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Turkish Court Hands Down Sentences in Coup Plot Turkish Court Hands Down Prison Sentences in Coup Plot
(about 11 hours later)
IZMIR, Turkey — A local court on Monday sentenced at least 10 defendants out of 275, including a former army chief of staff, to life in prison for their role in plotting a military coup to overthrow Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and acquitted 17. IZMIR, Turkey — A Turkish court sentenced dozens of high-ranking military officers, politicians, journalists and others to long prison terms on Monday for plotting to overthrow the government in a long-running case that captivated the nation for its audacity, laid bare the deep divisions within Turkish society between Islamists and secularists and earned sharp criticism from the international community over issues of judicial fairness.
After five years in one of Turkey’s most politically charged cases to date, the court, in a prison complex in Silivri, a western Istanbul province, sentenced some of the suspects, including Mustafa Balbay, an elected member of Parliament from the opposition Republican People’s Party, to prison terms ranging from 6 months to 129 years. The court issued arrest warrants for 11 suspects who had been tried without being arrested. The highest-profile defendant, Ilker Basbug, a former chief of staff of the military, received a life sentence. Three members of Parliament were given long terms, and at least 20 journalists were also sentenced.
Security forces fired tear gas at protesters after the announcement of the verdicts, which included life sentences for Ilker Basbug, who served as military chief of staff under the current government; Veli Kucuk, the lead suspect in the trial and a former brigadier general suspected of founding Jitem, a wing of the Turkish gendarmerie; Hursit Tolon, a former army commander; Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who has filed complaints against 40 writers for “insulting Turkishness,” and Tuncay Ozkan, a journalist. Mr. Ozkan was additionally sentenced to more than 11 years in prison on other charges, his defense attorney said. As judges read out the verdicts one by one, protesters who had gathered outside the courthouse and prison complex in Silivri, a coastal town west of Istanbul, faced tear gas fired by members of the security forces.
Mr. Balbay was sentenced to 34 years and 8 months in prison. Dogu Perincek, chairman of the left-wing Workers’ Party, received a 117-year prison term, Sinan Aygun, another oppostion Parliament member was sentenced to 13 years and 6 months, while at least seven journalists were handed prison terms between 6 months to 22 years, news outlets reported. The verdicts, which are subject to appeal, came as Turkey is increasingly divided between the followers of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-inspired government and those who are loyal to the country’s old secular elite or those — especially the young — who are casting about for a new voice in politics. Those fissures were exposed in June during huge and sometimes violent street protests that began over urban development plans in Istanbul, but similar divides had been exposed during the court case, which dragged on for five years.
Turkey has faced harsh criticism for having a poor record of media freedom. The Paris-based organization Reporters Without Borders has referred to Turkey as “the world’s biggest prison for reporters.” The group ranked Turkey 154th out of 179 countries, behind Iraq and Russia, in its 2013 World Press Freedom Index. The case was initially seen by many as an important move by Mr. Erdogan’s government to engineer democratic reforms by taming the military, which has carried out three coups in modern Turkey’s history and had been regarded as the guardian of the secular system laid down by Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Many democracy advocates in the country have grown weary of military interventions in politics, and hailed the trial, at its start in 2008, as a major step toward civilian rule.
Families were denied access to the final hearing, and state officials blocked access to the Silivri courthouse. Roads leading to the town were closed in the early morning, preventing buses of protesters from reaching the area. But as the case grew and ensnared journalists, academics and prominent government critics, it came to be seen as a politically motivated attempt at silencing dissent. It also carried the notion of revenge and class resentment, analysts said, because Mr. Erdogan and his religious followers represent a class that was marginalized under the old military-dominated order. Mr. Erdogan himself was once imprisoned for reciting a religiously inspired poem in public.
Television images showed security forces erecting barricades around the prison premises and at checkpoints on the Silivri highway, as well as images of antigovernment protesters in an open field far from the prison premises waving flags behind a security cordon. “In these cases, they tried to create a thornless rose garden by silencing opposition and intimidating patriotic people with secular principles,” said Celal Ulgen, a lawyer representing 16 defendants, including a journalist, Tuncay Ozkan.
Protesters tried to block the main highway around Silivri after verdicts were announced but were confronted by security forces, who fired tear gas in fields near the prison complex, the Ulusal Kanal TV station reported. Now, he said, “it’s impossible to talk about a justice system free of politics, or public trust in justice.”
Lawyers criticized the security measures as a violation of human and legal rights, and insisted the trial was unfair with the courts refused to examine evidence that they said would show close links between the police, the prosecutors’ office and judges in an unlawful attempt to silence political opponents. With at least 20 journalists sentenced to prison terms between 6 and 34 years, the case also illuminated Turkey’s poor record on media freedom. Reporters Without Borders, based in Paris, has referred to Turkey as “the world’s biggest prison for reporters” and ranked Turkey 154th of 179 countries, behind Iraq and Russia, in its 2013 World Press Freedom Index.
“In these cases, they tried to create a thornless rose garden by silencing the opposition and intimidating patriotic people with secular principles,” said Celal Ulgen, a lawyer representing 16 defendants, including Mr. Ozkan, the journalist. Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, a member of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, said in a televised news conference: “We are not at the point of liking or not liking the verdict. After all, it is a judicial verdict, and we have to abide by it.”
“After the Ergenekon trial, it’s impossible to talk about a justice system free of politics, or public trust in justice,” Mr. Ulgen said. “We are not those that celebrate convictions or applaud arrests,” he continued. “There is a court verdict, and everyone has to respect it.”
On Saturday, in what critics said were pre-emptive security measures before the verdict, the Istanbul police raided several locations, including offices of a neo-nationalist youth group, and detained at least 20 people who called for public protests against the trial. Others sentenced on Monday included Mustafa Balbay, an elected member of Parliament from the opposition Republican People’s Party, who was given a prison term of 34 years and 8 months; Kemal Kerincsiz, a lawyer who has filed complaints against at least 40 writers for “insulting Turkishness,” including the Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk; Veli Kucuk, the lead suspect in the trial and a former brigadier general suspected of founding Jitem, a wing of the Turkish gendarmerie; and another opposition member of Parliament.
The court case, named Ergenekon for a mythic valley that is the moniker of the clandestine organization to which the defendants are accused of belonging, is at the center of Turkey’s many fissures. It has looked into charges listed in 23 indictments that took up thousands of pages and involved 275 suspects, 66 of whom were under arrest, all accused of terror links. On Monday, families were denied access to the final hearing, and state officials blocked access to the Silivri courthouse. Roads leading to the town were closed in the early morning, preventing buses carrying protesters from reaching the area.
In more than 320 hearings, judges questioned many prominent Turkish figures, including Mr. Basbug, a former chief of staff in the army, NATO’s second largest, on charges of links to the Ergenekon organization, claims that he strongly denied. Television images showed security forces erecting barricades around the prison premises and at checkpoints on the Silivri highway, as well as antigovernment protesters in an open field far from the prison waving flags behind a security cordon. On Saturday, in what critics said were pre-emptive measures before the verdict, the Istanbul police raided several locations, including offices of a neo-nationalist youth group, and detained at least 20 people who called for public protests against the trial.
Mehmet Haberal, 69, an acclaimed professor of medicine and a deputy of the Republican People’s Party, was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison, however, he was acquitted on another set of charges. Mr. Haberal will be released with 16 others until a court of appeals examines his sentence. When the case began nearly five years ago, it had all the elements of a fantastic and conspiratorial spy novel: nearly 300 military officers, politicians, journalists and others were accused of being part of a clandestine organization whose roots stretched back to the days of the Central Intelligence Agency’s dirty work in Turkey during the cold war.
Many democracy advocates in the country have been weary of military intervention in politics after at least three coups that toppled governments in the past, and had hailed the trial as a major step toward civilian rule when it took off in 2008. The modern incarnation of the “deep state,” according to the thousands of court documents, was an underground organization called Ergenekon, named for a mythical valley, that had plotted to overthrow Mr. Erdogan’s government by sowing chaos in the streets and carrying out assassinations. The case summoned forth the ghosts of Turkey’s past, when the military lorded over civilian governments and the possibility of a coup was omnipresent in the country’s politics. That, in turn, underscored how much the Turkish state had changed under Mr. Erdogan, who through this case and others has secured civilian authority over the military.
But after dozens of indictments were merged into one, grouping many government critics from various backgrounds, including elected members of Parliament, academics, intellectuals and active or retired military personnel, the judicial process was soon labeled a government-backed witch hunt to intimidate opposition against Mr. Erdogan, and a reprisal of religious conservative groups that had been oppressed by the secular establishment in similar ways in the past. But Mr. Erdogan, who has been in power more than a decade and is Turkey’s longest-serving prime minister, is facing increasing resistance. Nearly half of the country did not vote for him. Those opponents found their voice in the street protests in June and could again be galvanized by Monday’s verdicts. That would present a new test for Mr. Erdogan, who is widely assumed to be planning to run for president next year.
Critics of the case said that evidence presented against some prominent members of society were digitally and factually forged. “It is highly possible that today’s court verdicts will prompt further soul searching, especially among opponents that became more politicized after the June protests,” said Ilter Turan, a professor of political science at Bilgi University in Istanbul. “Some might have plotted a military coup, but there were such evident violations of defense, of the right to a fair trial, that the public will widely consider this a political trial rather than a fair one.”
Prosecutors said the suspects were involved in planning and encouraging criminal acts such as extrajudicial killings, bombings and assassinations, in an effort to pave the way for a military coup against Mr. Erdogan’s government.

Sebnem Arsu reported from Izmir, and Tim Arango from Baghdad. Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.