Ergenekon: Turkey’s conspiracy to end them all

The Turkish Trial of the Century opened last month among scenes of pandemonium (above). With 86 defendants present, proceedings were temporarily adjourned for lack of space.

The indictment against the alleged members of Ergenekon numbers 2,455 pages - the indictment of the Nazi high command at Nuremburg was less than 70 - and the defendants demanded every last page of it be read out loud. Some poor schlub of a prosecutor dutifully droned on, page after page, day after day. Arguments broke out over the appropriateness of uttering the swearwords in a courtroom.

After a week of this the defendants were so bored that the courtroom emptied out and the journalists secretly prayed for a bomb to go off, if only to relieve the tedium.

If you're trying to make sense of this, remember that Turkish politics are like the adage about the

Arabic lexicon: any given word may mean a thing, its opposite, or a camel. If that doesn't make sense, don't worry. Neither does Ergenekon.

The drama began last June when police discovered a crate of grenades in an Istanbul slum. Investigators claimed they belonged to a hydra-headed clique of ultranationalist conspirators named after a legend about the original pan-Turkish paradise. (Think Camelot.) Ergenekon, allegedly, was plotting a series of terrorist attacks throughout Turkey. They planned to use the ensuing chaos as a pretext to stage a coup and depose the governing AKP. Wave after wave of pre-dawn arrests followed.

The AKP's supporters claim that Ergenekon - apparently in cooperation with every terrorist group known to man - was behind a series of bombings previously credited to the PKK, the assassination of the journalist Hrant Dink, a shooting at the Council of State, a grenade attack on a left-wing newspaper, and several recent headline-grabbing attacks on priests. For their next act, they say, Ergenekon planned to assassinate the prime minister and murder the Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk.

The defendants reply that Ergenekon is fictitious, an excuse for the AKP to arrest its critics. "This is 100 per cent political," one defendant's lawyer was reported to have said: "It has all been cooked up by the government and by the imperialist powers, the CIA, Mossad and the Jewish lobby and the European Union to eliminate Turkish nationalism."

So who, puzzled observers may be wondering, are the real conspirators here?

Many of the accused are, if not guilty as charged, guilty of something

Many of the accused are, if not guilty as charged, guilty of something. It is hard to lament the detention of the creepy ultranationalist lawyer Kemal Kerincsiz, who has made a career of filing nuisance suits against Turkish writers and intellectuals, or Sami Hostan, known in connection with the 1996 Susurluk car crash, in which a police chief, an ultranationalist fugitive, a member of parliament, and a Turkish beauty queen-turned-mafia hit-woman wound up dead in a pile of fake passports, weapons, silencers, and narcotics.

Turkey is assuredly full of ultranationalists who are up to no good, and if the Turks are unusually partial to conspiracy theories, their country is also unusually prone to conspiracies. There have been four coups here in the past five decades. Each, obviously, was prefaced by a genuine conspiracy and all were justified by the need to preserve the nation from civil unrest. So the idea of Ergenekon is not as ludicrous on the face of it as it sounds.

But it defies all logic to believe that Ergenekon is as powerful, wide-ranging and inventively wicked as the government