TURKEY: Erman Toroglu's criticism of the chief of staff opens up a wider issue, writes Nicholas Birch in Istanbul
Turkey's Erman Toroglu has an influence his Irish counterparts can only dream of. When he told the TV cameras in 2004 he had stopped eating chicken because it was stuffed with antibiotics, Turkish poultry sales took nearly six months to recover.
A former professional referee whose tough-talking impartiality has made him the darling of tea-houses and changing-rooms around the country, Toroglu was back in the wrong end of national newspapers again this week.
Except that this time it wasn't farmers he'd angered; it was Turkey's chief of staff.
"They say he is a real democrat, a real gentleman," Toroglu said of Gen Hilmi Ozkok, who is due to retire at the end of this month.
"Fair enough. But I don't want a democratic chief of staff, you see. My sort of soldier doesn't go in for the softly-softly approach. My sort of soldier bloody well puts his fist down."
Talking after the co-host of his weekly show Maraton had shown highlights of a football match played by crippled soldiers, Toroglu claimed to be representing the voice of ordinary Turks.
He may well be right. Nationalist feeling is soaring in Turkey as Kurdish separatists, who broke off a five-year ceasefire in 2004, continue to attack military targets.
With soldiers being buried almost every other day, one prominent left-leaning intellectual, Murat Belge, has compared the atmosphere of anger and growing intolerance to Germany in the early 1930s.
Toroglu's calls for the military to invade northern Iraq to destroy the separatists' mountain bases there were only echoes of repeated threats made since July by the Turkish government.
But what makes his paean of praise for old-fashioned authoritarianism so controversial is that it comes as Turkey - prodded by the European Union - is slowly increasing civilian control over its 800,000-man army.
Recent reforms loosened the near-stranglehold the armed forces had on security policy. Another law is set to open up the army's secretive accounts to public scrutiny. Uncharacteristically for a Turkish general, the soft-spoken Hilmi Ozkok has generally chosen to bend with the wind.
Both inside the military and outside, though, some have been angered by what they see as the undermining of the army's rightful position of pre-
eminence.
Nourished by a slew of proverbs describing Turkey as a nation of soldiers, the hawks insist the conscript army has far more legitimacy than a government whose parliamentary majority is based on only a third of the country's votes.
Like Toroglu, they also insist Brussels-backed change has weakened the security forces' capacity to fight separatist terror. It's a claim widely contested, and not just by pro-European political analysts.
"What exactly does being a democrat have to do with people being wounded or dying?" fumed well-known football analyst Mehmet Demirkol.
"Once again Toroglu has overstepped the mark. When a single sentence of yours is as devastating as bird flu, you should be a bit more careful what you say."
Asked by journalists for his opinion on the controversy last Saturday, meanwhile, Gen Ozkok was more succinct.
"The chief of staff we long for is the chief of staff we deserve," he said.