By S. Ahmet Aytac
ANKARA
Although many in the West had heard little of the Fetullah Terror Organization (FETO) before last year’s attempted coup in Turkey, the group has origins stretching back more than four decades.
Before it launched the July 15 putsch attempt that killed 250 people, FETO was known as the Gulen movement, after its founder Fetullah Gulen.
To many, it was seen as a faith-based group that outwardly promoted tolerance and interfaith dialogue.
However, even before the attempted coup, the group, which was also known as the Hizmet or Cemaat movement, it had gained notoriety across Turkey.
Judges, prosecutors and police officers tied to the terror group were involved in the “Sledgehammer” and “Ergenekon” trials between 2010 and 2013 that resulted in hundreds of military officers being wrongly imprisoned.
In December 2013, FETO-linked judicial and police officials attempted a “judicial coup” by accusing ministers and their relatives of corruption.
Its leader was born in 1941 in Turkey’s eastern province of Erzurum. In 1966, he was appointed as an imam in the Aegean city of Izmir, retiring in 1981.
Since 1999, he has lived on a sprawling estate in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania.
Mustafa Ozturk, a theology professor at Istanbul’s Marmara University, said that despite its claim to be a faith group, FETO differed hugely from traditional groups of worshippers.
“The Gulen network has no resemblance to the congregations that we know as sects in terms of their characteristic features and reactions,” he told Anadolu Agency.
Megalomaniac
“They bring to mind deep structures and cults such as Hassan-i Sabbah, Opus Dei, and the Knights Templar, beyond the congregation found in these lands.”
According to Ozturk, Gulen has a megalomaniacal personality and realized the best way of achieving power was not an open confrontation with the state but through slowly taking charge of its levers of power.
From the mid-1980s, Gulen embarked on a program to infiltrate his supporters into the civil service, judiciary, and police.
These supporters had initially been recruited through their piety and provided with the means to enter public service through hundreds of private schools run by the group.
Their path to positions in the state apparatus was also helped through the theft of entrance exam papers, which would then be handed to FETO candidates.
“Gulen regards himself as a spiritual authority to end the material, spiritual troubles of mankind and to overcome the challenges in religious and social life,” Ozturk said.
“There is no doubt that such a self-perception corresponds to a well-known belief in the Mahdi or Messiah. Over time, the idea that Gulen was an ‘extraordinary person’ was spread through pockets of its society and followers were convinced that he was a spiritual person or Messiah.”
At the same time, the terrorist head presented a benign face to the West as a Muslim leader who embraced democracy, human rights, liberalism, peace, and tolerance.
This approach seemed particularly fruitful in the wake of 9/11 when the U.S. and its partners began searching out “moderate” Muslims to stand against extremism.
“There is no doubt that FETO has been structured from the very beginning with a very good plan and agenda,” Ozturk said.
“Even the [smartphone messaging] applications like ByLock and Eagle, which emerged after the coup attempt of July 15, 2016, show that this organization was designed by a consortium-style network of superior minds.”
Overseas reach
During the 1990s, FETO began establishing itself abroad, initially setting up schools in the central Asian former Soviet republics.
The schools gradually spread around the world, where they provided added income for the movement on top of donations from many of Turkey’s most prominent businesses.
According to a report submitted to parliament by the National Intelligence Organization in May, FETO’s overseas interests included 520 companies, 269 foundations, 205 media outlets, 252 NGOs, 327 associations and 216 hospitals in 170 countries.
It was believed to have around 1,000 schools and high education institutions around the world.
FETO has around 150 charter schools in the U.S., some of which are being investigated by the FBI.
Supporters are known for their duplicity -- FETO members of Turkey’s military were instructed to hide their religiosity to the extent of drinking alcohol -- and are said to have an unerring devotion to Gulen and absolute faith in their status as “chosen ones”.
“The organization sought to use illegal means of wiretapping, monitoring and reporting information to leverage and enable itself by making threats and blackmail in order to reach its goals in Turkey,” Osman Kose, the vice president of the Turkish police academy, said.
“Particularly in the 1990s and 2000s, they infiltrated strategic public institutions in Turkey such as the judiciary, police force, military… by stealing exam questions and dispatching them to their members.”
Since last year’s coup attempt, Turkey has arrested thousands of suspected FETO supporters and dismissed many more from public sector jobs.
This has often been criticized in the West as an attack on human rights but Kose defended the government’s response.
“The Turkish government is not randomly arresting people or opening investigation cases for some suspects for nothing,” he told Anadolu Agency.
Assassinate
“Everybody who is linked to this organization and the coup attempt should get the punishment they deserve.”
Abraham Wagner, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, has been among those warning of the threat posed by FETO.
Writing in The Washington Post in January 2016 -- five months before the coup attempt -- Wagner said Gulen “actively agitates and plots the overthrow of the democratically-elected government in Turkey.”
Ahmet Kesgin, a philosophy assistant professor at Ankara’s Yildirim Beyazit University, described "Gulenism" as an ideology that merely uses the language of religion.
“All ideologies have a motivation shaped around power, especially political ones,” he said.
“The so-called Gulenism movement chose to take a position according to an era shaped by the modern authoritarian mind, sometimes aiming to capture power openly, sometimes with a hidden program or agenda.”
These followers stepped into the open on July 15 last year, when fighter jets, tanks, and helicopters manned by FETO terrorists attacked civilians in Istanbul and Ankara as well as bombing the presidential complex, parliament and police headquarters in the capital.
A group of FETO terrorists even tried to assassinate President Recep Tayyip Erdogan as he vacationed in the Aegean town of Marmaris.
However, despite this carnage and an obvious grab for power, many countries, particularly those in the West, have failed to recognize the FETO threat.
“FETO is a cult structure that turns followers into the organization leader’s monkeys under the religious congregation mask,” Kesgin told Anadolu Agency.
It seems that, for some outside Turkey, the mask is yet to slip.
