The guilt of the 1960 military junta will follow the culprits to their last day. The blood of Menderes and his friends still stain the hands of the then-junior officers and the present generals implicated in the revelations.I assume that the coup makers of past and present have had no time or capacity to study the universal themes of that great literary work about the ambitions of generals, Shakespeare's “Macbeth.” Gen. Macbeth commits evil deeds in his fervent desire for power. The play shows that destruction befalls individuals and communities when ambition goes unchecked by moral constraints. For the sake of the 1960s cadets who later became the Ergenekon generals, let us follow the simple parallels between the Scottish general and the Ergenekon generals in the historical details.
In 1950, the DP won the national election in Turkey, and Menderes became the prime minister. But then something happened that in different guises continues to haunt Turkey to the present: Top army officers offered to stage a coup d'état to suppress the elected government and restore İsmet İnönü (of the Republican People's Party [CHP]) to power. For fear of an international intervention, İnönü (then the president) declined because during his rule, appalling economic conditions, censorship of the press and restrictions on personal freedom had led the international community into growing exasperation with İnönü and the CHP.
In 1950, the DP government, wanting to purge the revolutionary core of the army's General Staff, discharged the top brass with ties to İnönü. It looked to thread a way between the pressures from constitutional secularism and their electoral base. The defenders of the status quo in Turkey counter-mobilized against the elected government. Citing the economic downturn, displeased businessmen and academics withdrew their support for the DP. Academics started to deliver “political lectures” and mobilized students for protests. From 1955 onwards, officers in the armed forces began noticeably to conspire against the government.
They had already incorporated revolutionary ideology into the training of cadets and junior officers, and a small number of army officers formed a kind of oppositional movement against the elected government. Menderes was ill-informed about the generals and about the junior officers who were frustrated by the hierarchy of the officer corps and hungry for economic and political power. Here their Scottish counterpart springs to mind.
Discontent among state servants and the elite persisted. The CHP went on the offensive. A tour of Anatolia by İnönü became the occasion for outbreaks of violence along the route. Student protests and riots started in April 1960. On one occasion, the police opened fire, killed five people and injured more. Under their top officers' direction, cadets from the military academy staged a protest march against the government but in solidarity with the oppositional student movement. Some elements of the armed forces openly displayed their opposition to the elected civilian authorities. Martial law was declared. Crowds demonstrated in the streets. These days we see a parallel in the coordination of street protests and violence by Ergenekon members.
In 1960, after the deputies fought within Parliament, on May 27 the armed forces took over the state. There was a general perception that the coup was an intervention against the DP government on behalf of the CHP. A junta of 38 junior officers arrested all DP parliamentarians and closed the party down. The DP was denounced as an instrument of “class interests” aligned with “forces opposed to the secularist principles of [Mustafa Kemal] Atatürk's revolution” -- still a major theme in Turkey today.
The trials and executions of DP leaders during 1961 made obvious the junta's true political ambitions. Partly in response to public appeals for clemency, the sentences of 11 of the 15 condemned to death were commuted to life imprisonment. The former president was spared on account of his advanced age and ill health. Prime Minister Menderes, Foreign Minister Fatin Rüştü Zorlu and Finance Minister Hasan Polatkan were hanged in September 1961.
The radicals of that time disseminated revolutionary views among the junior officer corps, which persist like a nuclear spill until today. The coup was a grave error, and it set a bad example to the rest of the military cadre about ignoring the military hierarchy. It also aroused their ambitions for the successive military interventions into Turkish domestic politics, especially in 1971, 1980 and 1997, and halted the democratization process, so Turkey lost valuable time in its economic and democratic modernization.
Now the cadets and lieutenants who zealously took part in the 1960 coup and persecutions have emerged as the generals implicated in more recent coups and the Ergenekon case. As Macbeth asks, “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood?" and answers, "No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."
