Adultery Tapes Work Of President Erdoğan, Says HDP Leader

Pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP) Co-chair Selahattin Demirtaş has accused President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of organizing the dissemination of adultery videotapes of political figures including former Republican People's Party (CHP) leader Deniz Baykal and former politicians from the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) in the run-up to the general election in 2011, dismissing the allegations that the tapes were recorded and released by the faith-based Hizmet movement.

“We know who filmed those tapes,” Demirtaş said at a campaign rally in Van province on Sunday. "The president blames it on the ‘parallel structure' [a term invented by Erdoğan to refer to followers of the Gülen movement inspired by Turkish Islamic scholar Fetullah Gülen]. But those recordings were taken by himself [upon his instruction]. They recorded the private lives of many people. They still do. And they blackmail those whose wrongdoing they uncover.”

Demirtaş also claimed that Ankara Mayor Melih Gökçek, who recently became embroiled in a public spat with Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç, keeps hold of sex tapes of many figures within the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). “The Ankara mayor has tapes that he uses for blackmailing. He has tapes of his friends and uses them -- against his own friends. That is why he has managed to stay in office for years in Ankara,” Demirtaş added.

Following Demirtaş's allegations, Mayor Gökçek announced on Monday that he will file a libel and compensation suit against the HDP leader, saying that he will show Demirtaş to be a “dishonest politician” by a court decision.

In the run up to the general election in 2011, many political figures who used to constitute an important place in Turkish politics either resigned or were forced to quit their positions when the adultery video footage was posted on the Internet. The first video recording -- that showed Baykal with a female deputy from his party who formerly worked as his personal secretary -- was leaked on May 6, 2010. The footage was first published by a news portal called habervaktim.com. Four days after the video's release, Baykal announced his resignation as the chairman of the CHP. Since the incident, Baykal has always put responsibility for the video on the AK Party and Erdoğan.

However, Erdoğan has rejected the claims that he was behind the scandal that led to Baykal's resignation, instead putting the blame on the Hizmet movement, saying that he said he had ordered the transportation, maritime affairs and communications minister at the time to try everything to remove the content from the Internet.

The pro-government Yeni Şafak daily, which is known for its slanderous campaigns against moderate scholar Gülen, involuntarily revealed Erdoğan's role in organizing the dissemination of the videotapes in a report released on June 2 of last year. Yeni Şafak said that Mehmet Yılmaz, a police officer allegedly affiliated with the so-called “parallel structure,” was placed in charge of the Directorate of Protection Affairs when he gained Erdoğan's “trust” by bringing the tapes to him. However, the daily immediately removed the report from its website upon criticism.

The MHP is another political party that was forced to cope with the release of sex videos involving its politicians. On May 20, 2011, MHP Deputy Chairmen Mehmet Ekici, Osman Çakır, Ümit Şafak and Ahmet Deniz Bölükbaşı, MHP Secretary-General Cihan Paçacı and MHP Presidency Council member Mehmet Taytak resigned from their positions and withdrew their candidacy for the post of deputy in the June elections.

Earlier in the same month, four other MHP politicians -- Recai Yıldırım, Metin Çobanoğlu, Bülent Didinmez and İhsan Barutçu -- resigned from their posts after the release of video clips that showed them having sex.

However, despite the many allegations made by politicians, the real sources of the tapes have always remained a puzzle. Current CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu claimed on June 12 of last year that Erdoğan is the main person responsible for the release of tapes featuring Baykal. Kılıçdaroğlu also added that he had seen a video of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan watching Baykal's tapes.

“I saw more than one such tape with my own eyes. Those who were showing the Baykal tapes to Erdoğan on a laptop were at the same time recording Erdoğan with the webcam on the laptop. The conversations there were the same conversations in the audio recording that was leaked a few days ago. I have never seen a man who lies in such a despicable way. Baykal also has this information and is preparing to sue Erdoğan,” said Kılıçdaroğlu on a live program on Bugün TV.

In an audio recording uploaded on to YouTube in March of 2014, Erdoğan purportedly instructs a man to capture a video of Baykal in flagrante delicto and spread the footage via the media and the Internet. “Unfortunately, these are very indecent and immoral things. There has to be an intervention here. The CHP has gone completely off the rails,” the voice attributed to Erdoğan is heard telling the people in the room.

“We have such things in our hands, some things to be released. If I give it to you, how would you do it? … Are you passing them to websites?” says the voice; and, after a pause, possibly a point in which parts of the original recording were edited out, he adds: “All right, let's do it like this, then. Let me first save it to a hard disk. But the recording is very bad. Will he [Baykal] say they are fake and this and that?”

Former Interior Minister Idris Naim Şahin, who resigned from the ruling AK Party after a 2013 corruption scandal, also claimed some of the officials within the ruling AK Party are engaged in efforts to produce fake sex tapes that implicate a number of deputies who recently parted ways with the ruling party. “I have heard that efforts are ongoing at the Prime Ministry and the [AK] Party headquarters to dub and montage [tapes]. I have heard about efforts to fabricate tapes involving resigned deputies,” the ex-minister said on March 27 of last year on a Bugün TV program.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)