Ergenekon

Turkey’s most famous transvestite entertainer, allegedly part of the Ergenekon plot

I suppose it was only a matter of time before MRZine would attach itself to the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey. In today’s edition of this curious blend of Marxism and political Islam, there’s an item crossposted from the Muslim Brotherhood’s website (naturally) hailing Turkey’s Soft Power Successes. It backs the government’s claims about a shadowy conspiracy called Ergenekon that is threatening Turkish democracy, an institution that the Muslim Brotherhood should know lots about as a long-time adversary:

At the same time, this is a crucial moment as Turkey sends its military back to the barracks and exposes the dark secrets of its “deep state” — in particular shadowy elements within the military (which toppled four governments between 1960 and 1998) that are accused, inter alia, of coup attempts against the AKP government. These include a plot to assassinate the deputy prime minister, Bulent Arinc, on 19 December 2009. The findings promise for the first time to “touch the untouchables” within the army. This has been happening within the framework of the ongoing Ergenekon trial. In January a flood of media revelations provided yet greater details of coup attempts (including a document exposing the so-called Balyoz or Sledgehammer operation).

Some Turks, especially those who are still capable of thinking in class terms, are much less generous to the AKP, including one comrade whose critique of the ruling party was rejected by MRZine’s editor for ostensibly anti-Islamic offenses. Titled Here is Turkey, and Israel!, it reminded readers that the Turkish government is just as capable of killing children as the Israeli government it so hypocritically chooses to denounce for public relations in the Arab and Muslim world.

While it is undeniable that the Kemalist ruling party and its out-of-control military has been guilty of staging coups in the past, some caution is necessary before accepting the AKP’s word about the conspiracy called Ergenekon.

In December 2008, Ece Temelkuran, the most-read female political columnist in Turkey and author of “We are Making a Revolution Here Senorita” about the Bolivaran revolution in Venezuela, wrote an article for Counterpunch titled Turkey’s Sinister Blend of Watergate and the Dreyfuss Affair: Inside the Ergenekon Case that is must reading for the left, especially given the mounting press coverage in the bourgeois press. On February 24^th, the NYT reported:

Tensions between Turkey’s powerful military and the government have escalated sharply as a court has ordered the formal arrests of 20 former and current officers on charges they had plotted a coup.

The 20, arrested Wednesday and Thursday, were among 49 people detained Monday as part of an investigation into allegations of a 2003 military plan called Sledgehammer. Prosecutors say the military at that time intended to stir chaos to justify overthrowing the governing Justice and Development Party, known as the AK Party, which came to power in 2002.

Turkey’s army regards itself as a protector of the country’s secular traditions and has had tense relations with the AK Party, which is rooted in political Islam.

Temelkuran approaches this topic from neither a nationalist/secularist nor from the perspective of many liberals in Turkey who defend the AKP reflexively after having seen the military abuse democratic rights over the years. The AKP was quite skilled at demagogically exploiting the fear of reactionary Kemalism, representing itself as the “oppressed Muslims” who were dedicated to social justice and overturning the “deep state” that had ruled Turkey for years. It mattered little to their liberal supporters that the AKP’s economic and social policies were basically an Islamic version of the European Christian Democracy.

After the bloom faded from the AKP rose as a result of its neoliberal programs, its top politicians found it convenient to raise the Ergenekon bogeyman in order to frighten the Turkish people into supporting it uncritically. If you questioned the evidence in the case now being prosecuted against nearly 200 defendants with supposedly long Kemalist pasts and malevolent intentions, you were labeled “Ergenekon-lover”, “coup-wanter” or “military-toy-boy”.

Two of the defendants were associated with the Kemalist newspaper Cumhuriyet that was seized by the government and sold to an investor’s group led by the prime minister’s son-in-law. It was then renamed Taraf and, like another Turkish newspaper Zaman, became a vocal supporter of the prosecution. The newspaper was staffed largely by pro-AKP liberals with a leftist past. Temelkuran notes that one of Taraf’s editors is considered the “voice of the White House” in Turkey and infamous for her articles supporting the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq.

When the trade unions tried to demonstrate on May Day in Taksim, the center of Istanbul, the AKP speculated that they were in league with the Ergenekon plotters. Temelkuran writes: “Yet another interesting detail was that in those mainstream American newspapers which are more than eager to put Turkey on their front page when it comes to lifting of the headscarf ban or any other moderate Islam issue, there was not even one sentence about the Mayday violence which turned Istanbul into an invaded city.”

The prosecutors have cast a wide net in the Ergenekon case, including two very unlikely members of the “deep state”. Temelkuran notes:

One of the latest prosecutions is against a famous transvestite, Sisi, who happened to be doing a documentary called ‘The Women of the Republic’, probably a Kemalist product representing the role models of Kemalism in country’s early period. The other prosecution is against the well-known actress Nurseli Idiz, whose latest work involved her disguising herself as Kemal Atatürk. The media follow-up of the prosecutions was even more awkward then the people themselves. The liberal columnists who are over-rating the case, especially the female ones, made fun of these two, commenting on how they looked, what they wore, how they loved to be taken by the police etc. The following week, Sisi was a guest on the TV show of the most famous pop star in Turkey, and Idiz was seen on a daytime women’s show. Both of them talked about the psychological torture that they went through, and the only democratic support they got was the ‘Oh my god’s that they received from the TV audience. While Sisi was talking about psychological torture, she said it was up to European standards—and she was not being ironic at all.

Temelkuran concludes by reaffirming her belief that the left in Turkey has no interested in being confined into a Kemalist or AKP/liberal box. And unlike MRZine, which has been screaming about the danger of a “colored revolution” in Iran for what seems like an eternity, Ecel Temelkuran is worried that the AKP just might be the agent of that kind of movement in a country bordering Iran:

This barren intellectual climate is dominated by those figures who very much resemble their peers in Georgia, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. Like those colour revolutions, stamped with the words ‘made in USA’, the chosen political leader is praised by the New World Order’s Wizard of Oz, Richard Holbrooke. Like Saakashvili of Georgia, Prime Minister Erdogan is a good friend of Holbrooke, and like the Orange Revolution of Ukraine, the ideological transformation of the intelligentsia towards liberalism is directed by US-approved, freedom-fighter NGOs. Those who don’t want to be ridden by this wave are classed as counter-revolutionaries or just Kemalists, which basically means fascist. Even if you have proven your ideological trustworthiness before history, for instance by being tortured or executed by the coup, you still might not be saved from being counted as a coup-lover. Taraf, the very young newspaper set up just before the Ergenekon case, and which became a committed supporter of the case, made its debut by branding three very young revolutionaries—Deniz Gezmis, Yusuf Aslan and Huseyin Inan, executed in 1972 by an earlier coup—as xenophobic and Kemalist. The last words of these 20-something people were ‘Long live the brotherhood of Kurdish and Turkish peoples!’, but it was passé to defend victims of the former coups. Now it was this new coup that we were supposed to concentrate on! The newspaper not only attacked respected and beloved figures of the left, but also tried to make the whole leftist tradition worthless in a blink of an eye.

From what I have read about colour-coded revolutions, this is what you go through when they decide to make one in your country. Lots of ideological confusion is spread, the concept of democracy is reduced to oranges or tulips, and when you try to defend some basic values like equality or secularism, you become a scapegoat if not a fascist guardian of the old regime. The difference is that this time the so-called revolution is taking place not in Europe but in the Middle East, and for the Middle East. When the revolution is completed probably the old guards of the Kemalist regime and the Cold War generals left over from the Cold War will be gone, but Turkey will also be a Middle Eastern country more than ever before. When that time arrives, the liberal intellectuals probably won’t apologize for their ‘misunderstandings’ like their colour revolutionary buddies in other countries.