Ko?aner’s confessions a blow to Sledgehammer skepticism

TODAY’S ZAMAN
?STANBUL

Former General Staff Gen. I??k Ko?aner (Photo: AA)
Statements of the former military chief, Gen. I??k Ko?aner, in a voice recording posted online on Thursday in which he confirms the authenticity of the Sledgehammer coup plot have dealt a severe blow to arguments made by critics of the Sledgehammer case who claim that the coup plan was fabricated and that the records of a 2003 military seminar were manipulated to discredit the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK).
Sledgehammer refers to a suspected coup plot believed to have been devised in 2003 with the aim of unseating the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government through violent means. According to the Sledgehammer plan, the military would systematically incite chaos in society through a series of violent acts, among which were planned bombings of the Fatih and Beyaz?t mosques in ?stanbul.
In the voice recording, the alleged voice of Ko?aner confessed that the military did violate the law and confirms that documents detailing the Sledgehammer Security Operation Plan are authentic. He says that all the documents regarding the Sledgehammer plan were thought to have been destroyed by the military, but the documents used in the indictment prepared by civilian prosecutors into the plan. “The part of the Sledgehammer case that upsets us is that all the documents the First Army had were stolen. All we had regarding the seminar was stolen, including our voice recordings, were obtained by unauthorized people.

This is the real shame. How could this happen? The guys have everything we spoke about. We were involved in this shame. This is the story of the Sledgehammer case. There may also be some criminal elements to the story. I fear that,” he says.

The General Staff has denied that the Sledgehammer plot was the subject of the 2003 military seminar, saying they have no record of such an incident, and it defended itself by claiming the Sledgehammer plan was merely a war game.

Currently, there are nearly 200 retired and serving members of the TSK who are under arrest on charges of involvement in the Sledgehammer plan. All of the suspects are accused of a failed attempt to destroy Parliament and overthrow the government. Such a charge calls for a jail sentence of up to 20 years in prison.

Cornered by Ko?aner’s statements in the voice recording regarding the Sledgehammer plan, relatives of the suspects in the Sledgehammer case have begun to argue that Ko?aner confirms the authenticity of the seminar not the Sledgehammer coup documents; however, Ko?aner explicitly talks about the documents of the Sledgehammer coup plan in the voice recording.

At the 43rd hearing of the Sledgehammer case at the ?stanbul 13th High Criminal Court on Friday, Hüseyin Ersöz, lawyer of retired Gen. Çetin Do?an, a key suspect who has been jailed as part of the Sledgehammer case, said he will take action to request for a cautionary judgement to be imposed on news reports regarding Ko?aner’s voice recordings. He said he was disappointed that people had begun to make judgments based on these voice recordings, which he said had not been confirmed to be authentic by any state authorities. In the voice recording, Ko?aner says: “We searched the General Staff, Land Forces Command and the First Army but we failed to find any documents. A journalist went to the prosecutor’s office and handed a sack full of documents and CDs. We also failed to obtain those CDs.”

The journalist Ko?aner refers to is Taraf daily’s Mehmet Baransu who first reported on the matter in January 2010 in a front-page article featuring the headline “Fatih Mosque was to be bombed.” He later delivered many documents and CDs regarding the Sledgehammer coup plan to a prosecutor’s office, leading to the launch of the Sledgehammer (Balyoz) investigation.

“We unfortunately gave trump cards to the hands of the dishonest. All the responsibility with the Sledgehammer lies with the First Army. How can such plans be leaked from the military headquarters? There is no explanation for this. Who leaked these plans? It was us. We cannot blame anyone else,” says Ko?aner in the recording.

Military covered up its negligence

The alleged audio recording of Ko?aner was the second such recording posted online this week. In the first voice recording posted online on Tuesday, Ko?aner made yet another series of scandalous confessions in which he admitted the military’s negligence and shortcomings in the fight against terrorism and preventing some deadly terrorist attacks. The statements of the former military chief indicate how the military failed to find out who the negligent commanders were and punish them, instead launching investigations to find those who had leaked military documents exposing the military’s negligence.

“One issue that gets us in trouble is that we are failing to ensure unity of command. Wherever there is an operation or an ambush or whatever, a commander should charge. He should be responsible for that region. We have the very big advantage of being able to receive intelligence from [unmanned aerial vehicles] UAVs. A commander who sees images from an UAV should immediately intervene in the situation,” he said.

Ko?aner also admitted that the military had failed to prevent a 2010 terrorist attack on the Hantepe outpost in Çukurca, which claimed the lives of six soldiers, even though UAVs had detected the terrorist group in the area 15 minutes before the attack took place. “We should not commit this fault again,” he said.

Strikingly enough, none of the commanders accused of negligence in four attacks by the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) on militaryoutposts in Hakkari’s Da?l?ca, Aktütün, Gediktepe and Hantepe provinces in the past three years have been investigated by military prosecutors.

Some have been promoted, while others have simply been appointed to other provinces, as if nothing happened. In all of these attacks, evidence was found to indicate that the commanders had failed to act against the terrorists, despite intelligence reports and visual images provided by Heron UAVs. The General Staff also imposed pressure on the families of soldiers who had been killed that wanted to take legal action against the General Staff due to its negligence in the killing of their sons, telling the families that they will not be given any compensation, which is given to families of martyrs, if they take such an action.

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