Coup Plot Intensifies Ankara's Power Struggle
Generals arrested as coup conspirators, a court on the verge of banning the ruling party: The power struggle in Turkey between Prime Minister Erdogan's Islamic-rooted AKP and the secular, old-guard Kemalists is intensifying -- at the cost of political stablity Ali Ercan’s world swarms with enemies. The gray-haired professor of nuclear physics and deputy chairman of the Kemalist Thought Association (ADD) has to worry about reactionary Islamists, separatist Kurds, suspicious Armenians and Greeks, capitalist Americans and of course the European Union, with its constant pressures to reform. A bodyguard stands in front of Ercan’s small office on Gazi Mustafa Kemal Boulevard, round the clock.
Inside, a brass plaque greets visitors: “Turkey will never belong to Europe! She will never give up her sacred sovereignty!” Ercan, 55, came up with the slogan himself. Now he wants the words etched on his gravestone, he says. The Europeans come in for particular blame in this “dark and dangerous time which our country is living through.” Who else have encouraged Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Islamicize Turkey through “reactionary religious forces,” he says. Who else have pushed Erdogan to sell off Turkey economically and erode its national sovereignty? Many Turks think the same way. It was Ercan’s association that drummed up massive demonstrations last year against Erdogan’s conservative Islamic-rooted government. Hundreds of thousands gathered in front of the Atatürk Mausoleum in Ankara to demonstrate against the election of Abdullah Gül, a onetime fundamentalist, as president and to rail against the foreign “neo-colonial powers” that backed him. The ADD is a sort of think tank for Turkey’s patriotic conservatives -- and a refuge, above all, for retired military leaders.
Ercan’s club has gained some notoriety in recent weeks after police arrested 21 members of the secret, ultra-nationalist group Ergenekon, who are alleged to have been planning a bloody coup against the government. The chairman of the ADD, retired General Sener Eruygur, was one of those arrested in connection with the plot.
The arrest of a onetime general like Eruygur by ordinary police officers is astounding. Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of modern Turkey. Governments have never before challenged the military -- an institution which, since the foundation of the republic by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, has seen itself as the iron guardian of the state.
A 'Tsunami' Breaks Over the Nation
The arrest of the retired general is being regarded as a watershed moment in the power struggle between Erdogan’s government and the Kemalists. This struggle will continue in the courts, since the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which Erdogan and Gül lead, is in the throes of a bitter legal battle. The democratically-elected ruling party may be banned altogether. Even by Turkish standards, that is pretty spectacular.
However, as the arrests demonstrate, Erdogan is fighting back http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,564631,00.html
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