The former head of Turkey's armed forces, General Ilker Basbug, was in custody on Friday on charges of trying to overthrow the government, a stunning move by the judiciary against a military that was once the ultimate power in the land. Basbug, who retired in 2010 as chief of Nato's second-largest army, is the most senior officer to be caught up in the Ergenekon case, a long-running crackdown on the military and the secularist establishment.
He was charged overnight and jailed, crowning the fall from grace of the once invincible military. The General Staff chief was Turkey's most powerful man until Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's government gradually eroded army influence in the last decade.
Erdogan managed the transformation thanks to overwhelming public support for his government, now in its third term. Over the past couple of years Turks have become used to the sight of military officers being sent to jail, but the move against a former chief was unprecedented and will stir emotions. "It's a first. It's never happened before," Murat Yetkin, editor of the Hurriyet Daily News, told Reuters. "The country has to live through this thing."
Police said they first unearthed evidence five years ago of an ultra-nationalist network dubbed "Ergenekon". Authorities accused it of conspiring to create an atmosphere of chaos that could pave the way for military intervention to unseat the AK Party government because of the Islamist pedigree of its leaders. Erdogan denies that his socially conservative party harbours any religious agenda.
Hundreds of people have been arrested in the Ergenekon investigation, including military officers, academics, lawyers and journalists, though many people are sceptical about the existence of the shadowy netwwork described by prosecutors Basbug was taken from an Istanbul courthouse in the early hours of Friday for a health check before being taken in a police convoy to Silivri prison, some 80 km (50 miles) west of the city, where hundreds of defendants in the Ergenekon case are being tried in a specially built courtroom.
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