Just before the start of the Syrian civil war, I wound up discussing the Jan. 25, 2011, Tahrir Square uprising with a group of dedicated Justice and Development Party (AKP) supporters at a cafe in Athens. When one of them claimed Syria would fall shortly after Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, I said this would not be the case because of Syria being a spy state (mukhabarat) — meaning that it was highly skilled in crushing any civilian movement. I explained in detail how the Syrian regime had generated a rather elaborate system (four different agencies) to gather and process domestic intelligence to sustain the Baath regime.
In the last couple of months, those critical of AKP’s cycles of “new regulations” have been complaining about an evolution of Turkey into a mukhabarat state. Is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan following in the footsteps of Syria’s former ruler Hafez al-Assad?
Almost everyone is confident that a bill in the parliamentary commission stage will soon be “the law of the land" in Turkey. The MIT bill introduces drastic institutional changes to the Turkish National Intelligence Agency (MIT). When I first heard about this, I was hopeful that finally there would be separate agencies for domestic and international issues, given MIT Director Hakan Fidan’s personal criticism of the MIT being bogged down with “domestic” matters. I was wrong.
The introduction of the draft bill states that it aims to bring the "MIT in line with the necessities of the era, grant it the capabilities of other intelligence agencies, and strengthen its methods and capacity for individual and technical intelligence." Several pro-AKP pundits make references to the CIA to defend the bill and position it as a step in the right direction. Is it? We need to first question the potential practical implications of the bill itself, and then also put it in the context of all other updated laws of Erdogan’s "advanced" democracy. This may help explain why many are referring to the Syrian mukhabarat state to explain the current situation in Turkey.
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