It’s been a week of firecrackers going off inside the soul of the Turkish nation and, not surprisingly, many are still trying to steady jangled nerves. The shock is not that there is a branch of the Turkish military whose humdrum function was to ready a plan, using fair means and foul, to wage war against the elected government. It is our sudden ability to put real names and faces to such stratagems and to see for the first time in republican history the military being called to account for alleged misdeeds.There are distinct views and different ways of emphasizing what is going on. The first is that Turkey is finally coming to terms with a culture of impunity. For long year it was not so much Turkey’s foreign critics as its friends who complained about the muddy division of labor within the higher echelons of the Turkish state. How could Ankara realistically consider becoming a member of the European Union while its own military had an unhealthy leverage over public policy? But this was also a wake up call to the government (and increasingly to the opposition). If the military was to be deprived of its tutelary role over governance, then the political parties themselves must behave in an accountable way. The real culprit is a constitution, bequeathed by the military to the nation in 1982. It makes those who have control over the offices of state too powerful and is a temptation that needs to be destroyed.
The second approach is a more cynical concentration on the struggle for power. And from this perspective, what happened this week is tit-for-tat. This is not the first time that the military and the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) have been at each other’s throats before. In 2007, the chiefs of general staff issued veiled warnings about the suitability of electing the current Turkish president for the job. They also gave at least tacit blessing to “republican,” pro-secular rallies ahead of the general election of that year. And newspaper accounts of senior officers meeting with high court judges suggest that the high command gave a quiet nod to the Constitutional Court case to shut the AK Party down. The AK Party has managed to withstand those attack and not everyone is pleased at its seeming invincibility. Now the military is on the defensive and those who relied on them to keep the power of the government in check are concerned that the government will press its advantage too far.
Those wearing the first set of spectacles are alarmed at the tête-à-tête which the president arranged between the prime minister and the chief of general staff. It appears to be some backroom deal. From the second point of view, the meeting is a sign that the status quo might be restored.
My own view has been colored not by the detention and release of military officers, but news of an entirely different acquittal. I received a message from a friend at the beginning of the week that read our babysitter has been in jail for 10 months and today he went on trial. “Let me know if you hear of any news. The kids miss him.” The case has acquired a certain amount of notoriety because one of the other suspects was the editor of the Vatan newspaper’s Web site whose acquittal has made the headlines. She was one of 16 people arrested after police shot and killed a member of a revolutionary organization along with an innocent bystander in an affluent area of İstanbul. The judge accepted that the evidence against her (the dead man was a university friend who had gotten back in touch to ask her to review a book he had written) was not strong enough for the case to continue. The babysitter is also now out jail, but still awaiting a verdict.
There are many concerned about the amount of time those on conspiracy trial will spend behind bars even if it turns out they have no case to answer. This is not a conspiracy against conspirators but a fact of the penal system. It turns out that well over a third of those being detained in Turkish jails are awaiting trial and at least half of those can expect to be acquitted. So while the prosecution of those plotting against the state should go forward, change in the administration of justice should not stop there.
