In Turkey, Trial Casts Wide Net of Mistrust
November 22, 2009 By DAN BILEFSKY- NYT
ISTANBUL — Few here doubt that the case began with something threatening: in June 2007, 27 hand grenades and fuses were found in the attic of a house in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they were stashed there by an ultranationalist retired officer and they were later linked to an elaborate coup plot.
But the question many are asking, inside and outside Turkey, is whether the Islamic-inspired government is exaggerating the threat in order to wage a much larger battle against this moderate Muslim nation’s secular establishment.
Since 2007, 300 people have been detained during the investigation of an underground group known as Ergenekon, including a writer of erotic novels, four-star generals and other military officers, professors, editors and underworld figures — some of whom appear to have committed no offense greater than speaking in favor of Turkey as a secular state.
“Ergenekon has become a larger project in which the investigation is being used as a tool to sweep across civic society and cleanse Turkey of all secular opponents,” said Aysel Celikel, a former justice minister and president of a charity that finances the secular education of underprivileged rural girls. “As such, the country’s democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake.”
In all, 194 people have been charged, accused of trying to overthrow the government as part of Ergenekon (pronounced ahr-GEN-eh-kahn), named after a mythic Turkish valley. Prosecutors contend that they planned to engage in civil unrest, assassinations and terrorism to create chaos and undermine the stability of Turkey as groundwork for a coup.
Their trial, widely referred to by the group’s name, has become one of the most explosive in the nation’s modern history and has captivated Turks unused to seeing political secrets aired in public.
The case has brought into relief the larger strains in Turkey between a secular elite seeking to hold on to its waning influence and a growing, increasingly assertive population of observant Muslims. The case is being watched closely in Brussels, headquarters of the European Union, as a barometer of Turkey’s adherence to Western standards of justice. It comes as the country’s prospects for joining the bloc seem to be diminishing.
Proponents of the investigation argue that the trial is a long-overdue historical reckoning aimed at bringing to account what Turks call “the deep state”: a murky group of operatives, linked to the military, thought to have battled perceived enemies of the state since the cold war. The military, which sees itself as the guardian of Turkey’s secular state, has overthrown four elected governments in the past 50 years.
“No one has the right to establish a militia to overthrow a democratically elected government,” Egemen Bagis, the minister for European Union affairs, said in an interview.
Violence for which the authorities blame Ergenekon includes an armed attack on a senior state court in 2006 and the 2007 bombing of a leftist newspaper in Istanbul, Cumhuriyet.
But critics accuse investigators of overreaching in their pursuit of the perpetrators. Legal experts say zealous prosecutors have detained dozens of suspects without charges, and incriminating conversations intercepted from cellphones, as well as private documents, including love letters, seized during raids, have surfaced in pro-government newspapers and on Web sites.
In an extensive study of the case for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.”
In Ms. Celikel’s view, the fate of her predecessor at the charity, Turkan Saylan, an outspoken 73-year-old, is evidence of a political pogrom.
In April, as Ms. Saylan was recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer, police officers raided her home, carting away dozens of files. Colleagues say she was put on a watch list by prosecutors because of her secular political views. She died of cancer the next month. No charges were ever brought.
Further, Ms. Celikel said, at the same time, investigators raided 95 of the charity’s offices across Turkey, taking the files of more than 15,000 students, confiscating computers and interrogating 14 board members, some of whom were remanded to prison without charges. Ms. Celikel said prosecutors had even sought to link some of the charity’s students to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, know as the P.K.K. and considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and the United States.
The Ergenekon case certainly seems intertwined with other major battles over Turkey’s way forward — as more Islamic, or more secular.
Last year, a top prosecutor sued in the Constitutional Court seeking to ban the governing party on the grounds that it was undermining Turkey’s secular state by, among other things, seeking to relax a prohibition on the wearing of Islamic head scarves by women in universities. The court kept the party, Justice and Development, alive by just one vote.
Government critics say the Ergenekon case is a concerted effort by Justice and Development to restore its dented credibility by demonizing its opponents.
Mr. Jenkins, who has analyzed the first two of three vast mass Ergenekon indictments — 2,455 and 1,909 pages — argued that some allegations were absurd.
He said the first indictment said the group’s members had met with Dick Cheney when he was vice president to discuss toppling and replacing the government. He said it also maintained that investigators had evidence that the group planned to “manufacture chemical and biological weapons and then, with the high revenue it earned from selling them, to finance and control every terrorist organization not just in Turkey but in the entire world.”
Suheyl Batum, who teaches constitutional law at Bahcesehir University in Istanbul, is advising a team of lawyers for several defendants, including Ergun Poyraz, who has written more than five books critical of the government, and Tuncay Ozkan, a secular journalist and critic of the governing party who helped organize antigovernment rallies two years ago.
Professor Batum said Mr. Poyraz had been detained for 29 months and Mr. Ozkan for 13 months without any evidence that either had committed a crime. He argued that snippets from their recorded cellphone conversations — like “What should we do about antisecular policies?” — were construed as evidence that they were plotting to overthrow the government.
After dozens of such cellphone wiretap transcripts were published in pro-government newspapers, intellectuals and journalists said it was now common for dinner parties to begin with everyone switching off cellphones.
“I believe that people who hope that Turkey’s dark past will be enlightened by the Ergenekon case will be disappointed,” said Nedim Sener, a journalist who has investigated Ergenekon for Milliyet, a leading newspaper, and who now fears that he could also be a target in the investigation. “As a result of Ergenekon, the Turkish justice system has been broken in pieces.”
Sebnem Arsu contributed reporting.
