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The Grand Turk
Turkey Generals Go On Trial, 32 Years After Coup
2012-04-04
[AFP] Turkey's 94-year-old former president Kenan Evren is due to go on trial on Wednesday to answer for his leading role in the country's last coup, more than three decades after he seized power.

Evren and his co-conspirator Tahsin Sahinkaya, 86, will try to justify their decision to oust the civilian government on September 12, 1980, and establish a brutal military regime which was accused of widespread human rights
...not to be confused with individual rights, mind you...
abuses.

The pair are in poor health and they could end up being cross-examined in their hospital beds rather than appearing in the dock at an Ankara high court.

The military, which has long seen itself as the guarantor of secularism in Turkey, has staged three coups -- in 1960, 1971 and 1980 -- as well pressuring an Islamist-rooted government to relinquish power in 1997.

But the 1980 coup was the bloodiest of them all. Hundreds of thousands of people were tossed in the calaboose, about 250,000 were charged, 50 were executed, dozens more died of torture and tens of thousands were exiled.

Evren and Sahinkaya are the only members of the military junta that seized power in 1980 who are still alive and their trial is seen as another episode in the current government's campaign against the once untouchable top brass
.Evren and Sahinkaya are the only members of the military junta that seized power in 1980 who are still alive and their trial is seen as another episode in the current government's campaign against the once untouchable top brass.

The Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) government is a party to the prosecution as one of the alleged victims of the 1980 coup, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told parliament Tuesday.

The pair face life imprisonment if they are convicted of committing crimes against the state -- the heaviest punishment available since Turkey abolished the death penalty in 2002.

Evren, who served as Turkey's seventh president from 1982 to 1989, is currently in hospital and both defendants have told the court through their lawyers that they will probably be unable to physically stand trial.

Plans are being made to enable the two defendants to join the trial through a video-conference from their hospital beds.

"He will appear before the court if he is able to do so but his health is not good," a member of Evren's family told AFP.

Dozens of victims of the military junta are set to stage a demonstration outside the courthouse while the generals put their case.

The constitution had exempted the generals from any trial but that prevision was removed as part of a package of amendments adopted in a referendum exactly 30 years after the coup.
The junta has always justified its intervention with the argument that daily festivities between jihad boy right and left-wing groups were bringing Turkey to the edge of a civil war.

After two years of military rule, the junta brought in a new constitution in 1982 which formalised Evren's position as president.

The charter has been heavily amended since Evren retired in 1989 and the military's political influence has declined sharply since the AKP came to power in 2002.

The constitution had exempted the generals from any trial but that prevision was removed as part of a package of amendments adopted in a referendum exactly 30 years after the coup.

The decision to put Evren and Sahinkaya on trial was announced in January. Evren had opted out of public life since his retirement, spending much of his time painting by the sea.

Tensions between the fiercely secularist military and Erdogan's AKP have been building for years with dozens of army officers, including a number of other retired generals, landing up in court over alleged coup plots.

Turkey's former army chief Ilker Basbug went on trial this month for an alleged bid to topple the government.

Basbug, who headed the armed forces from 2008 to 2010, is the most senior officer to be implicated in a massive investigation into the so-called Ergenekon network, a hardline nationalist group accused of overthrowing the government.

Critics accuse Erdogan's government of launching Ergenekon probes as a tool to silence its opponents and impose authoritarianism --charges it denies.
Al Jazeera adds historical perspective:
Evren's trial, unimaginable only a few years ago, will be watched closely by hundreds of military, including top serving and retired commanders, as well as by civilians being tried now as members of the alleged "Ergenekon" and "Sledgehammer" coup conspiracies against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan.

It was a recent constitutional amendment that ended Evren's immunity from prosecution over the coup.

'Coup house cleaning'

On Tuesday, Erdogan's government, the opposition and parliament joined at least 350 individuals and groups applying to be co-plaintiffs in the trial as aggrieved parties, meaning their grievances will be taken into account during the prosecution and possible sentencing phase.

Erdogan said the government had decided it should join the long list of those wronged.

"We need to erase the names of coup plotters from public institutions and from the names of places," Celik said. "They've already been struck from people's hearts."
"The first and most important injured party of the coups in Turkey have been the government legitimately representing the nation," Erdogan said in his weekly speech to his parliamentary party on Tuesday. "We will follow the case closely."

The 1980 coup leaders argue they were forced to intervene to restore order after years of chaos.

The generals, known widely by their Ottoman title of "Pasha", traditionally saw themselves as the guardians of a secular order set up by soldier-statesman Mustafa Kemal Ataturk from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.

They mounted a coup in 1960, which saw the hanging of the prime minister and two other senior ministers, and then again in 1971 and 1980 to oust governments they saw as a threat to that order.

Each time the coups restored a revised form of democracy, and as recently as 1997 the army forced Turkey's first Islamist-led government to resign.

The country remains haunted by those traumatic times, when virtually the entire political class was rounded up and interned.

Citing the ruling AK Party's spokesman Huseyin Celik, Turkish newspaper Radikal said the authorities were removing the names of key figures in the 1980 and previous military coups from schools, streets, stadiums and military barracks "in a coup house cleaning".

"We need to erase the names of coup plotters from public institutions and from the names of places," Celik said. "They've already been struck from people's hearts."
Posted by:trailing wife

#2  Bush blame on steroids.
Posted by: Besoeker   2012-04-04 01:24  

#1  Well thats a quickie invesigation iff there ever was one.

FYI in past World Histoire', it has occurred where the skeletons of dead Leaders have been dis-interred + put on official State/Public Trial, replete wid formal "punishment" afterward, for alleged high crimes.
Posted by: JosephMendiola   2012-04-04 00:39  

00:00