Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Monday convened his cabinet and senior officials for an unscheduled meeting, after a group of retired naval admirals criticized the government’s stance on a key international convention to an extent that it was considered a direct challenge to Erdogan’s authority.
Erdogan’s communications director Fahrettin Altun on Sunday accused former admirals of insinuating that the government should be overthrown and said a public prosecutor was initiating an investigation into the incident. The cabinet will meet at 3 p.m., local time, followed by a meeting with the AK central government executive committee at 6 p.m.
The group of former admirals said Saturday in a joint statement that it was a wrong government policy to question the future of the so-called Montreux Convention, saying the 1936 treaty is a guarantee of peace in the Black Sea, which borders Turkey. with Russia and Ukraine.
The admirals issued their statement shortly after Parliament Speaker Mustafa Sentop suggested that Erdogan had the power to withdraw from the treaty if he wished, although he later backed down, saying he was trying to make a point about the powers of the president and not on a specific political agenda. . His comments on the Montreux deal revived a discussion on Erdogan’s Istanbul Canal multi-Millions project to build a new strait across Istanbul to avoid the Bosphorus.
The statement of the former admirals “has no other use than to harm democracy and the motivation and morale of the Turkish armed forces,” according to a statement from the Turkish Ministry of Defense. “We believe that the Turkish justice system will take the necessary measures,” the ministry said.
Erdogan says warships can overlook the 1936 treaty with a planned channel
Erdogan’s critics argue that the canal would be an environmental catastrophe and make Turkey’s largest city unviable. Opposition parties also said the treaty would keep Turkey out of possible conflicts in the future. The convention limits deployments in the Black Sea to 21 days for ships that do not belong to coastal states and prohibits the passage of all aircraft carriers.
(President Erdogan’s decision to hold a meeting has been added to the headline and the first paragraph.)