TURKEY:LEADING TURKISH business leaders have upped calls for calm this week, as tensions sky-rocket following an indictment against the governing party that could end in lifetime political bans for the country's president and charismatic prime minister.
"Everybody must step back from their current positions," Rifat Hisarcikcioglu said yesterday, amid fears that government plans to call a referendum to change a constitutional article permitting party closures could spark military intervention.
Mr Hisarcikcioglu's comments came a day after the head of Turkey's most powerful business lobby warned all parties against turning tensions into a full-blown political crisis.
The heads of two leading opposition parties are due to meet the president today to talk about ways out of the impasse.
In a country bitterly divided between secularists who fear democracy and a government convinced the state has declared war on it, finding a compromise seems well-nigh impossible. Labelled a "judicial coup" by some, the March 14th indictment against a party which won 47 per cent of the vote at elections eight months ago stems from diametrically opposed views of Turkish society that go back at least a decade.
For the prosecutor, and the Turks who define themselves as secularists, the self-styled conservative democratic government is no different from an Islamist party the army booted out of power in 1997.
Faced last spring with the election of a president whose wife wears a headscarf, the leader of Turkey's main secularist party did all he could to provoke military intervention. His efforts today to hide his delight over the closure case against the government fool nobody.
Some government members, meanwhile, appear to see the indictment as the latest move made by a criminal gang that has been under investigation since police found stocks of army standard weapons and explosives in an Istanbul shanty-town last summer.
Some 40 members of the group, dubbed Ergenekon by the press, have now been charged with "provoking armed rebellion against the government". The prosecutor leading investigations into the group has not yet written an indictment, but there is strong evidence that Ergenekon had a hand in the assassination of a high court judge in 2006 that sparked massive secularist demonstrations against the government.
According to allegations published by the Turkish media this week, the leader of a small left-wing nationalist party arrested last Friday had a copy of the indictment against the government on his computer before it was made public.
"We know what we are fighting against," prime minister Tayyip Erdogan said on March 21st, comparing the Ergenekon operation to Italy's crackdown on political corruption in the 1990s. "This struggle will end with the destruction of gangs and mafia in Turkey."
A handful of authoritarian secularists aside, nobody doubts the need to root out what Turks call the Deep State, a shadowy nexus of military and security men believed to have had a hand in anti-democratic activities since at least the 1950s.
For many, the fact those arrested include a retired general linked to dozens of unsolved murders in the 1990s is proof of how much difference a decade has made to Turkish democracy. In today's poisonous political atmosphere, though, fears are growing that the government's insistence on blaming its troubles on Ergenekon risk undermining the investigation.
Concerns centre around the way the second round of Ergenekon arrests came exactly a week after the release of the indictment against the government. In pre-dawn swoops that reminded some of the days leading up to the 1980 coup, police carted off 12 suspects including an ailing 83-year old journalist who is a figurehead of Turkey's authoritarian secularist movement.
A columnist for the daily Milliyet, Can Dundar, thinks the March 21st arrests smack of revenge. "Two prosecutors in two important cases are being put forward as representatives of two warring sides," he writes. "What we see here are not efforts to clean out the Deep State, but to use this as a pretext to liquidate opposition and enable it [the government] to create its own Deep State."
Dundar's proposal for a solution to the problem is an inversion of calls by the business community for everybody to take a step back. Ergenekon should be pursued with even more determination, but the government should also return to plans for a new liberal constitution that it abandoned last year.