Twists and turns as coup plotters go on trial

Oct 20, 2008, 17:02 GMT

Ankara - The trial of 86 people on charges of attempting to overthrow the government got under way in Istanbul on Monday.

A simple police raid in June last year on a shanty house in Istanbul in which a case of grenades were found has since lead investigators to launching what the Turkish press has dubbed 'the trial of the century'.

It was a relatively minor incident that began the investigation which has since linked ultra-nationalists, staunch secularists and former military generals to a plot to overthrow the government, to carry out assassinations and create the conditions necessary that would allow the military to carry out a coup d'etat.

On June 12, 2007, police raided a shanty house in the Istanbul suburb owned by a former non-commissioned officer. In the house police found 27 hand grenades. It was later found that the grenades were from the same batch as those used in an attack on the Istanbul offices of Cumhuriyet newspaper.

The subsequent investigation widened into something much more than the relatively small-scale attack on Cumhuriyet's offices. In a 2,455-page indictment, prosecutors have alleged that the coup plotters were involved in a variety of attacks, assassinations and had planned to create havoc in 2009.

The Ergenekon indictment, the name refers to a mythical Turkish homeland in central Asia and was the name the alleged coup plotters gave their organization, lists a range of crimes which were seemingly random but which prosecutors believe were carried out by the group over the past two decades, including the murder of journalist Ugur Mumcu in 1993, the shooting of business tycoon Ozdemir Sabanci in 1996 and an attack on the Council of State Court in 2006 that left a senior judge dead.

The indictment also hints that the 2007 murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink may have been carried out by the group.

Those are the alleged past crimes Ergenekon was involved in. The indictment claims the gang was also planning further assassinations, with the targets including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, former Chief of General Staff Yasar Buyukanit and Nobel Prize-winning author Orhan Pamuk.

Those facing the court on Monday included a retired general, the leader of the Workers' Party, the editor of Cumhuriyet newspaper and the former rector of Istanbul University.

The charges against the 86 on trial are not directly related to the murders listed above but instead are of a more general nature, inciting people to armed rebellion against the government, inciting hatred and hostility, acquiring secret documents on national security to name three.

The trial itself is expected to hear from a number of witnesses, including senior police officers, businessmen and mafia dons. Three of the witnesses are to give their testimony in secret.

All of Turkey is waiting to hear the allegations these witnesses will make. Whether they will indeed shed light on the links between ultra secularists who have an abiding hatred of the moderate Islamic government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, or as the defendants claim, whether the trial itself is a sham set up by the government to distract Turkey as it moves to undermine the secular state. A raid on a shanty house to 'the trial of the century.'