The truth of Ergenekon

As information about the network of relations of the Ergenekon structure, reaching in every direction, and about its manner of relations is poured out, a question comes to me: What extra do we actually learn thanks to this information compared with before it came out?

Look, for example, at the information from two branches that the newspaper Taraf has for days been publishing as the activity ledger of the Ergenekon structure. In one there is blood-curdling information about the background of the murders, recorded as "perpetrator unknown," that the JİTEM structure kidnapped and executed within the scope of its activities in the Southeast in the nineties. Even the gossip about this information would lead to social explosions in a normal country; in our case, these are realities that, although everyone with some knowledge of the matter has known them since the nineties, we have successfully gone on acting as if we did not know.

In the other, there are the shameful scandal records, in every respect, of the meetings that Gen. Şener Eruygur, former Commander of the Gendarmerie General Command and now an Ergenekon detainee, had with Mehmet Emin Karamehmet during the periods when he was extremely busy with coup preparations. The subjects that Gen. Eruygur discussed with Karamehmet, the boss of the newspapers Akşam and Güneş, of Show TV and Skyturk TV, and the owner of the Turkcell telephone network, and the details that have come out today, hold little surprise when one looks at the policies that Karamehmet's media group followed in this period. An exaggerated ultranationalist and closed-door broadcasting policy, which could not be reconciled by any calculation with the rationality required by investment activities, with enterprises immersed in the thoroughly globalized economic structure of the world, could only have been pulled off with such sycophantic assurances or coercions.

In fact, neither Karamehmet's nor any other businessman-media boss in his position had anything in the broadcasting policy they followed in that period that was compatible with their own objective situation. This behavior of those in this position was a typical example of "behavioral disorder." It was extremely clear that they were under a wrong influence that caused this behavioral disorder. So even if these meeting records had not come out, everything was just as clear.

Everything is like in the famous cave allegory of the Greek philosopher Plato… We also know that what is reflected in the media is not real, but it is not that what is reflected has no relation at all to reality. Moreover, what is projected on the cave walls are such distorted shadows of reality that this distortion itself damages any belief in the shadows from the outset. That is why in the Ergenekon process the realities that emerge behind the shadows do not cause much astonishment or excitement.

Now, in the trial process, another shadow play is being attempted to be staged. The noise of the traffic of messages that has begun to take place among different centers from the information poured out as progress is made in the case is the icing on this play… The bombs and munitions abandoned throughout Turkey, in parks, in the gardens of apartment buildings called Ergenekon, here and there, are surely not only the result of the panic of certain people to get rid of evidence of their crimes. The more logical way of trying to get rid of evidence of crime should be to destroy it out of sight. Yet it is desired that these weapons be seen somewhere and entered into a certain record. One possibility that comes to mind is that these weapons are on official charge and are in fact being used as a means of message by being registered against a certain target.

The exchange of messages is not limited to this example, of course. In İbrahim Şahin's statements involving the upper levels of the General Staff in the process there was a clear message, which those who needed to read it read at once and gave their own answers to. Was this the answer Şahin expected, or did that answer find its counterpart within his own question? For now we cannot know that. But I think a more striking exchange of messages took place when the conversation Gen. Eruygur's wife had during a doctor's visit at GATA was recorded by ambient eavesdropping and served up. It seems impossible in every respect that the prosecutors running the Ergenekon case recorded such an eavesdropping and served it up. In this incident one senses the traces of a reaction against the zeal to load all the responsibility onto Veli Küçük and those below him while somehow trying to extricate oneself from the Ergenekon process. Does the fact that the reactions to this ambient eavesdropping and its serving up, which under normal conditions should have been recorded as a complete legal scandal, remained so feeble show that this message too was somehow perceived?

This parting of ways that has formed between the detained and non-detained defendants of Ergenekon leads them to turn on one another as operational targets.

The dialogue between Karamehmet and Eruygur showed, perhaps with a disgust that turns our stomachs, the filth in the kitchen of the shadow-realities that were being projected onto us under the "permanent coup order." This state of the kitchen is the very truth of Ergenekon.

Unless our stomachs are turned enough by this sight, unless we vomit the soup cooked in this kitchen, we cannot grasp the essence of this truth.