Now Ergenekon makes even more sense

One of them, Mustafa Özbilgin, died. The killer was caught by the police and everything suggested that he was an Islamist fanatic. He reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar!" (God is great) as he fired his weapon. When got caught, he said that he was "a soldier of Allah." He also said that he shot the judges because of their stance against the right to wear headscarves. He even left a copy of the Islamist daily Vakit in his car, a paper which had strongly bashed the Council of State.

Reaping the secular whirlwind
Everybody denounced this killing, to be sure, but the secularists did so with a deeper passion. For them, this attack was the sum of all their fears: "Islamists," including the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, were trying to destroy the secular republic, and now they had even started an armed struggle against it. "This is an attack against our secular republic," President Ahmet Necdet Sezer said, "yet we will defend it for ever." The funeral of the killed judge turned into a political rally. "Turkey is secular and will remain secular," tens of thousands chanted. They also protested the AKP government for "encouraging the killer," for that Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan had lately criticized the judges of the Council of State for a controversial decision they made. They had decided that a school teacher shouldn’t wear a headscarf even on her way home, because "children could see that and take a bad example.

The Council of State shooting, in other words, changed Turkey’s political mood overnight. From that point on, the secularist campaign to overthrow the AKP government gained momentum. It lead to the "republic rallies" of early 2007; the "e-memorandum" of April 27, 2007, that the military issued to stop then AKP member, Abdullah Gül, from becoming president; and the closure case that another legal stronghold, the High Court of Appeals, opened against the AKP in March 2008.

But lo and behold!.. Something happened last July which suggested that the Council of State shooting was not an Islamist crime, but a one which was designed to appear that way in order to create all this secularist hysteria and political turmoil. That something was the indictment of the Ergenekon case. Prepared by a group of Istanbul prosecutors, based on an extensive investigation which started by the discovery of a huge pile of guns and grenades in an Istanbul home, this indictment had a shocking argument: that there was a nationalist/secularist network which called itself Ergenekon and employed terrorist tactics. These folks were dedicated to "save" Turkey from the AKP government, and they were provoking the steadiest way to get rid of such popular governments in Turkey: a military coup. Among their crimes were, the indictment alleged, the shooting at the Council of State and the bombing of the staunchly secular daily Cumhuriyet. Both of these acts were designed to aggravate the secularist camp to grind their axes.

The Ergenekon prosecutors were basing this allegation from the links they discovered between Alparslan Arslan, the Council of State shooter and the Ergenekon grandees, such as retired general Veli Küçük. Moreover, everything about Mr. Arslan was suggesting that he was a nationalist rather than an Islamist.

The Ergenekon indictment was accepted by the Istanbul court right away and the case is still going on as one of the most dramatic cases in Turkish history. Yet for a while, there emerged a very bizarre paradox: five months before the Ergenekon case, another critical case was opened. This was the closure case launched by Chief Prosecutor of the High Court of Appeals Abdurrahan Yalçınkaya against the AKP for being the "center of anti-secular activities." Mr. Yalçınkaya was referring to the Council of State shooting in his indictment as the most dramatic example of the "anti-secular" onslaught that the government had supposedly "encouraged".

In other words, while one indictment was regarding the Council of State shooting as a provocation designed for overthrowing the government, the other indictment was regarding the same attack as a reason to overthrow the government. As you would know, the infamous "closure case" ended last summer with non-closure. That had turned most eyes rather to the Ergenekon case. And the other day, another decision came which just made the Ergenekon case even more vindicated. The High Court of Appeals overturned the verdict which a criminal court in Ankara had taken on the Council of State shooting. That Ankara court had sentenced shooter Alparslan Arslan and other suspects in the case to life in prison. Apparently the High Court of Appeals didn’t have a problem with punishment, but it decided that the case would not be soundly judged if its alleged links with Ergenekon weren’t investigated. Thus, the High Court of Appeals decided that the Council of State shooting case must be merged with the Ergenekon case. Now the two cases will be somehow integrated. This is simply phenomenal. The High Court of Appeals is not the greatest fan of the "Islamists," as evidenced by the closure case its chief prosecutor opened against the AKP. Yet it seems that the evidence for a link between "the soldier of Allah" and the masters of Ergenekon are so obvious that the High Court decided to reframe the case. With this game-changing decision, now the Ergenekon case makes even more sense.