The day a coup plotter did not recognise a coup plotter

Gen. İ. Hakkı Karadayı, Chief of the General Staff of the February 28 period, responding to questions put to him after the documents published in the newspaper Taraf about February 28, together with audio recordings claimed to belong to him, seems to have adopted a line of defense that throws almost all the responsibility for the process onto Çevik Bir, then Deputy Chief. In a letter sent to Taha Akyol he said, "I never gave an order to anyone saying 'you will dismiss the writers.' I was never concerned with matters relating to writers, and I had no time to be. I did not even have time to read the press summaries put before me," thereby implicitly pointing to Bir, who worked under his command, as the address of all accusations on this matter.

Karadayı had also said some time ago that he did not know Veli Küçük. But he was not the only one who said he did not know Küçük. Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu, another former Chief of the General Staff, who in his own term of office had said "February 28 will last a thousand years," had also feigned not knowing Küçük.

In its 12th year, February 28 has emerged as a "great evil" for which even those who proudly played their roles in the process cannot take responsibility. The Genç Siviller set up a symbolic court of conscience for February 28, but the process of conviction is almost completed before there is any work left for this court.

This situation should in itself be a great lesson. Coup environments bring into play a peculiar logic of law and legitimacy that seduces even those who stand by indifferently. It is a logic that makes one see the coup itself overall, and all the legal murders committed during the coup in particular, as normal behavior. During coup processes the mind works differently, logic works differently. So much so that people compete to recount even their exploits within this process and can tell of their thefts with relish. Indeed, it appears that a kind of impulse to "show off" was very effective in the audio tapes that have come out. Evidently it did not even occur to those in the environment where the conversations took place that one day these actions might be treated as an offense.

Yet both the coup overall and many of the special treatments carried out during the coup are acts that, in normal times, would be immediately and inevitably re-evaluated as terrible violations of law. The sin of acts that do not look strange in the atmosphere of coup processes catches its perpetrators as an offense that no one would dare to take responsibility for in an environment where the ordinary logic of law has begun to operate.

For this there is no need for anyone to be in a feeling of revenge. Trying today to present Ergenekon as a revenge or retaliation against February 28 should be regarded merely as a simple and cheap defense discourse. If, in the end, everyone today can see much more clearly how great an offense what happened during the February 28 process was, the reason is only that the logic of law is operating relatively more effectively.

The April 27 coup attempt too, and the series of actions undertaken as its preparatory stages, are today evaluated differently under the increasingly remembered lens of law in the Ergenekon trial process, and of course, the alliances, collaborations, hierarchical protections and solidarities formed in the meantime all lose their meaning and function. The inability to share the spoils obtained through the coup attempt (every kind of unjust gain) can also set the coup plotters against one another.

Meanwhile, the fact that the victims of the February 28 period are today able to take their place on the social and political stage, perhaps even stronger thanks to those very sufferings, of course does not justify the February 28 interventions.

To read the fact that the AKP emerged as a result of the February 28 interventions as showing that this party is a project of this process requires understanding nothing about the nature of social phenomena. For in the end, none of the actors who took part in the February 28 process, from its lowest layer to its highest, had in their imagination or intention producing a party like the AKP; on the contrary, we understand much better today that those actors were working with might and main until the last minute to block the way to such a formation. Even a simple analysis of the discourses circulating in the network of social relations that has come to light with the Ergenekon trial process makes this situation clear.

In short, social actions often lead to the exact opposite of the intended results, and the day when the criminal does not recognize the criminal, the coup plotter does not recognize the coup plotter, comes sooner or later.