Justice or revenge?

IT WAS meant to be an irreversible leap forward for Turkish democracy. But the verdicts handed down on August 5th at the close of the five-year Ergenekon trial against some 275 alleged coup-plotters among the army and its allies left many believing the country had moved in the opposite direction.

Prosecutors gave Ilker Basbug, a respected former chief of the general staff, and 18 others life sentences for conspiring to overthrow Turkey’s mildly Islamist Justice and Development (AK) party. Of the 256 other defendants, including lawyers, journalists, and academics, 21 were not convicted. The verdicts will be appealed.

The Ergenekon case rests on the argument that the generals had created a huge dirty-tricks department to discredit AK. Their alleged plans, which included blowing up mosques and murdering Christians, sound credible when set against their record of sponsoring squad killings of dissident Kurds and of serially torturing and jailing thousands of other purported enemies of the state. Defanging the generals remains Mr Erdogan’s biggest achievement so far. And there is no denying that this week’s convictions send a clear message about the fate that awaits those who plot such mischief in future.

However, the trial, which took place in a purpose-built courtroom outside Istanbul, has been plagued by controversy from the start. Even Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister, whom the army sought to boot out as recently as 2007, has aired misgivings about its conduct. These grew after Mr Basbug’s arrest in 2012. The general has been credited with supporting the government’s moves to reach a political settlement with the Kurds. “History will not excuse those who call Basbug a member of a terrorist organisation,” Mr Erdogan recently declared. Mr Basbug’s daughter, Feride, called the verdict “a comedy”. Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s pro-secular main opposition, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), believes prosecutors were seeking not justice, but revenge.

Defence lawyers have long claimed that much of the evidence against their clients was either fabricated or doctored. Western diplomats who have followed the case agree that there are enough holes in the case to compromise its legitimacy. Some detect the hand of Turkey’s most influential Muslim fraternity, the Gulenists, so-called after their leader, Fethullah Gulen, a steely imam who lives in self-imposed exile in America. Mercilessly hounded by the generals, the Gulenists have thrived under a decade of AK rule. They are said to have infiltrated the police force and the judiciary in such large numbers that Mr Erdogan now sees them as a threat and is seeking to weed them out.

The public may well have been disposed to see the trial in a positive light, had it not been for Mr Erdogan’s increasingly authoritarian ways. These propelled the mass street protests that convulsed the country in June. The government’s harsh response, which left thousands injured and five dead, has blighted its image around the world. An unfazed Mr Erdogan continues to insist that a global network of financiers (he means Jews) and their local “pawns” orchestrated the demonstrations in order to “weaken” Turkey and to unseat the AK.

Turkey’s biggest industrial conglomerate, Koc Holding, is now being targeted for opening the doors of one of its Istanbul hotels to protesters fleeing police brutality. Mr Erdogan declared that the Divan Hotel had abetted criminals. On July 24th tax inspectors, flanked by police, raided nine provincial offices of the company’s energy arms, including Tupras, an oil refiner. News of the raid sent Koc stocks plunging on the Istanbul Stock Exchange’s main index. The company’s losses are said to have totalled 1.8 billion lira ($930m) in a single day. The finance minister, Mehmet Simsek, insists that the audits were routine. “These are nothing but authoritarian scare tactics,” counters a tycoon based in Istanbul. “It is these that have become routine.”