ARTICLE SPRING 2010
Naming what is going on in Turkey: from a ‘for the people despite the people’ elitism to a ‘for the people with the people’ democracy
Ýhsan Yýlmaz
R
ecently there has been an increase in the number of newspaper and academic journal articles published in the US about the Ergenekon terror organization case in Turkey. This case was opened by prosecutors when police discovered around two dozen hand grenades on the roof of a house in a suburb of Ýstanbul. The homeowner said that they belonged to a retired army officer, and it was later found that said army officer's fingerprints were all over the grenades. This retired army officer was not just anybody. He was a close friend of retired Gen. Veli Küçük, who has for years been accused of being behind a secret underground terror organization with deep connections to the state. In the 1990s, even though there was strong circumstantial evidence of his illegal activities, even a parliamentary commission was unable to question him. The story does not end here. The hand grenades were also connected to some terror attacks. When the hand grenades were discovered, a few were missing from their storage case. Criminologists later proved that these missing hand grenades were used in attacks on the staunchly secularist, ultra-nationalist and anti-Justice and Development Party (AK Party) Cumhuriyet newspaper. Every time the newspaper's entrance was bombed, the headlines in certain newspapers pointed fingers at the AK Party government and questioned whether Turkey was becoming an Islamist state. So the discovery was phenomenal. For the first time in Turkish history, there was proof that a plot against the democratically elected government was in action such that the government would unjustly be accused of paving the way for Islamist terrorism so the people would not re-elect the government or alternatively so a coup would be justified. Republican Turkish history is full of military coups and also full of unproven accusations justifying a coup against the government, such as one rumor that Prime Minister Adnan Menderes was butchering -literally, in mincemeat machines -- thousands of dissenting youngsters or burying them under the asphalt roads. Even though nobody reported any missing people, newspapers attacking the Menderes government claimed that the exact figures would be known by that autumn. But that spring, on May 27, 1960, the Menderes government was toppled by
Republican Turkish history is full of military coups and unproven accusations justifying a coup against the government. Most recent ones were fortunately unearthed by a handful of brave journalists and prosecutors. Documented evidence, witness testimony, wiretapped conversations, weapons and so on all point to an underground terror organization with deep connections to some high-ranking military officers, named Ergenekon. But some pieces that appear in the West somehow give a carte blanche on truth to the Ergenekon suspects and accept their claims as true
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biased, lack convincing arguments, are full of blanket accusations without any substantiating evidence and are simply written with an anti-AK Party political agenda. These pieces also mostly reflect the views of Turkish ultranationalists and American pro-Israeli neocons who are AK Party enemies and who disregard several objective Western analyses. They suffer also from several Orientalist inaccuracies, false assumptions and a lack of sufficient knowledge of Islam in Turkey. These anti-AK Party pieces emphasize that the army has been the pioneer of democratization in Turkey and is the only genuine protector of secularism and democracy in the country, implying that by enfeebling the army with the Ergenekon case, the "Islamists" in Turkey will easily establish a dictatorship. As we will see now below, a brief analysis of recent Turkish history shows that their positive claims about the army are not entirely true, that modernization, secularization and democratization have strong civilian roots and that the army has sometimes opposed, prevented and even stopped these processes. Army's role in politics Ottoman history is full of army uprisings and coups. These were not for lofty ideals, but either about their payroll or about resisting the modernization attempts of the sultans and their viziers. There has always been a power struggle between the modernizing and Westernizing foreign ministry, the reactionary army and Islamic scholars who were divided between modernizers and the reactionary army. By 1913, after murdering the defense minister and threatening the prime minister, the army-backed Ýttihat ve Terakki resolved the conflict for the benefit of the army. This hegemonic position of the army continued until very recently. It must be noted that by the end of the 19th century, the army was full of young military officers who had received a Western education, were socially Darwinist
young military officers, and nobody mentioned the allegedly missing youth afterward. Thus nobody was shocked to see the connection between the retired general, other retired military officers, hand grenades that were "stolen" from the military and a plot against the democratically elected government. Prosecutors have spoken to several witnesses, legally wiretapped several people, searched homes and offices of many people with warrants and prepared three indictments so far, amounting to thousands of pages, with millions of pages of documented evidence, not to mention hundreds of bombs, light anti-tank weapons (LAWs), all sorts of rifles, illegal wiretapping of many important people, secret reports about almost every public figure in the country, assassination plans targeting important people including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan and so on. Documented evidence, witness testimony, wiretapped conversations, weapons and so on all point to an underground terror organization with deep connections to some high-ranking military officers. The case is now before a court in Ýstanbul, and the media is closely watching. Until very recently, while one section of the media extensively covered the case, one section stayed away from it and did not report it properly, covering the case only when prosecutors or the police made so-called "mistakes," such as detaining elderly people or arriving at the homes of the suspects in the very early hours of the morning. The pieces that have recently appeared in the West show that the Western media also do not analyze the substantiated claims in the indictments but instead try to convince their readers that the whole situation is about the AK Party trying suppress its opponents and that everything is a conspiracy against secularism and its protector, the army. This piece endeavors to show that the articles that have appeared in the Western media and journals are 69
The Ergenekon investigation lead to several digs around Turkey, unearthing LAWs, bombs and other munitions for future use. Some of the munitions found were apparently stolen (or taken) from the army