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Turkey's Summer of Discontent: Ergenekon Blues

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  • Turkey's Summer of Discontent: Ergenekon Blues

    Turkey's Summer of Discontent: Ergenekon Blues

    by Steven A. Cook
    August 7, 2013


    Former Chief of the Turkish General Staff Ilker Basbug (Umit
    Bektas/Courtesy Reuters).

    Former Chief of the Turkish General Staff Ilker Basbug (Umit
    Bektas/Courtesy Reuters).
    With the dramatic developments in Egypt over the last month, Turkey
    has fallen out of the news even though it has been an eventful summer
    along the Bosphorus. The opposition to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
    Erdogan that began after authorities tried to clear Istanbul's Gezi
    Park in late May has proven more durable than virtually everyone
    predicted. The government has responded to this political turbulence
    with a variety of coercive measures making Erdogan's illiberal turn
    appear to be downright authoritarian. At the same time, Ankara's
    strategic position in the Middle East continues to crumble. The prime
    minister's reaction to Egypt's July 3 coup d'état may be principled,
    but his harsh and oddly emotional rhetoric has alienated yet another
    important Middle Eastern country. In an irony of ironies, the
    Egyptian press recently reported that if Erdogan makes a much-delayed
    visit to Gaza in late August, he will have to do it through Israel.
    That makes Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq the major regional
    powers with whom Turkey is at odds.

    If all this was not enough, earlier this week a Turkish court handed
    down verdicts in the controversial `Ergenekon case,' which is sure to
    roil Turkish politics further. There is not much discussion of the
    verdicts here in Washington. The Washington Post ran an AP story
    about the case on Monday, but nothing since. The White House has been
    silent. Marie Harf, a State Department spokesperson, offered an
    anodyne comment about Turkish law permitting appeals and (groan)
    `watching the process.' It is August, and maybe people in Washington
    care more about getting a reservation at State Road than high policies
    of state. Maybe officials believe that Washington needs Ankara on a
    variety of important issues (though I can only think of Syria) so it's
    not in anyone's interest to upset Erdogan. Maybe it is hard to get
    the administration and Congress riled up over a case that at one time
    promised to uproot Turkey's deep state and the dark underside of the
    country's national security establishment. Even so, there are aspects
    of the Ergenekon case that are troubling even if one quite rightly
    believes that the Turkish military has historically been a force of
    authoritarianism and repression.

    Just to review. In June 2007, Turkish police discovered a cache of 27
    hand grenades on the roof of a building in the Istanbul neighborhood
    of Umraniye. The explosives were linked to a non-commissioned officer
    in the Special Forces named Oktay Yildirim. He was subsequently
    connected to other officers (retired and serving), members of criminal
    gangs, ultranationalists, and intelligence officers ultimately
    numbering about 300 people. It seemed that the Istanbul cops had
    uncovered Turkey's mythical and much discussed `deep state' red-handed
    trying to sow violence in Turkey's streets in an effort to bring down
    Prime Minister Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP).
    The Ergenekon organization was subsequently alleged to have been
    responsible for a 2006 attack on the Council of State, played a role
    in the murder of prominent Armenian-Turkish journalist, Hrant Dink,
    and various other murders and plots. Turkish liberals were delighted.
    Until that time, Erdogan had practiced a pragmatic, reformist,
    consensual style of politics that made many (though not all) Turkish
    democrats and most foreign observers swoon. For Turkish liberals and
    their friends abroad, prosecuting members of Turkey's deep state and
    in the process helping to bring the Turkish military to heel would be
    an important step in the country's transition to democracy.

    In time, however, Turkish liberals started having second thoughts
    about what was then the Ergenekon investigation. Erdogan began to use
    Ergenekon against his political opponents. The conspiracy became a
    conspiracy within a conspiracy. Along with military officers,
    journalists, academics, politicians and other critics were hauled off
    to Turkish jails and detained indefinitely while state prosecutors
    conducted investigations. In 2008 and 2009, Turks were in a panic
    that the government was listening in on their telephone conversations
    and that everything they said would be used against them. People
    began taking the batteries out of their mobile phones in certain
    situations or leaving them outside meetings rooms. It actually became
    kind of `a thing' after a while. If you were not ostentatiously
    removing your cell phone battery while sitting down for a meal at
    House Café in Ortakoy, you were clearly not all that important.

    Then in early 2010, state prosecutors launched a related investigation
    directly into the military over what was called `Operation
    Sledgehammer,' which was believed to have been plans for a coup d'état
    in 2003 that then Chief of the General Staff, Hilmi Ozkok, stopped.
    Given the military's history of coups (1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997) as
    well as various other routine interventions to ensure the republican
    political system that Mustafa Kemal founded in 1924, the accusation
    that the senior command was plotting to overthrow Erdogan seemed
    entirely plausible. At the time, Washington yawned and regarded
    rooting out coupsters within the ranks was yet further testament to
    Erdogan's efforts to create a more democratic polity.

    It was clear to some analysts well before, but by late 2010 and 2011
    it was obvious to virtually everyone paying attention that the
    investigations were much bigger politically. The conduct of the
    inquiries, the quality of the indictments, and the profile of people
    who were being detained in the Ergenekon and Sledgehammer
    investigations after the initial discovery of weapons in Umraniye
    together became even more ambitious and cynical than the already bold
    effort to undermine the deep state. Many in Turkey - including the
    media - and foreign analysts have either decided to look the other way
    or determined that Erdogan and the AKP were so entrenched that there
    was little to be done, but much of the evidence contained in the
    ludicrously long and incomprehensible indictments in both cases was
    clearly fabricated. In the Sledgehammer investigation, the
    government's case was based on a single CD (among a set of 19) that
    came to light in January 2010. The CD allegedly contains incriminating
    evidence of the plot to overthrow Erdogan. Yet forensic analysis of
    the CD indicates that the information on it was created after the coup
    was supposed to have taken place. The courts ignored this devastating
    evidence of government malfeasance and last year 322 military officers
    were sentenced to prison, some for as long as twenty years. Similar
    kinds of chicanery went on in the Ergenekon case, leading to this
    week's verdicts that sent former Chief of Staff, General Ilker Basbug,
    and ten other retired officers to prison for life. All in all,
    approximately 250 people (of 275 indicted) were found guilty and
    sentenced to various terms behind bars. They include journalists,
    doctors, politicians, and academics.

    Regardless of what one thinks of the views of those convicted in the
    Ergenekon (and Sledgehammer) case, they deserve due process - a hallmark
    of democratic polities. They did not get it in Turkey.

    http://blogs.cfr.org/cook/2013/08/07/turkeys-summer-of-discontent-ergenekon-blues/


    From: Baghdasarian
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