Oligarchy's Conspiracy Theory Versus People's 'Conspiracy' Theory
The militarist oligarchy has been claiming that the Ergenekon terror organization case is a great conspiracy against the Turkish army. Although they do not specify who is behind this conspiracy, they imply that there are unspecified but great dark foreign forces.
In this oligarchic conspiracy theory, the Gülen movement is the domestic handyman of these dark forces, and knowingly or unknowingly, the movement works against the innocent Turkish military. On the other hand, as we are now all aware, the Ergenekon indictments (there are two of them comprising thousands of pages and millions of pages of evidence files so far) strongly claim that there is a terrorist organization with strong links inside the army, judiciary and media that conspires against the democratically elected government. Let us scrutinize which of these claims is more plausible.
According to the militarist oligarchy's conspiracy theory, there are thousands of Gülen movement members within the police and judiciary, and these bureaucrats cooperate against the army. Police officers plant weapons, guns, bombs and fabricated documents in the houses of retired or on duty military officers or bury them somewhere and plant only maps showing the secret locations of these arsenals and documents, etc. Then these corrupt police officers go and “discover” these hidden maps, and then corrupt prosecutors base their indictments on this false evidence. Could this scenario possibly be true?
Definitely not. Here we are not talking about a few weak and poor civilians that the police and prosecutors are allegedly conspiring against but an army with a million members. It is an army that killed and tortured thousands of civilians in prisons after the Sept. 12, 1980 coup, after which hundreds of thousands of people were put in prison, the majority of them without any charges against them. One may even call it the Turkish Guantanamo. We are talking about an army that openly worked against the democratically elected Erbakan-Çiller government in the late 1990s during the Feb. 28 process and successfully if indirectly toppled the democratic government in 1997. Nobody denies what the army has done so far, and in all these anti-government military actions, the military justified itself. Parliament has never asked them to destroy the constitutionally elected government.
There is no guarantee that the army will not do this again. Facing this almighty, democratically uncontrolled and brutal force, these allegedly conspiring police officers and prosecutors must be both manic and suicidal to fabricate false evidence to harm the military. We live in a country where Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was sent to prison just because he recited a poem that was included in state-sanctioned schoolbooks. I cannot imagine what could happen to these allegedly conspiring police officers and prosecutors if they were caught red-handed. They must be unintelligent not to see this almost inevitable fatal end. But then, if they are so unintelligent, how could they successfully conspire against an army that employs many thousands of military officers with so many skills, extraordinary education, billions worth of equipment and a number of intelligence agencies?
And, how come not even a single one of these allegedly conspiring police officers have been caught by the military intelligence organizations or the National Intelligence Organization (MİT)? Knowing that MİT also prepared several reports supporting the evidence against the Ergenekon terror organization, let us “improve” the oligarchy conspiracy theory and assume that MİT is also part of the anti-army conspiracy, but how have military intelligence organizations been unsuccessful thus far in catching the so-called culprits. There are only two options. Either these organizations do not do the work that they are paid by our taxes to do, or they are also part of the anti-army conspiracy. But, is this not stretching our poor old brains far too much?
In science, the most acceptable explanation is the shortest and least complicated one. Instead of getting crazy, why don't we simply take a look at history and see that our army has intermittently interfered with politics and that they sometimes did this with brutal force and are prepared to do this again? Have they ever hidden that they dislike Erdoğan and Abdullah Gül?
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