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| Turkish Military Plot Uncovered | ||
| 2009-12-17 | ||
| Chilling allegations emerged last month of a detailed plot by Turkish naval officers to perpetrate threats and violence against the nation's non-Muslims in an effort to implicate and unseat Turkey's pro-Islamic government. Evidence put forth for the plot appeared on an encrypted compact disc discovered last April but was only recently deciphered; the daily Taraf newspaper first leaked details of the CD's contents on Nov. 19. Entitled the "Operation Cage Action Plan," the plot outlines a plethora of planned threat campaigns, bomb attacks, kidnappings and assassinations targeting the nation's tiny religious minority communities -- an apparent effort by military brass to discredit the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Dated March 2009, the CD containing details of the plot was discovered in a raid on the office of a retired major implicated in a large illegal cache of military arms uncovered near Istanbul last April. Once deciphered, it revealed the full names of 41 naval officials assigned to carry out a four-phase campaign exploiting the vulnerability of Turkey's non-Muslim religious minorities, who constitute less than 1 percent of the population. A map that Taraf published on its front page -- headlined "The Targeted Missionaries" -- was based on the controversial CD documents. Color-coded to show all the Turkish provinces where non-Muslims lived or had meetings for worship, the map showed only 13 of Turkey's 81 provinces had no known non-Muslim residents or religious meetings. The plan identified 939 non-Muslim representatives in Turkey as possible targets. "If even half of what is written in Taraf is accurate, everybody with a conscience in this country has to go mad," Eyup Can wrote in his Hurriyet column two days after the news broke. The day after the first Taraf report, the headquarters of the Turkish General Staff filed a criminal complaint against the daily with the Justice Ministry, declaring its coverage a "clear violation" of the laws protecting ongoing prosecution investigations from public release. Although the prime minister's office the next day confirmed that the newly revealed "Cage" plot was indeed under official investigation, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan criticized Taraf's public disclosure of the plan as "interfering" and "damaging" to the judicial process and important sectors of the government. But when the judiciary began interrogating a number of the named naval suspects and sent some of them to jail, most Turkish media -- which had downplayed the claims -- began to accept the plot's possible authenticity. To date, at least 11 of the naval officials identified in the Cage documents are under arrest, accused of membership in an illegal organization. They include a retired major, a lieutenant colonel, three lieutenant commanders, two colonels and three first sergeants. The latest plot allegations are linked to criminal investigations launched in June 2007 into Ergenekon, an alleged "deep state" conspiracy by a group of military officials, state security personnel, lawyers and journalists now behind bars on charges of planning a coup against the elected AKP government.
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| Posted by: Anonymoose |