Sex and the (Ergenekon) party

İhsan Yılmaz

It appears that some in and around the Republican People’s Party (CHP) habitually make use of sex cassettes to get rid of their opponents. In its golden age, our deep state and its civilian collaborators would prefer assassinations, playing safe. As it turns out, intrigues by sex videos do not always bring the intended results, and you may not be able to terminate a political opponent with them. But in the good old days, many thousands that the deep state did not like simply disappeared, and culprits -- who never tried to hide themselves -- were never caught.

Whatever you can say about Justice and Development Party (AK Party) rule in the country, you cannot say that they are having their opponents assassinated. Can anyone say with a clear conscience the same about our deep state? If the AK Party is politically manipulating the judicial system to have its innocent opponents tried in court, the party’s opponents should convince the public. It is obvious they have huge support not only in the Turkish media but in the Western media as well. But it is equally obvious that it is not the tremendous media support that the pro-Ergenekonians lack but convincing and credible arguments. They have never questioned the coups, assassinations, tortures and forced assimilation of minorities by the Kemalist establishment and the undemocratic practices of the state, but now suddenly have become worried that Turkey could become like Putin’s Russia. They lack and will always lack credibility.

They keep giving the benefit of the doubt to suspects who are on record as saying, “This time we will be harsh on people,” and so on. But their leniency never extends to their imagined culprit: the police that investigate the Ergenekon suspects. So far, not even a single policeman has been caught red-handed conspiring against the Ergenekon suspects, but the defenders of the Ergenekon suspects keep stating as if it is given fact that the police under the control of the Gülen movement are conspiring against the Ergenekon suspects.

But how has this been possible? If the evidence in the Ergenekon case -- with its indictments that are thousands of pages in length and containing several million pages of evidence, countless weapons with fingerprints, legally recorded telephone conversations, handwritten documents that have been proven to belong to the suspects -- were all manufactured by the police, how come not even a single policeman was caught? And how come the many prosecutors and judges dealing with the several Ergenekon cases have not noticed any wrongdoing? What were the National Intelligence Organization (MİT), gendarmerie intelligence and several military intelligence services doing? The usual scare-mongering tactic is always, “They are everywhere.” Proof? Of course there is no need for proof, for they are sure that if they repeat this accusation countless times, it will become fact. And it has become fact. It is not only staunch enemies of the AK Party like Soner Cağaptay or suspect generals’ relatives such as Dani Rodrik but also pro-democracy writers in Turkey either directly writing or implying that some police who are associated with the Gülen movement are behind the wrongdoing. Democrats claim that even though the Ergenekon case is right, these police unjustly put some innocent journalists into the same Ergenekon basket just because they wrote books against the movement. It is ironic that they are talking about a legal case and insisting prosecutors should pay due diligence and utmost care to the case so innocent people will not be harmed, but they feel free to accuse the police without even a trace of evidence.

Every day you see a famous columnist on TV haranguing that Hanefi Avci wrote a book against the movement and was instantly put in jail. But they never mention that a court order for wiretapping Hanefi Avci was issued months before the release of the book because of his suspicious activities. And, he is on record as teaching another suspect how to evade police investigation. What is more, as Avci stated, nobody knew that he was writing a book against the movement when this court order was given. But forgetting all these vital facts and focusing on the surface seems easier and obviously beneficial for Ergenekon supporters and some democrat writers who seem to be under a great deal of peer pressure. Thanks to their media warfare, if you ask any of their readers who do not look at other media organs, they will tell you that Hanefi Avci wrote a book against the movement and that he was instantly put in jail. It seems that repeating the same line countless times is enough to reach a verdict.

I wonder why the Ergenekon prosecutors do not do the same and instead of trying to sort out the evidence, repeat in their indictments countless times the same sentence: The suspects are guilty. Of course it would not work. Because in our country, it is still a sad fact that everybody is equal, but some are more equal than others. Even white Turks’ lies are more equal than others’ facts.

Published on Today's Zaman, 12 March 2011, Saturday