November 17, 2008: Over the last five
months, Turkish police have uncovered a plot by "secular
fundamentalists" to destabilize the government and try to coerce the
military into staging another coup (there have been four in the past fifty
years.) At the moment, 86 people are on trial, many of them retired generals,
academics, journalists and leaders of organized crime.
It's called the "Ergenekon case" (after
the legendary homeland of the Turks in Central Asia). What the case is all
about is the radical fringe of the "old boys club", that has long
supported a secular Turkey, forming a secret vigilante organization and using
assassination and media manipulation to try and overthrow the current (and
quite popular, especially at election time) Justice and Development Party (or
AKP). The basic problem is that the "old boys" represent a corrupt
way of doing business, using government access to get their way and not really
believing in clean government and the will of the people. The AKP is all about
fighting corruption and making the Turkish democracy more democratic. To that
end, the AKP has attracted the support of a broad coalition of Turks, including
religious conservatives (who always had a hard time of it from the secularists
who turned Turkey into a democracy after the end of World War I, and the
overthrow of the Sultan.) It's another case of yesterdays radicals becoming
todays conservatives. While the original "Kemalists" (after Kemal
Ataturk, the young general that led the 1920s revolution) were all about
reforming Turkish society, they were never able to destroy the "old boys" network and all the corruption
that went with it. Now the AKP is trying to overthrow the "old boys",
and this trial is part of that. The army, long a bastion of Kemalists beliefs,
is cooperating with the government, and distancing themselves from the
"old boys." But the secular
fundamentalists have lots of money, and lots of supporters (a large minority of
Turks, 10-30 percent of the population, depending on how you measure that
support.) What's going to kill the "old boys" is the revelations
about misdeeds going back decades. This includes death squads, corrupting
government officials, buying votes and all manner of skullduggery. No wonder
they were a secret society.
