ISTANBUL | In a contest for the affections of schoolchildren in their respective countries, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln would have a tough time competing with Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.
Every school in Turkey has what is called an Ataturk corner, including a bust and list of his accomplishments. Excerpts from Ataturk speeches are part of every public building. His mausoleum in Ankara is a national shrine, and his image appears as a shadow on one mountain twice each summer, a few days before and after the spring equinox.
More recently, Ataturk helped inspire Osama bin Laden, whose primary goal is to restore the position of caliph, or Muslim leader, that Ataturk abolished in 1924.
In Turkey today, Ataturk’s legacy forms the nexus of a battle between Islamists and secularists, with state prosecutors fighting both groups at the same time.
Secularists showed up en masse last week outside the Ankara bureau of the daily Cumhuriyet, a secularist publication.
“Traitors in parliament, patriots in jail,” “Free motherland or death” and “Our only crime is to love Ataturk and the republic,” they chanted.
They were protesting the arrest a day earlier of a leading secular columnist during a police crackdown on an ultranationalist gang suspected of planning a coup.
Two retired four-star generals were among the 22 individuals arrested, the highest-ranking commanders in Turkey’s 85-year history to face coup charges. On Saturday, both were detained pending trial.
The police investigation targets a shadowy group widely known as “Ergenekon,” a outfit that many Turks say doesn’t even exist.
But newspapers began using the term following a June 2007 police raid that uncovered a stash of army-duty hand grenades and explosives in an Istanbul suburb.
About 70 suspected secularist militants have been jailed in six sweeps since then. They have yet to be indicted, but Istanbul’s chief prosecutor says they will stand trial for “forming a terrorist organization.”
For supporters of Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), Ergenekon represents the latest manifestation of “the Deep State,” a hydra-headed network of nationalist paramilitaries often compared with nationalist groups that battled communism in the U.S. and Western Europe.
They consider the AKP an enemy because of its Islamist roots.
“Since the 1960s, state-backed [nationalist] groups have been fighting what their paymasters saw as enemy No. 1,” says Belma Akcura, an investigative journalist who often writes about the Deep State.
“Their targets changed. In the ’60s and ’70s, it was leftists; in the ’90s, it was Kurdish nationalists; today, it’s the Islamists. But their three-legged structure remains the same: police, politicians, the military.”
For most secularists, Ergenekon is a hoax dreamed up by AKP to deflect criticism.
Prosecutors indicted the party, which includes Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, after it passed legislation allowing women to wear head scarves in schools. The trial is expected to last most of the summer.
If found guilty, the government would be dissolved, new elections held and Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gul banned from politics for five years.
Secularists have long mistrusted the AKP. Now, they are equally suspicious of the parallel offensive by authorities against them.
“There is a suspicion in society that [Ergenekon] is turning out to be a political revenge process rather than a legal process,” secularist opposition leader Deniz Baykal said.
A lawyer by profession, he offered on Friday to defend the nationalist suspects in court.
“It’s not one coup d’etat Turkey is facing, it is two,” said Cuneyt Ulsever, another prominent columnist.
Ms. Akcura also has the feeling that “the government is using Ergenekon as a card in its own fight for life: ’Take me down, and I’ll take you down, too.’”
Ms. Akcura, the author of a recent book on paramilitary groups in Turkey, says she is surprised neither at the identities of the arrested nationalists, nor at claims in the Turkish press that they were planning high-level assassinations to foment instability and force military intervention.
Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are as common in the Middle East as air. But for many ordinary Turks, the governing emotion is cynicism.
“Do you know what Turkey’s biggest problem is?” asks Huseyin Karatas, a chef. “Trust. Nobody trusts anybody. This fight [between AKP and secularist nationalists] has infected everything. How can you do politics in this sort of atmosphere?”
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