It appears the Turkish military, once a deeply respected institution, is being systematically neutered. The latest move is to remove its military wing and make the civilian medical system responsible for war casualties. Metin Gurcan on AL Monitor describes the situation:
The Turkish government is following through on its radical decision to totally dismantle the military medical network of about 900 doctors and more than 4,000 military nurses and paramedical personnel.
Under the state-of-emergency decree issued July 31, two weeks after an attempted coup, the 125-year-old Gulhane Military Medical Academy (GATA) in Ankara and 33 other military hospitals in different parts of Turkey were transferred to the jurisdiction of the civilian Ministry of Health. The medical needs of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) will be handled by the civilian medical system.
The transfer inevitably created a battlefront of discord between the military high command and civilian politicians, generating angry debates in the public sphere and also between civilian and military elites.
The debate in the public sphere was triggered by reports that a specialist sergeant who had suffered serious burns Sept. 6 had died. The sergeant, part of the Euphrates Shield military intervention against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria, was said to have died because he was not evacuated from the Gaziantep Public Hospital to GATA’s highly specialized burn unit. Reports claiming the sergeant had died because of incompetence in the civilian medical system spread like wildfire on social media. The reports added that the civilian system has been experiencing serious problems in prioritizing TSK casualties from clashes with the Kurdistan Workers Party and IS, thus hurting TSK morale and motivation.
According to Minister of Health Recep Akdag, such reports are malicious fabrications.
And even if it’s a true report, would it matter? If public support for the government is as strong as it appears to be, the ideological requirements of Party over the well-being of citizens will over-rule humanitarian and efficiency requirements, until the Party is dispossessed of the government – and that would be a “necessary but not sufficient” requirement. Any replacement government might also be motivated by ideology (either political or religious) and continue to see micro-control as being a necessity.
Metin’s report later speaks of concerns about losing institutional knowledge concerning military-oriented specialties, but I wonder if they are losing institutional knowledge about the political system itself. I am not particularly knowledgeable about the Turkish political system, but I do know that for many years it had stood out for being a secular system that refused to let any particular religious sect take over – as enforced by the military coups. It now appears the military is being co-opted, and the state will fall under the sway of one of the sects. That will place institutions at the whim of ideological purity, and may result in the degradation of the governmental institutions that support society.
Will Turkey turn into Iraq over the next century, with strong-men as leaders and dissenters firing up bombs? The Kurds, who might be best considered as a conquered populace, have of course caused occasional havoc, but now I’m thinking of ethnic Turks who happen to be in religious sects not currently in power.
