Turkey's AKP tries to vindicate itself with report of committee on coup investigation

The parliamentary committee on coup attempt in Turkey, which had ended its work in a hurry and postponed the release of its report to a date after the referendum of April 16th, has virtually turned out to be a report intended to vindicate the ruling party AKP.

Stating they ‘could not detect any specific affinity of FETÖ with a particular political party’, the head of the committee claimed, during a press conference on May 26th, that the members of the movement ‘leaked into all parties and institutions.’

Committee report claims Gülenists worked with left-wing governments of Turkey

A political party whose members had, for long years, walked side by side with the members of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gülen’s Hizmet (Service) Movement – which the government of Turkey has then accused of being the plotter of July 15th coup attempt -, the ruling party AKP was asserted by committee chair Reşat Petek as a party that ‘has been in contact with the group no more or no less than CHP, MHP, and HDP.’

It is also claimed in the 637 pages long report that Gülenists, who are claimed to have been working on a coup plot for as long as a half of a century, were placed especially within leftist parties of the country.

Although the President – and now the chair of AKP again – Erdoğan himself had said ‘they were deceived by the Gülenists’, Petek insistently emphasized during the conference that the members of Hizmet ‘did not act in partnership or affinity with a particular party’.

Neither chief of staff nor head of MİT were heard at committee meetings

The target of the group was president Erdoğan and AKP, as the report said, adding details of its ‘partnership’ with the left-wing parties and governments.

Throughout 22 separate hearings of the committee, a total of 141 people were listened to and 240 documents were forwarded to the committee. Because of AKP’s reluctance to assign members to the committee in the aftermath of the coup attempt, opposition groups in the parliament and the public became suspicious about AKP’s actual intention, which appeared to be covering up the actual story behind the coup attempt.

Though the creation of the committee was approved by all four parties in the parliament shortly after July 15th, its work was started almost three months later on 4 October 2016. While the executive team within the committee were selected only from among AKP members – who decided on investigation topics and the people to be heard at the meetings –, significantly important people, such as the Chief of Staff Hulusi Akar and Head of the MİT (National Intelligence Organization) Hakan Fidan, were not invited to the committee hearings to exchange their observations. Opposition parties HDP and CHP repeatedly reacted in the face of this ineffective functioning of the committee.

Mentioning that the first intelligence on coup attempt was received at around 15:30 on July 15th, Petek admitted that there was an ‘intelligence failure’ but added that the plotters decided to launch the coup attempt at 20:30 instead of 3:00 ‘thanks to the preventive steps of MİT and the Chief of Staff.’

Committee chair Petek points a finger at CHP by pulling out a donation check from 1967

While Petek claimed that there were no official receipts or invoices reflecting a sort of financial support to AKP from the Gülen Movement, he pulled out a document claiming it to be a photocopy of a check written by Fethullah Gülen back in 1967 for Turkey’s CHP (Republican People’s Party) in the amount of 5000 TL.

Strongly reacting to the assertions of Petek about a donation check claimed to have been written out by Fethullah Gülen for CHP in 1967, deputy chair of CHP, Aykut Erdoğdu said the check was fake and stated that his party will be seeking legal action against this slandering.

Pointing out that the copy of the check displayed by committee chair Petek is not included in the report of the committee, Erdoğdu also asked: “If you have such serious claims and documents, why didn’t you write about them in the report, Mr. Petek? This thing that is tried to be shown as a ‘committee report’ is an effort to hide the political background of the coup, which is a smear of AKP.”

Edited version of frong-page article of BirGün on 27 May 2017, Saturday

Source: https://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/buyuk-ortagi-aklayan-rapor-161386.html