WORLD VIEW: Journalists' arrest has put the nature of Turkey's ruling part back in the spotlight
SINCE IT came to power in 2002, Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) has been, depending on your perspective, the poster boy for the successful accommodation of Islamism to democracy and pluralism, or a stalking horse plotting at the heart of Turkish society to undermine its cherished secular state.
A party determined to embrace Turkey’s place in the EU, successfully to modernise a booming economy, state and society? Or an authoritarian, backward-looking, veil-wearing, enemy of western values?
Now the worrying arrests over the last two weeks of six journalists, bizarrely alleged to belong to terrorist organisations and to have been part of two conspiracies to overthrow the government, “Sledgehammer” and “Ergenekon”, has brought the differing interpretations of the party’s true nature to centre stage again at a sensitive time.
It matters, and not only to Turkey. In Germany the arrests have fed right-wing anti-Turkish EU accession propaganda. While in the wider Middle East, where Turkey is playing a stronger diplomatic and mediating role than at any time since the days of the Ottoman Empire, they undermine the aspirations of moderate Islamist groups, not least in Egypt, to promote the democratic “Turkish” way.
Prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists the AKP played no part in the arrests while the secularist opposition, in whose view Erdogan’s party can do no right, sees them as a further attempt to stifle dissent ahead of elections, a tightening noose on the country’s already pressured media.
But even the country’s AKP president, Abdullah Gul, has expressed his concern over the arrests, describing them as “developments that the public conscience cannot accept”, while the European Parliament this week expressed strong concerns about media freedom.
The existence of plots against the government should not be discounted. The army, with allies in the “deep state” apparatus and the academic and legal establishments, has overthrown four governments since 1960. And although its leadership professes now a commitment to democracy, many generals and senior officers still hold extremist views and are quite capable of the alleged plotting first unveiled in the Ergenekon case in 2007.
It is the first time in Turkey’s history that the generals have faced this sort of judicial probing, albeit in special courts, and there are hundreds of defendants in the two slow-moving trials, mostly from within the state security apparatus, but also now some 60 journalists.
Supporters of the controversial trials believe they are essential to establishing the rule of law in Turkey and ending the traditional culture of impunity in the military.
Yet there are real questions now from liberals and those outside the hardline secularist opposition about whether the state is overreaching itself and in doing so damaging a worthwhile process. Two of the journalists arrested last Friday, Nedim Sener and Ahmet Sik, have strong records of uncovering human rights abuses and exposing the “deep state” – the group they now stand accused of working for. Thousands took to the streets in protest after the arrests.
Sener received the International Press Institute’s World Press Hero award last year, for his book about the 2007 assassination of Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink. In it he sought to expose links between the murder and state security forces.
Sik’s most recent book probed the Ergenekon case and asked whether prosecutors had lost the run of themselves by concentrating too much on
plots and not enough on actual crimes of the past involving the military.
And at the time of his arrest he was about to publish a book on the role within the police of an influential Islamic brotherhood led by Fethullah Gulen, a Pennsylvania-based imam. They are reported also to be close to the AKP. “Whoever touches [them] burns,” Sik shouted as he was led away.
Confused? You thought the plotters were secularists? Well, join the bewilderment shared by most Turks at their murky security world of mirrors.
The chief Ergenekon prosecutor insists Sener and Sik were arrested for “other activities”, not their writing, but leaked transcripts of their interrogation show the prosecutor’s preoccupation with questions about their attitude to the Gulemists.
What is also not clear is the extent to which the latest prosecutions are the direct work of the AKP, or of its allies within the notoriously independent state prosecution or legal divisions. Though deeply regrettable, are they perhaps better seen as a symptom of precisely the challenges faced by the party in reforming the country’s dysfunctional state?
They are certainly damaging the fraught Turkish bid for EU membership. Turkey has so far opened 13 chapters in its accession talks with the EU but they are widely seen as going nowhere, courtesy of German and French foot-dragging. Turkish exasperation has seen Erdogan recently upping anti-EU nationalist rhetoric. “If they do not want Turkey in, they should say this openly . . . and then we will mind our own business and will not bother them.”
Election talk? Or another straw in the wind hinting at the AKP’s true nature?