ISTANBUL — I should be rejoicing. Dozens of Turkish Army officers and retired generals have been rounded up this past week on suspicion of plotting against the elected government led by the Islamic-inspired A.K. Party.
The 5,000 pages of documents that landed on the doorstep of a small anti-military paper in late January have suggested the officers planned to bomb Istanbul’s historic mosques, shoot down Turkish air forces jets and round up thousands of suspected Islamists in stadiums to provide a pretext for a coup.
Never mind that the military says the plan was a “simulation exercise,” a scenario based on the possibility of internal conflict following the onset of the Iraq war. Turkey’s immensely powerful military has carried out four coups against elected governments in the country’s short history.
While the military has been the major modernizing force in creating a pro-Western secular republic out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire during the last century, its hard-line interpretation of secularism and its role in politics seem outdated to many Turks today.
So I should be cheering the arrests, celebrating with the far left and the Islamist right that forces of democracy have triumphed.
But somehow I find myself with the larger Turkish public nervously wringing my hands, a mere bystander in what seems to be a power struggle between the military and what the Economist calls “a rising class of overtly pious Anatolians symbolized by the A.K. government.”
Since 2007, we have seen dozens of men in uniform being interrogated, detained and arrested on various coup allegations that range from convincing to far-fetched. Charges and documents have usually been leaked to pro-government newspapers before they made it onto prosecutors’ desks.
In some of these cases — most notably a related case known as Ergenekon, in which about 200 people are already in detention — fact and fiction seem to have blended in such a way that opposition journalists, former generals and organized crime leaders find themselves in the same jail for months for membership in an organization whose existence they were unaware of.
Problems in due process are exacerbated by the widespread use of wiretaps by law enforcement officials. Some 119,000 people — including journalists, generals and judges — have been had their phones tapped over the past three years. Recordings of private conversations sometimes end up on the Web.
So when the military chief of staff, Gen. Ilker Basbug, complains about an “asymmetrical psychological war on the army,” many Turks are sympathetic. (Soon after he said that, a secret recording of his conversation with a group of officers appeared on a pro-government newspaper Web site.)
Don’t get me wrong. Turks are sensible people. We do not want the military meddling in politics, even to fend off Islamic radicalism, thank you. We can do that ourselves at the ballot if necessary.
But we also do not like politicians messing with the nation’s most revered institution. The arrests and wiretaps have certainly tarnished the military’s image as an invincible constant in politics. But the army continues to be by far the most “trusted” institution for Turks, most of whom grow up with the motto “Every Turk is a soldier.”
For all its faults on the domestic scene, the Turkish military — NATO’s second largest after America’s — has been the leading force behind Turkey’s prestige and Western orientation in a lousy neighborhood. The military gave us our freedom in the battle of independence in 1923; it has kept us on the right side of history during the Cold War and fought off Kurdish separatism — albeit often with the wrong methods. A decade ago, the generals made a strategic decision not to stand in the way of Turkey’s advance toward membership in the European Union — a process that involves curbing the army’s own power.
Do the generals need to give up more? Sure. The Turkish military needs to undergo a significant psychological transformation, accepting that stewardship of the secular democracy is best handed over to civic institutions. The generals have to understand that their supremacy in political life is over.
That said, humiliating men in uniform with allegations that at times seem choreographed for a political vendetta do not give me confidence about the path ahead. Unlawful detention and politically motivated trials used to be the methods of the military in its campaign against Islamists and Kurdish nationalists. They are not how a democracy deals with its past.
While fighting the generals, the government is not moving forward on legal reform, a new constitution or freedom of speech. The judiciary, the business world and society seem deeply polarized. The A.K. government’s disdain for its critics and its intimidation of the media hardly make me confident about the next episode in this drama.
More Articles in Opinion » A version of this article appeared in print on March 2, 2010, in The International Herald Tribune.
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