A Dark Past
By Trends • Mar 4th, 2009An ambitious investigation is shedding light on an alleged plot to overthrow Turkey’s current ruling government, which is led by the AKP party.
In Turkey they call it DerinDevlet – “the deep state” – a supposed underground network that reaches into the country’s power elite, the political leadership, the military, police and judiciary, and has close links to the country’s crime syndicates, terrorist organizations, mercenary assassins and drug cartels.
In recent months, the authorities have arrested more than 120 ultranationalists, including retired four-star generals, politicians, journalists and lawyers, on charges of plotting to overthrow the Islamist-led government headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Eighty-six of those arrested are now on trial for belonging to a shadowy network known as Ergenekon, a name that’s steeped in Turkish national mythology. The mammoth trial marks the first real attempt in Turkish history to prosecute the leaders of the violent nationalist fringe and their friends in high places.
It will be a lengthy affair. The indictment totals 2,445 pages and will take weeks to be read into the court proceedings. And the political implications for Turkey, at a critical juncture in its efforts to reassert itself as a major power in the Middle East and Central Asia, may be immense and problematic.
The alleged coup plot has dramatically exposed the fissures that divide Turkey’s 73 million people. This at a time when the nation is grappling with where it belongs (to Europe or Asia), and is coming to terms with the growing political power – and popularity – of the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or AKP).
Turkey, heir to the Ottoman Empire, has been pressured into making sweeping political and social reforms to bolster its bid to qualify as a member of the European Union. But the long-powerful military see the changes as eroding the dominant status it has held since the modern Turkish Republic was founded in 1923.
Ergenekon has evoked the dark days of Turkey’s ferocious battles between left and right in the 1970s and 1980s. “The cleavage is very deep: every institution, every social class, everybody is divi-ded,” says Professor Murat Belge of Istanbul’s Bigli University. “I’m deeply apprehensive about what is going on now, and what might happen.”
