Başbuğ’s critical meet...

The YAŞ meeting will convene in the morning. After a short opening session, YAŞ members will visit Atatürk’s mausoleum and attend a luncheon hosted in their honor by President Abdullah Gül. In the afternoon the second session of the meeting will be held and late in the afternoon decisions adopted will be sent to the presidency for presidential endorsement. Traditionally, after receiving presidential approval, decisions are made public the same evening.

For the past six years, Prime Minister Erdoğan and Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül have been placing reservations to expulsion decisions complaining that unlike other administrative undertakings the YAŞ decisions are final and cannot be appealed against and thus do not conform to the principles of democracy and the supremacy of law. In this fall routine YAŞ meeting, generally the defense minister and the top commanders discuss under the chairmanship of the prime minister "disciplinary matters," a general evaluation of the political and military situation within Turkey’s "influence area" as well as in the areas of interest, preparedness of the Turkish Armed Forces for war and force requirements.

For the first time in many years, there were no expulsions from the military either for "poor discipline," a term used often to describe Islamist activities in contravention to the secularism principle on which the military attaches ultra-high importance, or for any other reason. Though there were some "poor discipline cases" in the military over the past months, such as leakage of the photographs of Başbuğ at the Wailing Wall, but military judicial process is not yet complete on any of those cases and thus cannot be taken up by the YAŞ.

Still, ahead of today’s YAŞ meeting we were hearing some incomplete sentences such as, "the chopper deal is over," "(the alleged) Dolmabahçe understanding era is over," and "There were different conditions in August..."

Indeed, the August meeting of the YAŞ was important for two reasons. While on the one hand, it was the first YAŞ meeting after President Abdullah Gül assumed presidency, top on the agenda of that meeting was promotion within the military. If because of expulsions the YAŞ decisions did not receive presidential approval by the end of August due to age as well as waiting period limitations, many top commanders, including Gen. Başbuğ could have been retired from service and the military would have been landed in a command crisisÉ There is no such concern now...

Before the August YAŞ meeting, President Gül had said as president his duty was to oversee smooth functioning of the state organs and thus he would fulfill the duty entrusted on himself as president. Although as no one was expelled, the remark of Gül could not be put to test, the performance of the president ever since he assumed the highest office of the republic indeed underlines that even if he might not be personally happy with the YAŞ decisions, he would endorse and put them into implementation out of his concern not to disrupt the smooth functioning of the state organs and land the country in an administrative crisis at a time when the government is fighting to ease the impacts of a global financial crisis on the Turkish economy. Still, as prime minister and a Cabinet member he objected expulsions and placed reservations on YAŞ decisions in the past, as he was not tested as a president on this highly controversial issue before, it is difficult to estimate what will be the attitude of a President Gül on expulsions? As he does not have the power to place a reservation for the expulsions section before endorsing the YAŞ decisions, will he endorse the text submitted to him or land the country in a fresh controversy? Or, will the YAŞ decide not to expel anyone at this meeting as well and thus a possible confrontation between the military and the presidency and the AKP government be avoided or postponed to the next YAŞ meeting?