Municipal elections in Turkey. Discoveries about the Havana syndrome / LR1 / / Latvijas Radio

Current events are analyzed by political scientists Arnis Latishenko and Andis Kudor and foreign policy expert Veiko Spolitis.

Erdogan’s worst defeat

On March 31, Turkish voters gave mandates for the next four years to more than 23,000 local government officials, from mayors of the capital and big cities to members of district councils. Also, many thousands of heads and other non-political officials of lower-level local governments – urban villages, villages and neighborhoods – were elected.

The election results immediately made headlines in the world media, as this is the first time in the more than two-decade-long rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party that this party is not in a leading position in a national election. Not only the ruling party’s hopes of regaining a say in the capital Ankara and the country’s largest city, Istanbul, have vanished. With the loss of the mayor of Turkey’s fourth largest city, Bursa, five of Turkey’s largest cities are now in the hands of the main opposition force, the center-left Republican People’s Party.

In the provinces of Turkey, the most important power belongs to the governors appointed by the central government, however, the provincial parliaments also have a role in solving local economic, infrastructure, environmental, cultural and similar issues. If until now the Justice and Development Party dominated the parliaments of thirty-nine provinces, eighteen of them have been lost in these elections, gaining only three instead. Also in this case, the biggest winner is the Republican People’s Party, while in the traditionally more conservative provinces in the central part of the country, the Islamist-conservative New Welfare Party, which has the third largest number of votes in these elections.

The People’s Equality and Democracy Party, which represents the interests of the Kurdish minority, has slightly improved its position in local governments, while the Nationalist Movement Party, an ally of Erdogan’s party, has maintained its position overall. According to analysts, these local government elections should have a significant impact on the further political development of the entire country.

According to the current constitution, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s final term as president ends in 2028, but until now there had been speculation that the leader, who has no shortage of authoritarian tendencies, would try to change the law and stay at the helm of the country longer. Now such a possibility seems much less likely.

The Kremlin’s “sound of silence”

The Havana syndrome is a so-called phenomenon that has periodically appeared in the press headlines for about seven years now, but remains at the level of versions and assumptions.

In 2017, information appeared that several employees of the American and Canadian diplomatic missions, who stayed in the Cuban capital Havana at the end of the previous year, experienced unexplained health problems. Already at that time there were suspicions that some secret weapon was used against them, most likely an ultrasound or microwave source. There was no direct evidence at the time, but the expansion of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba, which had been marked during the administration of President Obama, came to a halt with this event.

In the following years, reports of similar incidents involving American diplomats and secret service personnel emerged in other parts of the world, from Guangzhou in China and Tbilisi in Georgia to the capital of the United States, Washington. The official term for the phenomenon is “anomalous health incidents” and, according to a September 2022 secret report from the American intelligence community, its main characteristics are: “acute audiovestibular sensory phenomena, including sound and/or pressure sensations, dizziness, loss of balance and ear pain; a strong influence on the sense of location or direction’.

Some of the victims of Havana syndrome had minor damage to the brain or hearing organs, and in several cases they experienced long-term health problems.

In 2021, the Joe Biden administration passed a law providing generous compensation for confirmed anomalous health incidents, but the United States has still not officially recognized that Havana syndrome was the result of a targeted act by a hostile power. Perhaps the turning point in this regard will be the April 1st publication in the Riga-based web edition “The Insider”, which was made in cooperation with the American TV channel CBS news program “60 Minutes” and the German edition “Der Spiegel”. The authors of the article Roman Dobrohotovs, Kristo Grozev and Michael Weiss reveal a whole bunch of facts that link the known cases of Havana syndrome to the activities of Unit 29155 of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Armed Forces. It is the same unit whose name became infamous after the poisoning of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Britain.

As it has now been established, the account of these assassination and sabotage experts also includes two attempts to poison the Bulgarian arms manufacturer Emilian Gebrev and a whole series of explosions in warehouses owned by his company in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, which claimed the lives of dozens of people, as well as participation in a coup attempt in Montenegro and sabotage in Ukraine. The first attack using the Havana syndrome weapon did not take place in 2016 in Havana, but in 2014 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It is possible that the last attack, on the other hand, was recorded last July in Vilnius, during the NATO summit.

In the final part of the article, the authors emphasize the actions of the United States government, which has so far tried to cover up the scale and nature of the attacks. According to the authors, the reason is the fear that the disclosure will scare off potential diplomatic service employees, as well as the fact that attacks of this scale against representatives of the United States may be treated as an act of war, which would require an appropriate response.

Prepared by Eduards Liniņš.