The recent detentions suggest that Turkey's Justice and Development Party is ready to use muscle for political ends, writes Gareth Jenkins Turkey's deepening political crisis took a dramatic turn last week when police seized 24 hardline opponents of the ruling Justice and Development Party (JDP) on suspicion of links to a shadowy ultranationalist organisation known as Ergenekon alleged to have planned to destabilise the government in a campaign of bombings and assassinations. Those detained included a former commander of the Turkish Gendarmerie, retired General Sener Eruygur, and a former commander of the Turkish First Army, retired General Hursit Tolon, together with a clutch of businessmen and prominent secularist journalists. The detentions sent conspiracy theorists in both the pro-JDP and the opposition media into overdrive. The JDP's opponents claimed that Ergenekon was a myth dreamed up by the JDP to boost its legitimacy during the final stages of the case brought before the country's Constitutional Court in March this year, which called for the party's closure on the grounds that it was seeking to erode the principle of secularism enshrined in the Turkish government. Last Thursday, the JDP presented its final defence to the court. On Friday, Osman Paksut, deputy head of the Constitutional Court, issued a statement saying that the court could reach a decision "within 4-5 weeks". Given that most of the court's 11 members are known to be die-hard secularists, most analysts expect it to decide to close down the JDP, probably in August or September this year. For the pro-JDP media, Ergenekon is not only real but also part of a wider conspiracy -- led by elements in the military -- to force the JDP from office. In the days following police raids on the JDP's opponents, pro-JDP newspapers published a flurry of claims, almost all based on "anonymous sources", purporting to link the closure case, Ergenekon and extracts from what is alleged to be a diary written by former Navy commander Admiral Ozden Ornek and which appear to suggest that in 2003 and 2004 he and several other members of the Turkish high command were looking for ways to force the JDP from office following its victory in the November 2002 general election. The alleged diaries were first published in March 2007 in the Nokta news magazine, which was promptly raided by the gendarmerie and eventually forced to close. Ozden has consistently denied writing the diaries, although a Turkish court ruled last year that forensic evidence proved that they had originated on Ozden's computer. It is still unclear how they found their way into the public domain, although the suspicion is that members of a pro-JDP Islamist organisation stole them. It is also unclear whether, even if they originated from a record kept by Ozden on his own computer, the documents have subsequently been doctored with changes and additions. What is undoubted is that the documents leaked into the public domain are not the full text of the diaries and that even these make absolutely no mention either of Ergenekon or any other violent clandestine organisation. Similarly, despite denials by some of JDP opponents, there is no question that an organisation called Ergenekon was established by former covert operatives in the Turkish security forces. But it appears to have been a small and rather shoddy organisation, which was probably unravelled before it managed to plan any major act of violence. It was first discovered in June 2007. By January 2008, the founders and leaders of Ergenekon were behind bars and the organisation had effectively ceased to exist. But this has not prevented the pro-JDP media from claiming that, under Eruygur and Tolon's leadership, it was preparing for a coup on 7 July as part of an ongoing process first revealed in Ozden's diaries. By last Saturday, all but 10 of the 24 seized in the raids had been released, including anti-JDP journalists. One of them, Mustafa Balbay, the respected Ankara representative of the hard-line secularist Cumhuriyet newspaper, later gave an interview to a local television channel in which he said that after almost four days in custody he still was not sure why he had been detained. He claimed that the "evidence" his interrogators produced to "prove" his links to Ergenekon consisted solely of interviews he had conducted with hard-line secularists and his attendance as a reporter at various conferences and meetings. Perhaps most ludicrously, he was also interrogated about the supposed real purpose of a lunch he had attended which had been hosted by the US ambassador to Turkey, and in which several other journalists, including one from a pro-JDP newspaper, had also participated. The JDP has long complained that the case before the Constitutional Court for the party's closure is motivated by ideological rather than legal considerations and is the result of hardline secularists in the judiciary abusing their powers for political ends. But Balbay's statements following his release have reinforced the impression that the JDP has now begun to use its control of the Interior Ministry, which oversees the police force, and the shabby -- if potentially murderous -- reality of the Ergenekon gang to demonstrate its ability to use its own muscle to intimidate its opponents and critics.
