9 January 2010 / ,
It has been a rotten year for Turkey’s generals. A series of leaked documents, tapped phone calls and sometimes plain accidents have exposed enough instances of shenanigans and mischief to shake the faith of even the most hard-core secularist.
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the prime minister, has spoken of “historic changes”. The days when civilians took their orders from generals in Turkey may be gone for good. The most recent scandal concerns two officers from Turkey’s special forces who were arrested just before Christmas on suspicion of trying to assassinate Bülent Arınç, the (overtly pious) former speaker of parliament who is now a deputy prime minister. One of them apparently tried to eat the piece of paper on which Arınç’s address was written when they were arrested near his Ankara home. The army’s explanation that the officers were spying on a colleague after an anonymous tip-off that he was passing secrets on to Arınç failed to impress prosecutors: several other officers were briefly detained in connection with the alleged murder attempt.
