 14 June – The Istanbul 10th High Criminal Court prosecutor demanded a prison sentence of one to seven years for Milliyet reporter Namık Durukan, for violating the Anti-Terror Law by reporting PKK leader Duran Kalkan’s statement “We will not lay down arms even if a general amnesty is passed.”
• 18 June – Arrest warrants were issued for 13 of the 34 people who had come from the camps in Qandil and Makhmour. BDP Deputy Group Chairman Bengi Yıldız said that with the arrests the opening was over.
• 13 August – The PKK announced a decision to halt actions until 20 September.
• 12 September – The constitutional amendment referendum was held.

Year: 2011

• 13 September – An audio recording allegedly from a meeting between MİT officials and PKK members in Oslo was published on the internet. In the recording, Hakan Fidan stated that he had met both Abdullah Öcalan and PKK members on the instructions of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and in the capacity of his “special representative”. The recording was alleged to be of a conversation between MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, MİT Deputy Undersecretary Afet Güneş, KCK member Mustafa Karasu, PKK member Sabri Ok, KONGRA-GEL Deputy Chairman Zübeyir Aydar and representatives of the coordinating country. It emerged that the leak was carried out by the PKK.
• 19 October – After an attack by about 150 PKK militants who crossed the Iraqi border and infiltrated Çukurca in Hakkari, 24 soldiers lost their lives.
• 22 October – A major operation was launched in the Kazan Valley. It was reported conclusively in the press that the PKK suffered heavy losses in the operation.
• 28 December – 34 Kurdish citizens lost their lives as a result of a bombardment carried out on intelligence grounds on the Türkiye–Iraq border near the Uludere district of Şırnak.

Developments After the Incident

• 7 February – MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan, former Undersecretary Emre Taner and former Deputy Undersecretary Afet Güneş were summoned as suspects to give statements by the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office with special powers.
• 10 February – Instead of going to give a statement, MİT Undersecretary Hakan Fidan went to the Çankaya Mansion to meet Abdullah Gül.
• 11 February – The investigation was taken away from Prosecutor Sadrettin Sarıkaya, who had summoned the MİT officials to testify.
• 17 February – The MİT Law was amended in parliament and, with the President’s approval, published in the Official Gazette. Testimony by Fidan and other MİT members on matters within the scope of their duties was made subject to the Prime Minister’s permission. The MİT members did not go to testify. In public opinion, this process was regarded as the starting point of the conflict between the Cemaat (the Gülen movement) and the AKP.
• 20 August – In a PKK attack in Gaziantep, 10 citizens lost their lives and 66 people were injured, 9 of them seriously.
• 2 September – In a PKK attack on the district centre of Beytüşşebap, 10 soldiers were killed and 7 wounded.

*****

I don’t know about you, but when I look at the timeline above, I sense the presence of a “third party”. I have used the word party in a broad sense, because I wanted to draw attention to a consensus formed by different groups with opposing mindsets. That is the very question that has been seeking an answer for ten years: Who is this third party?

If we go back to those days, we see that tension arose between the TSK and MİT, which were at the centre of the debates after the incident. The reason for the tension was (allegedly) that MİT had informed the General Staff that PKK leader Fehman Hüseyin would cross from Northern Iraq into Türkiye on the night of 28 December. Although Erdoğan said that the MİT report had been sent ten days before the incident, the General Staff insisted that MİT had been sending information until the last moment. This insistence, which meant that one of the state’s two long-established institutions had set a trap for the other, naturally heightened tensions. On the other hand, the counter-thesis voiced behind closed doors was that a group of soldiers within the TSK opposed to the opening process and the AKP had steered headquarters and carried out this massacre. Şamil Tayyar’s article “The Code Is This Pasha” can be cited as an interesting example in this respect.

After asking some questions in his article, Şamil Tayyar ends with the sentence: “In my opinion, the person who best knows the answer to these three questions is Brigadier General Ali Rıza Kuğu, a unit head at the General Staff. He must be invited to the Uludere Commission in parliament.”

Since Şamil Tayyar wrote the article, the side he points to is known to everyone. But looking back from today, I believe that the article drew attention to one part of the picture while preventing us from seeing the big picture. That is to say, however critical the position held by a brigadier general in the Armed Forces, it is not possible for him to take such critical decisions with such important consequences alone. Moreover, even if we say he did steer things, among the commanders he would have steered there are generals such as Yaşar Güler, who had served in Uludere and knew the region very well. Again, when we look at the headquarters staff, we find a structure of different mindsets, almost a mosaic, so steering and getting decision-makers to take wrong decisions does not seem easy unless support comes from a different institution.

The claim is that this institution was MİT!

So why would MİT mislead the TSK at a time when it was conducting a process under its own coordination (the solution process)? Of course, it was hard to give a satisfactory answer to this question at the time, but much water has flowed under the bridge. It became crystal clear that the government was not sincere about solving the Kurdish question. But an even more important truth also emerged: part of the old(!) deep state had been grafted onto the AKP. There is a prevailing belief that the foundations of this grafting were laid in 2010. If you ask “Where did you get 2010 from?”, the mandatory course the road took for the AKP, which won the referendum, did not lead to the final destination it wanted to reach. The final goal was to change the country’s system of government and bring in the “Turkish-style presidential system”.

At this stage, the old enemies pledged allegiance to the “Palace” and guaranteed that they would support the presidential system. And they formed the “third party”. From then on, the first target was to take control of the TSK again. Let us also note that the structures forming the consensus I call the “third party” had hidden agendas and kept ready plans to purge one another at the first opportunity (like the latest Supreme Military Council purges).

So Roboski is the first trap set for the TSK by this new consensus that I call the third party.