WORLD SUSPICION AS TURKEY COURTS DETAIN DIPLOMATS

Arrests of U.S. pastor and other Western citizens cause allies to question judicial system

I STAN B U L » Turkey’s arrests of an American pastor and other Western citizens have thrust its troubled judicial system to the forefront of ties with allies, reinforcing suspicions that the Turkish government is using detainees as diplomatic leverage.

Turkey scoffs at the idea that it treats detained foreigners as foreign policy pawns, and points the finger at the U.S. for cases against Turks in American courts. Turkey’s top appeals court judge weighed in this week, saying only “independent” courts can free pastor Andrew Brunson.

The reality is more complex in a nation where President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has tightened his grip on the state, includ ing a judiciary purged of thousands of judges and prosecutors after an attempted coup in 2016. Constitutional changes have since expanded Erdogan’s control of judicial appointments, undermining Turkey’s avowals that it wants to mold impartial courts.

There is no evidence that jailed foreigners in Turkey were arrested to be used as “hostages,” and Erdogan could genuinely believe they were acting on behalf of foreign governments against Turkey, said Nicholas Danforth, an analyst at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington.

“In taking and holding prisoners to combat the West’s presumed hostility, Ankara ends up creating the kind of hostility it imagines,” Danforth wrote in a blog post last week.

Recent Turkish court rulings seemed to align with diplomatic outreach to Europe. Two Greek soldiers held for months were freed; Taner Kilic, an Amnesty International representative, was released; and a judge lifted a travel ban on a German of Turkish descent accused of terror offenses.

Conversely, the courts ruled against freeing Brunson, who is accused of links to Kurdish rebels and the 2016 coup plotters, after U.S. economic penalties deepened the Turkish currency’s slide.

A coincidence? Some analysts don’t think so.

“As the crisis with the U.S. heated up and as the economic crisis heated up, Erdogan saw a need to speed up the process of normalization with Europe,” said Howard Eissenstat, an associate professor of Middle East history in Canton, N.Y.