Does The Military Support Ergenekon Arrests?
On Tuesday, 23 people, including three former army commanders, a journalist and the leader of a business group, were detained in operations in the cities of Ankara, Istanbul, Antalya, Erzurum and Trabzon as part of an investigation into a powerful and illegal organization suspected of plotting to overthrow the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government….
The detainees include retired Gen. Sener Eruygur, former head of the paramilitary gendarmerie forces and currently the head of the secularist Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD), named after the founder of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Eruygur was a key figure in diaries of former Adm. Özden Örnek which revealed plans by generals to stage coups against the AK Party government in 2004 and 2005.
Eruygur, retired Gen. Hursit Tolon, retired Gen. Ilker Güven, Ankara Chamber of Commerce (ATO) Chairman Sinan Aygün and the Ankara bureau chief of the radically secularist Cumhuriyet daily Mustafa Balbay were among those taken into police custody early in the morning hours of Tuesday.
Former Gendarmerie General Command Intelligence Department head Levent Ersöz, who was reported to be in Russia, and former AK Party deputy Turhan Cömez, who is currently in London, are also wanted as suspects in the Ergenekon case.
The military has not raised any public objections to the Ergenekon operation despite the involvement of former generals, a sign that the military’s command line is opposed to plans for a coup and that it is ready to cooperate with the civilian judiciary when it takes action against those members of the military who were trying to engineer a coup….
The detentions came only days after a secret meeting between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Land Forces Commander Gen. Ilker Basbug, triggering comments that the two had discussed the upcoming sweep and that Basbug, who is widely expected to become the new chief of general staff in late August, had approved the operation targeting the former generals involved in plotting a coup.
Basbug yesterday … rejected this interpretation of his meeting with Erdogan and said the Ergenekon operation had not been discussed in the talks with Erdogan. He did not, however, express any opposition to the operation…
The fact that some of the detentions took place in military compounds was also widely seen as a nod by the military to an operation against coup plotters. In a statement released yesterday, the military denied the claim that the police entered the compound and said the detentions were carried out by military personnel acting under a request from the public prosecutor…
More than 70 people, including retired army officers, lawyers and politicians have been arrested over the past year for suspected links to Ergenekon, which is named after a valley in Turkish nationalist mythology.
The Ergenekon scandal has put the spotlight on Turkey’s deep state, a term for ultranationalists in the security forces and state bureaucracy who are ready to bend the law or act in opposition to the government in pursuit of their political aims. The military, which has repeatedly criticized the government and considers itself the guardian of Turkey’s secular system, has denied any links to the group.
Coup action plan seized in Eruygur’s house
Police officers who raided Eruygur’s off?ce reportedly seized an action plan detailing a coup. According to the plan, surveys would have been conducted whose results would show a deteriorating economy. The results would then be highly publicized. Political assassinations would have been carried out from the beginning of July 2008. A 30-member team which included former members of JITEM (a de facto intelligence organization of the gendarmerie) would have been established to carry out these assassinations. These attacks would have mainly targeted members of the judiciary and would have been immediately followed by simultaneous “Stand up for your judiciary” demonstrations across 20 provinces on July 6. Tolon and leading ultranationalist figures would have participated in demonstrations to have been held in the southeastern province of Gaziantep in which clashes with the police were to have arisen. In this way, the society would have been dragged into an environment of civil strife and the way for a coup would have been opened.
[JW: The timing of the Ergenekon arrests on the same day as the AKP presents its verbal defense to the Constitutional Court has caused some to argue that the arrests are politically motivated and in revenge for the court case that seeks to shut down the ruling party and ban 71 of its members from politics. The following is an excerpt from Turkish Daily News]:
Except for members of the government and pro-government circles, almost everyone in Ankara believes that the detentions were purely political. Rusen Cak?r, political analyst at the private NTV news channel said yesterday, “It is not easy to predict the limits of political meddling in the Ergenekon case.” (click for article)
As a private citizen, I am more worried that the law is being broken repeatedly and systematically by leaks to the — apparently — favoured press groups than the timing. The proper place for all this to come out is the trial and/or formal indictments. The results of the searches and any other part of the preparatory investigantion is supposed to remain confidential (including the juicy but incidental stuff like how much cash or what kind of jewelry people have in their safes). The arrests are well within the law and probably — we hope — required by it, as is the — very unpleasant — prolonged pre-trial detainment of the suspects but the leaks are not. People are so used to seeing the army as the countervailing force to the elected government that they miss the crucial point that the only proper restraint on the government is the law. If we truly wish to go beyond paying mere lip service to “the Rule of Law” then I’d expect to see the leaks questioned. And no, I don’t mean going after the journalists who print what they’ve been given but the gov’t employees who do the leaking.
But the indictment has to come, and come soon. There was some expectation created the other day that it would see the light of day in a matter of days, despite having to exclude the last wave of detained/arrested persons, but today a postponement appears to have been announced in order to, well, include this last wave. I’d like to believe everything is within the law, but this is getting ridiculous to a degree where even some AKP brass are starting to fear that nothing substantial will come off this and it will backfire on them (click for Turkish).