The outcry following the publication of a letter penned by 103 retired Turkish admirals on Sunday showcases a possible rift within President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government.
In their letter, the admirals warned against any decision that undermined the Montreux Convention, an international convention that regulates the passage of ships into and out of the Black Sea. Fear that Erdoğan could withdraw from it was sparked by a comment by Speaker of the Parliament Mustafa Sentop, who said the president had the authority to do so if he wanted to. Sentop defended his comment, saying that it was not meant as any statement of intent.
Officials from Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) condemned the letter when it became public. Fahrettin Altun, Erdoğan’s communications director, slammed the authors as “pawns of foreign powers” and Sentop labeled the letter an allusion to a military coup. On Sunday, Ankara’s Public Prosecutor Office announced an investigation into the letter’s signatories.
Dr. Gökhan Bacık, a political science professor at Palacký University in the Czech Republic, said that this war of words could be a hint towards an internal schism within Erdoğan’s alliance of Islamists, ultranationalists and a Kemalist cadre that formed after the failed coup attempt in July 2016.
“What we have observed now is typical of Middle Eastern politics,” Bacik told Ahval News in a new podcast. He pointed to recent news of a suspected coup attempt in Jordan as another example of the region’s tense brand of internal regime politics.
Ahval