Former Top Generals Detained in Turkish Coup Inquiry

By SEBNEM ARSU

Published: February 22, 2010

ISTANBUL — In one of the toughest actions against the powerful Turkish military in the history of modern Turkey, the police detained three of the country’s highest-ranking former generals on Monday as part of a vast investigation into a shadowy ultranationalist movement accused of planning to overthrow the Islamist-inspired government.

Ibrahim Usta/Associated Press

Soldiers kept watch as the police searched the home of a retired army commander in Istanbul.

News reports identified the detainees as a former deputy chief of the general staff, Ergin Saygun; a former air force commander, Ibrahim Firtina; and a former naval commander, Ozden Ornek. They were detained at their homes in Istanbul and the capital, Ankara.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said more than 40 people in all were taken into custody during the operations on Monday, including 14 other former high-ranking military officers.

The case, which has riveted Turks, revolves around a suspected conspiracy by secular ultranationalists who are accused of developing several plots to attack civilian targets, like a mosque in central Istanbul, and to provoke a crisis with neighboring Greece, with a goal of paving the way for a coup.

More than 200 people have been arrested so far in the case, including military officers, intellectuals, academics and writers who are outspoken critics of the government, and some have been held for months without charge. A first trial opened two years ago. The case is widely referred to as Ergenekon (pronounced ahr-GEN-eh-kahn) after the mythic Turkish valley that lent its name to the suspected conspirators.

Mr. Erdogan would not elaborate on the Monday operation. Speaking at a news conference in Madrid, where he was on an official visit, he said, “We are going to learn about it once the judiciary makes an evaluation after the delivery of the security forces.”

Details of the suspected plot first emerged in 2007, when a left-wing publication printed what it said was a 2004 diary kept by Mr. Ornek, the former naval commander detained Monday. He denied the authenticity of the documents, and the publication is now closed.

Since the establishment of the modern Turkish state in 1923, the military has cast itself as the guardian of the country’s stability and secularism. It has usurped civilian governments at least four times in the past 50 years.

The arrest of high-ranking officers is widely seen here as part of the continuing struggle between the country’s relatively new religiously conservative political leadership and staunchly secular institutions in Turkey.

Turkish society divides largely along those lines, as has reaction to the conspiracy case, with secularists seeing it as a crackdown that threatens Turkey’s secular future and the conservative Islamic side regarding the case as necessary to protect their own democratically-won power.

One political analyst who has been strongly supportive of the investigation, Oral Calislar of the newspaper Radikal, said that whatever failings there might be in the trial process, they are products of the military’s distorting influence.

“Forces supporting military coups are still very powerful and resisting change,” Mr. Calislar said. “If there is a political will to prosecute military coup perpetrators, it is a fantastic will to be supported, regardless of the criticism of the methods.”

The Constitution, adopted after one of the military’s coups in 1980, assigns the army to intervene in politics to defend of the republic, a vaguely defined responsibility that has until now been read as granting the military unconditional immunity. But the Turkish military has been criticized by the European Union for its influence in civilian politics, as the country aspires to join the pact.