MILITARY ARRESTS RAISE POLITICAL TENSIONS
Thomas Seibert

The National
3/FOREIGN/31691776/1135
Jan 13 2009
United Arab Emirates

Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, leaves his seat to address
members of parliament in Ankara. Umit Bektas / Reuters

ISTANBUL // The high-profile arrest of several serving military
officers and retired generals in a suspected right-wing plot to bring
down the government has raised political tensions in Turkey, fuelled by
opposition accusations that the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan,
is using the judicial investigation against the plotters to silence
his secular critics.

Rusen Cakir, a columnist with Vatan, a daily newspaper, called
last week’s raids the "most important wave" of arrests yet in the
so-called Ergenekon investigation. The arrests targeted more than
30 people in several Turkish provinces, including the army officers
and former generals as well as a former high-ranking police chief who
is accused of having planned political murders. It is highly unusual
for the Turkish police to arrest active or retired military officers.

Yesterday, a judge in Istanbul charged a nationalist author, Yalcin
Kucuk, and Mustafa Levent Goktas, a retired colonel, with "membership
in a terrorist organisation", the Anatolia news agency reported. Both
were among the 33 people arrested last week. With yesterday’s charges,
the number of people taken into custody after the latest raid rose
to 15. For the first time in the current investigation, police also
arrested several serving military officers, four of whom were taken
into custody.

Investigators suspect them of involvement in a plot by a right-wing
group called Ergenekon, which takes its name from the mythical
home of the Turks in Central Asia and is said to have prepared
assassinations and attacks to provoke a military coup against Mr
Erdogan’s government. Dozens of suspected Ergenekon members have been
on trial in Istanbul since last autumn.

After the latest raids, police put dozens of handguns, automatic
rifles and hand grenades on public display.

The Ergenekon investigation has also turned into a major battleground
in a political power struggle between Mr Erdogan and his secular
critics, who accuse the prime minister and his ruling Justice and
Development Party, or AKP, of pursuing an Islamist agenda and of
trying to silence critics.

"The AKP has declared war on the republic by using the judiciary,"
said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, a leading member of the Republican People’s
Party, or CHP, a secular party and the main opposition group in
Ankara. The CHP leader, Deniz Baykal, said the AKP was creating an
"empire of fear" with the Ergenekon investigation.

Coming 18 months after law enforcement authorities in Istanbul
unearthed a weapons cache in Istanbul, an event that marked the
beginning of the Ergenekon case, the investigation reached its highest
level last week with the arrest of Gen Tuncer Kilinc, a retired
army general and a former general secretary of the powerful National
Security Council in Ankara, a key institution used by the military
to influence Turkish politics.

Gen Kilinc and two other former generals were released and another
retired soldier was taken into custody, awaiting trial. One of the
ex-generals, Gen Erdal Sener, was told not to leave the country.

Shortly after the arrests, Turkey’s general chief of staff, Gen
Ilker Basbug, met Mr Erdogan to voice his unease about the way Gen
Kilinc and the other former generals had been treated, press reports
said. Such warnings by the military leadership set off alarm bells
in a country where the military has ousted four governments since 1960.

At the same time that Gen Kilinc and the other soldiers were arrested,
investigators picked up Ibrahim Sahin, the former deputy head of
a special operations unit of the police, who had been convicted
several years ago for involvement in a scandal involving the police
and right-wing organised gangs.

The media reported that police found a list of assassination targets
alleged to have belonged to Mr Sahin. It included the brother
of the writer and Nobel laureate, Orhan Pamuk, a hate figure for
Turkish nationalists, and the patriarch of the Armenian Church,
Mesrob Mutafyan. Mr Sahin, who was taken into custody last weekend,
denied the charges, news reports said. But newspapers also reported
that associates of Mr Sahin were accused of a plot to kill a member
of the small Armenian community in the Anatolian town of Sivas.

Mr Baykal and other critics concede that accusations against some
of the Ergenekon suspects may turn out to be significant. "It is
cowardice not to put Ibrahim Sahin, people like that, the gangs, on
trial," Mr Baykal told Milliyet, a daily newspaper. But he added that
so far every wave of arrests in the Ergenekon case had also targeted
honourable citizens who happen to be critics of the government,
in an apparent effort to create a connection between these two
groups. "[T]his is a matter of political planning."

During the arrests last week, investigators also searched the house
of Sabih Kanadoglu, a retired prosecutor general and a leading
legal expert of Turkish secularists, though he was not arrested,
while Kemal Guruz, a former president of Turkey’s higher education
board and a prominent opponent of the government, was arrested,
then released. "This is a psychological operation," Mr Baykal said.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress