The plot would have blamed the killings on the government and continues to be debated in the Turkish media, with analysts trying to shed light on the incidents in Turkey’s recent history that aimed to create chaos in the country with the ultimate goal of preparing a coup environment.Focusing on the reactions of some circles upon the discovery of the Cage Operation Action Plan, who questioned whether those who would make such plans are mad, Sabah’s Emre Aköz says those who devise such horrifying plans are not mad or crazy. “Aren’t exactly such plans made in order to create a coup environment, to mobilize a certain segment of society and to accuse another segment both in the world and in Turkey?” asks Aköz. As an example of this, he offers a bomb attack allegedly carried out by Italy’s Gladio at the Bologna train station on Aug. 2, 1980. The goal of this attack, which claimed the lives of 85 people and injured more than 200 others, was to blame leftists. According to Aköz, the bomb attack against the Council of State in Turkey, which left a senior judge dead in 2006, is not much different from the case in Italy. The goal of this attack, says Aköz, was to blame Islamic circles for the attack, and if the main suspect in the attack, Alparslan Arslan, had not been captured, they would have achieved this. “Remember how well everyone played their roles. Then-President Ahmet Necdet Sezer immediately termed the bombing an attack against the secular republic. According to pro-Ergenekon media, the attack was Turkey’s Sept. 11. So the pro-secular middle class of Ankara was mobilized and the ministers who attended the funeral of the slain judge were condemned. The actual goal of the attack was to raise tension in the country starting from that day, to undermine the AK Party and ensure that the candidate of the pro-secular segment won 2007’s presidential election,” explains Aköz.
Yeni Şafak’s Fehmi Koru says that although some newspapers failed to cover the discovery of the Cage Operation Action Plan, they would have run it on their front pages if the plans in it had been put into practice. “Just as they termed the Council of State attack ‘the Sept. 11 of Turkey’, they would show those attacks as the work of an Islamic organization,” says Koru. About the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, he says, it is now understood that Dink’s murder was an operation to lay the groundwork for a military coup, as killing the member of a minority would help the international community to blame the government.
