The plan’s mastermind, retired Gen. Çetin Doğan, at first denied the nature of the meeting he chaired or that there were any recordings of him; however, after further revelations by the Taraf newspaper, Doğan acknowledged that it was his own voice on the recordings of the Sledgehammer coup planning meeting.Doğan was not alone in denying the existence of such meetings or the presence of such people within the TSK. After close to a week, four media groups and their journalists were still resisting seeing or writing about the planned coup d’état. Considering the attitude and political stance of those media barons and of their journalist employees toward the AK Party government, this could be “understandable” in Turkey. However, the strangest and most irrational reaction came from Deniz Baykal, the leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).
Faced with 5,000 pages of documents, audio cassettes and CDs, Doğan’s partial admission and a case already initiated by prosecutors, Baykal calls the allegations “scenarios fabricated” by a certain group and compares them belittlingly to a soap opera. He claims that “Turkey has developed in the past 30 years and has left the possibility of a coup behind. There has been no coup, but rather continuous discourse using the words ‘coup d’état’.”
This is not the first time that Baykal’s mentality and discourse have run against the norms of social democracy. Throughout the Ergenekon case and investigations of other coup schemes and plots, which are just variations on the aborted Sledgehammer, Baykal has declared that he does not believe such plots or people exist and that he is the advocate for the accused. It is not a “normal” social democrat who advocates for those that attempt military coups with the aim of making Turkey an undemocratic society, in which political and cultural rights are curtailed and ethnic and religious groups are wronged and unrecognized.
After all, along with glorious and honorable events, Turkish history is replete with the unruly military staff burning with lust for power and wealth against the common good. Thousands of people -- sultans, their family members, viziers, other state officials and military officers, scholars and intellectuals -- were the objects of schemes, plots, killings and elimination at the hands of military officers or ordinary soldiers. No need to go back so far in our history. What about the improvised “Action Army” (Hareket Ordusu), which caused instability and chaos in the Ottoman state in the 19th and 20th centuries? What about the officers within the Committee of Union and Progress, which brought about the demise of the Ottoman state and millions of its citizens? What about military officers’ intrigues during the tenure of İsmet İnönü? Since Inonu was the leader of the CHP, Baykal must know about his predecessor’s interference with the military during the republican era.
In 1950, after the elections, did top army officers not offer to stage a coup to suppress the elected Democrat Party (DP) government and restore İnönü to power? From 1955 onwards, did not officers in the armed forces begin to noticeably conspire against the government? Since the end of World War II, democratization has marginalized those accustomed to playing a central role in the country’s affairs. Some officers in the military have formed a kind of opposition movement against the elected government, incorporating revolutionary ideology into the training of cadets. And since 1960 has Turkey not suffered several coups at the hands of such military personnel? Doğan himself admits that he is one of them. Just look at the dates since the 1990s… They have been fouled by aborted coups such as Moonlight, Sea Sparkle and Glove, and no doubt several as-yet-unknown coups, as well as plots devised within the army with the intention of fomenting chaos and conflict, such as the “plan to finish off the AK Party” and other civic and faith-based initiatives in the guise of “actions to fight reactionaryism.”
So how can Baykal and his cohorts give us any assurance that there have been no attempts at coups under way within the last 30 years? Or are he and his like-minded colleagues so blinded or deluded by their own personal and ideological interests at the expense of the whole nation that they do not realize that it is high time for pseudo-social democrats to retire and take a much-needed break from the strain of pretence.
