Anixneuseis

YAVUZ BAYDAR

Those who read the latest shocking story in daily Taraf yesterday would possibly not have been able to help smiling ironically.

While the attempts to inject further confusion amongst ill-informed, distracted and already confused “Westerners” — particularly those in Washington, D.C. — about the Ergenekon trial seemingly intensify, Taraf revealed why dozens of naval officers a short while ago were arrested and interrogated: A large cell within the navy — Taraf describes it as a “junta” — has been planning a comprehensive action plan with Turkey’s non-Muslims as the target.

The plan (decoded from the contents of a CD belonging to a mayor who is a detained suspect of Ergenekon) called “kafes” (cage) contains, in four phases, a large set of directives, including the filing of non-Muslims’ whereabouts — work places and where their children study, community registers, etc., — and identities; the systematic exposure of them in public places and on the Internet; the massive usage of media with the aim of discrediting the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) as “indifferent” to those secret threats and accusing the government of being the culprit of all these campaigns. In the final phase, called “action,” it gives details of bombings on the Princes’ Islands near İstanbul (where the non-Muslim density is higher) and kidnappings and assassinations on which the responsibility will later be claimed by fundamentalist organizations.

As of the Malatya slayings of Christian missionaries (a key case which contains all the elements of how the Ergenekon network operates), Priest Santoro’s murder in Trabzon and Hrant Dink’s assassination, this plan (which also contains allegations of assassination plans to murder a former commander of the navy, and a commander of the fleet) has aimed to kill two birds with one stone: it would scare the hell out of the non-Muslim minorities by telling them, simply, “you have no place in this country” and, more importantly, it would send the “strong” message to the world that “Islamo-fascism is now on the full offensive” in Turkey.

The shocking details in this deep investigation may be yet another slap in the face for those who desperately try to make us believe that Ergenekon is closer to fiction than reality.

For people like Ahmet Aras, it is an insult. An elderly Kurdish socialist, a staunch anti-Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) figure, who served as a founding member of Turkey’s Workers’ Party (TİP) in the sixties and suffered massive oppression, Aras welcomes all the revelations with pleasure.

I had invited him onto the TV program “ROTA” that I present to talk about the Dersim uprising/massacre (during which some 15,000 Alevi Kurds were indiscriminately slaughtered in 1937). Almost in tears, he told me: “I had never imagined that I would live to see these days, where a prime minister speaks of crimes of humanity and incredible cruelty.” After years of prison and exile, Aras lives in İzmir, researching Kurdish history.

“I am also very, very glad to see now who was serving Ergenekon and who was not,” he said, referring to his “leftist” comrades. “Some were not leftists or socialists at all, they were only disguised Kemalists; they were part of the big lies that were repeated, year after year.”

It is clear why people like Aras, who had once believed that the struggle of the left could be conducted though free elections and paid dearly (his party, elected to Parliament in the mid ’60s, was forced out of the political scene by constant physical harassment), feel truly insulted when one mentions the efforts to discredit the “real content” of Ergenekon. They feel closer to justice, more than ever before.

Meanwhile, as I predicted, Deniz Baykal, leader of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), taking Onur Öymen under his protective wing, without blinking an eye, continues as if the latter’s Dersim gaffe has no significance. The “pale hope” of the party, deputy Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu of the same party, who also happens to have his origins in Dersim, also switched his rhetoric, saying “the case is closed.”

I asked a knowledgeable retired military judge what the “deep state” (the state within) in Turkey actually is: “It is the chief of general staff and the higher judiciary” was his brief and swift response. He went on: “The executive power, the governments, have never had control over the higher judiciary and never will. Everyone should keep this in mind. The issue is, therefore, to separate forever the higher judiciary from the generals and move it to its independent and impartial position, as is necessary for any democracy.”

Today, Turkey may look as if it is sinking deeper into a crisis. It could very well be to the contrary, at the end of the day. What will happen is this: All the dirty linen is put on the table for cleaning, taboos are broken (the latest approaching firmly to that of Atatürk himself), a nasty struggle is staged in order to separate and “liberate” the judiciary from “the state within” mentality and the “politicized” military is pushed back to its barracks, possibly out of the cities.