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<\/div>\nBOMBS target the faithful in Istanbul\u2019s busiest mosques; a Turkish air force jet is shot down over the Aegean, provoking a war with Greece. Chaos descends over Turkey. The army steps in, overthrows the mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) Party that has governed Turkey since 2002, and takes control.<\/p>\n
This plan, codenamed \u201cSledgehammer\u201d and hidden among 5,000 pages of army documents, was exposed in January by a small independent newspaper, Taraf<\/em>. It caused a storm. The army said it was just a \u201csimulation exercise\u201d. How, thundered General Ilker Basbug, the chief of the general staff, could Turkish soldiers, who charge into battle crying \u201cAllah, Allah\u201d, bomb a mosque? It is a question which civilian and military prosecutors are now attempting to answer.<\/p>\n \u201cSledgehammer\u201d is only the latest in a string of alleged coup plots to have been exposed in recent years. That helps explain why, on February 4th, Turkey\u2019s government scrapped the controversial security and public order (\u201cEmasya\u201d) protocol, which lets the army choose to take charge in the provinces when law and order breaks down. Critics argued that Emasya\u2019s real purpose was to provide the legal framework for a future coup.<\/p>\n The army\u2019s image has been badly tarnished and its role is now being questioned. Is its influence fading irreversibly as Turkey becomes a fully fledged Western democracy? Or is this just the latest twist in the long battle between the elite, made up of generals and an old guard used to monopolising wealth and power, against a rising class of overtly pious Anatolians, symbolised by the AK government?<\/p>\n The answers matter, and not just to the Turks. Turkey is a strategic pivot between Europe and the Middle East. It has a large and growing population of 72m people. It is poised to become a main transit route for oil and gas from the east. It has NATO\u2019s second-largest army, after America\u2019s. And it is a rare example of a secular democracy in a mainly Muslim country, closely watched by other democracies, such as Pakistan and Indonesia, where the army is strong.<\/p>\n Herein lies the conundrum. The Turkish army has long been seen as the guarantor of the secular republic founded 86 years ago by Kemal Ataturk. For all its recent troubles, it remains the country\u2019s most trusted and popular institution (although its ratings are slipping to unprecedented lows). Yet the generals\u2019 persistent meddling in politics and the red lines they seem to draw around some of the thorniest subjects\u2014such as Cyprus or the Kurds\u2014are among the biggest obstacles to Turkey becoming a full democracy. Turkey\u2019s constitution was drafted by the army 30 years ago; it urgently needs a rewrite. And the issues on which the army is most recalcitrant are precisely those that most bedevil Turkey\u2019s chances of joining the European Union.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n The army has staged three coups since 1960, when it hanged the country\u2019s first freely elected prime minister, Adnan Menderes, established the National Security Council and set up its own courts. \u201cThey created a parallel state,\u201d explains Umit Kardas, a former military prosecutor. The generals cemented their power after the 1980 coup by pushing through an authoritarian constitution that remains in force.<\/p>\n In 1997 the generals toppled the country\u2019s first Islamist-led government, on the dubious ground that it was seeking to introduce sharia<\/em> law. This \u201cpost-modern coup\u201d came after a sustained campaign orchestrated by the generals and their friends in the media and business. In 2007 they threatened to intervene again, this time through a web posting on the defence staff\u2019s website objecting to Abdullah Gul, then Turkey\u2019s foreign minister, becoming the country\u2019s president. They were unhappy that Mr Gul\u2019s wife chose to wear a headscarf, which is banned in state institutions as a symbol of Islamic fundamentalism.<\/p>\n This \u201ce-coup\u201d proved a huge miscalculation. Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, called a snap election, AK won a second term with a greater share of the vote (47%), and Mr Gul duly became president. \u201cThe army tried to dictate its will and the people said no\u2014and what\u2019s happened since shows that the army is losing its power,\u201d notes an EU diplomat in Ankara.<\/p>\n Undeterred, in 2008 the generals tacitly backed the country\u2019s chief prosecutor, Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, when he tried to persuade the constitutional court to ban the AK party on the flimsy charge that it was seeking to reverse secular rule. The constitutional court ruled against the ban, though by a whisker.<\/p>\n Since then, the government has been fighting back. Over the past two years the public has been bombarded with revelations of the army\u2019s alleged skulduggery. Scores of officers, including retired generals, have been interrogated or arrested in connection with the so-called Ergenekon case, named after an alleged shadowy network of rogue security officers, academics, journalists and businessmen. Prosecutors accuse the network of planning to foment chaos through a series of bloody provocations, thus justifying a coup against AK. But the evidence has not always been convincing, and some innocent people have been caught up; many have been detained for months without charge.<\/p>\n The generals insist that Ergenekon is part of a smear campaign led by Fethullah Gulen, a moderate Islamic cleric who heads Turkey\u2019s richest and most influential Islamic brotherhood. This movement, which abhors violence and embraces capitalism, is acknowledged to have kept Turkish Islam tame. But the generals believe Mr Gulen and his followers are steering Turkey towards Islamic rule. One of the army\u2019s alleged coup plots involved the planting of weapons in the homes of Gulenists in an attempt to discredit them.<\/p>\n It is not just coup-mongering that is blighting the army\u2019s image. A recent string of bloody attacks by the separatist Kurdistan Workers\u2019 Party (PKK) has raised questions about the army\u2019s prowess in the field. These grew louder when Taraf<\/em> published documents purporting to show that the army had advance warning of a PKK attack carried out in 2007 on Daglica, a remote outpost on Turkey\u2019s border with Iraq. The revelations provoked an outcry, and previously taboo questions about Turkey\u2019s military activities are now being asked. Ali Bayramoglu, a liberal academic, notes: \u201cUntil recently, losing a son in service of the country was a badge of honour. But for the first time the Turkish people are openly questioning the merits of the war.\u201d<\/p>\n Ergenekon and Daglica have sapped the army\u2019s prestige. But it is EU-oriented reforms that are nibbling at its power. This may explain why the generals, although paying lip service to the goal of joining the EU, are in fact rather ambivalent about it.<\/p>\nA parallel state<\/h2>\n
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Basbug, the anti-coup leader<\/div>\n