OPPOSITION CHP: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 03 ANKARA 002327 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/19/2014 TAGS: PREL PGOV TU SUBJECT: OPPOSITION CHP: IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD, AND THE WORD WAS WITH BAYKAL, AND THE WORD WAS MALLEABLE REF: A. ANKARA 2119 ¶B. ANKARA 2153 ¶C. ANKARA 1905 (U) Classified by Political Counselor John Kunstadter. Reason: 1.4 (b,d). ¶1. (C) Summary: Unable to look at the beam in their own eye to understand their own responsibility for CHP's serious decline, CHP leader Baykal and others in his circle are looking for a mote in the U.S.'s eye as they accuse the USG of actively seeking Baykal's ouster. All the while rebels in CHP continue to look for a new champion to replace Baykal while Baykal alternately scrambles to "Muslimize" his speech to attract the Anatolian vote and yet deprecates the same Anatolian voter bloc. Bottom line: CHP remains an elitist, dead-end party. End summary. -------------- The Conspiracy -------------- ¶2. (C) Islamist and anti-"secular" daily "Yeni Safak"'s April 16 interview with main opposition CHP chairman and champion of "secularism" Deniz Baykal contained a conspiracy-laden diatribe against media groups, businessmen, and the U.S. Baykal referred to a "secret" document allegedly from the Pentagon's "Office of Special Programs" describing illegal financial transactions and bribery allegations against Baykal and other party leaders -- a document the Embassy publicly denounced as absurd and a fraud -- that was leaked to the press. Baykal asserted, "Documents were distributed. Documents with Pentagon stamped on them. When I got these papers I wondered if there is such an office. Later I learned that there is. We (ordered our people) to look into whether there is such a name. They said there is. The U.S. Embassy made a statement saying there is no such thing. But we know that there is." ¶3. (C) Baykal added, "This is an issue about our party. Maybe it was thought that a more suitable leader would make their work easier here...I am calling on my nation to think about who is behind this and why they are attacking CHP so much." When the reporter asked if Baykal was speaking in code, the CHP leader replied, "Yes, this is a code. Figure it out and you'll understand everything." ¶4. (C) Several CHPers -- senior M.P.s and Baykal followers Mesut Deger and Fuat Cay among them -- had earlier approached poloffs privately about the alleged report, asking why the Pentagon is interested in "sowing division in the party." Reactions to our rejection of the documents as a patent, Turkish-origin forgery ranged from plastic smiles amid expressions of gratitude for clarifying the situation to outright disbelief. ¶5. (C) Adding fuel to the conspiracy fire, CHP Deputy Secretary General Oguz Oyan on April 18 told journalists that SIPDIS the U.S.' Greater Middle East (GME) initiative is designed to promote ideological divisions within CHP. "By breaking off a piece of CHP, the GME project hopes to develop a more social-liberal movement," he claimed. Oyan added that at the same time, GME will "tame and render ineffective" the other part of CHP. -------------- The Denial -------------- ¶6. (C) CHP M.P. Bulent Tanla, who is Baykal's chief advisor, phoned poloff April 16 to deny that the CHP leader believes the U.S. is leading a conspiracy to undermine the party. Tanla half-heartedly suggested that we were not reading Baykal's statements correctly. He further asserted that "Yeni Safak" journalists had distorted Baykal's remarks to try to create the impression that CHP is anti-American. CHP Deputy Secretary General Sinan Yerlikaya told poloff April 16 that Baykal would never make such a statement, although he claimed he had not read the interview. He undertook to get back in touch with us after reading the story, but has avoided contact since then. -------------- The Admission -------------- ¶7. (C) Undermining his colleagues' denials, CHP M.P. Gokhan Durgun, who is close to Baykal, told poloff April 21 that there is, in fact, a widespread view among CHP deputies that the U.S. is out to punish the party. Durgun described the CHP thinking in a typically convoluted and self-absorbed fashion. Senior CHP officials -- Durgun among them -- have put together disparate pieces of information to spin a USG conspiracy against them. Given CHP's hard-line stance on Cyprus and Iraq, the USG wants to install a more pro-U.S. leader at the top of CHP, he asserted. Durgun said he appreciated the Embassy's public statement regarding the alleged Pentagon report but asserted that "someone" in Washington must have know about the document and sanctioned the leak to the press. ¶8. (C) Durgun and CHP leaders have misinterpreted Secretary Powell's remarks on Turkey and Islam (ref A),which in any event we and the Department have since clarified, as evidence that the USG prefers a government under ruling AKP, which has Islamist roots. In light of the Secretary's remarks, Durgun claimed, the GME project takes on a sinister meaning: the U.S. wants to promote "moderate Islam" at the expense of "secular" (sic) political movements like CHP. Durgun concluded his monologue by saying "if I were the U.S., I would do the same thing." -------------- The Power Struggle -------------- ¶9. (C) Meanwhile, Baykal spins madly in three different directions. First, he has announced his intention to travel the roads of Anatolia in a minibus to understand what the common man thinks. In this regard, he has approached two of our close contacts with the urgent request for coaching on how to "Muslimize" his speech. ¶10. (C) Yet at the same time, he revealed his true feelings toward the common man in a public debate with PM Erdogan. When Erdogan emphasized the value of democracy, Baykal remarked that democracy is fine as long as it doesn't clash with "the achievements of the Republic." As ruling AKP parliamentary whip Sadullah Ergin and another contact explained to us, this was Baykal's coded way of reiterating CHP's and the Turkish "secular" Establishment's long-standing assertion that the ordinary citizens of Turkey are not ready for democracy, and that leaving Turkey exposed to full democracy would lead the country away from the principles imposed from above with the advent of the Republic in 1923. ¶11. (C) Not content to stop there, Baykal has tried to lay a trap for ruling AKP by seeming to encourage AKP to submit draft legislation to curtail certain powers of the Turkish military embedded in two laws. The press preferred to interpret Baykal's move as a breakthrough in AKP-CHP relations and a sign that the idea of cutting back the military's guardian of the Republic role has gained steam. However, closer examination of what Baykal said reveals that he merely offered to "take a look at" any AKP proposal, Baykal-speak for "now you see it, now you don't". ¶12. (C) With Baykal holding on grimly, internal CHP opponents and hard-core "secularists" outside the party who see CHP as the only viable vehicle to safeguard their Kemalist interests appear to be focusing their efforts on selling Istanbul Sisli district mayor Mustafa Sarigul (ref C) to the elite in Ankara as the answer to both Baykal and AKP. Contacts here, including former Ecevit deputy PM Husamettin Ozkan, tell us Istanbul University rector Kemal Alemdaroglu and current Land Forces Commander Aytac Yalman are among those promoting Sarigul. Ozkan has signaled to us that his interest in Sarigul (ref C) may be on the wane. A long-standing financial sector contact of ours has also given us details of a specific incident of Sarigul's corruption in the past, involving Sarigul's use of the Cevahir mafia group to shake down a business consortium. -------------- Comment -------------- ¶13. (C) Refusing to engage in any self-criticism, CHP leaders have turned to finger-pointing and flimsy conspiracy theories to explain away the party's elitist stagnation. Under Baykal, CHP will continue to relegate itself to the political sidelines. While Sarigul's supporters pump up attributes they think will make him attractive to Anatolia (he is from the eastern Anatolian city of Erzincan, has an Erdogan-like populist swagger, and tries politically to market his tolerance for religion and pious Turks),their own entrenched Kemalist nature is likely to be a drag on any move he might make to the national stage. EDELMAN