Whatever the real cause, the impression that Turkey’s chief of staff feared being poisoned by people in his own institution remained. The only reason for this impression was not just Gen. Özkök’s basket. It was a well-known fact that he was abhorred by the radical secular-nationalists who found him too soft against – or even a secret friend of – the “Islamists.”

Enter the coup diary

One source that had unveiled this enmity toward Gen. Özkök, was the infamous diary of one of his subordinates, Admiral Özden Örnek. The extensive memoirs kept by this retired admiral in his personal computer were somehow leaked to the press in 2007 and published in detail in the Nokta magazine. To date, it remains a mystery how this “leak” occurred. In those notes, the admiral told that he and the other three top commanders of the army, the air force and the gendarme, were horrified by their chief in the spring of 2004.

He wrote, “We were all convinced that things would not go forward with this chief of staff, who was an opportunist, a coward and pro-government, and that although he looked like a republican, he actually supported the Islamists.”

If the conditions had been riper, apparently these four musketeers would have organized a military coup to “save” Turkey and northern Cyprus from the AKP government and the EU reforms. But, as Admiral Örnek frustratedly explains in his diary, they failed.

However, some of these commanders, especially Şener Eruygur, were determined to fight. After their retirement in August 2004, which gave Gen. Özkök great relief, they planned another operation named “Ayışığı,” or “Moonlight.” This time the logic was to provoke a military coup through indirect means. Like-minded media and civil society groups would be used to create a widespread impression that the government was moving the country toward disaster and that it should be stopped “by all means necessary.”

All means necessary

To master this process, the retired Gen. Şener Eruygur became the head of the Society for Atatürkist Thought, which would emerge as the main organizer of the “Republican Rallies” of spring 2007, in which the AKP Government was denounced along with the “imperialist US and EU.” Around that time, Şener Eruygur also gave a conference to a group of Turks based in London with one of his comrades, Retired General Tuncer Kılınç. Kılınç had a shocking proposal: Turkey had to abandon NATO who were supporting the formation of a “Greater Kurdistan,” and instead join forces with Russia.

In other words, these retired generals quickly became anti-American, anti-European and anti-AKP ideologues. That fitted very well with their association with eccentric figures like Doğu Perinçek, the head of the ex-Maoist and ever-Kemalist Workers Party, or ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz who sued dozens of liberal intellectuals for “insulting Turkishess.” Even Alexander Dugin of Russia, the ideologue of the “Eurasianist” movement who hopes to restore the Russian Empire, became their comrade.

But all that ideological struggle was the tip of the iceberg, at least the evidence collected by the Ergenekon prosecutors suggests so. The evidence implies that Şener Eruygur and some other hawkish generals, none of whom have been touched yet, founded the Ergenekon network to organize not just propaganda, but bombings and assassinations, that would convince many people, including less impassioned officers, that Turkey was in grave danger and a military coup was the only solution.

Two acts of violence are shown in the Ergenekon indictment as examples of this manipulative scheme of terror, the shooting in “Danıştay,” the Council of State and the bombing of daily Cumhuriyet. Both of these were secularist targets and both events convinced many people that Turkey was under Islamist attack. But now the indictment provides convincing evidence that the attackers in both cases had close links with nationalists of Ergenekon.

Facts and miracles

This is the story of Ergenekon in a nutshell and you don’t have to be an “Islamist” to take this scenario seriously. İsmet Berkan, the editor-in-chief of the daily Radikal, who has written extensively on this case, is as secular as one can be. Yet it is him along with many other secular liberals who say that charges against Ergenekon are serious and persuasive.

According to Berkan, there is a “Greater Ergenekon,” which is made up of generals, and a “Little Ergenekon,” which is made up of civilians. In the current court case only three generals are accused, Şener Eruygur, his friend Hurşit Tolon, who was the commander of the first army until his retirement in 2004, and a lower ranking general whose name repeatedly surfaced previously in similarly nasty deep state business, Veli Küçük. But the coup plans of 2004 included other names in the military’s top brass who are still around and maybe even in office.

So will this Greater Ergenekon ever be brought to justice? I don’t know. But I am not holding my breath. That would be a miracle. And in this country, miracles hardly happen.