After being released by the authorities, Gürüz said: "I am against military coups. … All gangs have to be eradicated. I have never participated in such activities." And as proof of his non-involvement with the Ergenekon gang and in reference to claims that the Ergenekon gang aims to move Turkey away from the West toward "Eurasia," he also remarked: "Talk about American imperialism is baloney. … I am an ardent supporter of America. Only America can achieve world peace."
I have, of course, no way of knowing whether Professor Gürüz was involved in the Ergenekon gang or not. This will surely be determined by the judicial process. I see, on the other hand, no reason at all to doubt the sincerity of Gürüz's remarks regarding his views on America. It is, however, not at all necessary to be against alliance with the United States to approve of military interventions in Turkey. Isn't that quite obvious?
Claims that the US is the force behind all and everything, that it gives direction to or is capable of affecting all that happens in Turkey and the world, are surely irrational. Turkey has, of course, never ever been a "banana republic" under American domination. It cannot, however, be argued that the military interventions of 1960, 1971 and 1980 in NATO-member Turkey during the Cold War were not staged with the approval or support of the US. It is true that one of the consequences of the military takeover of 1980 was the lifting of Turkey's opposition to Greece's return to the military wing of the NATO alliance. But it is definitely absurd to argue that the coup was inspired by the US and staged mainly to achieve this objective. What surely led to the military coup of 1980 was the increasingly violent conflict between left and right-wing extremists, which has been called a "civil war in slow motion." There are good reasons to suspect, however, that the national security state that was set up by the military regime was based on an American prescription.
What US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in response to the rejection by the Turkish Parliament in March 2003 of the bill that would have allowed American troops preparing to invade Iraq to be deployed on Turkish territory and thus push Turkey into the Iraqi morass has not at all been forgotten. He said the Turkish military "did not play the strong leadership role … that we would have expected." Wolfowitz thus made it very clear how little the neocons (that is, the mentors of the George W. Bush administration), who said they aimed to export democracy by invasion, cared for democracy in Turkey, a close ally of the US since the end of World War II.
Aren't we still witnessing how spokesmen for the neocons, hopefully no longer having influence over the White House, are trying to incite the Turkish military against the democratically elected government by arguing that it is turning Turkey into another Iran and moving it away from the West? Aren't we observing the tacit alliance between the neocons in the US and the Ergenekon gang in Turkey?
It is misleading to argue that Turkey today is divided between those who want to keep the country in the Western alliance and those who want to pull it out as represented by the advocates of a "Eurasian" orientation for Turkey who are among the members of the Ergenekon gang. The main divide in Turkish politics, since at least the start of Turkey's EU accession process, has been between those who want to consolidate democracy with full civilian control of the military on the one side, and those on the other side who favor either continuation of military tutelage or outright military rule. This cleavage can be said to cut across the country's political, bureaucratic, economic and cultural elites, while those in favor of democracy's consolidation seem to be prevailing perhaps for the first time in Turkish history.
The camps for and against democracy on European norms do surely have international allies. It is expected that the new administration in Washington will not in any way support military interventions in Ankara, while the neocon circles and the Israel lobby in the US may even escalate their agitation against the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government. In the European Union, those in favor democracy in Turkey seem to prevail, while there surely are forces in Europe who would be more than glad if the democratic regime were to be derailed in Turkey. There are those, even in Sweden, who write and shout that the AKP is Islamizing Turkey, turning it into another Iran and moving it away from the West. In the rest of the world, not many care whether or not Turkey consolidates its democracy by, among other things, pursuing the investigation against the Ergenekon conspiracy to the full and punishing all involved.
