‘DEEP STATE’ INVESTIGATION ROCKS TURKEY
by Jasper Mortimer
The Media Line
asp?NewsID=24216
Feb 11 2009
NY
The two-story-high bust of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk protruding from
the side of the Turkish Navy’s headquarters looks down on a busy
intersection outside parliament, as if admonishing: "Don’t you dare!"
But 70 years after the death of the secularist Ataturk – the
military and political leader who transformed what was left of the
Ottoman Empire into modern Turkey – Turks are daring to challenge
the establishment, as the January investigation into the Ergenekon
organization has shown.
Named after an old Turkish myth, Ergenekon is a network of
ultranationalists who have allegedly conspired to kill and plot
coups in the name of "protecting Turkey" from the moderate Islamic
government that has been in power since 2002.
More than 80 alleged Ergenekon members, including a retired general,
have been standing trial since October, charged with subversion and
forming a terrorist organization.
The armed forces, or TSK in Turkish, say it has nothing to do with
Ergenekon and has sought to portray those military personnel who did
get involved as bad apples.
But that line wore thin in January when prosecutors detained more
than 20 members of the TSK and the police, including three retired
generals and a serving lieutenant colonel. Police found two caches
of weapons in the colonel’s house and garden, including 20 grenades
and some 200 bullets.
Shortly after the arrests began, Chief of General Staff Gen. Ilker
Basbug, canceled the TSK’s weekly press briefing, and requested a
meeting with Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan.
The summit of Turkey’s military and civilian leaders illustrated how
disturbing the Ergenekon investigation has become. No statement was
issued afterwards, but the talks caused a flutter on the Istanbul
Stock Exchange. The military, after all, is a fifth estate in Turkey,
having forced four governments out of office in the past 50 years.
Ergenekon generated waves in other sectors in January. Prosecutors
arrested the head of Turk Metal, one of the country’s biggest trade
unions, who is suspected of diverting funds to the conspirators.
The investigation came under fire from a usually sympathetic quarter
– mainstream newspaper columnists who support the probe accused the
prosecutors of overstepping boundaries.
The criticism indicated the investigators were losing public support,
which is vital if they are to pursue Ergenekon all the way.
"In this country, there are groups that plan murder in the name of
their motherland," wrote Mehmet Ali Birand, Turkey’s equivalent of
Walter Cronkite, in a column.
"I believe that this conduct has to be stopped. Especially when I
remember how in the past some people in Ergenekon’s associations or
groups made life unbearable for me and my family…
"But for some time the conduct and administration of the investigation
has bothered me… Everything is so bizarre. The suspected relations
between groups and people are so weak, and some allegations are so
far from plausibility that one can’t help but be skeptical."
Turks in the street are "generally confused," Hurriyet Daily News
columnist Burak Bekdil told The Media Line.
While some detainees are known to be shady characters, most Turks
"think it is absurd that people like Sabih Kanadoglu and Ilhan Selcuk
can be terrorists," he said, referring to respected former prosecutor,
Kanadoglu, who was detained and released, and the chief editor of
the highly regarded pro-secular newspaper Cumhuriyet, Selcuk, who is
on trial.
An opinion poll confirmed the public’s ambivalent attitude toward
what has been described as the most important investigation in
decades. From interviews with 2,400 people conducted 10 days after
the latest arrests began on January 7, the A&G polling company found
that 49 percent of Turks saw Ergenekon as a group of "criminal gangs
and military coup plotters."
That means that despite three months of court hearings and nine months
of press coverage, only one in two Turks accepted the prosecutors’ view
of Ergenekon. The poll found that 22% of people saw the investigation
as "an excuse by the government to suppress the opposition and the
army" – a view championed by the main opposition Republican People’s
Party – and 24% declined to comment.
For those who want Turkey to progress, the poll is quite disheartening
in view of what has been uncovered so far.
Ergenekon came to light in June 2007, when police raided the home
of a retired non-commissioned officer in a low-income suburb of
Istanbul. They found 27 Turkish-made grenades. Their serial numbers
showed they belonged to the same batch of grenades used to bomb the
offices of Cumhuriyet in May 2006.
Days after the Cumhuriyet attack, a young lawyer walked into a court
in Ankara and opened fire on the bench with an automatic pistol,
shouting, "I am God’s soldier!" By the time he was overpowered,
a judge was dead and four others were wounded.
He told his interrogators he had taken revenge for a judicial ruling
against a teacher who had wanted to wear an Islamic headscarf at work.
The shooting provoked an outcry. It was seen as proof of what hardline
secularists had long claimed: the government’s Islamic policies
would inspire fundamentalists to push the country into becoming a
second Iran.
Prosecutors have now found evidence that Ergenekon carried out the
Cumhuriyet and courtroom attacks. The network allegedly paid a large
amount of money to the courtroom assassin’s family, and chose both
targets to make the military feel that the centers of secular power
in Turkey were in danger.
According to the trial’s 2,500-page indictment, the leaders of
Ergenekon did not plan to seize power themselves, but to use bombs and
assassinations to cause such mayhem that the TSK would feel obliged
to intervene and topple the government.
Their targets for assassination included Erdogan, the head of the
army, Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk, the Armenian patriarch,
and others.
A similar scenario was portrayed in the diary of a retired admiral
published in Nokta magazine two years ago. Admiral Ozden Ornek recorded
conversations in 2003-4 of TSK commanders who were opposed to Erdogan’s
Islamic leanings and his support for the U.N. plan to re-unite Cyprus.
The generals hatched two plans for a coup, but the plans didn’t
go anywhere because of divisions among them. Ornek wrote that the
strongest advocate of a coup was Gen. Sener Eruygur, then commander
of the Gendarmerie, and accused him of seeking a coup to advance his
own ambitions to become head of the TSK.
Eruygur retired and went on to become the principal organizer of the
mass rallies held in numerous cities in 2007 to demonstrate secular
opposition to the presidential nomination of Abdullah Gul, whose wife
wears a headscarf.
The indictment names him as a leader of Ergenekon.
"We’re talking about clearing out an Augean stable here," International
Crisis Group analyst Hugh Pope said of Ergenekon. "It’s extremely
deep. This is something that has been troubling Turkey for decades
– the idea of a state within a state acting as if it can do what
it wants."
Two of the Ergenekon detainees – Gen. Veli Kucuk and Ibrahim Sahin,
a former police commander – were implicated in the Susurluk scandal
of 1996. In that affair, a fatal car crash revealed that a gangster
wanted by Interpol, a member of parliament and a police chief had
been riding in the same Mercedes, whose trunk was loaded with weapons,
narcotics and dollars.
This generated a storm of protest, and some people stood trial.
But then Turkey’s traditional forces exerted themselves. A diligent and
independent judge was transferred mid-trial. A general and a police
commander obstructed the parliamentary commission by declining to
testify on grounds of state security. And finally, Sahin, who had been
sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, received a presidential pardon.
A chorus of Turkish commentators has said that what happened in
Susurluk must not be allowed to happen in Ergenekon; that this
investigation must reflect a more transparent Turkey.
There are two schools of thought on whether this will be achieved. One
holds that the establishment is waiting for Ergenekon to run its
course, that those convicted in court will then be dismissed as rogue
elements, and the status quo ante will be restored.
Columnist Bekdil, who covers defense matters for the American weekly
Defense News, says that top ranks of the military "privately admit
some of their colleagues have been engaged in dirty activity, but
they also think the investigation is politically motivated."
He believes the generals will endeavor to control the damage to the
military’s reputation by remaining calm and trying to "draw a line
between the bad guys and the innocent."
When the TSK spokesman resumed giving press weekly briefings in
January, Brig.-Gen. Metin Gurak attacked the investigation as
unfair to the accused, and said of the colonel’s uncovered hoard:
"All measures have been taken and the investigation launched by the
military continues." He did not take questions.
The other school of thought maintains that Ergenekon has already set
important precedents, and these will have permanent consequences. The
trial has only one general in the dock, Veli Kucuk, but it is the
first time that Turkey has prosecuted a general for plotting a coup.
The Ergenekon affair is also the first time that Turkey has prosecuted
part of what the media calls "Deep State," a mysterious network
thought to be responsible for a host of political murders and which
is believed to be linked to the security forces.
One of the killings on the indictment is that of Ugur Mumcu, an
investigative journalist for Cumhuriyet who was killed by a car
bomb in 1993. Prosecutors have found an old diary in which Kucuk
purportedly wrote that Mumcu had been threatened with death unless
he ceased probing a shipment of arms.
Liberal Turks see Ergenekon as a case that will shape the future
of Turkey.
"The real question," wrote columnist Mustafa Akyol in the Turkish
Daily News "is whether Turkey will become a liberal democracy or stay
as an illiberal autocracy with some face-saving democratic facade."
Hurriyet’s Bekdil believes Deep State remains too powerful to allow
the Ergenekon prosecutors to uproot it. But, he says, "No matter how
the whole thing ends, I think Turkey will become more transparent
than it is today."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
