How to use this Page

Reports that luminaries of the ‘establishment,’ including Archbishop Carey, were queuing up to write letters directly to the Director of Public Prosecutions in support of Bishop Peter Ball, who was eventually convicted of numerous sex offences, is hardly a revelation. Bishops of the Church of England move in the rarefied circles of the establishment, such as the London clubs.

The post The scales of justice and the establishment appeared first on OUPblog.

On 21 September 2015 the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) released a statement into Operation Midland. Within this statement the MPS provide a description of the current practice of investigating claims of child sexual abuse or serious sexual assault.

The post Reasonable suspicion for arrest in the era of Operation Midland appeared first on OUPblog.

In December 2013, Turkish authorities arrested the sons of several prominent cabinet ministers on bribery, embezzlement, and smuggling charges. Investigators claimed that the men were contributing members in a conspiracy to illicitly trade Turkish gold for Iranian oil gas (an act which, among other things, violates the spirit of United Nations’ sanctions targeting Tehran). The scheme purportedly netted a vast fortune in proceeds in the form of dividends and bribes. Among those suspected of benefiting from the trade was Prime Minister (now President) Tayyip Erdoğan and members of his family. The firestorm from this scandal was initially so furious many feared that Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party would not survive its implications. Yet as of this September, the investigation into this scandal has all but come to an end. The officials involved in propagating and executing the investigation have all been dismissed or transferred. Consequently, virtually all charges related to the case have been dropped.

Most of the analysis of this scandal has focused upon the political implications of the arrests and the subsequent purges of Turkey’s national police force. Events since December have indeed underscored the intense levels of strife within Turkey’s governing institutions as well as the growing authoritarian tendencies of the country’s ruling party. Yet Turkey’s “oil for gold” corruption scandal also illuminates fundamental, yet long-standing, aspects of the relationship between prominent illicit trades and the country’s politics.

Turkey’s black market, by all accounts, is exceeding large and highly lucrative. As a country sitting at a major intersection in global commerce, Turkey acts as a spring, valve and spigot for multiple illicit industries. Weapons, narcotics and undocumented migrants, as well as contraband carpets, petroleum, cigarettes, and precious metals all pass in and through the country’s borders on a regular basis. Official statistics on cigarette smuggling offer a few hints of the extent of smuggling in and out of Turkey. According to Interior Ministry sources, Turkish seizures of smuggled cigarettes grew fourteen fold between 2009 and 2012 (with ten million cigarettes seized in 2009 and over 145 million in 2012). In January of this year, Bulgarian customs officials purportedly confiscated fourteen million cigarettes illegally imported from Turkey in one seizure alone. The numbers of arrests for cigarette smuggling has also climbed precipitously, with over 4000 people arrested in 2009 and over 24000 arrests in 2012.

Organized crime takes other forms in Turkey. Criminal networks, builders, and lawmakers have been known to violate laws governing land sales, usage, building safety, and contracting. Bribes and kickbacks to government officials and regulators historically have been essential elements in the rapid building projects undertaken throughout the country for much of the last century. Charges levied against the managers of Istanbul’s Fenerbahce soccer club stand as an example of the match fixing and extortion scandals that have rocked professional sports in Turkey in recent years. Gangsters and extortionists, known as kabadayı, have been counted among Turkey’s most noted and notorious figures in the public spotlight. All in all, organized criminal trades have generated an untold number of fortunes for a select few and have provided a subsistence living for an even larger number of average citizens for a very long time in Turkey.

If Tayyip Erdoğan and his family did glean a great fortune as a result of illicit doings (which some reports claim to amount to total in the tens of millions of dollars), Turkey’s president joins a fairly sizable host of Turkish politicians who have benefited from organized criminal trades. American officials in the 1950s, for example, secretly suspected that noted members of Adnan Menderes’ Democratic Party had protected major Turkish heroin traffickers. During the 1970s, at least four members of the Turkish Grand National Assembly were official charged with attempting to transport heroin abroad. Other politicians from this era, including one-time Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, were unofficially suspected of engaging in the drug trade but never charged. Accusations of theft and corruption especially dogged the governments of the tumultuous 1990s. Tansu Ciller, the country’s first female prime minister, was implicated in organized criminal activity both before and after she was first elected to office. Tayyip Erdoğan’s JDP came to power in 2002 with the promise of bringing discipline and respectability to politics. Yet even as recent as last year, a regional JDP chairman was implicated in trading in heroin in the province of Van. The revelations of December 2013 now has many in Turkey convinced that the JDP is as dirty and corruptible as any of the parties that had preceded it.

Erdoğan’s ability to deflect last year’s corruption charges has not put the specter of smuggling and corruption to rest. Local media reports and other studies suggest that the Syrian civil war has stimulated a surge in smuggling along Turkey’s southern border. It is now estimated that fuel, cigarette, and cell phone smuggling has risen by 314%, 135%, and 563% respectively since the war began. The initial efforts to arm and maintain resistance groups in Syria were deeply indebted to Turkey’s smuggling trade. As smuggling continues, it is clear that some groups have attempted to tax trade into and out of Syria (al-Nusrah, for example, purportedly levies a fee of 500 Syrian lira for every barrel of fuel that crosses the border). What this means for the present and future of Turkey’s government is not entirely clear. Suggestions that Ankara has allowed for the passage of large numbers of foreign fighters into Syria has cast doubt over the country’s police and customs officials stationed on its borders (particularly after the official purges earlier this year). Trading schemes and corruption allegations like those revealed in December may yet again manifest themselves considering what international watchdogs call Turkey’s “grey” status as a state with loose embezzlement and money laundering controls. Whether these trends will dent the image of Tayyip Erdoğan or upend JDP control over Turkey remains to be seen.

Headline Image: Turkish flag photo by Abigail Powell. CC BY-NC 2.0 by Flickr

The post Corruption, crime, and scandal in Turkey appeared first on OUPblog.

        

Related Stories

• Mapping historic US elections
• Umbrellas and yellow ribbons: The language of the 2014 Hong Kong protests
• Full-circle in the Middle East?

 

This is one of those great novels that blends up truth and imagination so well that the lines between fact and fiction are so blurred you don’t even know where to begin trying to unravel it. It also doubles the intrigue especially the way Jesse Ball structures the story to unfurl piece by piece, layer by layer in such a way you are taken by surprise after surprise.

The story concerns the “Narito Disappearances”. A crime that baffled local authorities in Osaka where eight people had gone missing seemingly without a trace until one day a signed confession is handed in to police. The man who has made the confession is quickly arrested and doesn’t say another word. But this is not a whodunit because as the story goes on we see there is a much bigger and more important question that who.

“I am looking for this mystery. Not the mystery of what happened but the mystery of how”

One one level this is an ingenious crime novel. By telling the story in a different order the facts and “truth” aren’t revealed to us until we get to the beginning of the story. Rather than telling the story in chronological order we follow the path Jesse Ball’s investigation follows like a trail of breadcrumbs. Ball recounts his investigation through interview transcripts and internal notes as well as letters and other documents he is given along the way.  Each interview shines a little more light onto the story and leads Jesse to another piece of the puzzle.

I was so engrossed in this book it wasn’t until finishing it that I truly digested what I had read. In many ways this is a modern parable about the moral fallacies we place on our systems of justice but the skill and subtlety in which Jesse Ball tells the story gives it not just power but also emotional resonance. And by doing so Jesse Ball gets to the absolute core of what a crime story is and what it should mean when we read one.

Buy the book here…

David Canter is Professor of Psychology at the University of Hudderfield. Widely known for developing systemic offender profiling in Britain and creating the emerging field of Investigative Psychology, he also provides evidence to government enquiries and major court cases. His new book is Forensic Psychology: A Very Short Introduction, and in the short excerpt below he looks at what a ‘psychopath’ really is.

There are many individuals who commit crimes who understand perfectly what they do and its illegality but who have no obvious mental problems. They are lucid and coherent with no signs of any learning disability or psychotic symptoms. Some of them can be superficially charming and are intelligent enough to be very plausible on first acquaintance. They do not hear voices or think that they are commanded by forces beyond their power to commit crimes. Yet, over and over again, they abuse people, lie without any compunction or remorse, can be unpredictably violent, and seem unable to relate effectively to others over any extended period. Various forms of criminality are almost inevitably an aspect of the lifestyles of these individuals. In the jargon of mental health professionals, such people may be given a diagnosis that implies that their ‘personality’ is somehow disordered.

In psychiatric medicalization of human activity, a whole set of ‘personality disorders’ has been identified that attempts to distinguish different ways in which individuals may have difficulty in relating to others. The one that has found its way into popular discourse is ‘psychopathic disorder’. There are complications here because the term ‘psychopathic disorder’ is not a medical diagnosis but a legal term under English and Welsh law that refers to a ‘persistent disorder or disability of the mind’, not that far removed from the McNaughton rule that first emerged over a century and a half ago. Thus there is some debate as to which of the psychiatric diagnoses of personality disorder are closest to the legal definition of ‘psychopathic disorder’, and whether any of them relates to the popular conception of a psychopath.

The Hollywood portrayal of the psychopath is someone who is inevitably a merciless serial killer, often some sort of cross between Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster. Silent films from the 1920s such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to the more recent Kalifornia, or No Country for Old Men, never really provide any psychological insights into the actions of the monsters who are the anti-heroes of their dramas. They are presented as pure evil. The rather more psychologically interesting films such as Psycho or The Boston Strangler provide pseudo-Freudian explanations for the nastiness of their villains, but still present them as rather alien individuals who can appear unthreatening but deep down are malevolent.

Until you have met someone whom you know has committed horrific violent crimes but can be charming and helpful, it is difficult to believe in the Hollywood stereotype of the psychopath. Without doubt, there are people who can seem pleasant and plausible in one situation but can quickly turn to viciousness. There are also people who just never connect with others and are constantly, from an early age, at war with those with whom they come into contact. If we need a label for these people, we can distinguish them as type 1 and type 2 psychopaths. The former have superficial charm, are pathological liars, being callous and manipulative. The clearest fictional example of this sort of psychopath is Tom Ripley, who has the central role in