A storm of political unrest is gripping Turkey this week after the arrest of 22 people on suspicion of plotting against the government
THERE ARE A lot of angry, bewildered people in Turkey these days, and none more so than the crowd shouting incendiary slogans on Wednesday outside the Ankara bureau of the daily newspaper Cumhuriyet, a secularist mouthpiece. "Traitors in parliament, patriots in jail", "Free motherland or death", "Our only crime is to love Ataturk and the republic."
They were there to protest the arrest on Tuesday of one of the newspaper's best known columnists as part of a spectacular police crackdown on a gang suspected of plotting a coup against Turkey's elected government.
In a normal country, the arrests of 22 people, including two retired generals, would probably have been greeted almost universally as a victory for democracy. But Turkey has never been a normal country, and many think it is getting less normal by the day.
The atmosphere is so poisonous that families have given up talking about politics altogether. One well-known newspaper pundit - a secularist uneasy at his fellow secularists' increasing authoritarianism - has called a temporary halt to his daily columns, saying debate is impossible.
Interpretations of what is happening could not be starker. Some call it a revolution, others a counter-revolution. The majority in the middle prefer to wait out the storm. On the most superficial level, the source of polarisation is the gang the Turkish media has dubbed "Ergenekon", after a Romulus and Remus-style myth of the Turks' central Asian origins.
For government supporters and Turkey's small but vociferous band of liberals, the group is just the latest manifestation of the "Deep State" - a hydra-headed network of nationalist paramilitary groups that analysts compare to the violent operatives set up to combat communism in post-war Italy.
"Since the 1960s, State-backed groups have been fighting what their paymasters saw as enemy number one", says Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist. "Their targets changed. In the 1960s and 1970s it was leftists, in the 1990s it was Kurdish nationalists, today it's the Islamists. But their three-legged structure remains the same: police, politicians, military."
For many secularists, meanwhile, Ergenekon is a hoax, dreamed up by the Justice and Development government to discredit its political opponents.
Such arguments can not be dismissed out of hand. Investigations into Ergenekon began 13 months ago, and - leaks to the press apart - it is still unclear what the 70 men in custody are accused of. The timing of this week's sweep is also suspicious, coming just two hours before the Constitutional Court heard evidence in a case many experts believe will result in the closure of the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
Yet, as the vitriolic rhetoric used by secularists makes clear (opposition leader Deniz Baykal somewhat oddly compared the arrests to Hitler's 1934 purge of Nazi stalwarts), this war is about much more than a criminal investigation. It's about Kemalism, the mix of authoritarian secularism that is still Turkey's official ideology.
A former Islamist who once compared democracy to a train - "you get off when you reach your destination" - Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has achieved a lot since he came to power in 2002.
He got Turkey onto the first rung of European Union accession negotiations after 40 years of waiting. He broke a 30-year Turkish impasse on Cyprus, the mixed Turkish-Greek island in the Mediterranean which Turkey invaded in 1974 to crush an Athens-backed coup. He pushed through some of the most radical reforms in Turkey's 85-year history.
For people, like those protesting outside Cumhuriyet, though, it's all takiyye - an Arabic word that describes a Muslim's right to dissimulate his real intentions when faced with non-believers. What he and the AKP really want, they argue, is to replace Kemalism with sharia, Islamic law, and western lifestyles with women in Afghan-style burkas.
It is true: since 2004 AKP's reformism has gone belly-up, and Erdogan, an angry man at the best of times, has increasingly preferred compromise to outright confrontation. The closure case against AKP was almost certainly triggered by his intemperate efforts this spring to end an unjust ban on headscarves in universities.
But the fact is that illegal efforts to get rid of his party began well before 2004. Even before the 2002 elections, when the elderly head of the then government was dying at his post as Turkey wallowed in its worst economic crisis ever, generals were talking to politicians about ways of stopping the AKP.
The two generals arrested this week are known to have been the leading lights in two failed coup attempts in 2003 and 2004. The failure of many secularists to speak out against all this illegality arguably points to the key issue at the heart of the Ergenekon affair, an issue which again goes back much further than this investigation.
For the first 30 years of Turkish Republican history their fathers and grandfathers - members of the authoritarian modernising single-party government that Ataturk founded - were in undisputed control of all that they surveyed. But since the first multi-party elections in 1950, the Republican People's Party has failed to win a single election outright.
Instead, disregarding their spiritual father's repeated warnings that "politics and soldiering have no place together", many secularists have turned increasingly to the army to make up for their weakness at the polling booth. And the army, after each of the three coups and new constitutions Turkey has lived through in the last 58 years, has more and more firmly cemented its position at the heart of the country's politics.
"By law, [the armed forces] have been given the duty of protecting the Republic," retired general Armagan Kuloglu told Cumhuriyet today, in a reference to the 1982 military-backed constitution, and what looked like a justification for Ergenekon-style operations.
"That obligation would remain even if those laws didn't exist, because it is the body which founded the Republic, fought the War of Independence, founded the State and defended its philosophy up to today."
Even after European-backed reforms, generals still sit monthly with cabinet ministers in a National Security Council that audits government policy. Parliament passes military budgetary demands without comment, and acting generals are, to all intents and purposes, above the law.
It's an influence many liberals think is the main obstacle to Turkey's advance towards a full democracy, rather than the closely-guarded version that has been in place for decades. A prominent psychologist and author, Gunduz Vassaf, puts the point ironically.
"Most countries try their juntas," he says. "We crown ours."
He is referring specifically to the head of the 1980 coup, in which tens of thousands of people were imprisoned, thousands tortured and hundreds executed. Retired general and former president Kenan Evren now lives in an Aegean resort town, a respectable and respected old man who paints nudes and landscapes in his spare time.
"In Turkey, this view that the army is the rightful owner of the State is like a chronic cough," adds Perihan Magden, a novelist and sharp-tongued newspaper commentator.
"We failed to face up to this fact after the September 12 [1980] coup. With Ergenekon, the possibility of a partial reckoning has been born."
It's an admirable sentiment. But with the first arrests in Turkish history of two top generals on suspicion of involvement in an attempted coup, there is no evidence whatsoever that the more radical secularists are engaging in any soul-searching.
Turkey's greatest tragedy, in a sense, is that the government which has (or at least had) the will and authority to pull the country into the 21st century is one most modern Turks look on with deep suspicion.
When you add that to the fact that change is being pushed through with political instruments that have been tainted by decades spent propping up the status quo, you have a recipe for pandemonium.
Secularist commentators today are busy berating the AKP for turning the judiciary into a political tool to take down opponents. Not one of them has questioned the closure case against the government, the 26th such in 50 years, despite the fact that plenty of legal experts see it as a travesty of justice.
Likewise, the editor of Cumhuriyet, Ilhan Selçuk, may very well have a point when he says that "the religious clerics of the AKP are busy pumping the media full of coup rumours that serve their purposes".
But neither he, nor any leading secular newspapermen, let out a squeak in 1997 when several leading liberal journalists lost their jobs and a leading human rights activist was shot and severely wounded after the military top brass had planted stories claiming they were receiving money from the Kurdish separatist PKK.
"Do you know what Turkey's biggest problem is," asks Huseyin Karatas, the garrulous chief cook in the soup kitchen just up from my house.
"Trust. Nobody trusts anybody. Everybody thinks everybody else is out to get them. How can you do politics in that sort of atmosphere?"