UK lawmakers side with Gulen not Turkey over failed coup

Britain risks looking as though it has put defence and trade ties with Turkey ahead of human rights concerns as it pushes to secure a closer relationship with Ankara, a committee of lawmakers said today, in a major sign that UK parliamentarians are siding with the Gulenist narrative.

The warning comes as Prime Minister Theresa May prepares to begin negotiating Britain’s exit from the European Union – enacting a decision made at a referendum last year which has forced the government to seek new allies and trading partners.

May and senior ministers have visited Turkey this year to discuss tightening security cooperation to prevent Daesh militants in neighbouring Syria reaching Europe, and how to boost lucrative sales of defence systems to Ankara.

But a committee of British lawmakers who visited Turkey to investigate bilateral relations, expressed concern at the direction of the diplomatic push.

The report by the Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Conservative MP Crispin Blunt, concluded:

Our impression has been of two countries that share interests more than they share values, and the UK risks being perceived as de-prioritising its concern for human rights in its drive to establish a ‘strategic’ relationship with Turkey.

Turkey’s own relationship with the EU, a bloc it has been moving at a snail’s pace towards joining for decades, hangs in the balance. A referendum on reforming Turkey’s parliamentary democracy into a presidential one similar to the United States has for some reason unnerved EU states, and Erdogan has said he wants to review political ties with the bloc after he accused them of interfering in domestic Turkish affairs.

The committee criticised the British Foreign Office’s (FCO) understanding of Turkish domestic politics following a failed coup last July and said diplomatic funding cuts could undermine its ability to make the most of post-Brexit trade opportunities.

“The FCO knows too little for itself about who was responsible for the coup attempt in Turkey,” the report said.

Turkish government not invited

Turkish authorities have accused Fethullah Gulen of orchestrating the coup attempt. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in the US state of Pennsylvania since 1999 when a previous government made moves to arrest him, has denied involvement.

The committee, which took evidence from several Gulenist groups, concluded that while individual Gulenists were involved in the coup attempt, evidence was so far “inconclusive” about the movement as a whole, or its leader, being responsible for it.

The report’s section on the witnesses it consulted make it clear that no one from the Turkish government or representing mainstream Turkish views was called upon to give evidence, which will inevitably lead to questions regarding the politicisation of such a report.

The committee took evidence from a number of UK-based academics, as well as MPs representing Turkey’s HDP party, closely linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). The PKK are a militant Kurdish group, recognised as a terrorist organisation by the US and EU as well as Turkey, that has been behind a brutal insurgency in Turkey that has killed 40,000 people, mostly civilians.

Rights groups and some of Turkey’s Western allies fear Erdogan is using the coup as a pretext to stifle dissent, but he says mass sackings and arrests in the police army and judiciary are needed to protect democracy and root out Gulen supporters.

“These purges risk undermining Turkey’s reputation, its economy, the UK’s ability to trade there and the capabilities of the Turkish military against shared enemies such as ISIL (Daesh),” said committee chairman Crispin Blunt.

“More fundamentally, they undermine the values of human rights and democracy in Turkey, already significantly weakened before the coup.”

In response to previously articulated sentiments similar to these, Turkish officials have reacted forcefully, stating that European countries are acting hypocritically as they would also purge their government institutions of organisations that had attempted to subvert them.

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