PressTV

Press TV has interviewed William Jones, a member of the Executive Intelligence Review in Leesburg, about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan saying he has no respect for a recent Constitutional Court decision ordering the release of two journalists jailed for reporting on the government’s alleged arms delivery to militants in Syria.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: What do you make of Erdogan? He appears to be going more and more in the direction of a dictator. How do you see it?

Jones: Well I think he wants to be the new Sultan in this Turkish Empire that he is building. He may have overstepped his bounds right there. I think there might be a significant reaction to the fact that him really taking, eliminating the influence of the Supreme Court at all I think he is going to be in trouble there.

But what his policy is has been very, very clear that he wants to increase really one power rule, he wants to make it into something like a religious entity, a strict Sharia law entity and he wants to get rid of the Kurds. So these are the three bases of his policies and he is continuing in that direction and I think he is going to be cruisin' for a bruisin’ now because there are certain institutional structures that will react to his decision.

Press TV: Well let’s look at that. You said he wants to go in the direction of a strict religious entity, on the other hand the Turkish society is a very secular society and in general with Erdogan is very important, his acceptance with NATO and with the Europeans, so how do you see this together? Do you really think it is that or is it a type of political ploy just to get control over various entities inside of the country and also to continue with his aggression outside of the country?

Jones: I think it is both of these and I think the fact that the Turks are ostensibly involved in the war against ISIL (Daesh) although the rest of the journalists and the suppression of their evidence that that is not the case, that the Turks were indeed supporting the ISIL terrorists contradicts what impression they are trying to give to the Europeans and to United States but I think he feels that his position is strong enough in that respect internationally that he can move against opposition whatever way, shape and form he can within the country and he is not going to get a terrible amount of blowback from the US or from Europe on that.

I think he probably has considered that EU membership is not going to happen and so that does not remain a main target for him. However, the fact of Turkey having developed so successfully in the form that Ataturk, in the form of the nation that Ataturk had laid down is now being undermined economically and other ways by Erdogan’s attempt to change the face of Turkey.

It is also a multi-ethnic republic including the Kurdish minority and in that kind of a situation trying to institute what he wants to do on the basis of his so-called religious criteria I think is going to be doomed to failure or at least lead to chaos within the nation, possibly a civil war.