While everyone was puzzling through the who, what, and how of the coup-non-coup family drama in Jordan, it was yet another wild week in Turkish politics. On April 3, around the same time as Prince Hamzah was allegedly plotting against his half-brother King Abdullah II in Amman, 104 retired Turkish admirals released a letter expressing concern that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government apparent proposal to pull Turkey out of the Montreux Convention, which grants Turkey the right to regulate access to the Dardanelles and Bosporus straits. The letter also raised alarms over what the naval officers regard as the Islamization of the armed forces.
This is a big deal; there have been coups in Turkey over less. Yet it is entirely unclear what the admirals intended. Perhaps they sought to activate like-minded officers who remain in the ranks. If so, the letter was the first step in the long-awaited showdown between the Justice and Development Party (AKP) and secularist-nationalist officers who have disposed of their common enemies—their NATO-friendly colleagues and followers of the cleric Fethullah Gulen. Perhaps it was just a group of retired admirals upset over the changes Erdogan and his party have wrought over the last 19 years who finally felt the need to unburden themselves. Perhaps it was a setup.
