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[NEWS ANALYSIS] Analysts: Battle in Turkey between status quo and democracy
The investigation into Ergenekon, a clandestine criminal organization nested within the state bureaucracy and accused of working to overthrow the government, was launched in 2007. Dozens of its suspected members from the military, academia and the business world have been arrested on charges of membership in a terrorist organization.
Though the probe seeks to eliminate the Turkish deep state, its opponents claim that it is a maneuver by the country’s conservative -- or so-called Islamist -- population to weaken Turkey’s secular principles.
However, according to several Turkish analysts following the course of developments from abroad, this is not the case. To them, the Ergenekon investigation has uncovered a battle between supporters of the status quo and supporters of change, i.e., full compliance with democracy and the rule of law.
Ahmet Kuru, an assistant professor of political science at San Diego State University, said he sees the Ergenekon probe as a struggle between the state bureaucracy, the military and the judiciary, in which neither the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) nor its leader, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, plays a pivotal role.
“This is a battle between authoritarianism and democracy, not between secularism and Islamism. Those arresting the generals are as secular as the generals themselves. The AK Party defends a passive secularism that tolerates the public visibility of religion. The CHP [Republican People’s Party] defends the sort of secularism that would kick religion out of the public domain,” he explained.
According to Ramazan Kılınç, a political scientist and lecturer at Michigan State University, those who interpret the course of recent developments in Turkey as a confrontation between secularists and Islamists fail to observe the transformation Islamist groups have gone through in Turkey over the last decade.
Stressing that Islamist groups in Turkey have become fervent supporters of democracy, particularly after the military intervention of 1997, Kılınç said this was the only way for them to survive in the political arena. To the contrary, he said, the Kemalist circles, the CHP and the members of the supreme judiciary have failed to contribute to the democratization process in Turkey, blocking many reforms including the solution of the Kurdish and headscarf problems.
In 2008, the CHP challenged a constitutional reform package initiated by the AK Party to remove the headscarf ban in universities at the Constitutional Court, leading to the annulment of the reform. The party also said it would not support the government’s Kurdish initiative, which aims to resolve Turkey’s long-standing Kurdish and terrorism problems.
Bülent Gökay, a political scientist and a lecturer at Keele University, said the investigation into Ergenekon was a delayed confrontation with the deep state within Turkey, as similar confrontations took place in other NATO countries in the 1990s.
He said that although just a small part of the deep state has been unearthed so far, it was still important to start this cleansing process. “Turkey’s Gladio is nested in the depths; it touches nearly the entire political and economic structure, so it requires tough, long-term and careful planning to disclose it,” said Gökay.
George Washington University lecturer Merve Kavakçı, a former deputy who was kicked out of Parliament in 1999 due to her insistence on wearing a headscarf, said there were some circles who have contact with Washington-based neo-cons who want to defame the AK Party at all costs. Kavakçı said she interprets the recent developments in Turkey as the pains of democratization and the transformation from an elitist autocracy into a representative democracy.
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