This year, I had quarrels with many friends; some lifelong friends from childhood. You might say, so what? Everyone, have fights with friends every now and then, but you make up after a certain period of time.
In my case, the discussions were so intense that we either avoid talking politics anymore or deleted their numbers from cell phones and erased them as “friends” on social networking platforms like Facebook.
The main subject that destroyed long-standing friendships was not personal at all. The advent of the religiously-rooted Justice and Development Party, or AKP, had already led to ruptures in society. However, the investigations that started with the Ergenekon case have intensified the polarization.
As a member of the so-called apolitical generation raised after the military coup of 1980, I hardly discussed the political state of Turkey with people I have shared my life with, and when we did, it was all shallow.
“Politics” was a dirty word anyway; it reminded many of the days before the coup when people killed each other on the streets for belonging to the rival “leftist” or “rightist” camp. Politics was boring and we were warned by our elders not to get involved.
Things started changing when the cadre of the incumbent AKP broke away from the pro-Islamist Welfare party, or RP, which was closed by the Constitutional Court in 1997, and founded their own party in 2001. AKP members entered the political scene with the motto that they had changed their Islamist ways and were now just part of a conservative political platform.
This has met with great doubt from secularist circles. Society was divided among those who believed the AKP had changed and was doing the reforms the country needed and those who believed the AKP had a secret agenda to erode the secular structure of the state.
AKP skeptics argued that the party would chase away secularists from the fundamental institutions of the state and replace them with their own supporters. The election of Abdullah Gül, one of AKP’s prominent leaders to the presidency, fueled the debate. One of the pillars of the Republic was lost to the AKP, secularists believed.
The Ergenekon investigations that began in June 2007 were seen as part of the party’s policy of weakening the secularists. In these investigations, retired top generals were called for testimony for the first time in republican history, representing a new milestone in Turkish political history.
For some, this was a good step to get the military under civilian control, a basic requisite for democratization. For others, however, it was an unfair and intentional blow to the military, which is the guardian of the secular state.
The debates in society got so intense that friends, relatives, siblings, spouses and colleagues realized – and usually ended up terrorized by – how little they knew of their loved ones’ political stances.
How did it all begin?
The Ergenekon case started after the discovery of 27 hand grenades on June 12, 2007, in a shanty house belonging to a retired noncommissioned officer in Istanbul 's Ümraniye district. The grenades were found to be the same ones used in attacks on the daily Cumhuriyet’s Istanbul offices in 2006.
The finding led to scores of arrests, putting more than 100 journalists, writers, gang leaders, scholars, businessmen and politicians into detention in what became a terror investigation to stop the alleged ultranationalist, shadowy gang known as Ergenekon. In the later stages of the investigation, those under custody were accused of planning to topple the government by staging a coup in 2009 by initially spreading chaos and mayhem.
Earlier bombings of daily Cumhuriyet, the murder of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, the murder of the Council of State’s top judge and alleged plans for the assassination of high-profile figures in Turkish politics are sometimes associated with the case.
The supporters, the opponents and those in-between
The main opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, condemned it from the beginning as “a campaign to silence the opposition,” while the Nationalist Movement Party, or MHP, has tried to remain as silent as possible.
The recently disbanded Democratic Society Party, or DTP, backed the Ergenekon process for a period of time because they wanted to tie unsolved murders in eastern Turkey during the 1980s and 1990s to the case, yet the killings have rarely been mentioned in recent months.
In the media, columnists from dailies known to be supporters of the AKP, namely Taraf, Zaman, Yeni Şafak, Star, Sabah and Bugün argued that the case was very serious and was useful in terms of breaking taboos in Turkey, thereby leading to further democratization.
Opponents of the case have circled wagons around newspapers Cumhuriyet, Hürriyet, Vatan, Sözcü and Akşam, arguing that the allegations are baseless and devoid of serious proof.
However, as the case progressed in 2009, both camps have lost strength while the gray area grew in numbers. Some of the people who initially supported the judicial process openly began having second thoughts after the obvious legal irregularities that occurred during the investigations.
Others who were skeptical in the beginning started to take the matter more seriously as more and more illegal acts from certain officials were revealed.
Today, it is fair to say that the majority is now in the gray area. That, however, has not reduced the polarization.
How come, one may ask? Logically, as the number of skeptics increased on each side, this would have led to healthier debates. But this is not the case.
First, the case has become so complicated that it is extremely difficult to keep up with its developments anymore; second, people have stopped bothering to listen.
Criticize one single action of the military and you immediately become pro-AKP; conversely, say one word in favor of a single detainee and you are a coup supporter.
After that, anything else you say is likely to fall on deaf ears – even with people with whom you agreed on other issues. I know this from dozens of examples I experienced in 2009.
And so it continues
It would be fair to say the case will not conclude next year. The common question shared by both camps, "Where is Turkey headed to," will not suddenly provide a climactic answer.
Many other events are also developing at a fantastic speed in Turkey, and these may draw the map for the future. Not everything is related to Ergenekon, yet is clear that the case will continue to be an important part of Turkey’s agenda – whether the debates on the case is settled or not.
