Does Erdogan face a coup ??

Turkey on Monday detained 10 retired admirals after a declaration signed by more than 100 of them warned against a possible threat to a treaty governing the use of Turkey’s key waterways.

The declaration released on Saturday by 103 Turkish retired admirals over the "Montreux declaration," received wide support from several senior figures of the main opposition Republican People's Party, saying that they offered "patriotic criticism" and exercised their freedom of expression.

The declaration has drawn ire from government officials who slammed the retired admirals, accusing them of implicitly threatening the government with a coup. 

The prosecutor launched a probe on Sunday into the retired admirals on suspicion of an “agreement to commit a crime against the state’s security and constitutional order”.

One of the 10 suspects detained was Cem Gurdeniz, described as the father of Turkey’s controversial new maritime doctrine known as “Blue Homeland”.

The doctrine has grown in prominence, especially during tensions last year between Greece and Turkey over Ankara’s gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean.

Turkey’s approval last month of plans to develop a shipping canal in Istanbul comparable to the Panama or Suez canals has opened up debate about the 1936 Montreux Convention.

CHP Chair Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Spokesperson Faik Öztrak called the debate a "fake agenda" meant to distract the public from the real problems.

Quoting his message, Kılıçdaroğlu wrote, "These fake agendas won't work. The only real agenda of our people is their dining tables."

"The great and famous economist, I'll make you face the economic destruction that you have caused," he wrote, addressing President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

More recently, Parliamentary Speaker Mustafa Şentop, in defense of Erdogan's move to pull Turkey out of the İstanbul Convention on combating violence against women, said that the president can also withdraw the country from the Montreux Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights.

Coups are a sensitive subject in Turkey since the military, which has long seen itself as the guarantor of the country’s secular constitution, staged three coups between 1960 and 1980.

There was also an attempted overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016, blamed on followers of US-based Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen in the military.

The Montreux Convention ensures the free passage through the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits of civilian vessels in times of both peace and war. It also regulates the use of the straits by military vessels from non-Black Sea states.