Mıchael Rubin: Balyoz a Travesty of Justice
Michael Rubin, a world renowned scholar and writer for one of the USA’s major think-tanks, has castigated Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan over his attempts to lock up political enemies using the now-corrupted Turkish legal system, an act Rubin calls a “travesty of justice.” Rubin has claimed that Erdoğan, not the 200 or so people locked-up in recent trials, is in fact the “true coup leader” for leading an “autogolpe” (self-coup) in order to gain ‘sultan-esque’ powers.
In his entry on the official blog of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a resident scholar, Rubin wrote that the crime of “more than 200 suspects” tried in the Balyoz and Ergenekon trials was not coup-plotting, anti-government or anti-religion activity, but that “their crime is that they believe in a separation of mosque and state.” Rubin further states that the “conspiracy” against these “political prisoners” claimed that they “planned to sow chaos in order to give an excuse for the military to step in and restore order,” using evidence which “has been so clearly fabricated,” such as documents which contain fonts that did not exist at the time. While the rest of the world can see straight through this plot, the Prime Minister has managed to make it sound real in the “feverish minds” of his supporters, and Rubin asserts that the “Turkish judiciary—now thoroughly dominated by Erdoğan supporters—has become a joke, albeit a tragic one,” and one that has allowed these opponents of Erdoğan to become “political prisoners.”
After giving scathing criticism to Turkish ‘justice,’ Rubin focuses his concluding paragraph to shed light on the real coup-master - the Prime Minister himself. Rubin declares that “while Erdoğan may enjoy his sultan’s power to throw political and intellectual opponents in prison for opposing his whims and while he may rant and rave about imagined coup plots or righting historical wrongs, if Erdoğan wants to see the true coup leader, he need only look in the mirror, because he has led an “autogolpe” not much different than Alberto Fujimori did in Peru 21 years ago. Fujimori later fled to Japan—my bet is Erdoğan will choose Saudi Arabia as his country of exile—but was subsequently arrested and returned to Peru where he remains in prison.” Rubin, who predicts that “against the backdrop of unexplained personal enrichment, abuse-of-power, and nepotism, I suspect Erdoğan will end his career in much the same fashion as Fujimori,” leaves his sharpest denunciation of Erdoğan until the end, declaring that “those arrested on the “Balyoz” coup plot are political prisoners, and Erdoğan has become a coup leader no different than those of 1960 or 1980.”
Alberto Fujimori, who Rubin refers to, was the President of Peru throughout the 1990s. In 1992 he joined forces with the Peruvian military to purge all opposition from parliament and the judiciary, in order to break a political deadlock. Although according to the constitution of Peru, the President should be allowed only two terms in office, Fujimori used the power he had gained in the autogolpe to win himself a third term, a clear parallel to Erdoğan's own aim of reforming Turkey's presidential system. In 2001, during Fujimori's third term, he was forced to flee to Japan and resign his presidency by fax.
Michael Rubin is a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School alongside being a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Rubin received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1999, he later lectured in history at Yale University, Hebrew University, Johns Hopkins University. Rubin worked as editor of the Middle East Quarterly between 2004 and 2009, and currently teaches senior US military officials prior to their deployment in the Middle East and Central Asia.