A heavily guarded Turkish court on Monday handed down verdicts against 275 defendants — whose ranks include former generals, parliamentarians and journalists — on charges of plotting to overthrow the Islamist-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The landmark trial took five years, led to indictments that ran for thousands of pages and was housed in a purpose-built courthouse in Silivri, a coastal resort town outside Istanbul. In the process, it also became a bitterly contested symbol of the deepening divide between the government and its supporters on one hand, and secularists who accuse it of trying to muzzle dissent on the other. The defendants were charged with forming a clandestine ultra-nationalist “terrorist organization,” dubbed Ergenekon, the name of a mythic valley in Central Asia where, in lore, the Turkic peoples originated. Their alleged plan was to feed social unrest by staging high-profile assassinations and bomb blasts, creating a pretext for the military to step in and take control — Turkey has a long, dark history of military involvement in civilian affairs, including three coups. On Monday, General Ilker Basbug, retired chief of staff of the Turkish military, was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the Ergenekon conspiracy, along with 16 others. The court judges, announcing verdicts in the case individually, also sentenced three opposition MPs to between 12 and 35 years in prison, while 21 others were acquitted. Basbug maintains his innocence and claims the prosecutions were politically motivated. The government and its supporters say that if unexposed, Ergenekon would have instigated another coup. Erdogan once called himself “the prosecutor of Ergenekon.” To them, the trial marked a necessary coming-of-age for Turkish democracy and an end to the military’s domination of political life. For decades, Turkey’s generals saw themselves as self-appointed guardians of Turkish secularism, a tradition dating back to the country’s Westernizing founder Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who was also a military commander. The top brass were deeply opposed to the democratically elected Erdogan when he first took office in 2003 — but he steadily eroded their power,![]()
