Turkey's Ergenekon imbroglio and academia's apathy.

• Author: Tas, Hakki
• Position: Report

At the heart of civil-military relations lies a pervasive problem: "Who will guard the guardians?" This two-millennium-old question warns us against the risk of agent-opportunism, which is the alleged case par excellence in contemporary Turkey. In July 2008, former generals and active duty officers were charged with running a covert terrorist organization, Ergenekon, and inciting an armed insurgence aimed at bringing down the government of the Justice and Development Party (AK Party). At the end of the five-year trial, the court acquitted only 21 out of some 275 defendants and handed down harsh sentences to the rest.

From the very outset of the investigation, Turkish newspapers filled thousands of pages with descriptions of the indictments, painting the Ergenekon affair as an enthralling thriller; yet, it is important to note that news about the state's ties to the criminal underworld is far from a novel event. The prosecution has been viewed as a blow against the long-established Turkish derin devlet (deep state), a widely used term referring to parallel state operations and a hidden power network outside established state hierarchies. Such subversions imply that conspiratorial coalitions, composed of high-level figures of intelligence services, military, judiciary, business, and mafia, operate within (if not above) the political system.

Recently, the term "deep state" has been borrowed by several international scholars to analyze non-Turkish contexts, as well. In his analysis of Britain's role in the Iraq War, Anthony Barnett, for instance, questions whether there is "a UK 'deep state'." (2) Similarly, in The Road to 9/11, Peter Dale Scott examines the "American deep state," which is presented as a world of terrorism, oil, drug trafficking, and arms trade behind the facade of liberal democracy. Scott observes a parallel power structure responsible for setting the agenda of the American government. (3) Furthermore, utilizing Hans Morgenthau's conception of the "dual state," Ola Tunander locates the deep state vis-a-vis the democratic state and views it as not just a parallel state, but rather a political formation that exerts control over the latter. (4)

Despite such references to the deep state in European and American academic circles, the term appears to have attracted much less interest within Turkish academia. This article primarily deals with the lack of academic interest on the Ergenekon affair as a manifestation of the Turkish deep state. As Ergenekon is considered to be part of the stay-behind networks in Western Europe, popularly named as Gladio, the article first treats the trajectory of studies on stay-behind terrorism and points to the scarcity of scholarly work in European academia. Thereafter, it focuses on the Turkish case, while reviewing the main currents of the Ergenekon affair within Turkish studies and, finally, highlights the importance of investigating the subject in its historical continuity with Turkey's recent past.

The Inert State of the Stay-Behind Studies

Founded in April 1949 as a transatlantic military alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) institutionalized American influence in European security policy in the Cold War context, and as its first Secretary-General Lord Ismay formulated, the organization aimed to "keep the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down." (5) Keeping the Russians out, or known formally as the United States' (US) containment policy, involved the use of several political, economic, and military instruments to counter the Soviet Union's intentions to extend its influence over Europe. One of those measures of retaliation was the institution of the Gladio program, which saw the formation of clandestine stay-behind networks in NATO countries, as well as in neutral countries such as Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and Austria. Accordingly, more than a dozen secret militias funded, trained, and armed by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) constituted a covert stay-behind network throughout Europe to operate against any Soviet expansion. (6)

The stay-behind scandal first broke in 1990, when Judge Felice Casson of Venice discovered that the explosives used in a 1972 car-bombing had come from arm caches kept for Italy's Gladio. The most controversial aspect, however, was the allegation that despite the absence of any Soviet assaults, these paramilitary forces had been mobilized to hinder domestic leftist groups to prevent communists from gaining power in government, business, and society at large. (7) The European Parliament's (EP) resolution on Operation Gladio, passed on November 22, 1990, remarked that these "military secret services (or uncontrolled branches thereof) were involved in serious cases of terrorism and crime as evidenced by, various judicial inquiries" and "may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of Member States." The resolution pointed out that these clandestine networks "operated [...] completely outside the law since they are not subject to any parliamentary control and frequently those holding the highest government and constitutional posts are kept in the dark as to these matters." (8) The EP also called the parliaments of member states to investigate these paramilitary organizations. However, only Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland pursued parliamentary investigations in this regard. With the exception of an Italian parliamentary report in 2000, (9) since then the Gladio story has otherwise practically disappeared from public scrutiny.

The initial, yet short-lived, curiosity after the revelation of the Gladio story led to a vast amount of journalistic accounts in different European languages. (10) One of the early accounts is an outstanding three-part BBC documentary, Gladio, which was originally aired in 1992. Directed by Allan Francovich, it provided insight to Gladio-linked false flag terrorism in Cold War Europe with special reference to the "Strategy of Tension," the anti-leftist terror campaign in Italy during the 1970s. Nevertheless, the Gladio affair did not hold the media's attention for very long, and one had to wait even longer for scholarly treatment of the subject.

That silence, however, was broken in 2005, when Swiss academic Daniele Ganser published "NATO's Secret Armies" (11) and reinvigorated the discussion on the Gladio affair. Although his conclusions are found to be too ambitious given the sources and evidence available, (12) Ganser has offered the most comprehensive analysis thus far by examining the stay-behind organizations country-by-country. Unlike studies focusing on individual countries, Ganser's work was an important contribution by expanding the scope of analysis to a more inclusive, general picture of Cold War Europe as a whole.

At the end of the same year, when Greek writer Kleanthis Grivas wrote an article titled "Terrorism in Post-War Europe" and accused the Greek stay-behind Sheepskin of numerous assassinations and atrocities in the past, the US Department of State felt the need to make a statement. On January 20, 2006, it published a communique that confirmed the establishment of stay-behind forces to organize paramilitary resistance against a possible Soviet invasion. Yet, it denied allegations of US involvement in Gladio-linked strikes against European civilians and criticized Ganser's and Grivas's use of Soviet sources some of which were deemed by the State Department to be forgeries: "Those researching the 'stay behind' networks need to be more discriminating in evaluating the trustworthiness of their source material" (13)

In the same period, strikingly similar to Ganser's findings, Ola Tunander from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) underlined the importance of US security concerns in the formation and operation of the Gladio networks, which he also viewed as part of the "the deep state." (14) Tunander argues that there is a formal state apparatus acting within the constitutional framework while there is also a "security state" that controls the former and defines the limits of democracy according to the interests of the hegemonic powers. This hidden state hierarchy attempts to secure political life through terror and anarchy and prioritizes security concerns over those of democracy. In Tunander's approach, the United States established a dual state system in Cold War European countries and the informal security hierarchy acted in several cases, "as in France and Greece in the 1960s, Italy in the 1960s and 1970s, Portugal in the 1970s, and Sweden in the 1980s--by carrying out or preparing for 'military coups' in order to overthrow or contain dissident governments or to influence the policies of such governments." (15)

As a recent scholarly contribution to studies on the stay-behind phenomenon, the Journal of Strategic Studies devoted a special section titled "Preparing for a Soviet Occupation: The Strategy of 'Stay-Behind'." (16) The volume, edited by prominent scholars Leopoldo Nuti and Olav Riste, covered stay-behinds in France, Italy, Norway, and the Netherlands. In comparison to Ganser's book, it takes a more reserved approach by limiting American involvement to some informal relations and takes the issue of Gladio-linked domestic terrorism more cautiously, albeit not denying its possibility.

Overall, in contrast to other international political scandals, Operation Gladio seems to have attracted suprisingly little attention within political and academic circles. Any simple search on the net would demonstrate that even former US President Bill Clinton's sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky has been subject to more intense (direct or indirect) academic studies. While one can read articles titled as...