The number of people arrested in Turkey in connection with the activities of the violent, ultranationalist group Ergenekon has risen to over 150, of whom 95 have been charged with conducting and planning acts of terror designed to destabilize the populist ruling party and trigger a secular, military takeover. Ergenekon allegedly draws its membership from the traditional, conservative elite: the police, the military, and the urban aristocracy. The opposition of these groups to the ruling Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is well-known: it stems from the weakening of their power and their fears that the AKP will do away with Turkey’s vaunted secularism.
The government claims that members of Ergenekon were responsible for two acts of terror in 2006: a grenade attack against the newspaper Cumhuriyet, and the assassination of a judge. It also claims to have found two arms caches, one in June 2007 and another earlier this month near Ankara. The 2007 cache was located in the basement of a retired Turkish army officer and contained grenades which allegedly matched those used in Cumhuriyet attack. The prosecutor’s case regarding the current arrests is that Ergenekon was planning further acts of terror and assassination, including the targeting of Prime Minister Recap Erdogan and Nobel-Prize winning author – and convicted critic of the Turkish government – Orhan Pamuk. The alleged purpose of the attacks was to trigger chaos and a collapse in public confidence in the current government, after which the army would intervene to save Turkey from itself.
While Ergenekon’s existence is real, the validity of the charges is widely questioned: many feel that the case is a political maneuver by the AKP against its most vocal and powerful opponents. Many of those so far imprisoned have not been charged, and no evidence has been shown against them, although ten people were released over the weekend. Long pretrial detentions, long trials, and dubious support for the constitutional principal of presumed innocence are areas where Turkey’s legal system has long been in desperate need of improvement. The use of the courts as a political tool is an old story in Turkey, although in general opposition secularists are considered to maintain strong influence. Indeed, the most recent row was started last year by the military establishment, whose leadership publically asked the Constitutional Court to rule that the AKP was actively undermining the state’s constitutional secularism. The AK party’s roots are clearly religious, as it maintains the leadership structure of three parties dissolved on similar grounds, but the court fell one vote short of the number required to dissolve the AKP. While the AKP tried – and failed – to remove a few restrictions on public expressions of religiosity, its policies have focused largely on the economy and pro-EU reforms. Although the party lost much of its public funding, it felt that the ruling was a decisive victory against the military. Now, some say that the AKP is pursuing its advantage in the courts to undemocratically undermine its opponents even further.
Tension between the military and elected government is nothing new in Turkey, which underwent military coups in 1960, 1971, 1980 and 1997. The most recent coup, achieved via published threat instead of direct action, deposed Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, who led the AKP’s three predecessor parties. The military has also pressured the constitutional court into dissolving 24 parties over the past 50 years, including all of Erbakan’s. However, the military has been extensively defanged in recent years, and in 2007 failed to deliver on a public and thinly veiled threat to remove president Abdullah Gul – banned many times for his Islamist views – if he were elected. The military has had its executive powers removed and been subjected to greater government oversight, something it fears will result in the armed forces becoming more religious. Although the AK party surely intended to protect itself against the military with these reforms, many were also made at the behest of the European Union, which has explicit standards for democratic control of the armed forces.
Support among elites for a coup seems extreme on the face of things; Turkey is a partly-free democracy with free and fair elections that cares about its international image, making a political solution preferable. However, the primary opposition party– the Republican People’s Party, or CHP – is not seen as credible. Its leader has clung to power for almost two decades, and although deeply unpopular within the party, he cannot be unseated under rules he himself has written. New parties that entered parliament for the first time in 2007 do not represent promising alternatives for democratic, non-Kurdish secularists. Of course, while the need to expand political pluralism is clear, conservative dissatisfaction with CHP is no excuse for murdering a judge, attacking a newspaper with grenades, or stockpiling arms.
Elites’ open discontent with the AKP is a constant in Turkey’s recent history. This polarization makes the version of the Ergenekon story in which Gul is taking revenge on those who criticized him a compelling one. On the other, the wealthy and military classes have publically allied against the democratically elected government. Faced with the AKP’s populism and the opposition party’s perceived fecklessness, they may be willing to take drastic steps to have another constitutional “reform” handed down by men in uniform. In the end, a real commitment to judicial independence and respect for democratic government may force Turkey to accept a loosening of its rigorous secular laws, while improving overall tolerance and pluralism. In the meantime, the endless battle between political parties and Ataturk’s secular guardians continues in its politicized, polarizing course.
Photo credit: Flickr user serdar
