TURKEY AND ERGENEKON: FROM FARCE TO TRAGEDY
By Bill Park for OpenDemocracy.net
ISN Zurich, International Relations & Security Network
/Security-Watch/Detail/?ots591=4888CAA0-B3DB-1461- 98B9-E20E7B9C13D4&lng=en&id=113654
March 12 2010
An epic military, political, and security scandal continues to absorb
Turkey. The affair’s latest bizarre sub-plots make the tensions
between the country’s ‘deep state’ and its constitutional order even
more acute, says Bill Park for openDemocracy.
The sprawling, chaotic, all-consuming "Ergenekon" investigation into
the activities of Turkey’s so-called derin devlet ("deep state")
shows no sign of abating. Indeed, its tentacles are spreading ever
further as it moves from enveloping its politicians and public to
polarising the state’s core institutions.
The reverberations of a seemingly permanent yet ever-elusive political
scandal have reached a decisive stage at the highest level of official
politics. Turkey’s prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and head of
the ruling Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice & Development Party
/AKP) intends to bring a thirteen-part constitutional-reform package
to parliament by the end of March 2010. Its passage would enable
oversight of the party’s key institutional adversary, the Hakimler ve
Savcılar Yuksek Kurulu (supreme board of judges and prosecutors /
HSYK). But Ergenekon’s corrosive effect is equally evident in the
longer-term divisions it is fomenting within Turkey’s military and
judiciary, which the latest developments in the affair are sharpening
(see Soner Cagaptay, "What’s Really Behind Turkey’s Coup Arrests?",
Foreign Policy, 25 February 2010).
A conflict of shadows
The frenzy surrounding Ergenekon has begun to focus primarily
on one of the overarching conspiracy’s many sub-plots: namely,
the extraordinary 5,000-page Balyoz (Sledgehammer) plan. This was
revealed in January 2010 by the Turkish journal Taraf, the leakers’
outlet of choice. The plan – approved by the military elite in 2003,
following the AKP’s election victory of November 2002 – was modelled
on the orchestrated disruption that preceded the "generals’ coup"
of 12 September 1980. Its aim seems to have been to generate an
atmosphere of crisis in Turkey in order to prepare the ground for
a military takeover (see Gareth Jenkins, Between Fact and Fantasy:
Turkey’s Ergenekon Investigation [Silk Road Studies, August 2009]).
The Balyoz plan’s detail mixes the fantastical and the deeply serious.
It envisaged the bombing of Istanbul mosques during Friday prayers;
the deliberate shooting down of a Turkish warplane over the Aegean
to provoke a crisis with Greece; names of friendly and hostile
journalists; and lists of bureaucrats, ambassadors, and regional
governors to be targeted for arrest.
The military elite insists that the plan is no more than a
war-game scenario; its voluminous documentation was dismissed by the
chief-of-staff Ilker Basbug as amounting to a "piece of paper". This
stance ran into trouble over a single scrawl on one such piece. The
signature of an army colonel, Dursan Cicek, was found on a document
(published by Taraf in June 2009) outlining ways to discredit the
AKP and the Fethullah Gulen movement; Basbug said that the signature
was forged, though civilian forensic and police agencies declared
it authentic – a finding now acknowledged by an internal military
investigation.
This incident is emblematic of how each story-line in the wider
Ergenekon chain of disclosures tends to unfold in a way that
intensifies the pressure on the Turkish military. For example, the
signature of a retired general, Cetin Dogan, is now also alleged
to appear in the Balyoz archive. Dogan was charged on 26 February
2010 as part of the Balyoz investigation – along with the former
special-forces commander Engin Alan, the most senior of around fifty
active and retired officers detained in the most recent round-up (see
Gareth H Jenkins, "Defense against documents: the Turkish military’s
rearguard action", Turkish Analyst, 23 November 2009).
Dogan suggests that the former chief-of-staff General Hilmi Ozkök
should confess what he knows about the affair; Ozkök in turn
claims to have had no knowledge of Balyoz, and insists the then
land-commander General Aytac Yalman should take responsibility;
Yalman agrees, but refuses to speak until given permission from
the current chief-of-staff Ilker Basbug. The unsettled Basbug seems
more concerned with identifying whistleblowers from within the ranks
than with assisting the investigation, and is increasingly shrill
in his warnings about the morale of the armed forces (see "BaÅ~_bug:
‘A demoralized military is a national problem’", Hurriyet Daily News,
11 February 2010).
A landscape of plots
The agitation surrounding the Balyoz plot has to fight for space in
Turkey’s media with the equally convoluted Kafes (Cage) "operation
action-plan". This subterranean project was exposed in April 2009
after the discovery in Istanbul’s Poyrazköy district of an illegal
arms-cache provoked a police-raid on the home of a retired Turkish
army major.
The Kafes plan, allegedly (that word again) conceived within the
navy command, compounds the multifariousness of Ergenekon and the
scale of Balyoz with an ambition all of its own. Its bizarre features
include an operation to assassinate non-Muslims (along the lines of the
killing of the Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in January 2007)
in the hope that international and domestic blame would attach to the
AKP government; the use of prostitutes to blackmail unreliable senior
naval officers; and the concealment of explosives inside a submarine
exhibited at Istanbul’s Rahmi M Koc museum supposedly intended for
detonation during a visit of schoolchildren. In the latter case,
the police’s retrieval of the explosives in July 2009 was followed
by an internal military investigation which concluded that a navy
unit had been tasked to remove them – and "forgot" to do so.
The Kafes and Balyoz controversies have overshadowed even the arrest
of two special-forces command-officers in December 2009; they were
detained outside the home of deputy prime minister Bulent Arinc on
suspicion of plotting his assassination. The investigation into this
incident led to the military making an unprecedented concession: that
a civilian judge could conduct a thorough search of a super-sensitive
military facility: in this case the special-warfare department’s
Ankara headquarters, known as the "cosmic room". The judge concerned
received death-threats; if that was predictable, the arrest of seven
military officers who had been tailing him was – even by Turkey’s
"new" standards – more startling (see Steven A Cook, "The Weakening
of Turkey’s Military" [Council on Foreign Relations, 1 March 2010]).
The army for its part continues to dismiss officers suspected of
Islamist sentiment, if so far none alleged to have been involved
in Ergenekon-related activities (though in February 2010 a military
tribunal did give a four-year prison sentence to a lieutenant-colonel
who had kept at home weapons belonging to the armed forces). More
typical of its attitude is that on 3 March 2010, the third army chief
General Saldiray Berk – who has to date refused to appear before a
court for questioning over his supposed political plotting – led the
military’s biannual, high-profile military exercises. The event –
"Sarikamis 2010 Winter", referring to its location in the eastern
province of Kars – was, somewhat unusually, not graced with the
presence of any representatives of the Turkish government.
Turkey’s fracture-zone
The avalanche of revelations associated with the Ergenekon
investigation carries several "unknown unknowns" in its thunderous
train. A major one is the impact it might be having on Turkish public
opinion, which is traditionally well-disposed towards the armed
forces. An effect of the long crisis has been to strip the military
(for the time being at least) of its untouchability, as the detailed
exposure of its disruptive plans alternates with embarrassing personal
dramas (such as the dispute between teams of doctors as to whether
three indicted retired generals РLevent Erșz, Sener Eruygur and
Hursit Tolon – are fit enough to stand trial).
In these circumstances the tensions between Turkey’s military,
judiciary and political leaders are becoming acute. They were on
display when on 4 February 2010 the Ankara government rescinded the
longstanding protocol (Emasya) granting the military the right to
assume responsibility for public order in the event of a breakdown
(see Omer Taspinar, "Turkey’s Difficult Democratization", Brookings,
15 February 2010); and again after the chief prosecutor of Erzurum in
eastern Turkey ordered the arrest of his Erzincan counterpart Ilhan
Cihaner on 17 February for Ergenekon-related activities – and was
himself dismissed almost immediately by the judges’ supreme board
(HSYK).
The latter is far more than a local affair. The moderate-Islamist AKP
government regards the HSYK as a bastion of the secularist-Ataturkist
order, and suspects it of being the agent of a concerted attempt to
undermine the Ergenekon prosecutors. This underlines the significance
of the government’s presentation of its constitutional-reform proposals
to the Ankara parliament; these include measures (first outlined
in 2007) to restructure the HSYK in conformity with the process of
accession to the European Union. In turn the HSYK is conducting an
enquiry into whether the government might be culpable of illegitimate
pressure on the judiciary – and if the answer is "yes", the AKP could
share the fate of its Refah Partisi (Welfare Party) predecessor in
1998 and find itself closed down by the constitutional court.
Turkey’s lawyers and politicians are in dispute too about the
ramifications of a constitutional-court ruling of January 2010, again
part of the requirement to make Turkey’s legal order compatible with
the European Union’s acquis communautaire. The ruling overturns a law
passed in July 2009 which had given civilian courts the right to try
military officers for non-military crimes. This outcome alone has
the capacity to tip the entire Ergenekon investigation into an even
deeper abyss.
Turkey is surpassing itself in its capacity for the absurd – and soon
also, perhaps, in its capacity for the tragic.
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