By Sefa Yürükel
Since its establishment in 1949, the North Atlantic Alliance has presented itself to the public as the guardian of collective defense and democratic values. Yet behind this shining facade lies an extremely dark operational record, particularly in the case of Turkey. NATO’s presence in Turkey has turned into a structural instrument of domination that interferes in the country’s internal affairs, targets its political regime, harbors terrorism, and sheds the blood of the Turkish nation, rather than contributing to the security of a sovereign state. The Gladio type clandestine structures built during the Cold War functioned as NATO’s invisible hand in Turkey; they played a central role in overthrowing democratically elected governments, carrying out unsolved murders, and fueling social chaos. Simultaneously, the logistical, financial, and political support provided to terrorist organizations targeting Turkey, especially the PKK, reveals the true face of the alliance. The ultimate aim of all these processes has been to keep Turkey weak, dependent, and regionally isolated.
NATO Backed Coup Attempts and Political Engineering
The military coups and coup attempts Turkey has endured since transitioning to a multiparty system largely bear the traces of transatlantic planning. The May 27, 1960 coup is recorded as an intervention that punished Turkey’s search for an independent foreign policy and fortified the NATO centered security bureaucracy. The March 12, 1971 memorandum and the September 12, 1980 coup were political engineering operations deployed to prevent Turkey from drifting away from the Atlantic axis during periods when the Cold War intensified. The July 15, 2016 coup attempt, as the most recent link in this chain, went down in history as a betrayal in which elements nested within NATO’s headquarters and command echelons sought to destroy Turkish democracy. The common denominator of all these interventions is that the overthrown governments had adopted national and independent policy lines. Far from protecting democracy in Turkey, for decades NATO has sheltered, trained, and when necessary deployed the coup mentality that is the greatest enemy of democracy.
The Anatomy of the Gladio Structure and Unsolved Murders
The Turkish leg of the stay behind secret armies that NATO established in various European countries throughout the Cold War formed the backbone of the structure known as the deep state, which has been responsible for countless unsolved murders. This formation, known as the Counter Guerrilla, was designed as part of NATO’s psychological war against communism. Over time, however, it strayed from its objective and turned into a terrorist apparatus that targeted all segments loyal to Turkey and the Turkish nation, regardless of whether they were nationalist, conservative, leftist, rightist, Kemalist, revolutionary, idealist, Alevi, or Sunni. The social chaos, massacres, and provocations of the 1970s were the work of this NATO linked structure. In Kahramanmaraş, Çorum, Sivas, Malatya, and many other cities, the children of the Turkish nation lost their lives in incidents incited by this dark network operating in cooperation with mandate puppets. Gladio’s activities in Turkey are not a manifestation of alliance solidarity and the ideal of collective defense, but of a systematic strategy aimed at intimidating, dividing, and subjugating the Turkish nation. The primary motive behind this strategy is to prevent Turkey from rising as a regional power and to keep the country within the boundaries drawn by NATO.
Support for Terrorist Organizations and Its Bloody Consequences
NATO’s gravest betrayal of Turkey has been the indirect and direct support provided to the separatist terrorist organization PKK and its extensions. For decades, certain European members of the alliance have not only turned a blind eye to the PKK’s financing, propaganda, recruitment, and logistical activities but have also actively facilitated them. The overt military and political support given to the PYD and YPG, derivatives of the PKK in northern Syria, has proven that NATO’s counterterrorism rhetoric is a complete deception. The weapons, training, and intelligence support provided to the terrorist organization by NATO member countries bear direct responsibility for the deaths of thousands of Turkish citizens, soldiers, police officers, and innocent civilians. The NATO infrastructure financed by the taxes of the Turkish nation has indirectly served to sustain a terrorist organization that butchers the children of that very same nation. This betrayal is not an ordinary diplomatic disagreement; it is a bloody hostility waged under the mask of an ally. For every drop of blood shed by the Turkish nation, the NATO circles providing this support bear responsibility.
The Strategy of Making Turkey an Enemy of Its Neighbors and Regional Isolation
NATO membership has not only weakened Turkey internally but has also driven it into an isolation in foreign policy that contradicts its historical depth and geographical advantages. The alliance’s threat definitions transformed Turkey from a regional power with organic ties to its neighbors into the West’s forward outpost against the East. Throughout the Cold War, relations with the Soviet Union, and subsequently with Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Russia, were shaped along the axes of enmity determined by NATO; Turkey’s national interests were sacrificed to the strategic preferences of the alliance. In tensions with Greece, NATO often sided with Athens rather than maintaining an equidistant stance, and on the Cyprus issue, far from supporting Turkish theses, it did not hesitate to impose an embargo on Turkey. Independent diplomatic initiatives, such as the zero problems with neighbors policy, were viewed with suspicion and occasionally sabotaged by the NATO centered security bureaucracy. At the point reached today, Turkey’s loneliness in its region is largely the product of this zero sum and hostile strategic culture imposed by NATO.
Conclusion
For Turkey, NATO is not a security umbrella but a coup apparatus that has sought to destroy its sovereignty, a terrorism sponsor that sheds the blood of its nation, a dark network that commits unsolved murders through Gladio, and an architect of hostility that isolates it in its region. The alliance’s record in Turkey is a dense register of betrayal and enmity that can never be reconciled with discourses of friendship and alliance. This dark legacy, stretching from coup attempts to support for terrorist organizations and from unsolved murders to artificial tensions fabricated with neighbors, is engraved in the memory of the Turkish nation. Breaking this chain of dependency and betrayal and building a fully independent security and foreign policy line by leaving NATO is now a historical obligation. The account for the blood shed by the Turkish nation must be called to account, and no so called alliance relationship should be considered legitimate until that account is rendered. An independent Turkey possesses more than enough strength and determination to ensure its own security with its own mind, its own weapons, and its own children.
References
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Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.
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