Mystery of a killer elite fuels unrest in Turkey
Arrest of 47 people over alleged coup plot sparks fears of hidden
ultra-right network
Jason Burke in Istanbul
The Observer, Sunday/UK
May 4 2008
It has the elements of a thriller: a shadowy group of right-wing former
soldiers, a mafia don, extremist lawyers and politicians; hand-grenades
in a rucksack; plots to kill the Prime Minister and a Nobel-prize
winning writer; allegedly planted evidence and falsified wire taps.
Even the name of the villains – the Ergenekon network – has an airport
paperback flavour, and the stakes involved are high: the stability of
one of the world’s most strategically important countries. This highly
charged political reality is splitting Turkey.
In the coming days the Ergenekon investigation will reach its climax.
According to newspaper reports, a long-awaited indictment will be
issued by the state prosecutor. After successive waves of arrests, 47
people are in custody. They include senior figures in the
ultra-right-wing Workers’ Party, a dozen retired senior army officers,
journalists and a lawyer accused of launching legal attacks that drove
Nobel award-winning writer Orhan Pamuk from his homeland.
Crimes being blamed on Ergenekon include a series of murderous bomb
blasts, a grenade attack on a newspaper, the murder of an Italian
bishop and the killing last year of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant
Dink – all aimed, investigators believe, at creating a climate of
terror and chaos propitious to a military coup that would depose
Turkey’s moderate Islamist government.
The coup attempt has revealed deep divisions in Turkey’s 73
million-strong population over the country’s identity: pro-European or
anti-European, fiercely nationalist, ethnically homogeneous and
militaristic, or globalised and pro-Western, more or less Islamic, more
or less sunk in historical bitterness and dark conspiracy theories.
‘The cleavage is deep: every institution, every social class, everybody
is divided,’ said Professor Murat Belge of Bigli University, Istanbul,
an analyst. ‘I am deeply apprehensive about what is going on now and
what might happen.’
But for Mehmet Demirlek, a lawyer defending a colleague accused of
being a key member of Ergenekon, the allegations are ‘imaginary’.
‘There is not a shred of truth in them,’ he said. ‘This is 100 per cent
political. It has all been cooked up by the government and by the
imperialist powers, the CIA, Mossad and the Jewish lobby and the
European Union to eliminate Turkish nationalism. There is no such thing
as Ergenekon.’ His imprisoned client, Kemal Kerincsiz, told The
Observer in an interview prior to his arrest he was a ‘patriot fighting
the disintegration of the nation’.
For Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer representing Hrant Dink’s family, Ergenekon
has ‘existed for years’. ‘A small part of what has been previously
hidden is being exposed. Call it the "deep state".’
An investigation was launched by state prosecutors after 27
hand-grenades, said to be the make used by the military, were found in
a home in a rundown part of Istanbul last June. Investigators claim
that they later uncovered an underground network dedicated to extremist
nationalist agitation.
Wire taps led to further finds of explosives, weapons and documents
listing security arrangements of senior political and military figures
and death lists. The papers supposedly proving Ergenekon – the name of
a mythic mountain in Asia where the ancestors of the Turkic peoples
escaped the Mongols – was set up in 1999 as a clandestine and violent
organisation aimed of maintaining a reactionary, purist vision of a
strong, militaristic Turkey, the heritage, the extremists believed, of
the founder of the nation, Kemal Ataturk.
The plotters tap ‘into a psyche that is based on a new and extreme
nationalism’, said Cengiz Candar, one of Turkey’s most prominent
journalists. ‘The idea is that to preserve Turkey it is necessary and
legitimate to resist in any way. And anyone who is pro-European,
liberal, who argues for increased rights for minorities and so on is a
traitor.’
According to Candar, this new nationalism is the result of a
coincidence of factors: the difficulties of Turkey’s accession to the
European Union, soul-searching over nation identity generated by the
debate on Europe, the emergence of a strong, semi-autonomous Kurdish
state in post-Saddam Iraq with all the potential implications that has
for Turkey’s large Kurdish population, and, perhaps most importantly,
the continuing electoral success of the AKP, the Justice and
Development party, the moderate Islamist party led by Recep Tayyip
Erdogan to power in 2002. ‘With no way of ousting them through
democratic means, other means become attractive to the extremist
nationalists. This country has a long tradition of such actions,’ said
Candar.
Turkey’s political history has been marked by interventions by the
army, each preceded by a period of violent instability and each
justified by the need to preserve the constitution and the nation. The
repeated electoral success of the AKP, its social and economic
policies, its pro-European, pro-free market stance, the growth of newly
wealthy, religiously conservative middle classes who vote for Erdogan
and his colleagues and the party’s break with Turkey’s fiercely secular
ideology – all threaten the nation’s powerful military and bureaucratic
establishment.
A legal bid to ban the party – on the grounds that it wants to impose
Sharia law on Turkey and thus overturn the constitution – is one
tactic, AKP party loyalists say. Violence and the activities of
Ergenekon is another. ‘How long are these people going to keep their
power when it is incompatible with a European, fully democratic
Turkey?’ asked Belge. ‘And how big is Ergenekon? Who are they? How high
does it go?’
No official military spokesman would comment but General Haldu
Somazturk, who retired three years ago, told The Observer ‘the
Ergenekon group is trivial, barely worthy of attention’, saying that
though ‘it was possible’ a few military officers might have become
involved in the group, the vast majority of Turkish soldiers were
‘committed to maintaining democracy’.
Somazturk, who said that his own views ‘reflected those of most senior
soldiers’, insisted ‘there are far more grave problems facing Turkey
than a handful of right-wing crazies’. Instead, he said, it was the
government that worried him. ‘The AKP are a concern. There is no such
thing as moderate Islam. Either a government is influenced by religion
or it isn’t. And if it is, then it is not secular and not democratic,’
he said. ‘We want to move democracy forward, they want to move it back
and we are approaching a point of no return.’
In a rundown working-class suburb of Istanbul, far from the tourist
sights of the historic centre, the deputy chairman of the Nationalist
Action Party in the city, Nazmi Celenk, made an effort to show his
party’s moderate side. ‘In Turkey we are on the front line of the clash
of civilisations,’ he said. ‘We are the natural allies of America and
Britain in this region. Our future is in Europe – but not necessarily
in the European Union.’
Yet Celenk was critical of last week’s reform of Turkey’s strict rules
on ‘insulting Turkishness’, pushed through parliament in the face of
fierce resistance from the 70 deputies from his own party. If he was in
power, Celenk said, the tight laws on freedom of expression would be
maintained. And, if he had the power, he would invade Syria and split
the state between Turkey and Iraq. The violent Kurdish activism in the
south-east of his country would be solved ‘in 24 hours’.
A street away, a group of mechanics and local shopkeepers played
backgammon. They said they were worried by rising crime, drug use and
low wages, but would not vote for the nationalists. ‘They try and cause
fights between us to get votes,’ Hikmet, a bus owner, said.
Fethiye Cetin, the Dink family lawyer, is still optimistic despite the
tensions. She discovered her own minority roots – an Armenian
grandmother – at the age of 25. ‘This period is the peak of aggressive
nationalism in Turkey, but there is still peace,’ she said in her small
office on a hill above the blue waters of the Sea of Marmara. ‘But
everyone always focuses on the negative side and never on the tens of
millions who live together without any trouble at all.’
Victim of the plot?
Hrant Dink was a 52-year-old journalist, assassinated in January 2007.
As co-founder of Agos, a newspaper published in both Turkish and
Armenian, he became a prominent member of the Armenian minority in
Turkey and pushed for Turkish-Armenian reconciliation and human rights.
Dink was shot in Istanbul by Ogün Samast, a 17-year old Turkish
nationalist. 100,000 mourners turned out to Dink’s funeral to chant:
‘We are all Armenians’.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress