Turkey’s arrests for coup plot now number 100

Prime minister says crackdown will shed light on ‘sinister incidents’

ANKARA (AP) – A Turkish court formally arrested another 12 people yesterday for ties to an alleged secularist plot by ultranationalists to bring down the Islamic-rooted government, bringing the total of people implicated in the case to more than 100.

The prime minister said the crackdown will shed light on a network of renegade agents within the state and make Turkey transparent. Critics say it is designed to silence the government’s opponents.

The case highlights a difficult question about who holds the levers of power in a nation where tensions between secularists and Islamists, and liberals and rightists, have created deep fault lines in the country.

The problem is aggravated by key demands from the European Union – which Turkey hopes to join – to reduce the military’s influence in politics, make security officials accountable for torture and grant more rights to the country’s Kurds.

Over the weekend, an Istanbul anti-terror court formally arrested and jailed 16 coup plot suspects, including a former police chief and four active duty military officers. Twelve of the 16 were arrested yesterday.

Police detained another 33 suspects in the case yesterday and displayed confiscated weapons. Prosecutors say the plot aimed to destabilize Turkey through a series of attacks and trigger a coup in 2009.

There are already 86 suspects on trial in the case and they include a top author, a political party leader, journalists, a former university dean and a lawyer along with 16 retired military officers. All are outspoken opponents of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Erdogan’s AK Party – which narrowly escaped a ban last year for allegedly undermining the country’s secular principles – says it is trying to strengthen democracy in order to steer the country toward EU membership even as allegations mount from the secular opposition that the government is using its power to silence critics.

“Are you afraid of seeing Turkey becoming more transparent? Are you afraid of efforts to enlighten sinister incidents?” Erdogan shouted yesterday. “Turkey is changing.” Erdogan has alarmed secularists for trying to lift the ban on Islamic headscarves at universities, and nationalists for policies such as launching the country’s first 24-hour Kurdish-language television station on January 1. He uttered a few words in the once-banned tongue in a marked policy shift toward Kurds.

Turkey’s military, an instigator of coups in past decades, has warned that secular ideals are in peril, though an armed intervention seems unlikely for now. But many officers are uncomfortable with the government’s Kurdish policy as they fight a war against autonomy-seeking rebels that has killed nearly 40,000 people since 1984.

The coup plot case underlines a widening divide between the country’s growing Islamic class and secularists.