Mobster turns Turkey into a video tirade against the political elite

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With a smile on his face and a gold medal on his chest, fugitive gangster Sedat Peker has blown up Turkey with explosive accusations leveled at the political elite in a series of videos on Youtube.
Peker, who has been in prison in Turkey for a decade for being involved in organized crime and now leading a criminal group, says he is in Dubai from a rented room. In seven videos that have been viewed 55 million times, he denounces the bombings because some government officials or their families are involved in drug trafficking, rape and murder.
Peker does not impeach President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, which he affectionately calls Tayyip Help, or “brother,” but his accusations of corruption and stabbing within the leader’s inner circle have denounced the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which took power two decades ago with a commitment to break adherence to organized crime.
The mobster launched his video attack earlier this month after police raided his wife and daughter in April after a raid on his home in Istanbul.
This week, Erdogan broke the silence as part of a long-running plot by the shadowy foreign forces to weaken his rule. “We did it in Turkey, where they were called babies [godfathers] it was once known by pompous nicknames, where it is the only method that enforces the law, ”he said in a televised speech.
Peker appears to have caught the AKP at an all-time low in its admission rating due to the treatment and economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic. The elections are in 2023.
“Ventilating the administration’s dirty clothes could lead to a loss of faith that a lot of ideology remains in the Erdogan camp,” said Soner Cagaptay, director of the program for the Turkish Institute of Middle East Policy in Washington.
“The Peker tape reveals that one is self-enriched, nepotistic and has ties to the mafia. Erdogan runs Turkey but does not drive it, and the aura of stability has disappeared. Turkey looks like a house of cards.”
An artistic, confessional show, the video sees Peker between the rumble and the bellows. It provides little evidence regarding unconfirmed claims; among them, the son of the former prime minister defined a new route for the cocaine trade from Latin America to Turkey; An AKP lawmaker raped a college student who was later found dead; and that Peker kept the former deputy in a $ 10,000 monthly deposit.
“I will teach tyrants that there is no more dangerous weapon than the man who faces death,” Peker said in a teaser video. He said, “A tripod and a telephone camera will defeat you.”
Much of his anger is directed at Turkish Interior Minister Suleyman Soylu. Peker says he helped Soylu fight a group against the AKP he led Albayrak weight, Erdogan’s son-in-law resigned as finance minister last year.
Soylu complained that he was offered security and helped a friend to avoid arrest, but after fleeing more than a year, he was allowed to return to Turkey.
Soylu has appeared in interview sessions to deny all allegations against him and said he has denied or is unaware of those directed at others. He has filed a complaint against Peker for slander. Erdogan has defended Soylu, saying the attack targeted the entire nation.
Peker’s proclamations offer a strange look behind the political curtain in a country where the government has good control of the media.
“People are rushing to these videos because the government has created an environment where criticism is prohibited [and] this guy makes the interior minister stupid, what everyone else fears, ”said documentary filmmaker and journalist Umit Kivanc.
Over the past decade, the AKP’s collaboration with the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has boosted crime figures associated with ultranationalists. The MHP leader came out with another mob last year after being asked to take the photo out of jail.
Peker was a senior far-right youth group affiliated with the MHP and his patriotic credentials match those of the Turkish patriots. “He can show these things and not necessarily be a coup, because he’s an ultra-right darling. If they really went after him, he could sidestep the internal level of the MHP,” said Ryan Gingeras, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in California and author of a book on organized crime in Turkey.
“People came to Turkey to watch the policy related to organized crime because gangsters like Sedat Peker have not strayed from the spotlight,” he added. “He’s basically a famous person with a political agenda with a criminal record.”
Peker cut his teeth as an extortionist and fixing football matches, according to Gingeras. His rap page dates back to the 1990s, when newspapers reported that he decorated the cell walls with oil paints and took the washing machines and Roquefort cheese to jail. He was tried and acquitted of murder, but was convicted in 2007 of forming a crime syndicate and released seven years later.
A year later, he was campaigning for the AKP, saying at a rally that he would “bathe in the blood” of intellectuals who demanded an end to fighting with Kurdish militants. A few months later he took a photo with the president at a wedding and received awards as an entrepreneur and philanthropist of the year.
Peker apologized to intellectuals and accused politicians of exploiting nationalism “to turn each other around.” Speaking in the videos, he also implicated himself in several crimes, including organizing a bad success for a Turkish Cypriot journalist who was killed by others, “breaking the bones” of the former AKP parliamentarian, insulting Erdogan’s wife and attacking a newspaper for organizing rebellions at the request of an AKP lawmaker.
While the allegations frighten Erdogan’s criticism, they have dredged trauma for the victims. When Peker accused former Interior Minister Ugur Mumcu of an unsolved murder in 1993, his widow Guldal wrote this tweet: “Pull the bricks down, let the wall fall and bury what you catch underground.”
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