Turkey parliament gives spy agency controversial new powers

Turkey’s parliament has approved legislation to bolster the powers of the country’s intelligence service, a measure government opponents say will deepen a trend towards greater authoritarianism.

After weeks of debate, the bill was approved on Thursday evening and now only awaits a presidential signature to become law.

Among other powers, the legislation allows the National Intelligence Agency, or MIT, to demand documents, data and recordings from state bodies, companies, non-governmental organisations and banks, while bolstering its protection from prosecution.

“MIT will be able to monitor all of society,” Yalcin Dogan, a Turkish columnist, wrote this week. “Anything resembling a commercial secret is dead as of now.”

While government supporters say the new powers are necessary for MIT to operate as a modern intelligence service, detractors such as Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the country’s main opposition party, say it will turn Turkey into a Middle Eastern style “intelligence state”.

The legislation’s proponents reject such comparisons, arguing that the new powers are essential to allow MIT to operate internationally and to establish contacts with outlawed groups such as the Kurdistan Workers party, with which a stuttering peace process is under way after three decades of conflict and tens of thousands of dead.

Idris Sahin and Alpaslan Kavaklioglu, the two ruling party deputies who brought the bill to parliament, argue that the 30-year-old law currently underpinning MIT is inadequate. “In order to answer new security and foreign policy needs amendments had to be made,” they said.

“With this law, MIT will be modernised and have the capabilities of other intelligence organisations.”

But the broader backdrop to the law is a continuing battle between Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, and the movement of Fethullah Gulen, a preacher and ally-turned-enemy with followers throughout Turkish state institutions.

Despite Mr Gulen’s denials, Mr Erdogan has alleged that Gulenist penetration of Turkey’s police, prosecution service and judiciary amounts to a “parallel state” that has eavesdropped on figures throughout Turkish public life – including the prime minister himself. As the government’s distrust of such institutions has mounted, Mr Erdogan has increasingly relied on MIT, whose chief, Hakan Fidan, has become one of his closest confidants and a Gulenist bête noire.

The MIT legislation also follows a series of actions the government has embarked on since the fight with the Gulenists burst into the open in December.

Mr Erdogan’s administration has derailed a corruption probe it says is a Gulenist plot by reassigning thousands of police officers and pushed through a law – later ruled to be largely unconstitutional – that allowed it to assert greater control over the judiciary.

More recently it imposed bans on social media, including a block on Twitter that was also later lifted by the constitutional court and a similar bar on YouTube that remains in force.

Published on Financial Times, 17 April 2014, Thursday