There seems to be a tendency to see the whole affair as a peculiarly Turkish power struggle where no one is clearly right or wrong. The joke, lately, is that you need to have Turkish DNA in order to figure out the intricacies of the case. If there is an emerging consensus about the case, it is that Ergenekon reflects the extreme level of polarization in Turkish society. Nobody in the West sees Ergenekon as a legal investigation -– like the Italian “clean hands” operation of the early 1990s paving the road to the Second Republic in Italy -- that will close an era and open a new one in Turkish politics.
Instead, the Western media report the story as part and parcel of a very complex power struggle between the moderately Islamic government and the secularist-military resistance to the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Serious Western newspapers report the disturbing facts: Ergenekon was allegedly behind a series of bombings previously credited to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), the assassination of journalist Hrant Dink, a shooting at the Council of State, a grenade attack on a left-wing newspaper and several recent headline-grabbing attacks on priests. The top members of the Ergenekon network, assumed to be military leaders, planned to use the ensuing chaos after these attacks and assassinations as a pretext to stage a coup and depose the governing AKP.
Some Western newspapers even engage in some investigative journalism themselves by talking to the two sides in the Ergenekon case. The AKP's supporters often argue that the roots of Ergenekon go much deeper than the last few years. To them, Ergenekon seems to represent the “deep state” itself. Needless to say the deep state is another Turkish concept Western media and analysts have a hard time understanding. As an entity representing the dark side the national security establishment, it is as peculiarly Turkish as Ergenekon.
Many Turkish intellectuals argue that the roots of the deep state can be found in the early days of the Unionist movement of Enver Pasha, when small groups of officers gained power with the first military coup in Turkish history. And this was in 1908. Later on the Unionist movement of the Enver, Cemal, Talat Pasha triumvirate maintained a secret network called Teşkilat-ı Mahsusa (special organization) which among other things played a major role in the deportation and massacre of Armenians in eastern Anatolia. So the argument, goes, the roots of the deep state go to this unionist tradition. Today, supporters of the AKP have no doubt that Ergenekon represents not just a conspiracy against the government but the mentality of the deep state.
The job of Western observers who try to make sense of the Ergenekon case is made all the more difficult when they talk to the opponents of the AKP. Members of Turkey’s Kemalist elite, especially the ultra-secularists, reply that Ergenekon is fictitious, an excuse for the AKP to arrest its critics. They see the legal case against dozens of alleged Ergenekon conspirators as 100 per cent political, cooked up by the government and like-minded religious groups such as the Gülen movement. All this reinforces the Western viewpoint that you need to have Turkish DNA, or at least a great level of familiarity with the power struggle between the AKP and its opponents, in order to figure out what is going on.
I am personally convinced that the Ergenekon case is above all about establishing civilian control over the military. In that sense I do not trivialize the historic importance of what is taking place in Turkey. However, I also sympathize with the Western reluctance to believe the AKP’s version of the story. The government must understand that the best way to fight the deep state or any illegal attempts to overthrow elected politicians is by relentlessly pursuing EU membership and democratic reforms. This process has unfortunately stalled over the last three years.
As Andrew Finkel previously argued “The government must understand that if Ergenekon-style machinations have created anything, it is a general suspicion of authority. This government, no more than previous governments, cannot escape fears that it is seeking power for selfish ends. … The urgent priority of the government should be to halt polarization and to promote healing.”
