ERGENEKON TRIAL RESUMES CALMLY AND QUIETLY

Today’s Zaman
Nov 4 2008
Turkey

The trial of 86 suspects charged with involvement in Ergenekon,
a criminal network accused of plotting to overthrow the government,
resumed yesterday with a reading of the indictment.

The Ä°stanbul 13th High Criminal Court is hearing the case in a
makeshift courtroom inside Silivri Prison near Ä°stanbul. Unlike
earlier sessions, the prosecutor reading aloud the allegations was
not interrupted by angry suspects shouting at the prosecutor that
they are innocent.

The court resumed from page 432 and adjourned for a lunch break on
page 482. Some parts of the indictment read aloud yesterday included
the testimony of Osman Yıldırım, convicted of being an accomplice
to the 2006 murder of a judge at the Council of State.

Yıldırım in his testimony gave details about how Ergenekon assigned
various targets to different gangs and hit men.

Yıldırım admitted that he was assigned the task of throwing
hand grenades at the Cumhuriyet daily’s offices 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, which 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.

Alparslan Arslan had said that he attacked the Council of State
because of a ruling made by one of its chambers against the headscarf.

The change in Alparslan Arslan’s father

In the indictment, the prosecutor also points to the remarkable
differences between the initial and later statements of Alparslan
Arslan’s father. A few days after the attack, Ä°dris Arslan said:
"My son couldn’t have possibly done this for the headscarf. He is not
a graduate of an imam-hatip high school. He is not even religious. My
daughter doesn’t wear a headscarf. There are shady powers that
have used him in this act." But exactly one month later, he stated:
"There are enemies of Islam and the Quran in this country. There are
many people with Muslim names, such as Mehmet and Mustafa, who are
actually Armenian and Greek. These people are betraying our country’s
values under the guise of secularism. This nation will teach their
lesson to those who don’t respect the values of this nation."

Page 461 of the indictment points to a sharp increase in the amount
of money the Council of State suspects received shortly after the
shooting. The prosecutor documents that other convicts in the case as
well as Arslan’s parents saw sharp increases in the amount of money
in their bank accounts. Arslan’s mother and father received 32,000
euros and $30,000, respectively.

Because some of the suspects’ lawyers demanded earlier last week
that the 2,455-page indictment be read aloud, the court will spend a
significant amount of time with this process. The prosecution finished
443 pages of the indictment in the first six sessions.

Journalists who timed the prosecutor’s reading speed and found that
one page takes about seven minutes on average estimate it should take
at least 280 hours to finish reading the indictment.

Meanwhile, in yesterday’s trial, Ä°P leader Perincek demanded the
court subpoena Tuncay Guney, an alleged former Ergenekon member who
is currently living in Canada, where he is a rabbi. Guney has been
giving interviews to Turkish television stations and newspapers since
the start of the trial in October. Although Guney is guarded in his
statements, he often reveals information not cited in the indictment
but that appears to be vital. Guney came to prominence when the first
documents related to the Ergenekon gang were seized on his computer
in a 2001 police raid.

Meanwhile, journalists have found that Emin Gurses, an associate
professor who is currently under arrest as part of the Ergenekon
investigation, emphasized "democracy" as an answer to solve political
problems in a doctoral thesis he wrote in 1996. Gurses is being
accused of "membership in the Ergenekon terrorist organization" and of
"inciting the people to armed uprising against the government of the
republic of Turkey."

Gurses was detained as part of the Ergenekon investigation on Feb. 21
of this year, along with another academic, Umit Sayın.

In his doctoral thesis from 12 years ago, Gurses studied the
ways nationalist movements interact with society, the state and
the international system, a copy of the thesis found by the press
showed. Gurses argued democracy was the only viable way to resolve
conflicts in various countries. His thesis includes a study on Turkey’s
Kurdish and Laz communities. He argues that the only way to overcome
conflicts could be further democratization. "In addition to this,
the international system has to democratize."

–Boundary_(ID_vEqlsZXa6CV+7tN /m2norA)–