Shy No More

"He came to me [in the presidential typing pool] and started asking about my family. He just started talking to me, asking me about my life. Were you married before, things like that … I didn’t know it was leading somewhere. I was quite a shy person, very shy."
"I felt a bit uncomfortable when he proposed to me since he was still married to Sally (Mugabe's wife, suffering from terminal cancer]."
"I was very young when I started living with President Mugabe. But he was patient with me and took time to groom me into the woman that I am now."
Grace Mugabe, Zimbabwe 'first lady'

South African rights campaigners say it would be a disgrace to grant diplomatic immunity to Grace Mugabe. Photograph: Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP

Grace Mugabe might have started out shy, but it didn't take too long for her to become assertive and materially entitled. While Zimbabweans suffered a plunging value in currency, rising unemployment, scarcity of food and rampant inflation, she amused herself, travelling to Paris to shop, earning herself the uncomplimentary title of "Gucci Grace". Famously, another beautiful and wilful first lady, Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, was known in a much earlier generation for her profligate spending on shoes, and Grace Mugabe doubtless has come a close second, with her own estimated 3,000 pairs.

During one infamous shopping trip to Paris she is reputed to have spent 75,000 pounds, consolidating her reputation as an avaricious woman plundering her nation's scarce financial resources while her countrymen and women suffered privation in a country once considered the breadbasket of Africa. Her husband's scheme of forcefully reclaiming large tracts of land from white Zimbabwean farmers and doling them out to his political government henchmen, members of his family and his supporters destroyed agriculture in Zimbabwe.

Trips to Paris to spend her nation's financial resources are now out. As is her conniving to become the ruling successor to her 92-year-old husband. At age 52, Grace Mugabe will have to start all over again, somewhere else, with the aid of the funds she has squirrelled away since her parade has been rained upon, her schemes overturned, her husband under house arrest. South Africa has offered her haven, but it is rumoured that she has since departed to preserve her life, to Namibia.

Grace Mugabe, wife of Robert, was known as Zimbabwe's 'First Shopper'  Reuters

She does have an enemy who is guaranteed to look for revenge. The Vice-President, a long-time supporter and colleague of her husband's whom she persuaded Robert Mugabe to re-think his fitness to replace him, offering herself as a more suitable and appropriate candidate to become president, as a fait accompli by executive order. Mugabe had, indeed, a week ago informed his ZANU-PF party of his intentions and urged them to support Grace Mugabe as vice-president to replace Emmerson Mnangagwa, whom he had dismissed from his post and his successor last week.

"No one will remove the president except God", Grace Mugabe said at a cabinet meeting days ago. She had also said on a previous occasion that when Mugabe died he would be propped up and would remain president of Zimbabwe even dead. But at age 52 she felt herself to have been sufficiently schooled by him and mature enough in her political wisdom to take his place. The place that Mnangagwa was assumed to have been groomed for. A man whose sobriquet is "the Crocodile". Evidently, the man earned that name and the reputation accompanying it.

He is said to be more ruthless than Mugabe, and more cruel. During Mugabe's 37 years of dictatorship, Mnangagwa served as his spy chief, his chief of defence, and situation enforcer in the early years. Doubtless during the land-seizure campaign beginning in 2000 when white Zimbabwean farmers, skilled in ensuring that the land they farmed was productive, and employing black Zimbabweans who are now though knowledgeable, unemployed, his heavy hand was involved.

But a feud had developed between Grace Mugabe and Emmerson Mnangagwa, and during a ZANU-PF rally she urged her husband to agree that "the snake must be hit on the head". When he was fired, Mnangagwa seeing the writing on the wall as his chief lieutenants were also removed, fled the country, leaving Grace Mugabe to celebrate her victory, and since her husband is old, ill and feeble, her near-ascension to power.

It is assumed that the military chiefs became alarmed at the purge of Mnangagwa's faction, that it would spread to affect their high command. With Mnangagwa orchestrating things from exile in South Africa, a coup was concocted, skilfully and thoroughly, and to great effect, with no blood spilled, the people assured that their president and his family would be safe, that only the corrupt would be arrested.

A military convoy began the proceedings at midnight on Tuesday, launching a surprise assault on the barracks of the presidential guard while other units moved securing vital installations in government districts, to surround parliament, government offices and the studios of state television. Cabinet allies of the president's wife were swiftly hunted down and apprehended, spoken of by General Constantino Chiwenga, as criminals, threats to Zimbabwe.

Finally, liberated from the dictatorship of Robert Mugabe and his ambitious wife, Zimbabweans can breathe a sigh of relief. At least for a brief moment or two. But another, sinister threat of a totalitarian-thug-in-waiting preparing to ascend to the height of power in the country is close on the horizon.

The couple was married in 1996  Getty Images

Erdogan's Enemy-Terrorists: Kurds, Gulenists

"[This would represent] a landmine for our relationship [between Turkey and Canada]."
"Canadian officials, Members of Parliament], policy chiefs [and] many high-level people, they think they can use in future (sic) [to accept bribes such as paid trips to Turkey from Methullah Gulen's organization]." 
"People are brainwashed, they use these schools [Gulen Hizmet charter schools] for recruitment. This is dangerous for Canada as well. Our advice is be careful about these schools."
"We [Turkey] did not receive any kind of statement from any Western government that they support the democratically elected government [of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party, post-attempted-coup]."
Cemalettin Kani Torun, deputy chair, Turkish parliamentary foreign affairs committee

Recep Erdogan has accused the West of 'supporting terrorism'  AFP

It's not exactly a charm offensive.  Mr. Kani is leading a cross-party delegation in Canada, to raise the alarm of the 'terrorist threat' represented by Methullah Gulen and his followers. More in the nature of a vitriolic blame offensive, the repeated declarations that a 'democracy' has been threatened by the violence of a military coup that failed because the courageous ordinary people of Turkey stood up to defend their president and his Islamist political party, while the West simply yawned.

Failing the most basic courtesy of commiseration, of offering assistance to the Republic of Turkey in its hours of turmoil. We should hang our heads in shame and abject apology. And perhaps round up all those Turkish-Canadians who subscribe to the Gulenist ideology. We would then have the option of imprisoning them or returning these Canadian citizens to a revenge-ridden Turkey. And that would most certainly ensure that the Canada-Turkey relationship will be healthy and sound.

Not that democratic Turkey is failing to defend itself on the home front, having used the expeditious occurrence of the failed coup to strike hard against all those within the country that Ankara suspects have plotted against the government. And here we speak not of thousands of military personnel of high-to-middling rank persuaded that their president-for-life has dismantled the traditions that secular-governing Turkey was so proud of, but of tens of thousands of Turks.

The Turkey that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk bequeathed to his nation as a forward-looking, cosmopolitan nation wedged between progressive, modernized, secular-governed Europe and the backward Middle East mired in its quagmire of theism, sectarian and tribal antipathies and ruling kingdoms and sheikdoms has undergone a 90-degree seachange, a steady return to the grip of Islamism. And Islam excels at punishing its enemies.

President Erdogan has recovered the momentum he had briefly squandered in his imperial autocratic impulse, caught between NATO membership and its solidarity in battling Islamic State, expecting Turkey as a member to do likewise rather than nurture ISIL, and his blind rage at Russian intervention in a conflict where the detestable Bashar al Assad has been slaughtering Sunni Syrians with the backing of Shiite Iran, Hezbollah and Iraq.

How does all that disquieting violence and wretched misery impact on Canada? The reach of a cleric who once supported Erdogan, but became disgusted with his totalitarian Islamist compulsion to transform the nation in fond memory of the glory days of the monolithic and powerful Ottoman Empire. What was, can once again be recalled. Just as Vladimir Putin, Erdogan's newfound buddy has his own aspirations to reinstate the Soviet Union.

Cleric Methullah Gulen, despite years of exile voluntarily removing himself to the United States to be domiciled there and out of reach of Erdogan's vengeful grasp, has a wide and faithful Turkish following who prefer to subscribe to his brand of Islam. Mr. Gulen in fact, runs an empire with his followers integrated throughout every level of Turkish society and professions, both within Turkey and among Turks who have emigrated to other countries.

And it is the Gulenists who escaped persecution in Turkey by migrating elsewhere that Erdogan's emissaries warn about. Having arrested tens of thousands of Turkish police, military, journalists, lawyers, academics and students, Ankara has turned its sights on Turks abroad who support Mr. Gulen and his aspirations for Turkey. They are terrorists all, and those countries who support their citizenship are nurturing terrorists.

Turkey is now turning its face away from its former Western allies, who were never quite convinced that Turkey was as much European as it is part of the Middle East. Under the long propaganda arm of the Justice and Development Party, Turks no longer take pride in their tradition of having one foot in Europe the other in Islamism. The West and its interests have been transformed into the enemy.

More than 30,000 Erdogan supporters marched in Cologne, Germany in early August. Getty

The West, in fact, has been well infiltrated with the presence of Turks, most of whom support Erdogan and their version of Islamist democracy. Like many immigrants, retaining the fondness of dual nationality. The divisions between Turks with those loyal to Erdogan as opposed to those faithful to the Gulenist ideology of tolerance and secular-type government has been brought to the West and will play out as it will.

Erdogan's rage that the United States insists on proof that Methullah Gulen was behind the failed coup before they would begin to entertain the Turkish demand that he be returned to Turkey to stand trial for treason, for which the death penalty appears to be on the cusp of reinstatement, manifests itself in the extension of anger directed toward all Western nations, none of whom have expressed solidarity with a government on a witch-hunt.

"No To The Coup"

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's hatred of the Internet is legendary. Like all tyrants, even those as benevolent as he believes himself, as a 'respecter of democracy' to be, he is convinced it is the work of the devil, meant to undercut his authority by giving Turks an avenue to express themselves, in ways contrary to how he feels he should be regarded. Moreover the tools of the devil, like Facebook and Twitter permitted Turks to communicate instantly with one another, to devise conspiracies and to plot insurrection.

Burham Ozbilici, AP

The protests that took place at Gezi Park in Istanbul three years ago resulted from Erdogan's plans to transform the public and much-used green space so beloved of area Turks into a business and investment opportunity, to change the green atmosphere of nature's design, to the green transference of money through building on that natural site -- depriving people of a social gathering place -- a high-end shopping complex attractive to foreign investment.

AFP   Demonstrators heading for Taksim Square. Masks and swim goggles help protect them from tear gas.

Prime Minister at the time, Erdogan sent out the security police and the troops who used water cannons and tear gas to disperse the crowds in a show of violent disgust at the untrustworthy population unable to recognize economic advancement in favour of quality of life. And he waxed enraged over the protests that refused to dissipate, as people continued to protest even while facing the reality of exposing themselves to physical harm. Erdogan called the protests an attempted coup.

The protests in Turkey keep flaring up, in the street and on the Web. Police arrested activists because they had allegedly sent 'libelous' tweets. It's a sign of the government's contradictory approach to the Internet, which it purports to embrace. Spiegelonline

Since then, Erdogan has arrested journalists, shut down news sites, mounted thousands of lawsuits against those he feels insufficiently respectful of his august person. Press and Internet freedoms have been tightened. Journalists in their hundreds forced out of work. Cases against thousands of people have been opened by state prosecutors charging them with insulting the president online.

Staff members and supporters of the Zaman newspaper editor-in-chief Ekrem Dumanli shout slogans as he is arrested by plain clothes police and led towards a car.  AP

During the Gezi Park protests, Erdogan characterized Twitter as "the worst menace to society", used by protesters to organize demonstrations against censorship, police brutality and the authoritarianism of their-then Prime Minister, now President-in-perpetuity. Erdogan's reaction to the protests was to become ever more dedicated to democracy by attempting to entirely shut down his critics, going so far as to reach beyond Turkey's borders into Germany to complain about insults to his majesty.

But when a real putsch raised its ugly head, Erdogan suddenly became enamoured of the Internet and what instant outreach to plugged-in Turks could create; a loyalty-based population who could be urged to march right out of their homes into the public squares to confront the putschists. And they did just that. In response to Erdogan's having called a television station through FaceTime's video chat app and urging the population to react to save Turkey and just incidentally Erdogan as well.

Calling on his loyal subjects to flood onto the streets and bridges and squares to guard the airports and to place themselves in direct confrontation with the members of the police and military who were intent on overturning the Justice and Development Party rule, to return secularism long protected by the Turkish military, back to governance. In the process lives were lost, but the people were triumphant. And now they're back at square one, saddled with a president planning to change the constitution to crown himself President with fully executive powers, ad infinitum.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan speaks on CNNTurk via Facetime. Burak Kara / Getty Images

Throngs of Turks responded, contacting friends and relatives as they reached their destinations, to persuade them to come out to join them. Using WhatsApp, Twitter and associated communication tools on social networking they mobilized in their numbers, waving Turkish flags, daring the coup soldiers to thwart their intention to protect their government. No more coups in Turkey, autocratic dominance or not.

The overwhelmed coup plotters and the soldiers were no match for the unifying message that Turks have no more patience for coups, despite that many in opposition decry the direction Erdogan has taken Turkey in, isolated from its neighbours and traditional allies, attacked by the terrorist groups it had initially supported, and back at war with the Kurds because Erdogan decided the peace agreement with the PKK had gone on too long.

Satisfying Erdogan's Imperial Ambitions

"Had I stayed ten or fifteen additional minutes, I would have been killed or I would have been taken [by coup military at the resort hotel in Antalya on July 15]."
"[As for the public's call upon his government to reintroduce the death penalty]: "You cannot put aside the people’s demands."
"In a country where our youths are killed with tanks and bombs, if we stay silent, as political people we will be held responsible in the afterlife."
"No democracy shall allow for soldiers, prosecutors, police, judges, and bureaucrats to take orders 
from an outside organization [speaking of charges that Gulenists were responsible for the coup attempt] instead of the institutional bureaucracy."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

"I don't know who planned or directed it [attempted Friday-night putsch]. According to my experiences, I think that the [Gulen movement] attempted this coup."
"But I cannot tell who within the armed forces organized and carried it out."
General Akin Ozturk, charged and arrested as the coup military leader

Kayhan Ozer/Presidential Press Service/The Associated Press   Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan addresses supporters gathered in front of his residence in Istanbul on Tuesday.

Some nine thousand police officers, bureaucrats and others have been been fired by Erdogan's administration, identified as being loyal not to the state, but to the movement led by self-exiled Turkish Muslim cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who, once supportive of Erdogan, now rejects his administration as fanatically Islamist and corrupt. And whom, in turn, Erdogan characterizes as an interfering government-in-exile, insisting that the United States extradite him to Turkey from his home in Pennsylvania.

American air force warplanes stationed at Incerlik air base in Turkey have been placed in what appears like siege conditions with all power cut off, and Turkish military standing on guard. The U.S.-led airstrikes on Islamic State positions are obviously on hold until Turkey's demands that Mr. Gulen be turned over to Turkish justice sees some kind of resolution. With the U.S. in turn demanding that proof be shown them first that the elderly and ailing Mr. Gulen was in any way directly involved.

The Interior Ministry has dismissed 30 governors, 52 civil service inspectors and 16 legal advisers. Military police officers and coast guards have been removed from duty while the Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor's Office has arrested the former air force commander charged with being the coup ringleader, along with 24 other military elite personnel. The thousands of soldiers rounded up and the many generals will be tried for treason. Even those in the teaching profession have been impacted with over 24,000 fired.

The very courts that have been purged of prosecutors and justices by the thousands who were identified by the Justice and Development Party to be aligned with the Gulenists will now see Erdogan loyalists stand in judgement of the arrested. The Constitutional Court, comprised traditionally of secularists attempted a decade earlier to ban Erdogan's party on the basis of its being religious in character. When Erdogan called a snap election and won, the judicial system lost that attempt.

Ever since, the Justice and Development Party has focused on dominating the judicial system with appointing only Islamist loyalists. Erdogan has been warned that the injudicious level of his vengeance-soaked crackdown post-coup may result in the country's NATO membership being placed in jeopardy, while the European Union warns that a return to the death penalty would automatically disqualify Turkey from EU membership.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is prepared to veto any talks with Turkey joining the European Union if the death penalty is restored in Turkey. Matters internally have played out beautifully for Erdogan, with the bulk of the population having grown increasingly Islamist over the years, in full support of their president changing the constitution to give the presidency imperial powers.

His claims that the Kurds are in a league with all Islamist terrorist groups threatening to continue destabilizing the country, even as his military is killing Kurdish civilians, has resonance with his followers.

The instability that has rocked Turkish society with the attacks that have taken place in the public arena targeting popular areas certain to extract maximum deaths in bombing attacks has convinced the public that only their autocratic president with his firm hold on Turkey's future can save them from disaster. Erdogan's isolation on the world stage has been partially repaired with his pallid peace offerings to Russia and Israel.

Turkey remains the gateway for Syrian refugees flooding into Europe, and as such provides him with a trump card in ongoing negotiations with an overtaxed Europe tired of providing haven to economic opportunists and genuine refugees alike, stressing their already strained economies and Muslim-saturated societies even further. And the porous border that allowed Islamic State recruits ready entry to Syria with Turkey looking the other way is a matter far from resolution, one that has come back to bite Turkey.

An already strained economy is now further strained with violence from all directions ensuring that tourism has been depressed and is likely to remain so for the duration. The threat of civil war in Turkey is not that far from potential eruption. Recep Tayyip Erdogan is not possessed of a conciliatory nature, and the extent of his revenge will reveal in part the near trajectory of the country's fortunes.

The Terrorist Turkish Military

"[The aborted coup d'etat represents' an attempt at an uprising by a minority within our armed forces."
"They will pay a heavy price for their treason. The process has started today and it will continue just as we fight other terrorist groups."
"I'm making a call out to my people. I'm inviting them out to all our public squares. I'm inviting them out to our airports. Let us gather in our squares, at our airports as the people and let that minority group come upon us with their tanks and artillery and do whatever they wish to do."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan

"Those who are attempting a coup will not succeed.  Our people should know that we will overcome this."
Turkish General Zekai Aksakalli, commander, military special forces

"[We have seized control] to re-install the constitutional order, democracy, human rights and freedoms, to ensure that the rule of law once again reigns in the country, for the law and order to be reinstated."
Coup leaders statement

People stand on a Turkish army tank in the capital Ankara [Tumay Berkin/Reuters]

The arrogant presumption of a man claiming his determination to protect the very democracy he has altered to suit his personal taste is responsible for the delayed reaction of a significant proportion of the Turkish military, demeaned and subjugated, held in contempt, cleansed of its 'secular' generals and kept in tight control by Islamist defenders of the faith has come back to clamp its aggravated teeth on the seat of Erdogan's expensive trousers. He felt confident he had eradicated officers who might wish to return the nation to its traditional secular status separating faith and state.

Friday night it seemed certain that those members of Turkey's armed forces who remained loyal to the democratic European vision of Kamel Ataturk, in taking the initiative while Mr. Erdogan was on vacation outside the country, had taken control of the country. The background of troop movement, helicopters overhead, explosions, gunfire and an air battle between the coup helicopters and loyalist military warplanes marked the wholesale,  unexpected violence that was taking place.

And when Turkey's president called on Turkish citizens to get out on the streets to demonstrate their support for his government, he was calling on people to place themselves in high danger to satisfy his need to demonstrate that there are Turks prepared to sacrifice their safety for his ongoing demagoguery as a leader intent on destroying the country's democratic credentials, wedded to his rage at Turkish Kurds, his appetite to destroy the judiciary, to criminalize journalists who criticize him and his support of fanatical Islamism.

Turkey has not, in reflection of its past, been entirely comfortable with Erdogan's authoritarian rule; that he ran afoul recently of another authoritarian with an ego as large as his own, equally given to self-boosterism and sidelining state finances to erect palatial palaces while engaging in raging conflict with those who defy them, sank Turkey further into a state of isolation on the world stage. His crackdown on dissidents and the media expressing an opposing opinion to his own is legendary.

Brutalization of the Turkish Kurdish population in the southeast of the country while portraying them as prepared to destroy the country through their separatist agenda brought the country to an embattled state, fighting Syrian and Turkish Kurds while finally ending support of Islamic State terrorists to pretend to confront them on the battlefield, as a NATO member.

Soldiers had blocked Istanbul's main Ataturk Airport with four tanks stationed there and another two along with a military vehicle before the VIP terminal for the obvious purpose of denying Erdogan return to the country. All flights were stopped when soldiers entered the flight tower. The headquarters of the TURKSAT satellite station and Ankara police headquarters were attacked. A palace in the use of the prime minister and deputy prime ministers had a dozen tanks moving toward it.

The purge of the army high command, Erdogan's accusations against senior officers of coup plotting and the hundreds he had placed on trial during the "sledgehammer" cases has all waited silently in the background, simmering on low heat until the coup plotters felt sufficiently prepared to mount a real coup. Had they been successful Erdogan's determination to rewrite the constitution to give himself imperial presidency powers in perpetuity would have been stopped.

On the other hand, Turkey has the government a majority voted into power. Those Turks who are unhappy with the Justice and Development party are not in the majority. That the majority has been influenced by the propaganda machinery of an Islamist party speaking to those who already share its political ideology but who have been willing to be convinced that malign forces conspire to destroy Turkey and its cultural and religious values is only a partial explanation.

President Erdogan can now go on to claim that foreign interests were involved in motivating the coup leaders to strike against his rule, his party, the elected government and the people of Turkey. The very fact that it took a military coup, not an election to attempt to remove this man and his party from government will be validation enough for his claims that 'terrorists' have attempted to hijack the Turkish agenda to favour the evil plans of outside sources.

If it weren't for the fact that Erdogan was forced by the country's increasing isolation and failing economy, complicated by conflict on all fronts, to make peace with Russia and with Israel, he might have pointed the finger of blame at Israel which has in fact extended its support for him in a display of Realpolitik. On the other hand, he could still hint darkly at a "Jewish conspiracy" that succeeded in conspiring to persuade disloyal members of the military to topple him.

Clothes and weapons belonging to soldiers involved in the coup attempt lie on the ground abandoned on the Bosphorus Bridge. CNN