ARMY OFFICERS DETAINED IN NEW WAVE OF ERGENEKON RAIDS
Today’s Zaman
Sept 19 2008
Turkey
Nineteen people, including six active army lieutenants and a military
academy student, were detained yesterday in police operations in
five cities, including Ä°stanbul, Ankara and Ä°zmir, as part of the
investigation into Ergenekon, a neo-nationalist gang believed to be
the extension of a clandestine network of groups with members in the
armed forces that planned to overthrow the government.
Nearly 50 suspected members, including retired army generals, are
currently in jail pending trial, scheduled for October.
During raids in Ä°stanbul, Land Forces Lt. Mehmet Ali C.; Levent Temiz,
a former chairman of the ultra-nationalist youth clubs affiliated with
the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) known as Ulku Ocakları; actress
Nurseli Ä°diz and Seyhan Soylu (known as Sisi), a transsexual believed
to have organized a scheme that led up to a political scandal ahead
of a non-armed military intervention in 1997, were taken into police
custody. Following the raids in Ä°stanbul, eight other individuals,
whose identities were not disclosed by the police, were taken into
custody in raids by the Ankara Police Anti-Terror teams in the capital,
officials said. The police said three of the eight in Ankara were
held only for interrogation purposes and would be released after
testifying to prosecutors.
Temiz, one of the suspects held by the police yesterday, frequently
participated in demonstrations and protests of the ultranationalist
association the Grand Jurists’ Union, an organization led by Ergenekon
suspect Kemal Kerincsiz.
In an interview published on Sept. 15 in the weekly Aktuel, Temiz
said: "The country’s unity is being attacked by Kurdists. Under
the circumstances, we’ll do whatever we can to revive the Turkist
youth. We will put up an armed fight for this if necessary."
Temiz also participated in provocative events in protest to
Armenian-Journalist Hrant Dink, writer Elif Å~^afak, who was brought
to court under Article 301 of the penal code on charges of having
"insulted Turkishness," and Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk,
who once told a foreign newspaper that "1 million Armenians were
killed in Turkey."
The judge presiding over the trial of the murder suspects of three
Christians killed brutally in Malatya in 2007 had also suspected
Temiz’s involvement in the case, as key Malatya murder suspect Emre
Gunaydın was asked in court whether he personally knew Temiz.
In 2003 Temiz made the Ulku Ocakları a member organization of the Red
Apple Coalition without seeking approval from the MHP. It was later
revealed during the course of the Ergenekon investigation that this
"merger" was requested by retired Gen. Veli Kucuk, currently in jail on
charges of being a leader of Ergenekon. Kucuk is also believed to be
the founder of JÄ°TEM, a clandestine and illegal intelligence group
inside the gendarmerie force believed to have carried out hundreds
of unofficial and also widely illegal operations against targets
that were deemed by JÄ°TEM leaders as a threat to Turkey’s national
interests for one reason or another.
In an interview with the AkÅ~_am daily on Sept. 8, 2003, Temiz and his
friend Mehmet Perincek — the son of Ergenekon suspect and Workers’
Party (Ä°P) leader Dogu Perincek — said they openly favored a coup
against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.
Temiz was also detained once in the past on accusations of having
raped 24-year-old journalist Hatice AlkıÅ~_, but was released shortly
after his interrogation.
Witness details Ergenekon’s ‘job’ assignment
Osman Yıldırım, a convict in connection with a shooting at the
Council of State building in Ankara in 2006, has given details about
how Ergenekon assigned various attacks and assassinations to different
gangs and hit men.
Yıldırım admitted that he was assigned the task of tossing hand
grenades at the Cumhuriyet daily’s office in Ä°stanbul by Ergenekon. He
also testified that Ergenekon chose Alparslan Arslan, the hit man
in the Council of State attack, for the shooting that left a senior
judge dead and that it assigned the "job" of assassinating the prime
minister to a gang known as Atabeyler. The plot was foiled by the
police in 2006.
What is Ergenekon?
The existence of Ergenekon, a behind-the-scenes network attempting
to use social and psychological engineering to shape the country
in accordance with its own ultranationalist ideology, has long been
suspected, but the current investigation into the group began only
in 2007, when a house in Ä°stanbul’s Umraniye district that was being
used as an arms depot was discovered by police.
The investigation was expanded to reveal elements of what in Turkey is
called the deep state, finally proving the existence of the network,
which is currently being accused of trying to incite chaos and disorder
in order to trigger a coup against the Justice and Development Party
(AK Party) government.
The indictment, which was made public in July, claims that the
Ergenekon network is behind a series of political assassinations
carried out over the past two decades. The victims include a secularist
journalist, Ugur Mumcu, long believed to have been assassinated
by Muslim extremists in 1993; the head of a business conglomerate,
Ozdemir Sabancı, who was shot dead by militants of the extreme-left
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party/Front (DHKP/C) in his
high-security office in 1996; secularist academic Necip Hablemitoglu,
who was also believed to have been killed by Muslim extremists, in
2002; and a 2006 attack on the Council of State that left a senior
judge dead. Arslan, found guilty of the Council of State killing,
said he attacked the court in protest of an anti-headscarf ruling it
had made. But the indictment contains evidence that he was connected
with Ergenekon and that his family received large sums of money from
unidentified sources after the shooting.
Nearly 90 suspects, more than half of whom are currently under arrest,
are accused of having suspicious links to the gang. Suspects will
start appearing before the court on Oct. 20 and will face accusations
that include "membership in an armed terrorist group," "attempting
to bring down the government," "inciting people to rebel against the
Republic of Turkey" and other similar crimes.
–Boundary_(ID_/+O78jR2cOBDmwjIXpIwiQ)–