Fenerbahçe's Yıldırım: My views were displayed as if targeting a community

Leading football club Fenerbahçe's embattled chairman, Aziz Yıldırım, has corrected remarks quoted in news stories in some Turkish media outlets, saying his remarks in an interview with The Wall Street Journal on Monday were distorted to make it look like he was targeting the Hizmet movement.

In a written statement on the club's official webpage on Tuesday, Yıldırım said some excerpts from the interview with a WSJ reporter were arbitrarily chosen by some print and visual media outlets to show him lambasting a particular group. “Therefore, I kindly ask the public to read my interview as a whole so as not to lose its integrity of meaning and to avoid abuse,” he said.

Some Turkish newspapers and TV stations weaved stories out of the WSJ article showing Yıldırım in the position of accusing the Hizmet (Service) movement for a decision by the 5th Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals to uphold his sentence. Yıldırım was convicted in July of 2012 and sentenced to six years, three months in prison for fixing games, trying to influence the outcome of matches and leading a criminal gang. A lower court had convicted 93 defendants in connection with the case in 2012 and the court of appeals on Friday partially upheld the verdicts. Yıldırım had appealed against the ruling that convicted him of match-fixing and of forming a gang for this purpose. The ruling means Yıldırım may be going back to prison to serve the rest of his sentence, having already spent one year in prison during the trial.

Hizmet, a volunteer-based movement working to spread the interfaith dialogue with a primary emphasis on education inspired by Turkish Muslim scholar Fethullah Gülen, is in a row with the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) over allegations that some party members and businessmen close to the government were involved in graft and bribery. Hizmet, through its media, has warned the government to avoid actions disrupting the investigation process, whereas the government has accused it of establishing a parallel state network.

Yıldırım was quoted by some media outlets as accusing a Hizmet-controlled parallel state structure of setting up a plot against him and sending him to jail. The government has been conducting a similar smear campaign against Hizmet about the Ergenekon and Balyoz (Sledgehammer) cases, which were against clandestine organizations within the state planning to topple the government by staging coups. A consultant to the Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wrote in a pro-government newspaper a month ago that the Ergenekon and Balyoz convicts should be retried.

"I don't respect the decision of this judiciary, therefore my conscience is clear and I'm going home to serve jail time," Yıldırım was quoted as saying in the WSJ story. He was tried for match-fixing allegations and was found guilty by a court for bribing rival team players and referees in some matches. "The match-fixing case was a political trial with a political verdict," Yıldırım said.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan also dwelled on the court's decision about Yıldırım during a press conference on Monday as he was departing for Brussels for a series of meetings with EU officials. He criticized the appeals court decision as a political move ahead of planned local elections in March.

Yıldırım was acquitted of wrongdoing by the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) despite his guilty verdict. However, European football federation UEFA believed the club to have been involved in rigging activities and punished it for two years by suspending it from European tournaments.

Published on Today's Zaman, 21 January 2014, Tuesday