AN ISTANBUL court yesterday formally indicted 56 suspects including two top retired generals on charges of plotting to topple Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government.
The 1,909-page indictment is the second to emerge from a massive investigation into a secularist-nationalist group that has stirred deep controversy since it began in June 2007.
Charged last July with stirring up civil unrest to encourage military intervention, 86 suspects have been on trial since October 2008 in a court near Istanbul.
This week’s charge sheet names the men prosecutors appear to think organised the plot: Sener Eruygur, a former military police chief, and Hursit Tolon, a former military commander.
The highest-ranking military officers arrested in Turkey’s 62-year history of multiparty democracy, both men are charged with “forming and organising an armed terror group” and “attempting to remove the government by force”.
Mr Eruygur is also charged in connection with the May 2006 murder of a senior judge which triggered a huge secular backlash against the AK Party that ended in military threats of intervention in April 2007. The murder, which was carried out inside the High Court, a traditional mainstay of Turkey’s secular order, was originally blamed on Islamists.
The extent of Mr Eruygur and Mr Tolons’s opposition to AK Party rule became clear in 2007, when the Turkish magazine Nokta published extracts from diaries allegedly written by an admiral detailing their role in two failed coup attempts in 2004.
Now retired, the admiral continues to deny he wrote the diary. On July 8th, 2008, Hursit Tolon told Turkey’s leading newspaper that the sections referring to him were “correct”. The diary extracts are in this week’s indictment.
Forced to close Nokta down shortly after it published the diaries, former chief editor Alper Gormus insists the diaries are genuine. His claims were strengthened last week when a web news portal published extracts from diaries written about the same time by a leading journalist for Turkey’s oldest secularist newspaper.
“Hell, we were supposed to have finished this whole thing off on February 28th, weren’t we,” journalist Mustafa Balbay quotes Gen Erdal Senel as telling him in April 2003, referring to the 1997 removal of an Islamist party from power. “Now we need to come in and stay for 10 or 15 years until we sort things out.” Now retired, Mr Senel last week denied having said anything of the sort.
The diary of Mustafa Balbay, who is charged in connection with the group, is now alongside the admiral’s diaries in the second indictment. He insists his notes have been manipulated.
His arrest last week sparked outrage among secularists, many of whom continue to see coup investigations as a mirage conjured up by the government to undermine its rivals, starting with the army.
Many analysts, meanwhile, think the latest indictment into the group Turks have dubbed Ergenekon serves to shed light on tensions inside the military, which has ousted four elected governments since 1960.
Planned at a time when Turkey’s government was preparing to accept a United Nations-led plan to reunite Cyprus, the 2004 coup efforts allegedly led by Sener Eruygur foundered amid opposition from Nato member Turkey’s western allies and the then chief-of-staff Hilmi Ozkok.
Mr Ozkok and his successor told a Turkish newspaper last week that they were prepared to give evidence if asked by prosecutors.
Their words were not the only recent evidence of a mentality change at the top of Turkey’s most powerful state institution.
The country’s current military chiefs have put up no resistance this week as prosecutors began to arrest senior officers in connection with the executions of Kurdish civilians at the height of a Kurdish separatist war in the 1990s. Teams excavating sites, which are believed to hold the remains of hundreds of civilians who disappeared over a decade ago, began uncovering bones last week.
Although the group within the army intent on guiding it away from its old king-making prerogatives currently appears to have the upper hand, analysts believe the struggle to democratise the Turkish military’s mentality will be hard.
Mahmut Ovur, a columnist for newspaper Sabah, who follows the army closely, reckons 70 per cent of army officers sympathise with the Ergenekon network.
Hilmi Ozkok, the general who prevented the 2004 coup efforts, was known to be deeply unpopular in the ranks.
“If these coup efforts failed, it is in large part because the West didn’t want them,” said Umit Kardas, a former military judge. “What worries me now is that growing western doubts over AKP have clouded its judgment on this coup probe.”