General's golf game handicaps his career

ISTANBUL // In a highly unusual development for a country that worships its military like no other institution, the chief of Turkey's air force, one of the top-ranking officers in the country, is under public pressure to resign after newspaper pictures showed him playing golf in a sunny Mediterranean resort at the time of a Kurdish rebel attack that killed 17 Turkish soldiers. "Resign, my pasha," the daily newspaper Vatan said on its front-page, using a traditional and respectful term for generals of the Turkish military. The man in the line of fire is Gen Aydogan Babaoglu, 64, head of the Turkish air force. He has been facing calls for his resignation since last week, when photographs showed him playing golf in Antalya on Oct 3 and Oct 4. The general has been criticised for staying in the resort after Kurdish rebels attacked an army outpost in south-eastern Anatolia shortly after midday on Oct 3. "It was impossible to explain and understand what the pasha did," the mass circulation newspaper Hurriyet said in an editorial last week. Meanwhile, the country's cartoonists have been having a field day with the scandal surrounding Gen Babaoglu. A cartoon in Hurriyet showed two Turkish soldiers in the mountains of the south-east. One soldier is hit on the head by an object, and the other one says: "Don't worry, it wasn't a mortar shell; it was a golf ball." It is the first time a serving member of the Turkish military leadership has been subjected to such harsh criticism and ridicule. Some observers think this is a sign of a changing attitude in the Turkish public towards the generals, who have pushed four governments from power since the 1960s. In recent years, political reforms under Turkey's EU bid have widened the concept of free speech, and Brussels has called on Ankara to strengthen civilian control over the armed forces. "Increasingly, people are wondering if the military is doing its job properly," said Sahin Alpay, a political scientist and newspaper columnist in Istanbul. Turkey's armed forces enjoy a high degree of respect that goes back to the republic's early days, when Mustafa Kemal, a general in the Ottoman army, organised a national resistance movement after the First World War and led his troops in a war to push foreign occupiers out of Anatolia. Kemal later became Ataturk, the first president of the new republic. Even today, polls show that the military is the most trusted institution in the country. But Gen Babaoglu's perceived lack of sense of duty and sensitivity at a time when the Turkish public was shocked by the unexpected attack by fighters of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, disappointed many Turks and embarrassed the armed forces. The PKK attack on the outpost in Aktutun was the harshest blow the Kurdish rebels inflicted on the Turkish military in years. While Gen Babaoglu stayed in Antalya, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, cut short a foreign trip and returned to Ankara after the attack, and Abdullah Gul, the president, cancelled a planned visit to France. The general and the general staff in Ankara made matters worse for the armed forces by issuing conflicting statements on Wednesday that were meant to defuse the situation but ended up showing the military in an even more unflattering light. Gen Babaoglu said he did not know about the PKK attack on Oct 3, but personally gave orders for Turkish air strikes on rebel positions that followed the attack. Later on Wednesday, the general staff in Ankara issued a statement saying Gen Babaoglu was not informed about the PKK attack until the evening of Oct 4, thereby contradicting the general's own version of events. The general staff's statement triggered a new round of criticism because it implied that Gen Babaoglu did not know about the PKK action for several hours after the Turkish public had learnt about the attack on Oct 4 via a military spokesman. Some commentators asked why the head of the country's air force was left in the dark for 30 hours about the bloodiest rebel attack in years. Other media wondered whether the general staff's announcement about Gen Babaoglu playing golf in blissful ignorance until the evening of Oct 4 was true at all. "Does the general staff expect us to believe this statement?" asked Radical, a daily newspaper. Even observers known as stout backers of the military voiced their frustration with the general's conduct. "If the general staff's statement is correct, or if the air force chief defends himself that way, the air force chief should not hesitate to resign himself, and the resignation should be asked for by the chief of general staff," the commentator Fatih Altayli wrote on his website. "Just think that Istanbul comes under air attack. Not a single Turkish fighter plane offers resistance. Istanbul is flattened. On the next day, the chief of the air force says: 'I didn't know.'" Gen Babaoglu said his critics wanted to weaken the Turkish military. "All this is being written with the aim of wearing out the Turkish armed forces," the general told Hurriyet. "Should I have gone to Aktutun myself that day to make the critics happy?" But Gen Babaoglu did not find many allies for his position. Koksal Toptan, the parliamentary speaker, said that although criticism directed against the military should be measured - because the fight against terrorism could otherwise suffer - "an attitude of saying 'whatever you do is right' is not good either". tseibert@thenational.ae