TURKEY:FORMER MILITARY police chief Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon, the former army number two, were taken into custody in Ankara early yesterday in the latest twist in investigations that began last year.
Dozens of people - including another retired general and a prominent ultranationalist lawyer - are already in custody on charges of "provoking armed rebellion against the government".
The plotters allegedly planned to assassinate public intellectuals, Kurdish politicians and military personnel as part of a campaign to destabilise Turkish society and force military intervention.
Ismet Berkan, editor of liberal daily Radikal, compared the scheme to the civil unrest in 1960 that preceded the first of Turkey's three coups. "It's a classic model, a classic case of social engineering," he said. "The difference is that, for the first time in Turkey's history, four-star generals - the big fish - have been hauled in by a civilian prosecutor."
Not everybody shares his view, however. The arrests - coming hours before the state prosecutor, who opened a closure case against Turkey's Islamic-rooted government for anti-secular activities, presented his arguments in court - are seen by many as the latest step in a bitter power struggle between government and state.
"It's not one coup d'etat Turkey is facing, it's two," said Cuneyt Ulsever, a liberal columnist for mass-market daily Hurriyet who is critical of the ruling AKP's abandonment of compromise for confrontation.
Deniz Baykal, leader of Turkey's authoritarian secularist main opposition party, compared the arrests to events in Iran prior to the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Investigative journalist Belma Akcura was also concerned about the way the investigation into what Turks have dubbed Ergenekon was unfolding. "It's been over a year and we still don't know for sure what these people are being accused of," she said. "I get the feeling the government is using Ergenekon as a card in its own fight for life - 'take me down, and I'll take you down too'."
Yet as the author of a book on what Turks call the "deep state" - a paramilitary grouping of military and civilian bureaucrats and mafia opposed to full democracy - she is surprised neither by the accusations nor by the identities of the people arrested.
Sener Eruygur was revealed last year to have played a central role in two aborted attempts to unseat the government in 2004. The first - code-named "Yellow Girl", a Turkish name for cows - was a plan for direct military intervention that foundered on the opposition of the then chief of staff. Like Ergenekon, the second attempt planned for public opinion to be moulded via the media.
"They came to talk to all the big media bosses in 2004 to ask for their support," said Radikal's Ismet Berkan. "They didn't get it."
Mr Eruygur appears not to have forgotten the slight. When the secular lobbying group he has led since his retirement organised massive protests last year, a favourite slogan was "buy one Tayyip, get two Aydin Dogans free". Tayyip is Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan. Aydin Dogan heads the country's biggest media group.
For Alper Gormus, left-leaning editor of the magazine that revealed the 2004 coup plans last year and was shut down for its pains, Mr Eruygur's arrest is evidence of a change in the balance of power between government and state. "People say Turkey is in crisis and they are right, but what revolution comes to pass without a political crisis?" he asked. "What we are living through today are the birth pangs of a new regime - the death of 60 years of controlled democracy, the birth of the full democracy Turkey deserves."