TWO TURKISH GENERALS HELD OVER PLOT TO KILL NOBEL LAUREATE
©independent.co.uk
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
Conspirators ‘planned armed rebellion to destabilise Turkey’
Turkish police have arrested two retired top generals they believe were
members of a state-backed gang suspected of a slew of high-profile
killings and a plot to murder the Nobel Prize-winning novelist
Orhan Pamuk.
The former military police chief Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon,
former army number two, were among 25 people taken into custody in
Ankara early yesterday in the latest twist in investigations that
began last year.
Dozens of people – including another retired general and a prominent
ultra-nationalist lawyer – are already in custody on charges of
"provoking armed rebellion against the government".
The plotters’ plan, allegedly, was to assassinate public intellectuals,
Kurdish politicians, even target military personnel, as part
of a campaign to destabilise Turkish society and force military
intervention.
The arrests mark a sudden intensification of a power struggle
consuming the country. The arrest of the two members of the secular
establishment came on the same day that the religious-minded ruling
party was fighting court charges aimed at shutting it down.
The country’s senior prosecutor has brought a case against the AK
Party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan accusing it of trying to
establish an Islamic state. If the prosecution results in the party
being banned it is likely to lead to political turmoil and an early
parliamentary election.
The latest developments hit the Turkish stock market and could dim
Turkey’s chances of joining the European Union.
The editor of the liberal daily Radikal, Ismet Berkan, compared the
plan to the civil unrest in 1960 that preceded the first of Turkey’s
three full-on coups. "It’s a classic model, a classic case of social
engineering", he said.
"The difference is that, this time, for the first time in Turkey’s
history, four-star generals – the big fish – have been hauled in by
a civilian prosecutor."
Not everybody shares his view. Coming just hours before the state
prosecutor in the case against the Islamic-rooted government argued
his case in court, the arrests are seen by many as the latest step
in an increasingly bitter power struggle between government and state.
"It’s not one coup d’etat Turkey is facing, it’s two," said Cuneyt
Ulsever, a liberal columnist for the mass market daily Hurriyet who
is critical of AKP’s increasingly authoritarian rhetoric.
The state prosecution issued the charges in March, saying the AKP
should be dissolved because it threatens Turkey’s secular principles.
Party leaders deny the charge. Prosecutors also are calling for about
70 AK party members, including Mr Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul,
to be barred from politics.
Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist, is also concerned about
the way the investigation into what Turks have dubbed the "Ergenekon"
network is unfolding.
"It’s been over a year and we still don’t know for sure what these
people are being accused of," she said. "I get the feeling the
government is using Ergenekon as a card in its own fight for life –
‘take me down, and I’ll take you down too.’"
Yet as the author of a recent book on what Turks call the "Deep
State", which means a paramilitary grouping of military and civilian
bureaucrats and mafia opposed to full democracy, Ms Akcura is not
surprised by the accusations or the identities of the people arrested.
Turkey’s army has long considered itself the final arbiter on the
nature of the country’s regime, she pointed out, adding "paramilitary
efforts to shape politics go back at least 50 years".
A well-known hardliner, Sener Eruygur, was revealed last year to have
played a central role in two aborted attempts to unseat the government
in 2004.
The first – codenamed "Yellow Girl", a popular Turkish name for cows –
was a plan for direct military intervention that foundered because
of the opposition of the Chief of Staff. The second, "Moonshine",
was closer to Ergenekon and its scheme to mould public opinion via
the media.
Mr Berkan said: "They came to talk to all the big media bosses in
2004 to ask for their support. They didn’t get it."
Mr Eruygur appears not to have forgotten the slight. When the staunchly
secularist lobbying group he has led since his retirement organised
massive protests last year, a favourite slogan was "buy one Tayyip,
get two Aydin Dogans free." (Tayyip is the Prime Minister, Aydin
Dogan is in charge of the country’s biggest media group.)
For Alper Gormus, left-leaning editor of the investigative magazine
that revealed the 2004 coup plans last year and was shut down for
its pains, Mr Eruygur’s arrest is evidence of a fundamental change
in the balance of power between the elected government and the state.
"People say Turkey is in crisis and they are right, but what revolution
comes to pass without a political crisis?", he asked.
"What we are living through today are the birth pangs of a new regime
– the death of 60 years of limited democracy, the birth of a Turkey
that has the full democracy it deserves."
*Russia’s Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, has arrived in Ankara where
he is expected to discuss bilateral relations and regional issues,
including efforts to resolve the standoff with Iran over its disputed
nuclear programme. Mr Lavrov’s visit to Turkey, which borders Iran,
comes amid renewed demands for more diplomatic pressure on Iran over
its nuclear activities.
Who is Orhan Pamuk?
A best-selling novelist at home and abroad, Orhan Pamuk became the
first Turkish author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006.
His achievement met with an ambiguous reaction in his home country,
where his literary reputation had been all but forgotten amid a
scandal over comments he made to a Swiss newspaper the year before.
"Thirty thousand Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in
these lands and nobody but me dares to talk about it," Pamuk told
Tages-Anzeiger in February 2005. A prosecutor promptly charged him
with "insulting Turkishness" under the most notorious of a raft of
Turkish laws limiting freedom of speech. He was cleared in January
2006, but not before the car ferrying him to court had been attacked
by an angry mob of nationalists. Facing death threats, he left Turkey
and now spends most of his time in the United States.
Talking about Turkey’s conflict with Kurdish separatists and the ethnic
cleansing of Armenians in 1915 remains taboo among conservative Turks.
But possibly his greatest crime, in a country which can feel positively
Sicilian in its insistence that dirty washing be kept "in the family",
was to talk to foreigners about it.
Most Turks remain convinced that Pamuk was awarded the Nobel Prize
for political, not literary, reasons.
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