Turks trust their army, so the sight of military men being arrested is deeply disturbing, writes NICHOLAS BIRCH
TURKEY HAS never seen anything quite like this week’s crackdown on murky events which the media have dubbed “Sledgehammer”.
Soldiers founded this country. They have booted out four governments in 50 years, executing one prime minister in the process. Turks trust the army far more than any other state institution.
Unsurprisingly, then, the sight of 17 retired generals and three acting admirals and other men being escorted into custody by police has sent out shockwaves, rekindling a debate that has split Turkey since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.
Supporters of the AKP, led by former Islamists who now call themselves “Muslim democrats”, see the arrests as part of an ongoing process of growing civilian clout that they compare to the passage from dictatorship to democracy in Portugal and Spain in the 1970s.
Opponents say much-praised reforms the AKP pushed through to secure a start for Turkey’s European Union accession process in 2005 were merely a pretext to undermine the staunchly secular army. With the army now too weak to respond, they add, the time has come for phase two of the AKP’s plan – the Islamisation of Turkish society.
Some of Ankara’s resident Kremlinologists take a more mitigated view. Rather than being a simple face-off between government and military, they say, this week’s arrests are the latest act in a tense collaboration between the two to weed out officers with a penchant for military intervention.
They point to the emergency meeting called in Ankara on Thursday by Turkish President Abdullah Gul. Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and chief of staff Gen Ilker Basbug went into the presidential palace in the morning, grim-faced and carrying heavy brief-cases. Three hours later, they came out smiling.
Hours later, the three highest-ranking officers arrested on Monday had been released. On Friday, 18 active officers of much lower rank were arrested in swoops around the country.
A columnist for secular daily Milliyet Asli Aydintasbas is unconvinced by talk of co-ordinated give-and-take between the government and the military.
“The reality is that all Turkey’s main political actors have lost the capacity to set the rules of the game,” she says. “They are being dragged along. It has become a fight not to lose ground.”
Turkey’s drift into uncharted territory began in 2007, when the military hinted in a message on its internet site that it would intervene if the AKP selected a presidential candidate whose wife wears a headscarf.
The so-called “midnight memorandum” helped trigger early elections, which AKP won with a landslide. Its popularity boosted by public anger at army meddling, the AKP promptly gave the green light for judicial investigations into allegations of military plots between 2003 and 2004.
More than 400 people have been arrested since then, and the trial of 150 people, including several retired generals, accused of trying to force the government from power, is now in its seventh month in a high-security prison outside Istanbul.
There is no doubt that some in the military (and some outside) were up to no good. Published by a Turkish magazine in 2007, extracts from diaries allegedly written by Turkey’s top admiral detail his part in no less than three coup plots.
The Turkish military’s insistence that Sledgehammer was an elaborate war game played out in the Istanbul headquarters of Turkeys’ First Army in March 2003 is far from convincing.
Turkey’s civilian intelligence chief told leading journalists that a coup was imminent just before 2003. He may have told army chiefs too: in the spring of 2003, they unexpectedly ordered several First Army units to leave Istanbul.
But it remains far from clear whether Turkey’s deeply inefficient legal system is capable of taking the strain of so many high-profile investigations.
Government supporters accuse the judiciary, which has long been a mainstay of the country’s secular system, of trying to sabotage investigations. Government opponents say the AKP is trying to plant its own men in leading positions in the legal profession. There appears to be truth to both claims.
In the uproar that followed the arrest of a highly respected senior prosecutor last week on suspicion of links to the alleged terror group now on trial in Istanbul, President Gul called for urgent judicial reform. Without broad debate, however, any efforts by the government to make major changes to the constitution look likely only to polarise the country further.
“Buy a coffee and we’ll tell you your future for free,” read signs outside the cafes lining Istanbul’s popular Istiklal Street. As evidence grows that nobody really knows what is going on in Turkey, the fortune-tellers would arguably do better to ply their trade in the ministry buildings in Ankara.