At the very best, constantly accusing others of constantly conspiring behind your back makes you look childish. We all know people who blame their mother for everything and are unwilling to accept responsibility for their own lives. Hopelessness can be habit forming and a sense of powerlessness a self-fulfilling prophecy.All of which leaves Turkey with a public relations problem.
At the moment it is conducting a huge conspiracy trial. It is not just any old conspiracy but one directed at rooting out an unelected “deep state.” This deep state, according to the charge sheet, is the master of the dirty trick. It staged cruel and horrendous acts of provocation including bombings and assassinations to keep the nation in a state of unease. It manipulated the media to plant a sense of foreign threat and constant menace. Its ultimate aim was to replace a democratic and legitimate government with one dominated by the military. The Ergenekon trial (as it is known) started out accusing one set of conspirators, but the pile of briefs on the prosecutor's table kept growing and many more suspects are now under lock and key.
To many in the outside world, particularly those who don't believe in abduction by aliens or that America bombed itself on Sept. 11 or that Lee Harvey Oswald was simply the fall guy in the Kennedy assassination, this all seems a little strange. That many of the wrong turns in Turkey's post-war history were decided by people in dark glasses in a smoke-filled room sounds a bit like an attempt to transfer blame. At the same time, the ever ambitious attempt to expand the scope of the prosecution reads like a conspiracy in its own right by a not-entirely independent judiciary to intimidate the opposition. Ergenekon, to many minds, is beginning to look like a show trial and the simple truth is that show trials do not boost a nation's prestige. Even Iran's Ayatollah Khamenei rebelled at the attempt to try in court the protesters at last June's election, declaring himself unconvinced that they were the tools of foreign powers.
There would be no problem if Ergenekon was not so much about the identification of a large card-carrying “Valkyrie” style conspiracy, but a wide-sweeping public commission dealing with a culture of bureaucratic impunity which led to so many wrongs and to so many injustices, still not redressed. The trouble in starting such an enquiry is that many inside Turkey still have trouble in accepting as improper that the military should have a foreign or domestic policy that works independently, let alone in opposition to that of elected government. Turkey is often criticised by the Europe it aspires to join for having a military that feels mandated to become involved in issues (like the choice of president) which are so obviously political. It is fact, not conspiratorial fiction that the military has staged three overt coups in post-war Turkish history and that in 1997, a military high command successfully pursued a strategy to force the governing coalition to dissolve. It may even be the case (to suggest yet another conspiracy) the military is itself not unhappy with the Ergenekon trial which has weeded out the hotheads among young and retired officers or paramilitary types acting in the military's name.
I suspect I am not unique in not having perused the thousands of pages of the indictment but even under this veil of ignorance I would not be surprised if many of the charges are vague or poorly argued and that, over time, some cases will collapse. Yet overall, the balance of the Ergenekon trials appears to be not about finding scapegoats but restoring responsibility for government policy to government itself.
