A Dark Past
By Trends • Mar 4th, 2009Day of reckoning.
The trial, which began on Oct. 20 in the Thracian town of Silivri near Istanbul, is widely seen as an historic day of reckoning between the ultra-right, traditionally embodied by Turkey’s powerful military, its opponents on the left and, more recently, the emerging Islamist bloc.
The trial is also seen as a long-overdue purging of the “deep state.” But it’s primarily a test of strength between Erdogan’s Islamists and the military, self-appointed guardians of Kemal Ataturk’s secular legacy. The generals have staged three coups since 1960. In 1997, they drove Turkey’s first Islamist government, a coalition headed by Erdogan’s predecessor and mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, from power. Not since the founding of the republic has any government challenged the military with such boldness.
Erdogan is in a much stronger position than his pioneering predecessor. His AKP Party holds the presidency, parliament and the government. It has also come closer than any other to forcing the secularist establishment, headed by the military, to relinquish power since the modern republic was established.
“It’s a struggle for the future of Turkey,” says Kemal Kerincsiz, an ultranationalist lawyer and one of the Erge-nekon defendants. He achieved notoriety by taking more than 40 high-profile Turkish intellectuals and liberals to court under the controversial Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, which makes it illegal to insult Turkey, Turkish ethnicity and state institutions.
Ergenekon is an outgrowth of the “deep state” and several of its alleged leaders were linked to an episode 12 years ago that gave Turks their first real glimpse of their nation’s dark side.
In the early evening of Nov. 3, 1996, a black Mercedes carrying three men and a woman collided with a truck that had pulled out of a gas station outside the town of Susurluk in western Anatolia. The crash killed two men and a woman riding in the speeding Mercedes. The third man was badly injured but survived.
