Talk:1980 Turkish coup d'état

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the 1980 Turkish coup d'état article.
Article policies
WikiProject Turkey
Turkey Portal
This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Turkey, which aims to improve Wikipedia's coverage of Turkey-related topics. Please visit the the participants page if you would like to get involved. Happy editing!
Start This article has been rated as start-Class on the project's quality scale.
Mid This article has been rated as mid-importance on the project's importance scale.
edit · history · watch · refresh To-do list for 1980 Turkish coup d'état:

No to-do list assigned; you can help us in improving the articles in the same category
It is requested that a photograph or photographs be included in this article to improve its quality.

Wikipedians in Turkey may be able to help!
The Free Image Search Tool (FIST) may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites.

Contents

[edit] Comments

[edit] Wikify

I have done some wikification on this article, but I think it needs to be reviewed by someone with a reasonable knowledge of Turkish history. --rbrwr± 13:52, 29 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

The article, with its current version, is nothing but just a bit of ultra-leftwing commentry on 12 Eylül (12th of Sep. in Turkish). The NPOV problem begins with the first sentence: "General Kenan Evren, chief of Counter-Guerrilla, the Turkish branch of Gladio, on September 12, 1980" Should an uninformed reader know the fact that Kenan Evren was the chief of the general staff of the time, or should s/he know that he is considered as the head of that gladio thing firstly? I personally think that K.E. was a poor, thirty third class third-world dictator, junta leader, and human-rights violator; but this is an opinion, not something that I could present to the entire world as what the actual truth of the event was like. Also, following lines about the Kurdish question have virtually nothing to do with 12 Eylül. I was planning to make some editing but the "base" is so fraudulent that you simply cannot construct healthy "floors" on it. Maybe it requires a rewrite, dunno Okan 21:38, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Gladio

I agree with the NPOV above. Especially the Gladio references seem shaky to me (I admit they look sexy for generating an international curiosity). There are some references given about these at the end of the article but I am not sure how reliable they are. I don't feel qualified enough to judge them but at least I know enough that they deserve a closer look to pass Wikipedia standards for such controversies. Pembeci 23:07, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

To my mind the Gladio business does not belong here. It is part of a separate discussion that nowadays would carry the headline deeep State ("derin devlet") and in the 1970s was discussed as the Turkish form of counter-guerilla ("kontr-gerilla"). I've "cleaned" the intro, but left references that I am unable to challenge (don't have these books), even though I'm uncertain whether they are "correct" (related) quotes or not.

The military coup of 1980 deserves a well informed entry since it had so many impacts on society and history in Turkey. An edit of the rest of the page might request an even more radical approach (including suggestion of new items) because at this place only the general issue that I could term "new formation of society" should be the focus.--Sc.helm 18:14, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your clean-up Sc.helm. I've continued a bit your job, mainly removing redundances. A nice thing to do would be for someone who is more familiar than me with Turkish politics to add political membership and orientation of the cited politicians, and dates of events (Provide context for the reader: not only consider that foreigners are going to read the article, but also that Wikipedia is very broad public, and also read by high-school teenagers - and older people who don't necessarily remember such basics facts as that Carter was elected in 1979... News style requires to always add function and title to a name when first cited).


Concerning the deep state, Gladio (i.e. Counter-Guerrilla), etc., D. Ganser, researcher at the ETH Zurich Institute and leading specialist on Gladio (as well as author of a doctorate thesis on the subject, from which his book is issued), I think he is reliable enough and, beside, his statements concerning Grey Wolves, Abdullah Catli, etc., are cross-referenced in this article by Turkish sources, Le Monde diplomatique (a respected monthly), etc. I don't think there's any problem either for US support of the coup. If you are interested by the subject, I suggest you to have a passing look at the Gladio entry, at the Italian parliamentary commission on Gladio's involvement in the strategy of tension (notably Milan magistrate Guido Salvini's investigations), which have included false flag bombings and attacks (a non-exhaustive list: 1972 Peteano attack; 1973 attempted assassination of former (Christian Democrat) Interior Minister Mariano Rumor, 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, 1980 Bologna massacre... Italy also has suffered from a low-intensity conflict through-out the Cold War, and was also considered a strategic country by Washington). Gladio's existence has been recognized by the US State Dept. - although it, of course, denies having supported coups or others strategy of tension). Further information on the subject can be found on Daniele Ganser's website (list of newspaper articles in English, Turkish, German, French, etc.), on the ETH website (which, beside, also host research material on Stasi, and the Warsaw Pact if someones has doubt about its neutrality and scholarly aspect.) Switzerland and Belgium have also had parliamentary inquiries on the matter. Cheers Tazmaniacs 20:13, 28 February 2007 (UTC)

That's quite an effort that you put into the whole affair and thanks for the tipps for improvement. I still believe that the whole Gladio business does not belong here. It is dealt with in other sections such as deep state and Counter-Guerrilla and can be discussed there. Gladio (or whatever name you prefer) was active before and after the coup and not the central figure of it (or would you believe that?).

A lot of statements were added in, in order to convince readers that the Turkish Army was evil for doing this coup d'etat. They are trying to make it seem like they had a conspiracy of destroying terrorists through terrorism, which is a false notion invented by the PKK itself and still continues today. Please do not allow PKK (a known world terrorist organization) propagandists to write in this wikipedia article and ruin the neutral point of view by adding statements like "[The counter-guerrilla murdered and tortured thousands]" when there is no evidence supporting such statements. This is propaganda and should not be allowed in wikipedia especially in an unrelated article like this. Arsenic99 17:37, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Structure

As a working theses I would say that the coup of 1960 was directed against a political party (single party rule); the coup of 1971 was directed at the government (and growing opposition), but the military coup of 1980 was directed against the whole society with the aim of creating a complete new order.

The entry should be structured accordingly:

  1. Introduction (dates and main features of the coup)
  2. Context (background): reasons for the intervention such as instability, violence etc.
    1. Persecution and political trials might be a separate issue
  3. New Order
    1. The Constitution
    2. New legislation: 669 new laws and 139 decrees with the power of law were passed until 6 December 1983
    3. Heritage: Laws that still exist such as the Law on Political Parties (still not allowed to use the Kurdish language in their work) while the ban on broadcasting was abolished in 1991...

These are just examples of what might be mentioned here. Yet, these are radical suggestions since much of what is mentioned at the moment does not really fit into this concept. What do you think? --Sc.helm 10:27, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

By all means go for it! As you've seen, as the article was not in a great shape, you can only improve it. Just concerning Counter-Guerrilla and such "details" that it was alleged to reside in the DIA headquarters; or the circumstances of the Taksim Square massacre, during which thousands of policemen did not intervene while snipers shot on the masses (1st May, 1977); that the snipers shot from a building owned by the ITT - what a coincidence, isn't it? Four years earlier, Pinochet's coup was financed by ITT, wasn't it? Another, so "strange", coincidence, is the 1973 Ezeiza massacre: snipers hidden under Peron's tribune shot on the left-wing Peronists, putting a definitive end to the ambiguity of the Peronism movement which gathered from the far-right to the far-left. Sure, you might respond me: what's the relation? It is, that again, I am not a favourite of a conspirational reading of history, as that would be first assuming that: someone, or a little group, has the power to control events much more than anyone really can; and that the actions of other people do not count. So, of course, I agree with you in saying that "Gladio wasn't central", if by that you mean that the coup was (not) made by "Gladio" on its own. That's for sure. They are people in Turkey [sic] , living by their own, fighting between themselves, and they don't need any American to do a coup for them. But... if it is very naive to put too much weight to the influence of "deep state" and "Counter-Guerrilla" in this coup (which very well lived before & after the coup - no one contest that: the claim is that they supported this coup, and the violence before. Note that the Italian neofascists followed the same strategy, unsuccessfully - see Vincenzo Vinciguerra's declarations to the judges); but it is also naive to think that they had no influence and just represent some kind of folklore stories good enough to scare your kid... To conclude: if you think another structure for the article is better, go for it! The article definitively needs details and more about its legacy. And the facts that it doesn't speak enough about the specifically Turkish dimension gives it a conspirational aspect which it does not deserve. But I do think that the international context (i.e. Cold War) should be taken into account, and this means taking seriously CIA's (and others intelligence agencies, it seems)'s support for it. That's why Counter-Guerrilla should remained included here - although they're not American puppets, I doubt they could have supported and act in favour of a coup if the US were really opposed to it. Finally, Carter's statement is most surprising for those who put too much trust in the Nixon/Carter division (the bad guy - Pinochet, Argentina, etc./the good guy ; and then Reagan: the Contras, and a fresh start for the Cold War). Carter might honestly have wanted to stop a bit the abuses and put some reins in "his boys", but it seems that the situation in Turkey was too "uncontrollable" for him to stop "his boys" over there... Tazmaniacs 15:34, 1 March 2007 (UTC)
Stumbled on that:
In 2000, General Gianadelio Maletti, in charge of the SID Italian intelligence agency from 1971 to 1975, 
was convicted in absentia for obstruction of justice concerning the Mariano Rumor case. The investigations
revealed that he had known of the attack before-hand, but had deliberately failed to prevent it. Testifying in 2001
for the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing, he declared:
""The CIA [Central Intelligence Agency], following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian
nationalism capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left and, for this purpose, it may have made use of
rightwing terrorism... I believe this is what happened in other countries as well...Don't forget that 
Nixon was in charge and Nixon was a strange man, a very intelligent politician but a man of rather
unorthodox initiatives"<ref name="WillanCIA">Philip Willan, ''[[The Guardian]]'', March 26, 2001.
  [http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,462976,00.html Terrorists 'helped by CIA' to stop rise of left
  in Italy] {{en icon}}</ref>

Not so many countries where stay-behind movements have been active and promoted terrorism... Tazmaniacs 01:55, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

That damn warmongering Carter. He should be tried for crimes against humanity. 65.185.190.240 23:01, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Strategy of Tension

This article seems to say that the military and Evren purposely instigated violence in order to justify a coup by them. While I'm sure some people think that, it is by no means the mainstream view (as far as am aware). I think that needs to be rewritten. Also if anyone knows, I think we need clarification of when Evren was counter-Guerrilla head with an appropriate source to back it up. ----Jones89