COUP PLOT INTENSIFIES ANKARA’S POWER STRUGGLE
Daniel Steinvorth
Spiegel Online
July 8 2008
Germany
Generals arrested as coup conspirators, a court on the verge of banning
the ruling party: The power struggle in Turkey between Prime Minister
Erdogan’s Islamic-rooted AKP and the secular, old-guard Kemalists is
intensifying — at the cost of political stablity.
Ali Ercan’s world swarms with enemies. The gray-haired professor
of nuclear physics and deputy chairman of the Kemalist Thought
Association (ADD) has to worry about reactionary Islamists, separatist
Kurds, suspicious Armenians and Greeks, capitalist Americans and of
course the European Union, with its constant pressures to reform. A
bodyguard stands in front of Ercan’s small office on Gazi Mustafa
Kemal Boulevard, round the clock.
Inside, a brass plaque greets visitors: "Turkey will never belong
to Europe! She will never give up her sacred sovereignty!" Ercan,
55, came up with the slogan himself. Now he wants the words etched
on his gravestone, he says. The Europeans come in for particular
blame in this "dark and dangerous time which our country is living
through." Who else have encouraged Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdogan to Islamicize Turkey through "reactionary religious forces,"
he says. Who else have pushed Erdogan to sell off Turkey economically
and erode its national sovereignty?
Many Turks think the same way. It was Ercan’s association that drummed
up massive demonstrations last year against Erdogan’s conservative
Islamic-rooted government. Hundreds of thousands gathered in front of
the Ataturk Mausoleum in Ankara to demonstrate against the election
of Abdullah Gul, a onetime fundamentalist, as president and to rail
against the foreign "neo-colonial powers" that backed him. The ADD
is a sort of think tank for Turkey’s patriotic conservatives —
and a refuge, above all, for retired military leaders.
Ercan’s club has gained some notoriety in recent weeks after police
arrested 21 members of the secret, ultra-nationalist group Ergenekon,
who are alleged to have been planning a bloody coup against the
government. The chairman of the ADD, retired General Sener Eruygur,
was one of those arrested in connection with the plot.
The arrest of a onetime general like Eruygur by ordinary police
officers is astounding. Nothing like this has ever happened before in
the history of modern Turkey. Governments have never before challenged
the military — an institution which, since the foundation of the
republic by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1923, has seen itself as the
iron guardian of the state.
A ‘Tsunami’ Breaks Over the Nation
The arrest of the retired general is being regarded as a watershed
moment in the power struggle between Erdogan’s government and the
Kemalists. This struggle will continue in the courts, since the
Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdogan and Gul lead, is
in the throes of a bitter legal battle. The democratically-elected
ruling party may be banned altogether. Even by Turkish standards,
that is pretty spectacular.
However, as the arrests demonstrate, Erdogan is fighting back.
The Turkish daily Milliyet described the police operation as a
"tsunami" breaking over the nation. Several other people were arrested
along with Eruygur, including another retired general, the head of
the Anakara chamber of commerce, and the Ankara bureau chief of the
Kemalist Cumhuriyet newspaper, which promptly accused Prime Minister
Erdogan of trying to silence the opposition.
The move against the generals was quickly followed by a
counter-move. On the day of the arrests Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman
Yalcinkaya presented his closing arguments in the case against the
AKP. The ruling party, he said, posed a danger to the state because it
wanted to establish a theocracy in Ankara similar to that in Iran. The
complaint runs to 162 pages. It looks increasingly likely that the
AKP will be banned later on this summer. New elections would follow
and the AKP would soon be able to re-organize under a new name.
Political Islam in Turkey has gone through a number of
transformations. The movement started in the 1970s with the National
Salvation Party, led by Necmettin Erbakan, who became prime minister
in the 1990s. This party then gave rise to the Welfare Party and then
the Virtue Party. All these predecessors to the AKP were anti-Western,
and were eventually banned by the courts — but, unlike the AKP,
they were not in power when those verdicts were handed down.
Erdogan was the protégé of Erbakan, the movement’s founding
father. In April 1998, a state security court sentenced Erdogan to
10 months in jail and a lifelong ban from politics on charges of
"inciting hatred." The ban was later lifted. At this time Erbakan
and Erdogan really did want to see a different republic, an Islamic
republic, perhaps even based on the Iranian model, as the court
charges today. But when their efforts continued to fail, Erdogan
distanced himself from his mentor and steered a middle course —
economically liberal yet culturally conservative, which amounted to
deregulation plus the headscarf, or Islam plus the EU.
The constitutional court is now expected to announce a verdict by the
end of July. If the AKP is banned, establishing a new party would
take a matter of days. The chief prosecutor, though, wants to keep
Erdogan from leading it. He’s expected to seek a five-year political
ban for the prime minister.
But what do Erdogan and Gul want? Will they keep to the middle path,
or is their aim really the Islamicization of the secular Turkish
republic? The Kemalists are convinced that the ruling duo want to turn
the nation into a religious republic. President Gul, on the other hand,
thinks the true danger lies with the Kemalist conspirators.
Sowing Chaos and Fear
However, one thing is undisputed: There is a secret group called
Ergenekon and it did plot a coup. It’s possible that the group was
formed on the periphery of the ominous "Gladio" network — clandestine
NATO "stay-behind" units which were intended to defend countries
against Soviet attacks during the Cold War. Ergenekon’s attention,
however, was focused domestic enemies, such as minorities and liberals,
and intellectuals like the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, who
was gunned down on a public street in January 2007 or Nobel Laureate
Orhan Pamuk (more…), who has reportedly received death threats.
The police first uncovered the coup plot when they found a stash of
weapons and explosives in the Istanbul neighborhood of Umraniye
back on June 12, 2007. A retired officer was involved and an
investigation began into a group whose name resonates in popular
folklore — "Ergenekon" is a mythic valley in central Asia, where the
original Turkic tribes are thought to have lived in the far distant
past. It would have been a pure Turkish society without minorities
or dissenters — the kind of society ultra-nationalists would like
to see in Turkey now.
In January the lead conspirators were arrested, including retired
Brigadier General Veli Kucuk and the far-right radical lawyer Kemal
Kerincsiz. Documents found in their possession supposedly proved
that Ergenekon had intended to sow chaos and fear by carrying out a
string of murders. In the ensuing civil war-like climate, the military
would then have stepped in to establish law and order. But the plan
failed. "The state is functioning," Prime Minister Erdogan said after
the first arrests.
In March there was a second wave of arrests, but this time the list
of suspects looked more questionable: Was it plausible that the
aging Cumhuriyet journalist Ilhan Selcuk, who argued for free speech
during Turkey’s military dictatorships, really belonged to a circle
of anti-democratic plotters?
Meanwhile the power struggle on the Bosporus has grown increasingly
complex and confusing — it’s no longer a simple equation of
secularists against the faithful. It’s unclear, for example, how
deeply the army itself is implicated in the Ergenekon network. It is
also obvious that the government has been keen to exploit the coup
arrests in their battle against the Kemalists.
Just how serious the crisis is can be seen in its damaging effect
on Turkey’s economy. "Political stability is down the drain," says
Guldem Atabay, chief economist at Ekspres Invest in Istanbul. These
developments have scared off foreign investors, who want guarantees of
stability, she says. Turkey relies on foreign capital. If the tension
increases after the AKP is banned, Atabay predicts a period of chaos
and a general decline on the stock market.
Kemalists like Ali Ercan, though, would welcome that turn of
events. The deputy chairman of the Kemalist Thought Association
sees nothing but a shining future for his nation. "Back to our own
resources," is his motto, meaning: Turkey doesn’t need foreigners.
–Boundary_(ID_1IInzckxpwQ7UP6X9nwR8g )–