TURKEY:Prosecutors claim to have unmasked a plot to engineer a coup by murdering dissidents, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
Turkish investigations into a gang suspected of a series of high-profile killings and a plot to murder Nobel Prize-winning novelist Orhan Pamuk broadened this week, in a crackdown some are comparing to the anti-Mafia operations in Italy in the 1990s.
Twenty-nine people, including a retired general and a prominent lawyer, have now been charged by an Istanbul prosecutor with "provoking armed rebellion against the government". Their plan, allegedly, was to assassinate public intellectuals, Kurdish politicians, even military targets, as part of a campaign to destabilise Turkish society and force military intervention.
Dubbed "Ergenekon" by the Turkish press, the plotters' target date was in 2009. But after two years of increasing social tensions that culminated in army coup threats in April 2007, the group already seems to have a lot to account for. One of the men charged is Alparslan Arslan, currently on trial for the May 2006 murder of a judge at the High Court in Ankara. The attack on this secularist bastion triggered a backlash that culminated in last spring's massive secular demonstrations.
The judge's death was blamed at the time on extremist Islamists. Yet while Arslan himself appears to be religious-minded, many of those behind him are secular-minded, self-styled patriots.
It's a mix Turks call "the Red Apple coalition", a counter-intuitive collaboration based on rabid nationalism and a determination to block Turkey's path from authoritarianism to full democracy.
Unsurprisingly, evidence linking Ergenekon to the murder of Hrant Dink, a mould-breaking Armenian-Turkish journalist whose assassination last January sparked deep social polarisation, is mounting fast.
One of those arrested last week is Kemal Kerincsiz, the lawyer who opened dozens of cases against dissident intellectuals including Dink and Pamuk.
A key suspect, meanwhile, is retired general Veli Kucuk, whose presence at Dink's trial, Dink later wrote, convinced him the death threats he was getting were serious. Alleged founder of a shadowy military police intelligence unit suspected of the murders of dozens of Kurdish activists in the 1990s, Kucuk also has strong links to Trabzon, the home town of Dink's killers.
"He recently set up a security company there, and owns a local magazine," explains Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist whose book on state-mafia links was published last year. "Who writes for the magazine? A retired colonel linked to the nationalist group Dink's killers frequented."
Akcura points to another of the bizarre coincidences piling up around the Ergenekon case: the High Court gunman and the Trabzon man suspected of masterminding the Dink murder attended the same secondary school in the eastern city of Elazig.
Kucuk rose to notoriety in 1997 when it turned out he was the last man to talk to a convicted nationalist multi-murderer who died when a car carrying a police chief and a pro-state Kurdish MP crashed at high speed. Dubbed "Susurluk", the ensuing scandal shed a grim light on the Turkish state's dabbling in organised crime.
For many, Kucuk's presence in Ergenekon proves the gang is part of the "Deep State", a shadowy nexus of politicians, civilian and military bureaucrats and mafia many believe tries to twist Turkish society to its own anti-democratic agenda.
Back in 1997, the then prime minister blocked a parliamentary commission's demand that Kucuk give evidence. The army promoted him shortly afterwards. Some see his arrest now as evidence that Turkey is getting better.
"It's early days, but I'm optimistic we're seeing signs of a fundamental change in the balance of power between the elected government and the state," says Alper Gormus, editor of a magazine that was shut last year after it revealed a top admiral's plans for a military coup.
Others point out that Kucuk was then an active officer. Now he's not.
"What we have here is a bunch of retired men trying to use the influence they once had to their own ends," says Fehmi Koru, a prominent columnist who was on the gang's hit-list.
Most analysts think the real crunch will come when magistrates move against acting officers whose internet chats on the finer points of Ergenekon strategy began leaking into the press this week.
The allegations brought an uncharacteristially cautious public statement on Wednesday from Turkey's chief of staff. "The Turkish armed forces are not a criminal organisation," Yasar Buyukanit said. "Those who commit an offence as army members will be tried in court and punished."
In an investigation whose success ultimately depends on government determination, analysts are divided as to how far it will go. Some think the army - whose coup threats last year served only to boost the government's crushing electoral victory - will think twice before intervening again.
Others think the government's backing for the investigation has more to do with short-term power struggles with the army than any deep desire to cleanse the state of its links to crime.
For Belma Akcura, the government's limitations became evident in its lack of interest in following up the Dink murder, an ongoing investigation it has no vested interests in.
"I've looked into hundreds of political murder cases, and in all of them all you get at the end are the footsoldiers, never the top of the pyramid," she says. "To have the will to get to the top, you have to believe in law, in democracy. These people do not."
Reuters adds: The Turkish government's plans to allow female students to wear the Muslim headscarf at university will provoke campus chaos and street violence and end up destroying the secular state, university rectors said yesterday.
"After such changes in the constitution and the law, the republic of Turkey would inevitably turn into a religious state," Mustafa Akaydin, head of Turkey's inter-university council, said to loud applause from dozens of academics. "We are worried that the universities will be plunged into chaos . . . Universities are the venue for knowledge, not for [ religious] faith," he said, reading out a statement unanimously approved by the rectors after an emergency meeting in Ankara.
Some professors chanted, "Turkey is secular and will remain secular", and held up a banner that read: "Enough already, wake up! Let's protect the principles and revolution of Ataturk and the secular republic!"