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By David Pryce-Jones

Turkey has just held show trials that bear comparison to the judicial monstrosities staged in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Three hundred senior military officers, some serving and some retired, have been handed long prison sentences. They have been accused of belonging to a terrorist organization called Ergenekon that back in 2003 was plotting the overthrow of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The trials began in 2007. They are a disgrace. The plotters are alleged to have been intending to bomb mosques, shoot down a Turkish military aircraft and other improbabilities of the sort. The “evidence” offered by the prosecution is full of anachronisms, forgeries and other evident fabrications. The defense was not permitted to call witnesses in a position to expose the nonsense.

It is true that the military have staged coups in the recent Turkish past, not in their own interest but to preserve the secular modernizing state that replaced the old Ottoman Empire. Erdogan can now be seen to have taken the major strategic decision to re-align the country as an Islamist state. To that end, he had to neutralize the army. He could never have obtained 20-year prison sentences for innocent officers unless he had already purged the judiciary and installed Islamist yes-men. Similarly the media. Turkey is the country with the highest number of journalists in prison.

The balance of power is shifting again against the West. Turkey has renounced its status as a democracy. Suspecting that membership of the European Union was more and more probable, Turkey is instead choosing to become the leader of Sunni Islamism. Opposition to Shiite Iran and its Syrian protectorate follows, although just a short while ago Erdogan was supporting them whole-heartedly and claiming to have zero problems with neighbors. The new Islamism demands rupture with Israel and identification with Hamas.

President Obama is happy to tell everyone that he is in the habit of telephoning Erdogan frequently. He does not denounce the show trials and seems unaware that his chat-line friend in Ankara has changed.

via Turkey’s New Islamism – By David Pryce-Jones – David Calling – National Review Online.

In my trade you get used to it after a while, but the first time you wake up to find a military coup has happened overnight where you live is quite alarming. That was in Turkey back in 1971, when the army seized control of the country after months of political turmoil. It was not as bad as the 1960 coup, when the military authorities tried and hanged the prime minister, but it was bad enough.

There were two more coups in Turkey: In 1980, when half a million were arrested, tens of thousands were tortured and 50 were executed, and 1997, a “post-modern” coup in which the army simply ordered the prime minister to resign.

But there will be no more coups in Turkey: The army has finally been forced to bow to a democratically elected government.

Last Friday, a Turkish court sentenced

330 people, almost all military officers, to prison for their involvement in a coup plot in 2003. They included the former heads of the army, navy and air force, who received sentences of 20 years each, and six other generals.

Five years ago, nobody in Turkey could have imagined such a thing. The military was above the law, with the sacred mission of defending the secular state from being undermined by people who mixed religion with politics.

This was the duty the 330 officers thought they were performing in 2003, according to the indictments against them. The Justice and Development Party (AKP), a moderate Islamic party espousing conservative social values, had come to power after the 2002 election: The voters had got it wrong again, and their mistake had to be corrected.

With public opinion abroad and at home increasingly hostile to military coups, a better pretext was needed than in the old days. So the plot, Operation Sledgehammer, involved bomb attacks on two major mosques in Istanbul, a Turkish fighter jet shot down by the Greeks and an attack on a military museum by Islamic militants. The real attackers would actually be the military themselves. The accused 330 claimed Operation Sledgehammer was just a scenario for a military exercise, and the documents supporting the accusations have never been properly attributed. But given the army’s track record of four coups in 50 years and its deeply rooted hostility to Islamic parties, the charges were plausible, and the court believed them.

The army has no choice but to accept the court’s judgment. The AK party has been re-elected twice with increasing majorities, the party’s pious leaders have not tried to shove their values down everybody else’s throats, and the economy has flourished. Even now, many in Turkey still think the army is there to protect them from the oppression of the religious fanatics, and that any attempt to curb its power is a conspiracy against the secular, neutral state.

But the Turkish secular state has never been neutral. From the time Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and his companions rescued Turkey from the wreckage of the Ottoman empire after the First World War, the state was at war with religion.

But today’s Turkey is modern, powerful and prosperous, and there is no external threat.

It’s time for the Turkish army to stop waging a cold war against the devoutly religious. They are entitled to the full rights of citizenship, too.

That was the significance of AK’s victories in the past three elections, and of the trials that have finally brought the army under control. The head of the Turkish armed forces and all three service chiefs resigned in July in protest against the trials of military personnel, but President Abdullah Gul promptly appointed a new head of the armed forces — who tamely accepted the post. It’s over.

— Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

via Dwyer: Turkey makes peace with religion | Column | Opinion | The London Free Press.

A historic trial

The army condemned

Sep 29th 2012 | ISTANBUL | from the print edition

WAS justice served? The question has been raging ever since a special Istanbul security court on September 21st handed down sentences ranging from six to 20 years against 325 officers accused of seeking to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party in 2003. The trial called “Sledgehammer” was heralded as a historic turning point for Turkey’s wobbly democracy. For the first time civilian prosecutors had charged officers, including two former generals and a former admiral, for alleged coup-plotting, as part of a broader conspiracy known as Ergenekon, under which hundreds of other officers of varying ranks are also facing trial.

In the event it seems that the overriding goal was not so much to bring justice but a strong message to would-be coup-plotters of the consequences they are likely to face. Some go as far as to argue that the trial was merely an exercise in revenge for the army’s long history of intervention in politics (it has ejected four governments since 1960) and for its brutal suppression of any overt expression of Muslim piety in the name of defending Ataturk’s secular republic. Either way, the case has been bedevilled by allegations of sexed-up evidence and partisanship.

Many of the inconsistencies have been catalogued by Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist, in a blog. His father-in-law Cetin Dogan, an arch-secularist former general, was the chief suspect in the Sledgehammer plot, which allegedly contemplated the bombing of mosques, the murders of Christians and the downing of a Turkish fighter jet. Much of the evidence is contained in a single CD dated 2003 when the coup plans were said to have been hatched. Yet the same CD cites companies that did not exist at the time. Two prosecutors who called for the suspects to be released on bail were promptly dismissed and key witnesses for the defence were never heard.

The defence alleges that the tampering was done by Turkey’s most influential Islamic fraternity, named after its leader, Fetullah Gulen, a moderate imam who lives in self-imposed exile in America. It is impossible to prove but the “Gulenists” are said to have infiltrated the ranks of the police force in order to counterbalance the influence of the generals who have hounded them for decades. Moreover, thanks to constitutional changes brought in by AK in 2010, the army has lost its hold over the judiciary. The result, the defence argues, is that pro-Gulenist judges are swelling its ranks. Never mind that secret recordings of their conversations reveal that the generals were discussing how to get rid of AK, that they openly threatened an “intervention” in 2007 or that they egged on now-retired pro-secular prosecutors to launch a case to close down AK in 2008. In the event it was overturned by a single vote. “The perceived lack of an independent judiciary is among Turkey’s biggest problems,” says a Western diplomat.

Still, the case is by no means over. The defence can appeal to a higher court. Should this court uphold the verdict, they can turn to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, but not before passing through Turkey’s constitutional court.

It remains uncertain whether the generals will get a sympathetic hearing. Already, Hilmi Ozkok, who was the Chief of General Staff when the coup blueprints were allegedly conceived, appeared to suggest that he did not believe the trial was flawed. “I was upset by the verdict” the former general said “but not surprised.”

via Turkish politics: A historic trial | The Economist.