It has the elements of a thriller: a shadowy group of right-wing
former soldiers, a mafia don, extremist lawyers and politicians;
hand-grenades in a rucksack; plots to kill the Prime Minister and a
Nobel-prize winning writer; allegedly planted evidence and falsified
wire taps.
Even the name of the villains - the Ergenekon network
- has an airport paperback flavour, and the stakes involved are high:
the stability of one of the world's most strategically important
countries. This highly charged political reality is splitting Turkey.
In
the coming days the Ergenekon investigation will reach its climax.
According to newspaper reports, a long-awaited indictment will be
issued by the state prosecutor. After successive waves of arrests, 47
people are in custody. They include senior figures in the
ultra-right-wing Workers' Party, a dozen retired senior army officers,
journalists and a lawyer accused of launching legal attacks that drove
Nobel award-winning writer Orhan Pamuk from his homeland.
Crimes
being blamed on Ergenekon include a series of murderous bomb blasts, a
grenade attack on a newspaper, the murder of an Italian bishop and the
killing last year of Turkish Armenian journalist Hrant Dink - all
aimed, investigators believe, at creating a climate of terror and chaos
propitious to a military coup that would depose Turkey's moderate
Islamist government.
The coup attempt has revealed deep divisions
in Turkey's 73 million-strong population over the country's identity:
pro-European or anti-European, fiercely nationalist, ethnically
homogeneous and militaristic, or globalised and pro-Western, more or
less Islamic, more or less sunk in historical bitterness and dark
conspiracy theories.
'The cleavage is deep: every institution,
every social class, everybody is divided,' said Professor Murat Belge
of Bigli University, Istanbul, an analyst. 'I am deeply apprehensive
about what is going on now and what might happen.'
But for Mehmet
Demirlek, a lawyer defending a colleague accused of being a key member
of Ergenekon, the allegations are 'imaginary'. 'There is not a shred of
truth in them,' he said. 'This is 100 per cent political. It has all
been cooked up by the government and by the imperialist powers, the
CIA, Mossad and the Jewish lobby and the European Union to eliminate
Turkish nationalism. There is no such thing as Ergenekon.' His
imprisoned client, Kemal Kerincsiz, told The Observer in an interview
prior to his arrest he was a 'patriot fighting the disintegration of
the nation'.
For Fethiye Cetin, a lawyer representing Hrant
Dink's family, Ergenekon has 'existed for years'. 'A small part of what
has been previously hidden is being exposed. Call it the "deep state".'
An
investigation was launched by state prosecutors after 27 hand-grenades,
said to be the make used by the military, were found in a home in a
rundown part of Istanbul last June. Investigators claim that they later
uncovered an underground network dedicated to extremist nationalist
agitation.
Wire taps led to further finds of explosives,
weapons and documents listing security arrangements of senior political
and military figures and death lists. The papers supposedly proving
Ergenekon - the name of a mythic mountain in Asia where the ancestors
of the Turkic peoples escaped the Mongols - was set up in 1999 as a
clandestine and violent organisation aimed of maintaining a
reactionary, purist vision of a strong, militaristic Turkey, the
heritage, the extremists believed, of the founder of the nation, Kemal
Ataturk.
The plotters tap 'into a psyche that is based on a new
and extreme nationalism', said Cengiz Candar, one of Turkey's most
prominent journalists. 'The idea is that to preserve Turkey it is
necessary and legitimate to resist in any way. And anyone who is
pro-European, liberal, who argues for increased rights for minorities
and so on is a traitor.'
According to Candar, this new
nationalism is the result of a coincidence of factors: the difficulties
of Turkey's accession to the European Union, soul-searching over nation
identity generated by the debate on Europe, the emergence of a strong,
semi-autonomous Kurdish state in post-Saddam Iraq with all the
potential implications that has for Turkey's large Kurdish population,
and, perhaps most importantly, the continuing electoral success of the
AKP, the Justice and Development party, the moderate Islamist party led
by Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power in 2002. 'With no way of ousting them
through democratic means, other means become attractive to the
extremist nationalists. This country has a long tradition of such
actions,' said Candar.
Turkey's political history has been marked
by interventions by the army, each preceded by a period of violent
instability and each justified by the need to preserve the constitution
and the nation. The repeated electoral success of the AKP, its social
and economic policies, its pro-European, pro-free market stance, the
growth of newly wealthy, religiously conservative middle classes who
vote for Erdogan and his colleagues and the party's break with Turkey's
fiercely secular ideology - all threaten the nation's powerful military
and bureaucratic establishment.
A legal bid to ban the party - on
the grounds that it wants to impose Sharia law on Turkey and thus
overturn the constitution - is one tactic, AKP party loyalists say.
Violence and the activities of Ergenekon is another. 'How long are
these people going to keep their power when it is incompatible with a
European, fully democratic Turkey?' asked Belge. 'And how big is
Ergenekon? Who are they? How high does it go?'
No official
military spokesman would comment but General Haldu Somazturk, who
retired three years ago, told The Observer 'the Ergenekon group is
trivial, barely worthy of attention', saying that though 'it was
possible' a few military officers might have become involved in the
group, the vast majority of Turkish soldiers were 'committed to
maintaining democracy'.
Somazturk, who said that his own views
'reflected those of most senior soldiers', insisted 'there are far more
grave problems facing Turkey than a handful of right-wing crazies'.
Instead, he said, it was the government that worried him. 'The AKP are
a concern. There is no such thing as moderate Islam. Either a
government is influenced by religion or it isn't. And if it is, then it
is not secular and not democratic,' he said. 'We want to move democracy
forward, they want to move it back and we are approaching a point of no
return.'
In a rundown working-class suburb of Istanbul, far from
the tourist sights of the historic centre, the deputy chairman of the
Nationalist Action Party in the city, Nazmi Celenk, made an effort to
show his party's moderate side. 'In Turkey we are on the front line of
the clash of civilisations,' he said. 'We are the natural allies of
America and Britain in this region. Our future is in Europe - but not
necessarily in the European Union.'
Yet Celenk was critical of
last week's reform of Turkey's strict rules on 'insulting Turkishness',
pushed through parliament in the face of fierce resistance from the 70
deputies from his own party. If he was in power, Celenk said, the tight
laws on freedom of expression would be maintained. And, if he had the
power, he would invade Syria and split the state between Turkey and
Iraq. The violent Kurdish activism in the south-east of his country
would be solved 'in 24 hours'.
A street away, a group of
mechanics and local shopkeepers played backgammon. They said they were
worried by rising crime, drug use and low wages, but would not vote for
the nationalists. 'They try and cause fights between us to get votes,'
Hikmet, a bus owner, said.
Fethiye Cetin, the Dink family lawyer,
is still optimistic despite the tensions. She discovered her own
minority roots - an Armenian grandmother - at the age of 25. 'This
period is the peak of aggressive nationalism in Turkey, but there is
still peace,' she said in her small office on a hill above the blue
waters of the Sea of Marmara. 'But everyone always focuses on the
negative side and never on the tens of millions who live together
without any trouble at all.'