Turkish soldiers arrive to the court building in Silivri on September 21, 2012 (Reuters)[/caption]When a Turkish court last Friday convicted over 300 military officers of plotting to overthrow the government, Turkey divided like a football stadium on derby day.
For some the verdict on what Turks know as the Sledgehammer conspiracy was a massive step for Turkish democracy and a death-blow to the Turkish military's long habit of treating elected governments like untrustworthy baby-sitters. For others, it was the end of a grotesque show trial.
Immanuel Kant probably got closer to the real truth than either side. Two hundred-odd years ago, in a rather Eeyore-ish moment, he observed that 'out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was made.' Change 'humanity' to 'Turkey's institutions' and you have a good, clear snap-shot of the Sledgehammer trial.
Nobody in Turkey - nobody at least whose judgement is not blinded by tribal loyalties - denies that something fishy was going on in the Turkish military in 2003, the year that the Sledgehammer plot is alleged to have been hatched.
[inset_left]'The 1st Army Chief is ready to act, ready to lead a coup', the National Intelligence Chief told Mustafa Balbay in 2003[/inset_left]
It's not just the fact that, as the stager of four coups since 1960, toppling governments with impunity is what the Turkish army does. It is not even the fact that November 2002 saw the electoral victory of a party whose leader is the former right-hand man of an Islamist Prime Minister who was shunted from power by the military just five years earlier.
No: public awareness of military misbehaviour around 2003 is the result of evidence that has been building up since long before the Sledgehammer investigation began in 2010.
Evidence began accumulating in 2006, when an investigative magazine published extracts of a diary allegedly written by a Naval chief who was one of six top-ranking officers to be convicted this week.
The admiral writes about the conversations he had with other top-ranking officers about plans to undermine the government in such detail that his colleagues' personalities leap off the page. The air force chief is impatient but not much of a thinker. The head of military police is a real hard-liner. The admiral himself shilly-shallies. Then there are the Chief of Staff and the head of the all-important land forces, both of them opposed to the conspiracy, and despised by the conspirators as a result.
The flow of evidence speeded up after criminal investigations into coup plots began in 2007. Police found caches of guns and grenades. The Chief of Staff, it emerged, had been bringing food from home throughout 2003, for health reasons, he claimed, others say he feared being poisoned.
The diary of a journalist held in custody for three years on suspicion of involvement in another plot refers repeatedly to the general convicted this month of leading Sledgehammer.
'The 1st Army Chief is ready to act, ready to lead a coup', the National Intelligence Chief told Mustafa Balbay in 2003. Among political journalists in Ankara in those days, the joke was that General Cetin Dogan (Dogan Pasha, as Turks knew him) had attached sights to the gun he carried around with him.
Yet, despite the wealth of general evidence that something was up, the investigation into Sledgehammer has been dogged from the start by questions about procedure and evidence.
One part of the 900-odd Sledgehammer indictment does seem beyond doubt. Cetin Dogan has never denied the truth of transcripts made of a two-day seminar held in 1st Army headquarters in Istanbul in 2003 in which he appears to be trying to gauge the level of support for action against the government among his own officers. We also know that he went against orders from his Land Army superior to remove war games based on 'dealing with internal enemies' from the agenda.
The same is not true, however, of a crucial Word file which details how Sledgehammer was supposed to have been carried out, a Turkish jet downed over the Aegean in a false-flag operation, belligerent naval moves against Greece, bomb attacks on two of Istanbul's biggest mosques, all of them aimed to destabilise the government and soften the public up for military intervention.
Allegedly written in 2003, the document contains references to organisations that did not exist then. It also contains fonts that Microsoft did not bring onto the market until several years later.
'The 'incriminating documents' the court relied on to issue Thursday's verdict were forged and have been used to frame the defendants', Harvard economist Dani Rodrik, son-in-law of Cetin Dogan, wrote in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 21 September.
[inset_right]Despite repeated requests from lawyers, the judge preferred not to call on military contemporaries of the convicted officers.[/inset_right]
He added that, 'American, German and Turkish forensic analysts hired by the defense have independently confirmed the forgery.'
Perhaps more serious even that that, though, are the procedural flaws in the trial. Despite repeated requests from lawyers, the judge preferred not to call on military contemporaries of the convicted officers. More surprisingly, he elected to leapfrog the whole process of cross-questioning of witnesses which is written into criminal procedure and to proceed instead straight to the final depositions.
It meant that the trial finished very quickly, by Turkish standards at least, but that the evidence for and against the men was not subjected to a proper judicial investigation.
Then there is the issue of the justice of the prison sentences. The only evidence against many of the officers is that they were present at the 2003 seminar chaired by Cetin Dogan, a seminar which, as inferior officers, they couldn't very well refuse to attend.
A few convicted men had provided the court with proof that they were on posting outside Turkey at the time the conspiracy is alleged to have taken place. It didn't stop the court handing them out prison sentences of between 6 and 18 years.
Slightly melodramatically, columnist Ismet Berkan compares the trial to the novel Sophie's Choice, where a Polish woman is forced to choose between the life of her two children. The choice between two evils, rather than a good and an evil, he says, is typical of 'Turkey's tragedy.'
'You want to choose democracy against coups, but what they offer you instead of coups is deficient, defective, false, intolerant justice. And ultimately, it is that... unjust justice that you are forced to choose...'.
