Word: ergenekon
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...some observers, these inconsistencies suggest an even murkier authorship for Sunday's bombing. Earlier this year, after a yearlong investigation, state prosecutors arrested a total of 86 people - including military officers, journalists and prominent businessmen - for alleged membership in the so-called Ergenekon network, a secret ultra-nationalist militia...
...when Sunday's attack came a day before a top court convened to decide whether to ban the governing party for anti-secularism, and just two days after another court decided to take up the case against the Ergenekon defendants, the timing struck many as significant. "Call me paranoid," says Cuneyt Ulsever, columnist for the mainstream daily Hurriyet. "I think the bomb was Ergenekon at work. It was telling us that they are still here." That seemed to be the angle the PKK itself was taking when it blamed Sunday's attack on "dark forces...
...There is yet a third option being discussed, one that merges the two: that the attack was carried out by renegade PKK militants functioning as terrorists-for-hire - perhaps for operators like those fingered in the Ergenekon indictment. "My impression is that this attack was carried out by subcontractors," Sedat Laciner, director of Turkey's International Strategic Research Organization, told the NTV news channel. "It looks like it was planned by a group who infiltrated the PKK. As an organization, the PKK is weakened. It has become open to this kind of infiltration...
...subvert the Turkish state? On July 14, Istanbul's top prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, gave one grave and tantalizing answer. He announced indictments against 86 people, including military officers and prominent journalists, for allegedly "attempting to overthrow the Turkish government by force." The "Ergenekon" coup plotters apparently named their hard-core nationalist group after an idyllic valley evoked in the Turkish people's pre-Islamic founding myth. The prosecution claims they were out to unseat the Islamic-leaning government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan by sowing chaos to provide a pretext for the army to step...