In the last few months, Turkish politics seems to have been taking place less in the Parliament and more in court rooms. A series of revelations and arrests in the framework of the Ergenekon investigation has attracted attention away from the closure case against the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). As the Ergenekon affair was unravelling in the spring of this year, many commentators made a careful distinction between what they called the “small” and the “big” Ergenekon. The “small” Ergenekon referred to the group of officers, lawyers, journalists and others arrested in the police operations of January 2008. Most of these detainees belonged to the fringe of Turkish society. Being members of marginal nationalist groups, on the left or right, they had limited social appeal. The “big” Ergenekon though referred to a group of generals, leading journalists and academics who were suspected to be the masterminds behind the Ergenekon group. Most columnists doubted that the investigation would dare to touch them.
The arrests of Ilhan Selcuk, Dogu Perincek and Kemal Alemdaroglu in March 2008 gave the first hint that the prosecutors would not be willing to spare prominent suspects. Yet few could expect the twist which the events took last week, when two retired four-star generals, Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon, were among a group of high-profile suspects detained on 1 July 2008. In a country where the military has been held as “untouchable” and the perpetrators of military coups have not been held accountable for their deeds, these arrests were indeed a seminal event. This Monday, the Istanbul Chief Prosecutor Aykut Cengiz Engin filed a 2,455-page-long indictment against 86 persons involved in the Ergenekon affair. They were charged with organising an armed terror group and orchestrating a coup attempt. However, this document did not include charges against the latest group of arrested, including Eruygur and Tolon. These would follow in a separate indictment.
The arrest of the two generals brought attention to a news story from the magazine Nokta in March 2007. Nokta published what it claimed to be excerpts from the diary of the retired Admiral Ozden Ornek. They included information about two coup plots against the AKP government in 2004 organised by Eruygur, Tolon and other top-rank officers. Shortly thereafter, Ornek claimed that the documents were a forgery, the police raided the offices of Nokta and the magazine had to suspend its operation. Following the arrest of Eruygur and Tolon, information reinforcing the Nokta claims has appeared in the media in addition to information about two additional coup plots and a set of covert operations aiming to wreak social havoc, polarise existing divisions in the country and create conditions facilitating a military coup. Both Eruygur and Tolon had acquired leading positions in Turkey’s nationalist secularist civil society in the aftermath of their retirement. In fact, Eruygur is the President of the Ataturkist Thought Association (Ataturkcu Dusunce Dernegi-ADD), which organised the massive anti-government demonstrations “in defence of the Republic” last year. Now allegations rose that increasing pressure against the AKP government was not only limited to peaceful demonstrations. It may have included the murder of the Catholic priest Andrea Santoro in Trabzon in February 2006, the bomb attacks against the offices of the secularist daily Cumhuriyet in May 2006, the bloody attack against Turkey’s Administrative Court in May 2006 and even the murder of the Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007.
Interconnections between the Ergenekon affair and the case against the AKP are the focus of wide discussions. On the one hand, it is argued that the AKP uses a part of its friendly judiciary to put pressure upon his opponents on the eve of the critical decision of the Constitutional Court on the closure of the AKP. Its alleged aim would be to enforce a compromise between the government and the secularist elite. This could entail the survival of the AKP party organisation and its leading cadre, even if this would have to be done under a different party name. On the other hand, others argue that the indictment against the AKP gains new significance in light of the recent Ergenekon revelations. The indictment against the AKP could be seen as one more stage of the deep state’s all-out attack against the AKP, implemented not only through the operations of the Ergenekon group, but also through its loyal judiciary.
Which side will win this struggle is hard to predict. One of the most interesting findings from the Ergenekon affair though is the emergence of significant divisions within the Turkish military and judiciary. It appears that the former Chief of the Turkish General Staff Hilmi Ozkok has been one of the primary targets of the Ergenekon group. Being perceived as “weak” or even “crypto-Islamist” because of his unwillingness to undertake initiatives against the AKP government, Ozkok represented a Turkish military loyal to the Turkish Constitution and the principles of democracy. His recent meeting with President Abdullah Gul aiming to alleviate social tension and his repeated public support for Turkey’s EU integration project have reconfirmed this stance. In addition, his refusal to disprove the existence of the Ergenekon-led coup attempts attested that the case was not simply an AKP forgery against its political opponents.
The same division has pervaded across the judiciary. Turkey’s Chief Prosecutor of the Court of Cassations Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya filed on 14 March 2008 a closure case against the AKP, a party which won 47 percent of the popular vote less than a year ago. A decision of the Constitutional Court on 5 June 2008 annulled a constitutional amendment allowing the use of the headscarf and questioned in its rationale the very principle of popular sovereignty. On the other hand, Zekeriya Oz, the Istanbul prosecutor, who together with his two assistants Mehmet Pekguzel and Nihat Taskin has been running the investigation of the Ergenekon affair for the last eighteen months, has become the protagonist in what might become a turning point in the struggle of Turkish democrats against the deep state. To paraphrase the famous conversation between the Prussian King Frederick the Great and the miller Arnold, “if there are no judges in Ankara, there are still some in Istanbul.”
Dr Ioannis N Grigoriadis is a Lecturer at the Department of Turkish & Modern Asian Studies, University of Athens and a Research Fellow at ELIAMEP
(Published on Athens News on 18 July 2008)
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