The English-language website of Zaman newspaper—which strongly supports Turkey's AKP government—published an article today called "Newly launched booklet fights Ergenekon misconceptions" (the Turkish-language version of this article is called "They explain Ergenekon to the world in English"). According to the article, an organization calling itself the "Human Rights Agenda Organization" (İnsan Hakları Gündemi Derneği) has produced a booklet explaining the case to readers of English.

Awesome!

Explain Ergenekon to the world in English! Zaman's English-language website, of course, has been doing precisely that ever since the Ergenekon case began back in 2007. In the article published today, the Ergenekon trial is offhandedly described by Zaman as "a clandestine criminal organization accused of working to overthrow the government."

Of course, before the "Ergenekon gang" (as the targets of this investigation are known according to the government's narrative) became famous for "working to overthrow the government," the Ergenekon investigation was originally about something else entirely: rooting out a secret (and perhaps CIA-supported) network of death squads working with the Turkish state and charged with killing off PKK supporters at any price. This is what people in Turkey refer to as the actions of the "deep state" (derin devlet).

It was in order to investigate these crimes that the Ergenekon investigation first developed, after police raided a house in Istanbul in June of 2007 and announced that they had uncovered what appeared to be a criminal gang that, they charged, was responsible for carrying out various assassinations in Turkey. Immediately, people recalled the Susurluk scandal of the mid-1990s (my posts dealing with Susurluk can be found here), in which it was uncovered that a member of parliament, Sedat Bucak, had been riding in a car alongside a known assassin who was on Interpol's most wanted list. Inside the car were found a number of interesting items, including: weapons, silencers, thousands of dollars in cash, and a set of passports issued, in a variety of aliases to the assassin, whose real name was Abdullah Catli (and who died in the crash, along with the director of the Istanbul police force). All of the passports had been personally signed by Mehmet Agar, the Minister of Internal Affairs.

Portraits from Susurluk. In the bottom right-hand corner there's a photo of Abdullah Catli, who was a murder and drug smuggler wanted by Interpol at the time, dancing at a wedding alongside Ibrahim Sahin, leader of a special operations unit in the police forces. Now that Sahin is ill and apparently dying, he is the one figure from Susurluk who is actually being investigated in the Ergenekon investigation.

Orhan Kemal Cengiz, who Zaman quotes at the end of their English-language article, drags out the tired cliche that the Ergenekon investigation is something akin to Italy's "clean hands" investigation into the mafia in the 1990s, but this is patently untrue. If Ergenekon were really about rooting out state support for assassinations, why have Sedat Bucak and Mehmet Agar never been questioned in relation to this investigation?

Instead, who's being investigated? University rectors who were against allowing women to wear headscarves at universities. Turkan Saylan, leader of an NGO group dealing with women's issues who was critical of the AKP government. Journalists like Mustafa Balbay, who has now been in prison for over a year. In the post that I put up just yesterday there are three more cases of journalists being detained and facing long prison sentences for just writing about Ergenekon.

All of this is being cheered on by newspapers like Zaman and Taraf, and for quite some time this was all being reported uncritically by the bloggers and journalists who write on Turkey. Turkish journalists who had been risking their freedom, and maybe their lives, by writing about this investigation were being completely ignored by their international colleagues, most of whom have absolutely nothing important to lose in this game.

Anyway, that's no longer the case. Now, people covering Turkey internationally are a lot more suspicious of Ergenekon, even if they don't always seem to know why.

But this raises another problem. Before it was hijacked and transformed into a means for attacking the AKP's enemies, the Ergenekon investigation was looking into serious crimes committed (mostly) against Kurds living in the southeast. What appears to have happened was that the government gave certain people (in the military and outside it) carte blanche to take care of troublemakers, with the predictable result being that many of these folks turned into freelancers, using their carte blanche status to shake down loads of people with no suspected ties to the PKK at all. It's a story that's all too familiar, one that I'm sure is being re-told in Iraq and Afghanistan right now, but one that deserves to be investigated. This is what happens when you privatize counter-insurgency.

Investigating state crimes against civilians, however, began to take a back seat back in early 2008. That was when state prosecutors (who are independent of the government) announced that they were filing suit against the AKP on the grounds that its policies towards religion were unconstitutional. From that point forward, Ergenekon became all about plots against the AKP, and nothing else.

As I wrote about in an earlier post, the crimes that the Ergenekon investigation was originally supposed to investigate have thus been lost in the shuffle. Ergenekon is now solely understood to be a study into anti-AKP coup plots, a sprawling network including thousands of people, all of whom have criticized the AKP government at some point in time. The original impetus for the investigation—crimes committed against the state's own citizens—has been totally forgotten.

Finally, I hate the fact that everyone has to be either "pro" or "anti" Ergenekon. Is it really so hard to believe that some people in the military really have been plotting against the AKP government, or that they would at least study the feasibility of taking the government out? I don't think so. But let's call it what it is: a battle royale between the AKP government and the permanent state in Turkey (the military, bureaucracy, prosecutors and the like), with a large number of the AKP's other "enemies" from civil society, the media, and higher educations thrown in for good measure.

The deep state, meanwhile, is stronger than ever—and if you don't believe that, just ask one of the 70,000 people whose telephones were tapped (and that's the Justice Ministry's figure!) between 2006 and 2009.