Pro-Government Daily's Story Reveals Profiling In Police

An article in the pro-government Sabah daily has seemingly revealed that profiling personnel is pervasive in the police force and alleges that according to an intelligence report from the National Police Department, one-fifth of the police force has links to the “parallel structure.”

The “parallel state” or “parallel structure” is a term invented by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to refer to followers of the Hizmet movement, a civil society organization inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen which Erdoğan accuses of deliberately penetrating the upper echelons within the state bureaucracy.

According to the intelligence report from the Counterterrorism Department, the Anti-smuggling and Organized Crime Bureau and the Personnel Department of the National Police Department, more than 41,000 police officers in 40 cities, including Ankara, İstanbul, Adana, Bursa and İzmir, were listed as members of the “parallel structure.” Sabah ran the report on its Friday front page with the headline “One-fifth of police officers are parallel.” The pro-government daily -- which has run several stories targeting the Hizmet movement since December of last year, when a major corruption and bribery scandal broke out after details emerged of a police investigation into senior figures within the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government -- claimed that the report is a part of an internal operation within the National Police Department after the December “coup plot” against the government.

According to Sabah's story, 5,000 high-ranking and 36,000 regular police officers out of 180,000 personnel in these 40 cities are to be appointed to desk jobs at the headquarters of the National Police Department in Ankara or offered early retirement, given the impossibility of filing a complaint against the officers due to the absence of evidence of wrongdoing. Thousands of police officers, including police chiefs and commissioners, were removed and reappointed as part of the government's plan to purge police officers who were involved in the operations on Dec. 17 and 25.

Last December, the Taraf daily claimed that members of the Hizmet movement and other religious groups that had voiced criticism or disapproval of government activities were also being profiled. Taraf published details from a document from the National Security Council (MGK) dating from 2004 which was signed by a number of officials, including then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül and then-Justice Minister Cemil Çiçek. The AK Party's then-Deputy Chairman Hüseyin Çelik confirmed the authenticity of the document, saying that it had been leaked to the media by a member of the National Intelligence Organization (MİT).

Amid mounting public debates over reports of extensive government profiling of faith-based movements and religious individuals, Turkish Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç has strongly condemned the act of profiling. Arınç has said that profiling is “extremely immoral and ugly” and constitutes a serious crime.

Admitting the government profiling of a large number of senior public officials including police chiefs, prosecutors and judges as well as academics, journalists and businesspeople, Parliament's Constitutional Commission head and AK Party deputy Burhan Kuzu claimed on his Twitter account in January this year that “an intelligence report that was submitted to the prime minister after the Dec. 17 and 25 operations detailed a parallel structure within the state,” adding that some 2,000 names were listed in the report.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)