Eighty-six defendants are accused of attempting to remove the government by force, writes Nicholas Birchin Istanbul
TURKEY'S MOST important political trial in more than a decade starts near Istanbul today, amid hopes the country may finally be able to crush criminal groups that for decades have hobbled its democratic development.
The 86 defendants - prominent secularists and right-wingers united only by their authoritarian ultranationalism - stand accused of "attempting to remove the government by force".
The 2,455-page indictment against them reads like the plot of a Dan Brown novel. Beginning with the discovery of 27 hand grenades in the Istanbul home of a retired military officer last June, the prosecutors accumulated evidence linking the gang to assassinations stretching back more than 15 years.
The gang's aim, they assert, was to use high-profile murders to stir up social tensions, easing the way for military intervention against a ruling party which has its roots in political Islam.
The accused - among them senior retired military officers, mafiosi and prominent academics and journalists - are alleged to have commissioned the April 2006 murder of a high court judge.
Originally blamed on Islamists, the killing triggered a secularist backlash against the government that culminated in a veiled coup threat last year and a closure case this February. The government narrowly escaped closure this July, but ongoing divisions over Islam continue to polarise debates over what the media here has dubbed "Ergenekon".
Much of the pro-government media blames Ergenekon for every act of terrorism in the last half-century. Many secularists, meanwhile, dismiss the trial as a government-backed plot to neutralise its enemies. Who has heard of a coup attempt started with 27 grenades, they ask contemptuously.
In many ways, left-leaning secularists' hostility to the Ergenekon investigation is paradoxical.
In the past, they were the ones who worked hardest to shed light on what Turks called the "Deep State", paramilitary groups with links to the military, police, politicians - and possibly the CIA - that are believed to have been active in Turkey since the 1950s.
The reason for their change of heart stems from the fact that threat perceptions in Turkey have changed radically since then, according to Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist who is following the Ergenekon case closely.
"In the 1970s, the Deep State used ultranationalist gangs to fight leftists, and in the 1990s they targeted Kurds," Akcura says, referring to the unsolved murders of hundreds of Kurdish activists during a Kurdish separatist war. "Today, Islam is perceived to be top of the danger list."
Several of the men on trial today rose to notoriety during the 1990s. A key defendant, retired general Veli Kucuk, was military police commander in a western Turkish province that became a killing ground for pro-Kurdish businessmen.
Yet Akcura thinks pro-government media claims that Ergenekon is the latest face of the Deep State miss the point. "In the past, these people were part of the state," she says. "Now they are outside, trying to get in."
Accused of links with ultranationalist death squads in the 1990s, Kucuk refused to attend a parliamentary inquiry. For some, his presence in court today is indicative of the changing balance of power in Turkey in favour of the civilian government. Others say it is easier to prosecute a retired officer than one who is still serving.
For them, the real test of Turkey's transformation lies in the fate of two retired four-star generals who were detained in July in connection with a 2004 coup plot. The highest-ranking officers to be arrested in the history of the state, they are expected to be charged in connection with Ergenekon.