Where There's No Smoke, There's Fire

This past Sunday was a fairly historic day for Turkey. Despite centuries of being known as a land of smokers, Turkey is now officially smoke free, after a new law banning smoking inside restaurants, cafes and other public places went into effect. (Bianet has a good rundown of the new law's extent.) But how to view the new ban? A question of public health? An issue that touches on individual freedom? If only. With the political polarization in Turkey continuing to grow, the new smoking ban is clearly about something much more sinister, at least according to some of Turkey's newspaper columnists.

In the Hurriyet Daily News, Yusuf Kanli says the new smoking ban (a "pogrom," as he calls it) is yet another indication of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's attempt to fashion himself as a "neo-Sultan" and of his government's desire to create smoke- and drink-free "red zones" in Turkey's cities. From Kanli's piece:

Apparently, the “cloudless air space” pogrom of smokers was a “personal issue” for Prime Minister Erdoğan. After all it is an issue very much related to communal health. Yet, was it really a must to have such a strict and wholesome smoking ban? Could not Turkey follow the examples of Spain, Greece or Germany where smokers were given some rights, though very much restricted? But, the Sultan Recep the First wanted it so. Now, some allegiant media outlets are exploding in anger because the across the board smoking ban was likened in some Western media outlets as the success of Murat the Fourth, the Ottoman sultan who had banned alcohol, coffee and smoking as part of an effort to prevent people coming together and criticizing the edicts of his highness. Without thinking for one second why those Western media outlets were drawing such a comparison between Erdoğan and Murat the Fourth, the allegiant media has started complaining again of “Western hypocrisy....”

....What is indeed the intention of the government of Sultan Recep the First? Is it....aimed at confining Turks to their homes? Are we leaving through a process of advancing red zones in the cities? Or, is it as Le Monde or some other Western media outlets implied in their reports, an effort by the neo-sultan in the footprints of Murat the Fourth aimed at avoiding Turks coming together and criticizing his all benevolent and all capable government?

You can read the full column here.

Meanwhile, over at Today's Zaman, the HDN's pro-government rival, columnist Mumtazer Turkone sees through the smoke to find, I kid you not, the connection between those who defend the right to light up and the Ergenekon coup plot case. Writes Turkone:

There's no difference between the defense of the freedom to smoke cigarettes and the support of the Ergenekon terrorist organization in the name of the nation-state's interest. Neither of these are freedoms because both of them constitute major attacks upon the most basic right, the right to life. There is no such right as “the right to smoke....”

....There's no difference between saying that the acts committed by Ergenekon were for the good of the state and the people and listing the benefits of cigarettes. Both are harmful, very harmful....

....A society that has long been suffocated by cigarette smoke is finally being freed. It's akin to the freeing of a society unable to exhibit any of its talents under the military tutelage, imprisoned by a machine that's harmful to the intellect. The crises in Turkey's military-civilian relations are the forerunners of a freer and more diverse society -- just as the ban which began yesterday is the start of a healthier and more civilized society....

....This could be a good opportunity to try to see cigarettes in the same light as Ergenekon's weapons, and to get rid of them for good.

You can read the full (and strangely fascinating) column here.

It looks like even this new smoking ban will be another opportunity for Turkey's battling power centers to go at it. There may be less cigarette smoke floating around in Turkey now, but the air is certainly not any clearer.

Ergenekon's Side Effects

As the historic trial and investigation of an alleged coup plot – known as “Ergenekon” – continues to grow in Turkey, the whole process is also have some very interesting side effects in the country. (For some background on the Ergenekon case, take a look at this article I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor.)

The case itself has been, at times, too complicated – and occasionally downright bizarre – to easily explain to audiences outside Turkey. But what I’ve found particularly interesting about the case is how the investigation of the alleged coup plotters – some of them current and former military officials – is helping shed light on some other dark chapters in Turkey’s recent past. This is particularly true in the predominantly-Kurdish southeast, where the Ergenekon case has given new life to the issue of the people who went missing during the 1980’s and 90’s, when Turkish security forces were locked in a bloody battle with the guerillas of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Human rights groups estimate that some 5,000 extrajudicial killings were committed during this period and that some 1,500 went missing, mostly at the hands of state elements.

“The Ergenekon investigation has allowed people to talk about their feelings and ask for their rights, especially if they have missing relatives. It has encouraged people to talk about the past. People feel safer to talk about what happened,” Tahir Elci, a lawyer in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, which was also the scene of extreme violence during the 1980’s and 90’s, told me during a recent visit there. “Kurdish society knows very well the people who are now in jail. We know what they did. Now the rest of Turkish society is going to learn.”

In recent months, excavations of suspected mass graves and at cemeteries holding what had initially been ruled unidentified bodies have been conducted in several locations in the southeast, with the digs yielding bones that are now undergoing DNA testing. At the same time, numerous families have asked Turkish prosecutors to reopen their relatives’ dormant cases in the hope of finally resolving the question of what happened to them.

Outside the town of Cizre, near Turkey’s border with Syria and Iraq, I met Ata Ergul. His brother Hasan went missing on April 23, 1995, when plainclothes policemen picked him up while he was riding his tractor home. This past April, following information given in testimony by a former member of JITEM, a police unit believed to be behind many of the disappearances and unexplained killings in the southeast, the Ergul family started looking at old files of unclaimed bodies found in the region. In one of the files, they found pictures of a body that resembled the missing Hasan. Since then, they were able to convince a local court to have the body, buried in a potter’s field, exhumed and sent for DNA testing, which proved positive. This past June, Ergul’s family was finally able to give their relative a proper burial.

“Before, we were scared to say anything, but because of [the Ergenekon] investigation we saw other people asking about their missing relatives. We realized we were not alone,” the 41-year-old Ata told me, sitting in the courtyard of his missing brother’s house, shaded by a massive grapevine.

“It’s unbelievable that these people are in jail,” Mr. Ergul continued, talking about some of the military and police figures now in jail as pat of the Ergenekon case. “These people were the gods of this region. We’re not surprised by the names of those arrested, but that they’re in jail is unbelievable. It’s like a dream.”

“We hope that all those who are responsible for the killings stand before a judge,” he added. “Our pain and sadness are very deep.”

Back in Cizre, I met with Nusirevan Elci, director of the local bar association in, who these days finds himself more and more dealing with families now ready to look for their missing. Last December, sensing a change, Elci’s office decided to start writing petitions to local prosecutors to reopen the files of the missing. Since then, some 120 families have come asking for help. The bar association has also pushed investigators to start excavations at several suspected mass graves, with more to come.

“We tried to do these investigations before, but the empire of fear was still very strong here. We had to force families to talk about who they lost. They were not only afraid, but they were also hopeless about getting any results,” Elci said.

“Ergenekon is a big opportunity for Turkey. The state needs to look at its past and come to terms with it,” he added.

If the Ergenekon trial allows Turkey to actually do that is questionable. But as the new search for the missing in the southeast shows, the case is already unraveling much more than just the coup plot that it initially set out to investigate.

Ergenekon's New Clothes?

Gareth Jenkins, a veteran Turkey analyst and an expert on the country's military and security affairs, has a new report out that takes a comprehensive look at the complicated Ergenekon coup plot trial and investigation. Although Jenkins has been a consistent critic of various aspects of the Ergenekon case, the report -- published by the Silk Road Studies Program at Johns Hopkins -- strikes me as fair and objective. Still, after reading the report, it's easy to see what Jenkins's verdict on Ergenekon is: the case has very few legs to stand on, and even those are rather shaky. What I found particularly interesting about the report, which also provides very good background about the history of the "Deep State" in Turkey and of the Ergenekon story itself, is its look at how Turkey's predilection towards conspiracy theories might be tainting the Ergenekon case.

From the report (pdf), entitled "Between Fact and Fantasy: Turkey's Ergenekon Investigation":

Whether among those formally indicted as part of the Ergenekon investigation or those detained in the police raids and subsequently released without charge, many appear to have been guilty of nothing more than opposition to the AKP. In fact, there is no proof that the Ergenekon organization as described in the indictments exists or has ever existed.

Indeed, the indictments are so full of contradictions, rumors, speculation, misinformation, illogicalities, absurdities and untruths that they are not even internally consistent or coherent.
This is not to say that the Ergenekon investigation is simply a politically motivated fabrication. There is no reason to doubt that most of those involved in prosecuting the case sincerely believe in the organization’s existence and are unable or unwilling to see the contradictions and irrationalities that are endemic in the indictments. The indictments themselves appear to be the products of “projective” rather than deductive reasoning, working backwards from the premise that the organization exists to weave unrelated individuals, statements and acts into a single massive conspiracy. The more elusive the concrete evidence for Ergenekon’s existence is, the more desperate the attempts to discover it become. Rather than convincing the investigators that what they are looking for does not exist, this elusiveness appears merely to make the organization more fearsome and powerful in their minds; and further fuel their desperation to uncover and eradicate it.

A predilection for conspiracy theories is nothing new in Turkey and can be found across the political spectrum. Both a large proportion of AKP supporters and many of those in law enforcement genuinely believe that a malicious conspiratorial cabal – which most associate with the Deep State – has been not only manipulating the political process but supporting or guiding a large proportion of the political violence in the country. Amongst
AKP supporters, attention tends to focus particularly on violence carried out in the name of Islam; where their sincere horror at the carnage that is sometimes perpetrated in the name of their religion has created a culture of denial, and a refusal to believe that their fellow Muslims could be responsible.

The report takes a good look at some of the problems with the evidence, indictments and judicial procedures in the case. About the case's first indictment (there have been three released so far, and a fourth is expected), Jenkins writes:

The indictment was also marred not only by repeated examples of flawed reasoning but numerous absurdities and contradictions. Most remarkably, despite its extraordinary length, the indictment produced no evidence that the Ergenekon organization it described even existed, much less that the accused were all members and engaged in a coordinated terrorist campaign to overthrow the government.

Indeed, rather than being based on deductive reasoning, the indictment appeared to project onto a collection of disparate events and individuals – not all of whom are necessarily innocent of any wrongdoing – a conspiracy theorist’s template of a ubiquitous, and almost omnipotent, centrally controlled organization which had not only penetrated every sphere of public life but been responsible for virtually every act of politically-motivated violence and terrorism in modern Turkish history….

…. some of the claims in the indictment about Ergenekon’s deeds and ambitions extended beyond the bounds of credibility. For example, the indictment claimed that the organization had met with the then U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney to discuss toppling the AKP government and replacing it with a more acceptable alternative. Even more absurdly, the indictment maintained that investigators had uncovered evidence that the “Ergenekon Terrorist Organization” planned to “manufacture chemical and biological weapons and then, with the high revenue it earned from selling them, to finance and control every terrorist organization not just in Turkey but in the entire world.”

In the end, Jenkins calls the Ergenekon case a "wasted" opportunity:

From a broader perspective, the public debate triggered by the discovery of the crate of grenades in Ümraniye in June 2007 could have provided an opportunity for the establishment of an independent truth commission which could perhaps have enabled Turks – including both secular nationalists and Islamists – to come to terms with the realities of recent Turkish history. But, in the short-term, a more pressing concern is not the wasted opportunity for Turkey to confront its past but what the Ergenekon investigation might be saying about its future, and the disturbing questions it raises about the prospects for democracy and the rule of law in the country.

Clearly, there are other views out there about the merits and the strength of the evidence of the Ergenekon case, but Jenkins's report is highly recommended reading for anyone interested in this complex story.