Will Turkey’s Military Finally Get Its Act Together?

Adem Altan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Demonstrators outside the Turkish Parliament in Ankara on Sept. 22, after a court ruled that hundreds of senior military officers were guilty in a coup plot they called Sledgehammer.

ISTANBUL — A Turkish court’s conviction on Friday of 325 senior military officers for plotting to overthrow the state has left me with mixed feelings. Like many Turks, I’ve been pondering a host of questions: Was this justice or revenge? Is this the final curtain on a military that for decades believed it knew better than the elected politicians? Or was the 21-month courtroom drama the latest show trial, manipulated by a government that itself entertains delusions of grandeur?

My mixed feelings are compounded by my working relationship with the newspaper that broke the case open and also by an acquaintance with one of the key defendants — a former army commander who received the maximum sentence of 20 years.

There is no ambivalence about the seriousness of the charges. The prosecutor accused the senior military commanders of plotting a coup d’etat. Following the election in 2002 of what the military saw as a pro-Islamic government, these leaders planned violent provocations — including an armed confrontation with Greece and the bombing during Friday prayers of a famous Istanbul mosque — that would end in the coup. The military’s code word for the operation was Sledgehammer.

The defense pooh-poohed the notion that there was a serious coup attempt and questioned the motives of the court for refusing to hear expert testimony that much of the evidence consisted of badly executed electronic forgeries.

My own conclusion, reached purely on gut reaction and not from careful perusal of a warehouse-load of documents, is that many of the suspects, though probably not all, were guilty of something. A military that has historically taken a prominent role in politics, has staged repeated coups and, as recently as 2007, has warned Parliament about whom they should and should not elect as president, could always strike again.

Yet, the prosecution was ham-fisted and the judges refused to allow proper cross examination. The case will now wind its way to higher courts and possibly to the European Court of Human Rights.

I have friends who argue that you can’t blame the courts for indulging in a bit of rough justice against such a powerful foe. But this argument — that you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs — is precisely the argument used by other friends that say Turkey is not ready for full democracy.

I felt the full brunt of Turkey’s particular form of justice some 15 years ago when I was put on trial for “causing the military to be held in contempt,” which then carried a maximum sentence of six years.

I had written that the Turkish Army had learned from its mistakes during its campaign against Kurdish rebels and was at least trying not to behave like an army of occupation. This was seen as far-too-faint praise by a public prosecutor. I was put on trial, but in the end, the case was dropped under a general amnesty for “offenses committed with the printed word.”

It has crossed my mind that had the military been more accepting of criticism back then, it would not be in the mess it’s in now. It faces a constant barrage of criticism for incompetence — over the deaths of 34 civilians in an anti-terrorism operation gone wrong last December along the Iraqi border, to the dozens of deaths earlier this month in Bingol when Kurdish militants attacked a poorly guarded convoy. There have been no public explanations and no promises of inquiries.

Sledgehammer is just the first of a series of trials against senior officers. Even before the verdict, the government had almost certainly succeeded in clipping the military’s desire to get involved again in politics. The question now is whether the armed forces, badly demoralized, are still fit for purpose. The military needs to be made truly accountable and undergo a process of reform.

Andrew Finkel has been a foreign correspondent in Istanbul for over 20 years, as well as a columnist for Turkish-language newspapers. He is the author of the book “Turkey: What Everyone Needs to Know.”

via Will Turkey’s Military Finally Get Its Act Together? – NYTimes.com.