uh
welcome to sputnik orbiting the world
with me george galloway and me gayatri
for a decade prime minister erdogan the
leader of the muslim brotherhood's
turkish franchise has bestowed the
republic's politics like a colossus he
has transformed the economy abolished
ludicrous anti-islamic discrimination
women in hijabs were hitherto banned
from wearing them in public places like
schools universities town halls and the
rest he has built roads and bridges
bulldozed and battered his way through
the stagnation of his predecessors his
foreign policy began with the intention
of no conflict with the neighbours but
that has run into the sands since he
allowed turkey to become the war front
in the international assault upon his
neighbor syria
relations with iraq are poor too last
month a leaked audio file uploaded to
youtube revealed that erdogan's
administration had been discussing with
his generals a false flag provocation
which would be used to wait an all-out
war on the syrian arab republic
he then promptly banned youtube the
twitter sphere grew thick with
revelations about rampant corruption
involving members of erdogan's own
family and the sons of other leaders of
his ruling akp
he promptly banned twitter too and when
thousands earlier took to the streets to
protest his increasingly authoritarian
rule he gunned them down with water
cannon rubber bullets and finally hot
lead joining us now to discuss the
question of erdogan victor or villain is
nesen fechmei editor-in-chief of olay
gazette the london-based online turkish
newspaper thank you very much for
joining us erdogan has just won 45 of
the vote so not even a simple majority
but he's hailed it as a magnificent
victory and vowed revenge on his enemies
it's not quite the magnaminity that one
might have expected from an election
victor
obviously he calls it a victory but as
far as the turkish nation and population
concern i have doubts about that as far
as the municipal elections and possibly
the coming general elections i'm sure he
will win again uh obviously his
supporters
uh
comes mainly from the religious group
and possibly because of erdogan's during
his
ministerial prime ministerial time he's
encouraged a lot of investment brought
free nhs
uh he's also collecting
votes from the other part of the
community as well that's why he's
getting his majority
but as far as turkish democracy is
concerned i have very big doubts that
by looking at recent events during
erdogan's prime ministerial time
i can see that they got rid of the
security
of democracy in turkey the army itself
then obviously they got in control the
media
free speech
television
and i believe now they have probably
have the intention of
tempering with the constitution
if they get the majority in the coming
general elections so to me all these
events when i look back i can see as if
this is step by step dismantling the
secularism
in turkey
the you say the army is the guarantor of
democracy but the army of course
frequently crushed democracy in turkey
in the past
uh well military junta ruled turkey in
my lifetime yes when ataturk left he
brought in democracy parliamentary
system
uh changing it from empire
sultan ruling into a democratic system
obviously it was not easy because they
just came out of independence war as
well and he thought to himself that
there are
two
institutions that he can trust
to protect the
democracy that they brought
parliamentary system the university
students which he made a speech towards
the university students for the future
young generation
and the army itself but obviously there
has been corruption in the army as well
which nobody can deny that during that
period
and also he formed a national party
jhepe
unfortunately neither the army nor the
political party has served the country
as
ataturk would have loved to
if we look at the period between 1923
and erdogan's akp party time jf has
always been in the front line of
politics but they have always used the
nationalism card rather than bringing in
new policies and development
and they have also damaged the country
by
splitting the nation into
kurds and turks
rather than uniting the whole
remnants of ottoman empire whatever
background ethnicity they come from they
did not work on it they worked on
nationalism just to church
turkish nationalism which split the
country because they have a big
population who call themselves kurdish
kurds are spread in turkey syria iraq
and iran as everybody knows and they had
no nation they had no country
but
this does not mean that they could not
have lived
peacefully and with equal rights in
turkey but jaipur has never really
spent enough time solving these problems
and relating to these people with their
language
they couldn't speak or
learn their own language as well
as a secondary language they did not
spend invest money into
eastern and
southeastern turkey
mostly the investments has always been
into big cities like istanbul ankara
izmir
western turkey rather than east so
we no one can say that they've done any
better than erdogan
the national they use the nationalism
card now we look at the erdogan zira
they're using the religious card because
after 600 years of sultan's rule which
he was the religious leader as well
uh
majority of the population digested
islamic rules and
um understanding and philosophy
when ataturk changed into democracy in
1923 they did not have enough time to
digest
uh
democracy and secularism erdogan knew
this and his party knew this and they
tempered
with the
religious card and
they knew they would get a lot of votes
in the anatolia the whole turkey eastern
and southeastern plus on top of that
they added the investment encouraging
investment
and i understand in one of his speeches
he used saying uh earlier when he was
in public
eye
democracy is like a train
you jump on it and you jump off as you
arrive to your destination what i
believe he meant by that is that we will
use democracy as a name we will use
elections as a name
to get
the votes get to our destination and
don't jump off and bring in the changes
that we have in our minds
in other words islamic
rule maybe or
you can't do all that on the basis of 45
of the vote i mean as uh president morsi
found in egypt yes
winning 51 of the vote cannot be treated
as a mandate
for profound transformational uh changes
the issue for erdogan therefore is if he
gets 45 where's the other 55 and how
united are they how able are they to
stop this train yeah because you
mentioned the kurds i mean what was
what's their position now and how did
they voted in the past
at least they have entered parliament
they have their own parties but some
somehow they cannot get enough mps into
the parliament
due to the election systems in turkey so
yes they have a voice
to a certain extent but they cannot
enter into a party like the other
parties uh to represent themselves and
possibly get involved with politics and
they steal that split and it's not just
kurz themselves then you have
alevis which is a big portion of
population they are not sunnis
they're alive they don't go to mosque
they have their own places to pray and
none of the government this is the same
sect of course yeah that the ruling uh
family in syria and they're mostly
concentrated in the east as well they
have their own praying places but the
government
seems to be building 200 most
as we hear the figures a year whereas
those people don't have any they pay
taxes well and they don't have they
don't get permission to build no no the
governments are not paying attention and
respect so what's the opposition then to
erdogan is it well
divided and therefore 45 percent they
are divided they are divided because you
got the uh kurdish people they probably
will vote for
uh bedepa
which is a kurdish backed
party then you have jehovah
absolutely republicans and then you have
uh
which is merely
hurricane party which is more
nationalist party so their spit the
opposition is split into three i see
there's no left in this picture is there
no turkish left worth
talking about in electoral terms no
there is not that much well edjavit who
used to be the leader of jhepe
was supposed to be a a bit of socialist
but
edge of it yeah but what about left of
him nothing nothing nothing i can't see
that and there is no
there is no uh
development in the party itself and they
don't know which
car to use like erdogan
to attract votes
nationalism is out of the way at the
moment
only religion is working in turkey there
are no party who will bring policies
where people will say that yes we are
voting for policies now what is
positive to all these
arguments demonstrations and changes in
turkey is
at least
at least since 1923
almost half of the population now
digested
secularism
and they are
ladies
young women university students children
getting going out on the streets
and demanding equal rights
so if we look at it what happened in the
last 90 years
in turkish democratic history at least
we got the people now
trying to raise their voice through
demonstrations like jesse park if you
watch the pictures on gezi park you will
see a lot of women on the streets you
will see a lot of young students
they are not politically minded they
don't
vote they vote for different parties but
when it comes to local issues freedom of
speech
and equality they're on the streets so
this is positive signs that it will be
back on the streets
i think jesse park was the
point where public said enough is enough
and they put a stop to it
and this will go on it will continue the
problem is
where is the party a lot of people now
in
the general elections
will not even vote because they don't
approve any of the parties
thank you very much mr freckme we're
going to have to discuss that
again
coming up is one of the united states
hottest up and coming investigative
journalists who's broken stories to make
your hair stand on end some of which you
haven't heard of yet but you will trust
me you will don't go away we'll be right
back
welcome back to sputnik who what why
that used to be the abc of journalism
later replaced by the tame acceptance of
state press releases and backroom
government briefings
now it is the name of the go-to site who
what y.com which tells you everything
you need to know and otherwise surely
won't be told about america and the
world its founder and sharpest knife in
its formidable box is ross baker who
joins us now russ thanks for coming on
board the sputnik
tell us first
why are you here is american journalism
uh seeking to teach us something
how do you get this site
how's it doing
what's it doing well george we started
who what why because we found that the
full story was not being told to the
american people and we soon started
receiving visitors from around the world
particularly from the uk who also felt
that they were not always getting the
full story and so the reason i'm here in
london is to sort of try to partner with
other people here to recruit writers uh
some financial supporters others who
want to work with us to sort of spread
truth-telling journalism throughout the
world and it's who what why dot com
let's get that clear i've been following
you for a number of years uh and i think
there is something of a renaissance in
american
journalism i mean you you were just
watching the movie well uh a while ago
we watched uh all the president's men
great movie and it shows the real
journalist a profession and then and
then i think is this would you say that
who why is the current the modern um
online version well i i always uh
i hate to step on these sorts of myths
but unfortunately even the uh all the
president's men story was sort of a myth
and in my book family of secrets which
george knows i've gone into extensively
what the problems are even with that
story the establishment media tends to
serve us up stories and convenient
heroes who often actually are not uh and
when you're really going fearlessly
you're looking at the story of kibono
who gains in all of these situations
it's much much harder to find a platform
that is why we exist that's why we're
creating this platform but
grand world and the snowden affair and
your work
all seems to indicate that uh
life has not entirely gone out of the
investigative american journalists that
is true in fact i would say that uh
there is a hunger for it uh and that i
think that the establishment media is
playing catch-up struggling to uh to get
a little bit of a piece of it they're
afraid to take too much of it but they
want some of it because they know that's
where the public is headed now some
years ago you literally startled me with
information i had not seen or heard
anywhere else about the
character muhammad atta the lead
hijacker on 911
and you revealed things about his time
in florida and so on that were simply
amazing and which are not known
by the great majority of people even now
but when i met you in parliament the
other day
if anything you started me even more
with your analysis which you're working
on of the boston marathon bombing tell
us about that story well sure george uh
what we find is when we dig into these
sort of major traumas that result in an
increased public fear
increased measures by the governmental
authorities
really representing kind of a rollback
of our civil liberties we always want to
take a close look and see is the story
we're being told an accurate story most
americans and i think most people in the
world feel that it is a done deal that
these two brothers committed this crime
actually most of the things that we
think we know we don't actually know we
don't actually know we've never been
shown any kind of evidence that they did
it we think we saw footage of them
putting those backpacks down and leaving
there we never saw that footage and
really the key element in this whole
story that sort of convicts them before
any trial
is an alleged confession by the elder
brother the tsarnaev brother to a man he
allegedly hijacked carjacked now the
problem with that story was when we
began to look at it it falls apart
the man who claims that he received this
confession his identity has been
shielded from the public to the present
day and as we look at his story we see
that he told different stories to law
enforcement and to different uh media
organizations suggesting that uh his
story may have been sort of forced along
a trajectory from a more benign story in
which there was no confession and there
was no carjacking to where it was a much
grander and more insidious story the
lead perp dead
the brother
dead
the
witnesses
anonymous
what happened in that apartment again in
florida
was very different to what the
story we were told seemed to indicate
in a nutshell the elder of the tsarnaev
brothers dead the younger brother uh
badly wounded
they fired more than 100 shots into a
boat where he was believed to be hiding
he did not have a weapon he did not fire
a single shot back
second of all
a close friend of the elder brother who
perhaps could have shed the most light
on what actually happened and what if
any involvement
tamerlan tsarnaev may have had in this
he was in
fbi custody in florida and he was shot
and killed while being interrogated the
most extraordinary story is that
possible
how is that even possible that the fbi
couldn't uh i mean they said that he
attacked him whilst he was being
interrogated an inherently implausible
story to begin with but
even more implausible is the idea that
the federal bureau of investigation
could not deal with that attack in any
other way except by killing the person
they were interviewing it's all very
very strange and the other thing you see
is that
crime scene photos actually show
the only substantial blood nowhere near
where he was being interrogated but
rather by the door leading from the
hallway out of the apartment from which
we conclude the possibility that he
actually was shot while trying to escape
uh and the other thing that's very very
interesting is that um uh that the
stories of him attacking have changed uh
and also very strangely you know the fbi
is is perhaps the only law enforcement
agency that does not uh tape confessions
and they say that he had just confessed
before he attacked them
which is so strange and they say that
then he attacked them then they had to
kill him right and here's even more
interesting the fbi because they do not
tape these things they always have to
have two fbi agents in the room one of
them does the interrogation the other of
whom uh records it uh
with with paper and pen
but the other agent was out of the room
by chance and so we have essentially no
documentation of any of this
unbelievable this is keystone cops uh
stuff it's extraordinary that uh an
educated sophisticated public like the
united states public uh chooses to
believe that story but of course
they believe it because the alternative
is worse
the alternative is that these two guys
did not commit this act of mass murder
and that therefore someone else must
have who might that have been well a lot
of things are possible it's possible
that they were involved in something
we know that the fbi has very
reluctantly admitted to knowing this
family and interacting with the tsarnaev
family several years before this
incident that's absolutely key the fact
that the establishment media is not
focusing on the prior relationship
between
law enforcement and these people
is absolutely staggering because we know
historically that particularly the fbi
has a long history of working with
informants and even provocateurs
inside radical and extreme movements and
separating out their sort of
investigative role from their role in
tacitly or otherwise encouraging
this kind of behavior that then they
sweep in and and and
resolve is uh is is something that needs
to be looked at
the snowden revelations and the
reverberations over here
where it was revealed but only if you
read the guardian not if you read
anything or watched anything else
the heavy lifting being done by the
british security services in conjunction
with the nsa in the united states
all seem to point to a security state
which is out of democratic control
not subject to public scrutiny because
the media is merely an echo chamber of
what that security state is telling them
that's a very dangerous set of
coordinates don't you think it's
tremendously dangerous and i think it's
becoming more dangerous by the year and
even by the month we see new measures
being incorporated all the time uh and
and one of the things that troubles me
is the lack of accountability in the
united states we have minimal
accountability here in the uk you have
almost none at all uh they're uh people
like yourself and other people in
parliament have told me that they really
have very little ability to ask
questions and find out what really is
going on uh and that is dangerous and
that is i think inappropriate in a
democracy who what why dot com more
power to your elbow ross baker thanks
for joining us
and now it's your turn to tell us what
you think in the social media roundup
what's rattling gayatri well i asked
aragon victor or a villain
to its clairop response when you start
trying to censor the internet then
you're on the way out and he will be
gone soon
sarp ullas adds to that saying that it's
odd that the voting fraud which may have
changed results in three cities isn't
making any headway or international
media well there was an allegation of uh
voting fraud i don't myself think it has
all that much traction and neither i
should say did our uh um
guest the editor of a very well
respected online newspaper
uh so
there may have been there always is in
every election some voting fraud but i
don't think there's any serious reason
to doubt that erdogan has 45 percent of
the polity in turkey which is a very
impressive number
but it's not the magic number
uh even of 51 percent and as president
morsi found out even 51 isn't enough
well most are associated associating him
more to the villain guillermet says that
he's even a terrorist by association and
i think we understand what he means with
that well uh david cameron has just
announced an investigation in britain
into the muslim brotherhood
and their potential for terrorism which
is actually absurd
it's absurd to call erdogan a terrorist
but if david cameron saying the muslim
brotherhood may be terrorists then if so
facto erdogan may be a terrorist because
he is no more and no less than the
leader of the turkish chapter of the
muslim brotherhood you think that
association i was thinking about the
association with supporting the
terrorists in syria oh that's no doubt
but then by that uh definition david
cameron is a terrorist william yeah yeah
yeah there are all sheth
says that he's actually a victor turned
into a villain and that's i think is a
more appropriate
description
that's kind of my uh analysis i was uh
he's tripled the size of the economy in
ten years he has uh liberated
muslim women from totally oppressive and
unjustifiable imposed secular laws yeah
i thought he was doing terrifically well
until he turned into a villain
the syrian embrolio when i saw his
comments after his victory i thought
they were very very unwise
even
a juvenile politician here knows that
when you win an election you really have
to be magnanimous to those you've just
humble right yeah to come to the
microphone and threaten
all sorts of dreadful consequences
for those who had the temerity to oppose
you
very bad politics well that's all we
have for this week which sadly means
that's the end of the show remember you
can reach us on twitter at rt
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can like us on sputnik on russia today
it's goodbye from me gayatri and from me
george galloway it's been marvelous