UK: Turkish MP slams Western media’s coup bid coverage

A leading Turkish parliamentarian has attacked the Western media’s coverage of crises in Turkey and the wider Middle East.

Taha Ozhan, who chairs the Turkish parliament’s Foreign Affairs Commission, told a panel event in London that he had been shocked by the approach used by broadcasters and the press in the immediate aftermath of the 15 July coup attempt.

Ozhan, who happened to be in London the night before the failed coup, told a panel event organized by Al Sharq Forum and the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), a pan-European think tank, that he found himself being telephoned by a flurry of Western news outlets when the action began.

He said: “The questions were literally amazing. The question was mainly ‘When are they going to be successful? When [are] the coup leaders going to set themselves up?’ The tone was like that. All of them are on record, I’m not making an interpretation here. [These were] direct questions from this perspective,” he said.

He said a similar approach had been seen in the Western media’s coverage of incidents such as the July 2013 military takeover in Egypt, during which such outlets refused to even use the term ‘coup d’état’. This reflected what Ozhan termed the West’s “political apathy” towards the Middle East and the rest of the world.

Turkey holds the Fethullah Gulen movement ultimately responsible for the July coup attempt, which was carried out by a junta within the Turkish armed forces. It terms the group as a terrorist organization known by its Turkish initials FETO.

The coup bid had left 241 people martyred and around 2,200 others injured.

Ozhan said the coup attempt demonstrated the dangers that emerge when an “esoteric, messianic” group militarizes itself — and compared the Gulenist network to Daesh.

“What’s the problem here?” he told the panel.

“Any esoteric, messianic organization, if they really militarize themselves, they are having some advancement, easily. The Gulen group is quite similar. Right now ISIS [Daesh] is having militants from more than 100 different countries, but Gulen is also available in more than 100 different countries. One way or another, they establish themselves and nobody knows the nature of the threat.

“The only difference is ISIS’s face is quite clear: when you see an ISIS militant, you can say it’s an ISIS militant. But you cannot even diagnose and you cannot even notice the member of the [Gulenist] group. And nobody knows when their attack could happen in Turkey or elsewhere.

“So the threat still continues.”

In comments to Anadolu Agency after the panel event, Ozhan said the post-coup period had required extensive interventions in many different sectors.

Everyone in the Turkish government, from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan down, accepted there had been some cases of misidentification during this process, he said.

“We established commissions to rectify these cases,” Ozhan said. “There is no blind, uncaring attitude. To the contrary, there is a sensitive attitude that aims to dispense justice and we demonstrate this. We’re talking about a government that agrees to pursue mistakes where mistakes are made.”

He said it was “normal” for the West to highlight these cases but added its approach was ethically incoherent.

“These are actors who could not call the military intervention in Egypt a ‘coup’ and ignored the massacre of thousands of people during such coups. They make no mention — not even in a sentence — of the tens of thousands of people who suffer serious outrages in Egyptian prisons.

“That is why we see the need to question their [the West’s] ethics. There is an incoherence here.”