Mick Hartley

Soner Cagaptay on the latest news from Turkey:

The arrest of prominent journalists in Turkey on March 3, among them a recipient of the International Press Institute's "World Press Freedom Hero" award, is the nail in the coffin for Turkey's experiment with Islamists-turned-democrats. Included in the arrests was Ahmet Sik, a journalist whose work enabled the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, to launch the Ergenekon investigation in 2007 and pursue purported coup plotters. Sik was arrested for his alleged membership in Ergenekon.

Sound like a nightmare? Indeed. The AKP experience has become a bad dream for liberal Turks who once supported the party because of their belief in its reform platform.

I've written on Ergenekon before – the shadowy and sinister organisation that's been planning all kinds of conspiracies against the state: so shadowy, in fact, that it almost certainly doesn't exist, except as an excuse for the government to harass its critics.

Then, there is also the Ergenekon case. When the case opened in 2007, AKP watchers saw it as an opportunity for Turkey to clean up corruption and investigate coup allegations.

The case, however, has become much more than that. In a study published by the School of Advanced International Studies, or SAIS, at Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based analyst, described Ergenekon as a case that charges people "with membership of an organization which, as defined in the indictment presented to the court, does not appear to exist or to ever have existed."

Instead of prosecuting criminals, the AKP is using this fluid case to persecute its opponents. Since 2007, AKP-controlled police have taken more than 400 people into custody, including university presidents, journalists and women's rights activists, without evidence of criminal activity, only to release them without charge after a few days of harsh questioning. Following their release, most become docile intellectuals. Meanwhile, police have held some AKP opponents for years without charge — a strong signal to Turkey's intellectuals of the cost of not supporting the AKP.

Despite all this, Cagaptay manages to find some cause for hope:

The state of intimidation has turned into a nightmare. However, things could still end well. Whenever Turkey goes through a political spasm, analysts warn about democracy's collapse. Yet, Turkey has survived numerous crises in the past, thanks to the media's ability to balance power. With coup allegations, the arrest of the government's opponents, and an ongoing media crackdown, only independent media can expose these crimes. Never before has media independence been so crucial to the Turkish democracy.