Apr 8, 2016

The Panama Papers scandal, which led to the resignation of the prime minister of Iceland and has also troubled many other world businessmen, politicians and celebrities, has not yet fully reached Turkey. It has been reported in Turkish media that “101 companies and 10 clients” from Turkey are also involved, and their names will be disclosed in May. So far, therefore, the scandal has had no political repercussions inside Turkey.

However, certain elements of the Turkish media have already began cooking up the idea that the Panama Papers can have political implications for Turkey as yet another nefarious conspiracy against the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In a long editorial in Yeni Safak, one of the many pro-Erdogan newspapers, Editor-in-Chief Ibrahim Karagul made his argument emphatically on April 7. “The release of the Panama Papers has me seriously worried,” Karagul wrote. “I believe that this is not a money laundering operation or a tax issue. … It is the extension of a much bigger plan, a showdown project.”

This “project,” Karagul further explained, was led by “everyone from US intelligence to UK and German intelligence.” Its aim was “a new form of intervention … on the global scale.” Accordingly, “countries, leaders, political staff and political discourse that seem incompatible with the West” would be toppled and replaced by Western puppets. "Now they are attacking Russia,” Karagul claimed, adding, “They are attacking Pakistan. They might attack Turkey. They are going to wear out the other countries among their targets. That is when their operational forces on the inside will take action, and some are going to join this wave out of naivete.”

Of course, one could ask why “they” were also attacking the leaders of Iceland, the United Kingdom and the Bashar al-Assad regime as well — all of which were curiously left out of Karagul’s analysis. It is perhaps more accurate to take this not as an analysis, but as a clumsy application of the Erdoganist narrative of the past three years: that the West is conspiring against the patriotic leaders who are trying to make their countries independent actors on the global scale.

Notably, Karagul was not alone in making this argument. Another columnist in his paper offered a similar view in a smartly titled piece, “The Tailor of Panama.” Accordingly, Vladimir Putin's claim that “this leak could be the work of the CIA” made a lot of sense. Otherwise, why, for example, would Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev be targeted right at the heat of the renewed Azeri-Armenian conflict?