13 February 2010 / ,
Bombs target the faithful in İstanbul’s busiest mosques; a Turkish air force jet is shot down over the Aegean, provoking a war with Greece. Chaos descends over Turkey.
The army steps in, overthrows the mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK Party) that has governed Turkey since 2002, and takes control. This plan, codenamed “Sledgehammer” and hidden among 5,000 pages of army documents, was exposed in January by a small independent newspaper, Taraf. It caused a storm. The army said it was just a “simulation exercise.” How, thundered General İlker Başbuğ, the chief of the general staff, could Turkish soldiers, who charge into battle crying “Allah, Allah”, bomb a mosque? It is a question which civilian and military prosecutors are now attempting to answer. “Sledgehammer” is only the latest in a string of alleged coup plots to have been exposed in recent years. That helps explain why, on February 4th, Turkey’s government scrapped the controversial security and public order (“Emasya”) protocol, which lets the army choose to take charge in the provinces when law and order breaks down. Critics argued that Emasya’s real purpose was to provide the legal framework for a future coup. The army’s image has been badly tarnished and its role is now being questioned. Is its influence fading irreversibly as Turkey becomes a fully fledged Western democracy? Or is this just the latest twist in the long battle between the elite, made up of generals and an old guard used to monopolizing wealth and power, against a rising class of overtly pious Anatolians, symbolized by the AK Party government? The answers matter, and not just to the Turks. Turkey is a strategic pivot between Europe and the Middle East. It has a large and growing population of 72 million people. It is poised to become a main transit route for oil and gas from the east.
