A power struggle between Turkey’s Islamic-rooted government and its fiercely secular military escalated on Tuesday when a court formally charged a senior general with plotting to overthrow the civilian leadership.
The former head of the country’s National Security Council, General Sukru Sariisik, joined dozens of serving and retired senior officers accused of conspiring to destabilize the government in a conspiracy dubbed Balyoz, or “the sledgehammer.” The court also charged another retired general and a colonel.
Prosecutors have not made public any evidence or even details of the accusations since they were first made in January, but the national newspaper Taraf has published what it calls leaked copies of documents by the conspirators detailing their plans. These include blowing up at least two major mosques during Friday prayers; assassinating some Christian and Jewish leaders; and shooting down a Turkish warplane and blaming it on Greece, the country’s historic rival.
Taraf said the conspirators hoped the chaos would lead to calls for a military takeover, and even planned to turn stadiums into open-air prisons capable of holding tens of thousands of people if they challenged the troops. The paper said it had provided the documents to prosecutors, who are using them in their case.
Unable to independently assess the evidence, Turks remain divided on the authenticity of the plot and the threat it may have posed.
What is clear, however, is that the balance of power in Turkey has tipped significantly in favor of civilian authorities, whose arrests of high-ranking military officers would have once been unimaginable.
The state-run Anatolia news agency said prosecutors went to the court on Tuesday seeking charges against four officers including Sariisik, who emerged from a police minibus with tinted windows and walked into Istanbul’s main courthouse without speaking to the press.
The court released the fourth officer, a retired captain, without charges. Legal and military officials maintained their official silence regarding every aspect of the case.
The National Security Council was a powerful group of top military officials that exerted strong pressure on the government to follow a strictly secular line, including conducting close surveillance of radical Islamic movements. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s eight-year-old government has dramatically curbed its powers and turned into a merely advisory body on security affairs.
Erdogan’s business-friendly, Islamic government was elected on a platform that included permitting more open expression of faith, including a still-unmet promise to allow headscarves in schools. It was also forced to abandon an attempt to criminalize adultery.
The party has repeatedly denied that it is trying to impose religion on politics and society. However, many senior military officials view it as a threat to the strictly secular state built by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, and ferociously defended by the army since then. The military has ousted four governments since 1960 in the name of secular principles.
Many had thought such instability was a thing of the past in Turkey, which has emerged from a deep economic crisis, begun taking steps to expand freedom of speech and repair its tainted human-rights record by granting more rights to minority Kurds in a bid to join the EU.
Then, the discovery of a cache of weapons in the home of a retired military officer in 2007 led to an investigation into a purported coup plot by a gang of extremist secular nationalists called “Ergenekon,” the name from a legendary valley in Central Asia believed to be the ancestral homeland of the Turkish people.
The gang is suspected in attacks on a newspaper and a courthouse, and plots to kill the prime minister and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.
More than 400 people, including academics, journalists and politicians and soldiers, remain on trial.
Allegations of the “sledgehammer” plot emerged in January, when Taraf published what it called an intricately detailed leaked military plan to bomb Istanbul’s Fatih and Bayazit mosques, even including the names and ranks of officers involved.
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