It is very sad to see the point Turkey-U.S. relations have recently reached. The gap between the two "former" allies is unfortunately growing. The U.S. has been pursuing a systematic policy of keeping Turkey at bay for a while. One of the basic instruments it uses for this purpose is the Reza Zarrab case. What is this case? What kind of threats does it have against Turkey?
Zarrab was arrested last March when he went to the U.S. with his family for a holiday. He has been in prison since then. He has been transferred to different places for a while and a lot of speculation has been put forward about the accusations about him. It seemed as though the U.S. was able to judge the internal affairs of Turkey. The arrest of Mehmet Hakan Atilla, a former deputy general manager at Halkbank, one year after Zarrab and an arrest warrant against former economy minister Zafer Çağlayan even widened the gap, harming the relations too badly to be restored. Well, what is being used as an excuse in all these cases? What does the U.S. judiciary blame Zarrab for?
There is a lot of misinformation in public. The claims go as far as supporting terrorism and trading drug. However, the issue is nothing more than trade that has been going on for years between Turkey and Iran. You know that the U.S. has currently imposed embargoes on Iran by dominating the U.N. However, these embargoes are flouted in many parts of the world, not only in Turkey but also in the U.S. Thousands of companies are doing business with Iran but facing no sanctions. However, the will that prepared the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 files in 2013 to overthrow the democratically-elected leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is now striving to undermine Erdoğan through the U.S. judiciary. Already the evidence is the same, illegal and fabricated. And the false evidence being in the hands of the U.S. judiciary clearly proves the relation between the U.S. and the Gülenist Terror Group (FETÖ).
They have also found camouflage: Doing business with U.S. dollars. Zarrab is under arrest for only trading in dollars. They cannot question what he traded in euros. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of American companies that do the same thing as Zarrab, but they perfunctorily do it in euros.
Moreover, the U.S. judiciary is doing its best to clearly make advocacy difficult. You know that it has prevented documents from being shared and taken out of the country, announcing that only the testimony of a secret witness codenamed person-1 would be shared. Now there are speculations about this person-1, and some even propose that it is Zarrab. However, it is clearly aimed at undermining – and as far as I know it is a person who has nothing to do with – Turkish-Iranian relations.
It is also claimed that Zarrab will be a "confessor" and will say things that will challenge Erdoğan. This is a big black propaganda. Zarrab might be cooperating with the judiciary, but the charges are already no secret. The U.S. is trying to give an economic penalty instead of a judicial one: It might request a large amount of money through public banks to undermine Turkey, and it might justify this saying that U.S. banks suffered losses as dollars were used.
In short, a power, trying to impose its own rules on the world, is striving to bring Turkey to its knees through judicial camouflage. We need to see that this move is aimed at both Erdoğan and Turkey as a whole and unite.
