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Turkey Names New Commanders in Military Shakeup

By Agencies
Updated Thursday, 04 August 2011 20:08:41 - IST (UTC +5:30)

Ankara: Turkey has named four new generals to lead its armed forces, after the country's top military commanders resigned last week. They had quit to protest the arrests of fellow officers accused of plotting coups.
President Abdullah Gul Thursday approved the appointment of a new chief of staff, as well as new commanders to head the navy, army and air force. He made the announcement at the end of a key four-day meeting of the Supreme Military Council.
General Necdet Ozel, former head of the military police, was named the new chief of staff to replace General Isik Kosaner. Ozel had been made the acting chief of staff on Friday, hours after Kosaner resigned. General Mehmet Erten was promoted to head the air force, General Hayri Kivrikoglu becomes the commander of land forces and Admiral Emin Bilgel will lead the navy.
A presidential spokesman says the new appointments are expected to be easily confirmed by the Cabinet.
More than 200 officers have been charged in connection with alleged anti-government plots dating back to 2003. Most are in jail.
Tensions between Turkey's secularist military and the Islamist-rooted government have been building for years. The Turkish army has forced four governments from power since 1960. (VOI)
Turkey Appoints New Army Chiefs
By MARC CHAMPION
ISTANBUL—Turkey's civilian and military leaders appointed an new slate of commanders to head the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's second-largest armed forces Thursday, ending four days of tense negotiation.
Getty Images
Turkey's new Chief of Staff Gen. Necdet Ozel arrives for a security meeting in Ankara on Aug. 4.
The decisions followed the shock resignation of the chief of the general staff and three service chiefs Friday, which had briefly rattled the Turkish lira.
Thursday's appointments showed that the government had succeeded in forcing the armed forces to pass over some of the most senior generals in line for promotion, either because they were awaiting trial on charges that they plotted against the government, or because the country's Islamic-leaning government considered them hostile.
The new Chief of the General Staff will be Gen. Necdet Ozel, as had been signaled by the government. Gen. Ozel was previously head of the Gendarmerie, Turkey's large paramilitary police force which keeps order in rural areas among other tasks. He is seen as an a-political, but staunchly secular officer, acceptable to both the government and to the officer corps as a whole.
Gen. Hayri Kivrikoglu was made chief of the Land Forces, a key post that puts him next in line to succeed Gen. Ozel in the top job.
Admiral Emin Murat Bilgel become commander of the Navy; Gen. Mehmet Erten became chief of the Air Forces; and Gen. Bekir Kalyoncu will replace Gen. Ozel as head of the Gendarmerie, said Ahmet Sever, chief adviser to President Abdullah Gul, who approved the appointments.
Mr. Sever said it was "obvious" who the next Chief of the General Staff would be, referring to Gen. Ozel, but that would be made formal in a separate announcement after cabinet approval.
In a compromise on the part of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who led negotiations at the Supreme Military Council for the civilian authorities, jailed commanders won't be made to retire formally as the government had demanded. Instead, they will have their right to promotion suspended for a further year. In Turkey, defendants routinely spend multiple years behind bars as they await trial.
The decisions meant that several higher ranking generals had been passed over, including Gen. Aslan Guner, who had more seniority that Gen. Kivirikoglu but had publicly snubbed President Gul's wife on two occasions, refusing to greet her—apparently because she wears an Islamic headscarf. Gen. Guner will become head of the Military Academy until he retires in a year's time, according to Turkey's NTV telelvision.
Gen. Bilgin Balanli, who had headed the Military Academy and had been expected to take over as Air Force Commander, also was passed over. Gen. Balanli was arrested at the end of May, accused of taking part in a plot to topple the government. Some 250 military officers have now been indicted in coup-plot cases, of whom Gen. Balanli is the most senior active-duty general.
Turkey's military has conducted three military coups since 1960, and pressured a fourth, Islamist-led government to resign in 1997. As recently as 2007, the military posted a so-called e-memorandum on its website, in which it appeared to threaten to intervene if Mr. Gul was elected president, warning against the country's Islamization. The government called fresh elections which it won decisively, and Mr. Gul was then elected president with no intervention from the military.
The armed forces have long considered themselves guardians of the secular state that the founder of modern Turkey, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, created in 1923. Traditionally, civilian governments merely rubber stamped the military's choices for its force commanders at twice-yearly meetings of the Supreme Military Council.
But with the end of the Cold War, tolerance for the military's dominance of Turkish politics dwindled both at home and abroad. Thursday's reshaping of the military command by the government represents the end of a lengthy struggle between the ruling, Islamic-leaning Justice and Development Party and the hardline secularist generals—one that Mr. Erdogan appears to have won, analysts say. (Curtsy WSJ)

Tags: Agencies Turkey, New Army Commanders nominated

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