A Dark Past
By Trends • Mar 4th, 2009Top guns.
Among those arrested were two retired four-star generals. General Hursit Tolon is the former commander of the First Army. General Sener Eruygur is a former commander of the paramilitary gendarmerie that is responsible for internal security. He is also chairman of the Kemalist Thought Association, an organization sworn to uphold Ataturk’s ideals and the subjugation of religion – Islam – to the state.
Eruygur is widely believed to have been a key figure in thwarted coup attempts in 2003 and 2004 against the AKP, the party re-elected with 47 percent of parliamentary seats in July.
Some Turks have questioned the authenticity of the documents produced by the authorities, and have accused Erdogan’s AKP of mounting a witch hunt against ultra-nationalists who oppose them and who had been challenging the AKP’s legitimacy in the court system.
“Although it is based around a kernel of truth, the Ergenekon investigation has become highly politicized,” says Jenkins of the Jamestown Foundation. “The indictment … contains a potpourri of fact, hearsay and blatant invention, in-cluding claims that the Ergenekon gang was directly or indirectly responsible for almost every act of terrorism and political assassination in Turkey over the last 20 years.”
However, the arrest of two former four-star generals – something never seen before in a country where the army often appears to be a law unto itself – has given weight to the authorities’ allegations. The military – so far, at least – has not intervened in the government’s case against the ultra-nationalists. In fact, they even arrested Eruygur inside a military compound, in an act of unprecedented defiance against the generals.
The military appears to be seeking to avoid a confrontation with the government that could split the nation. The AKP has the strongest popular mandate seen in Turkish parliamentary politics for many years, and that is clearly staying the generals’ hand. But how far that tolerance will go remains to be seen.
