He went around blowing up buildings; shooting first and not asking any questions at all. And in case any of you are still having trouble following my drift, its hard not to conclude that those responsible for the Turkish variant of “Sledgehammer” -- the code name for a coup planning exercise deep inside the recesses of the Turkish armed forces -- were indulging in a bit of high jinks 1980s nostalgia of their own.For those who were vacationing on a polar ice floe last week and missed the plot, Turkey’s home-grown parody goes a bit like this: “A group of fun-loving, AK Party [Justice and Development Party]-hating officers decide that the only way to solve the nation’s problems is to plant bombs in mosques. They down one of their own jets [and make it look like the Greeks did it!]. In the resulting mayhem, they seize power.” The series tag line is “Bring 199,999 close personal friends down to the stadium for a General Pinochet reunion concert.”
To be fair, the whole concept was not very funny, and it is a small mercy that it didn’t get the green light. But let us be charitable for a moment and accept that the whole thing, all 5,000 pages of it, was never serious -- a “busted pilot” as the trade mag Variety would say. Given, too, that was staged at the taxpayers’ expense, the public has a right to know the results. Would a coup really have succeeded? Would Turkey have responded to a series of violent provocations by accepting the need for martial law, and would ordinary citizens have sat home and pulled down their blinds while tanks roamed the streets?
My own speculation is that the answer is “no.” In 2001, there were demonstrations in the heart of Ankara after the Turkish economy took a dive. People were not as passive as all that. In 2003, when the “mock coup” was being planned, Turkey’s business community had rallied behind a government that was busy implementing an economic policy devised in the Washington offices of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the While House, a few blocks away, President G.W. Bush was barely coping with the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq. He had been hoping that the Turkish chiefs of General Staff would have helped him overthrow Saddam Hussein, not their own government. One of the reasons the military was so upset was because they believed the AK Party had surrendered to US and EU interests -- hardly an argument that would have won them international recognition. In 1980 the military stepped in to rescue the economy. In 2003 they would have caused its collapse. In 2007, 100,000 marchers took to the streets in a dignified protest against the shooting of Hrant Dink. A coup around that time could only have succeeded through a grotesque violation of human rights. Whatever government the military decided to install, it would have been treated as a pariah by the rest of the world. Not even an episode of “Sledge Hammer!” could come up with anything quite so archaic and absurd.
It might seem churlish to bring the subject up (and I cite a media monitoring report published by the Bianet news agency), but “according to the Ministry of Justice, 1,572 children were tried as adults in 2006 and 2007 on anti-terror legislation.” Of the 174 tried in Diyarbakir, 92 were convicted of crimes which elsewhere would seem public order offenses (or at worst assault) like throwing stones at the police. However, the sentences demanded were up to 23 years’ imprisonment. Let us just suppose these children had been caught planning simulation exercises that involved setting off bombs in crowded public places, flying planes low over Parliament and dressing up as mad mullahs to storm a military museum, who knows how stiff a sentence the courts might have passed.
