In Turkey, Phone Users Fear Big Brother May Be Listening

ANKARA, Turkey — When journalist Fehmi Koru went out for dinner here recently with Islamist lawmaker Nazli Ilicak, he took his cellular phone along with him as usual. An hour later, Koru got a call from a fellow journalist. “He repeated almost word for word,” Koru says, “my entire conversation with Mrs. Ilicak.”

Koru, an outspoken critic of the role of Turkey’s staunchly pro-secular military in politics, is convinced that his cell phone was used as “a transmitter to eavesdrop on my conversation. By relaying it to a person they knew to be a close friend, they were sending me a loud and clear warning that they could follow my every move.”

“They,” according to Koru, are elements within the state security apparatus, who keep tabs on anyone deemed to be a threat to the Turkish state. When Koru appeared the following evening on the pro-Islamist Channel Seven television station to tell his story, the broadcast was jammed four times. When he gave up trying, the broadcast resumed uninterrupted.

Koru’s experience is nothing unusual in Turkey. Over the past few months, the country has been rocked by a series of controversies nicknamed “The Big Ear Scandals” because they all involve the illegal tapping of phones.

Last week, 13 members of the national police force, including Police Chief Necati Bilican, were suspended in the wake of allegations that they had been tapping the phones of President Suleyman Demirel, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit and senior military officials. The officers insisted that they had been tapping phones as part of their fight against organized crime.

Ecevit was skeptical. “The police have offered some explanations as to why they have been tapping the phones,” he said, “but I’m not convinced.”

He said the bugging had come to light as the result of a fierce turf war between rival factions within the police thought to be respectively allied with the military and a powerful Islamic sect.

There are further signs that tapping may no longer be tolerated. Last week, Turkey’s Constitutional Court said it may reject tape-recordings of a conversation between former Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan and a lawmaker with the Islamist Virtue Party as evidence against the group. A case launched earlier this year seeks to ban the party on charges of trying to establish Islamic rule.

Turkish governments have long used phone tapping to monitor political rivals as well as groups thought to be a security threat.

In 1994, as the Kurdish insurgency in Turkey’s southeast provinces began to spiral out of control, the security establishment was given sweeping new powers along with state-of-the-art equipment to monitor telephone conversations without requiring special court authorization.

That same year, four Kurdish former members of parliament were stripped of their immunity and sent to jail on charges of membership in an illegal organization.

Much of the prosecution’s case rested on recordings of conversations the four had held with Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is now being tried for treason. Ocalan was captured earlier this year in Kenya by Turkish special agents--after Israeli and U.S. agents detected him through cell phone conversations.

As reports of abuses connected with the wiretapping began streaming in, parliament launched an investigation. In 1997, a special Turkish security court ordered that all bugging devices be dismantled on the strength of parliament’s findings.

“This [latest scandal] shows that the equipment is very much in place and probably even more sophisticated,” says Sabri Ergul, a former lawmaker who led the parliamentary probe.

According to Ergul, the police have “stockpiles of recordings they can pull out any time to bring down any politician they choose.”

The first of the “Big Ear” scandals erupted last year after it emerged that a Turkish pop idol, Sibel Can, had hired a “phone-tapping gang” to listen in on calls between her former husband and father-in-law.

Arrested gang members subsequently revealed that they had sold their services to politicians, businessmen and mob bosses who used the phone recordings to blackmail one another.

In November, one of the mob bosses helped topple the government led by Mesut Yilmaz of the conservative Motherland Party by leaking tapes of conversations he had held with a prominent Cabinet minister.