Would you believe it? A tweet lands on my desk saying “Ukraine is investigating the reports that Turkey may have sold drone codes to Moscow after over 100 Turkish Bayraktar-TB drones sold to Ukraine were shot down by Russia. The essence is one of the “news flash” category. But it’s too long. And even then, until when I was writing this analysis, there was no more latest (new) information to beef it up.
With about 60 years of working in the media, my mind wonders and wanders. Is this possible? Then I remember the African indigenous knowledge observation that “what is said is there (exists). If it is not there, it is coming.” I go for the source. It is an institution calling itself “Terror Alarm” and selling itself as “non-state-affiliated, agenda-free news media with a focus on combatting terrorism through #AI”.
Could that “hash-AI” have even the remotest link with Artificial Intelligence? Or could it just stand for ‘artificial information’ which has got to be ‘cooked’? To me, logo components read too involving. “Terroralarm.org/news; Counter-terrorism company/ security and military news; www.TellorAlarm-org.” Somehow the words “company” and “org” don’t easily match in the course of category differentiation. Anyway, this is not the crux of his analysis.
Could the source of the information boil down to giving codes or hacking? If it is, this is bad – ethically. But, could this be part of what can be seen as the diplomacy of Bayraktar whereby this very-close-company to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s regime would be seeking rent on these rather cheap drones and their low humanitarian costs? This would help the business maximize Turkey’s political and military impact. I am not an expert on integrated defense stems. But without the TB2 warfare tangent, what would the state of affairs be in the case of Africa’s one of the poorest countries, Burkina Faso? Wouldn’t the Nagorno-Karabakh area still be under the rule of Armenia? What would be the status of the internationally recognized government in Libya? How about Tajikistan?
Basing on all these and other intriguing stories about Turkey’s character on the ground, whether the “Ukraine is investigating the reports that Turkey may have sold drone codes to Moscow after over 100 Turkish Bayraktar-TB drones sold to Ukraine were shot down by Russia” is true or not, there is something worth to chew the cud on. The United Republic of Tanzania Baba wa Taifa, Julius Nyerere, the equivalent of Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk (the Father of Turkey), had chance to argue that for a county’s leader, even to be suspected of corruption itself, is already worse than being corrupt.
Can’t this apply to President Erdogan? Not that it can; it actually does and in respect of not only country leaders but every human being. Knowing that we all have our deficiencies, we very politely blame anybody who says something and does the opposite for double-dealing. Likened to what we do on our computers, we ‘minimize’ peoples’ moral characters. But when we want full information, we click on the minimized file name, and there we are. What reveals itself in the case of the Erdogan regime practices is simply “palace hypocrisy”.
If we take the Ukraine-Russia Federation war as an example, Erdogan is well known for being close to the two countries in the conflict. Erdogan is the supplier of drones with which Ukraine has been landing Russian planes. He has also been at the forefront of securing peaceful negotiations between the warring sides. He has not hesitated to jump on the United Nations-brokered negotiations to claim praise from the re-opening of the black sea grain route to the rest of the world. Hasn’t one got to be a hypocrite to play this role comfortably?
Syria is another Erdogan’s hypocrisy crime site. Being anti-Assad, he has been involved in arming rebels while also taking the cover of fighting Islamic State terrorists threatening world peace from north-eastern areas of Syria. In this exercise, he has been cooperating with the United States.
Being occupied by anti-Assad rebels, the areas have also been subjected to bombing by Russian forces. He has also sat on an international organization dealing with the Syrian issue embracing Iran and Russia. The Libyan case is more intricate where Erdogan involves business, political and military interests besides sitting on a peaceful settlement platform. Who will ever forget Erdogan’s courage, as an ally of NATO, to go out and purchase S400 sophisticated Russian missiles?
On the domestic political scene, Erdogan came to power on the spirit and letter of the Justice and Development (AKP) Party, which has turned out to be a pseudonym. What do we see happening after two decades in power? It is exactly the opposite. For anyone in search of justice, Erdogan’s Turkey is not the place to go just as is the case with the practice of democratic principles. Present prosecutors and judges are Erdogan’s loyalists. They are his appointees. Some of their ethical likes are in prisons on flimsy charges.
Oppression and nepotism constitute the order of the day in Turkey. There have been cases of innocent children suffering from terminal illnesses like cancer being denied treatment abroad because their fathers, in particular, are classified as Gulenists. People have been denied befitting religious burial rites because they are relatives of Gulen, however distant. Others have been denied chances to bury their deceased parents and rear relatives.
There have been cases of people living in exile being kidnapped and flown back to Turkey, ridiculing Erdogan’s policy of “zero problem” with neighbors. One would not be exaggerating by contending that in actual fact the country has 100% problems with its neighbors – the reason for which Erdogan has been mending fences. If there is an area in respect of which Turkey finds itself unnecessarily entangled, it is what is taken for KRG. This is a geographic region traditionally inhabited by Kurds embracing plateau and mountainous areas spread over eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, and western Iran plus smaller parts of Syria and Armenia. What is criminal about being a Kurd?
