Sebnem Arsu

New York Times

ISTANBUL — Eighty-six people, including writers, members of civil organizations and former military officers, were charged Monday with membership in an illegal ultranationalist organization and of plotting to overthrow the Turkish government.

Speaking at a televised news conference, the Istanbul chief prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, refused to give details of the case against the ultranationalist and hard-line secular organization, known as Ergenekon, because the case had not yet been formally accepted by the court.

But he said the suspects, 48 of them in police custody and the others free while awaiting trial, were charged with forming, managing and aiding the organization, which is accused of plotting a coup against the Islamic-rooted, governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP.

The 2,455-page indictment is widely perceived in Turkey as being part of a power struggle between the secular establishment, including parts of the military, and the democratically elected and religiously conservative government.

In another case currently before Turkey’s highest court, AKP and its leadership are charged with introducing religion into government and violating the secular principles on which the Turkish state was founded. Prosecutors seek to disband the party.

The possible coup emerged when a cache of weapons, explosives and illegal documents was found in the home of an ultranationalist retired military officer during a security operation 13 months ago.

Since then, several police investigations have provided information that the Ergenekon group — the name is a reference to a central Asian Turkic legend with strong nationalist overtones — had also been involved in an armed attack on a senior state court in 2006, as well as the 2007 bombing of Cumhuriyet, a left-wing newspaper in Istanbul. Both attacks were included in the charges announced Monday.

A security operation this month led to the arrests of other suspects, including two high-ranking retired generals. These suspects were not included in the indictment on Monday, but will be added in a separate filing, Mr. Engin said.

Military prosecutors have also begun an investigation into the charges against the two retired generals, Sener Eruygur and Hursit Tolon, a private news station, NTV, reported Monday. Military prosecutors demanded copies of evidence that security forces had collected from the former generals’ personal premises, NTV said.

The arrest of the two former generals has stirred controversy in a nation where the military has traditionally seen its role as protecting the secular state.

The military strongly denies any links with the Ergenekon network. It reasserts its loyalty to the secular Turkish Republic in occasional public statements.

Secularists remain suspicious of the governing party, which grew out of previous pro-Islamic parties. Some warn that the government’s policies will lead to Islamic-oriented conservatism.

Opposition parties have heavily criticized the government for appointing religious candidates to critical state positions during its almost seven years in power.

The coup investigation has coincided with the case against the ruling party at the Constitutional Court, where hearings have been held this month.

The timing of the coup indictments, as well as the harshness with which some suspects were forced from their beds after midnight for interrogation, was seen by some Turks as an effort by pro-government prosecutors to intimidate secularists.

Since the founding of the republic in 1923, military coups have removed elected governments from power three times. In 1997, the military also pressured an Islamic-leaning government to step down.

There is widespread concern in some circles that closing down the ruling party, which won more than 45 percent of the vote in the general election last year, might destabilize the nation’s economy and damage reforms aimed at leading the country into the European Union.

Bekir Bozdag, a senior AKP official, strongly denied any links between the government and the continuing investigation into the Ergenekon network.

“These are statements by those that merely aim at diverting the subject,” Mr. Bozdag was quoted as saying by the semiofficial Anatolian news agency. “Government cannot direct an investigation; it doesn’t have an authority like that.”

Some on the left see the cases as reflecting Turkey’s struggle toward democracy.

“Circles that do not trust their political power to fight against the threat of fundamentalism on a democratic platform look up to the military, as antidemocratic as their ways are,” said Mithat Sancar, a law professor at Ankara University.

“Therefore both the closure case and the Ergenekon indictment are not about whether you support AKP or elitist military, but about whether you support a law state and better democracy in Turkey,” he said.

In a separate investigation, into the armed attack on the United States Consulate last week that killed six people, Turkish authorities arrested but released Cebrail Kocanarslan, who they said had driven the gunmen to the consulate and then fled in the same car, NTV reported.

Mr. Kocanarslan still faces charges and will stand trial, the report said.

An Istanbul court formally charged one suspect late Sunday with belonging to an illegal organization.

I love my country: 
I have swung on its plane trees, I have stayed in its prisons.
Nothing can overcome my spleen
as the songs and tobacco of my country.

My country:
Bedreddin, Sinan, Yunus Emre and Sakarya,
lead domes and factory chimneys
are all the work of my people
who even hiding from themselves
smile under their drooping mustaches.

My country.
My country is so large:
it seems that it is endless to go around.
Edirne, İzmir, Ulukışla, Maraş, Trabzon, Erzurum.
I know the Erzurum plateau only in its songs
and I am ashamed
not to have crossed Tauruses even once
to go to the cotton pickers in the south.

My country:
camels, train, Fords and sick donkeys,
poplar
willow
and red earth.

My country.
The trout which likes
pine forests, best freshwaters and the lakes
at the top of mountains,
and at least half a kilo,
with red reflections on its scaleless, silver skin
swims in the Abant lake of Bolu.

My country:
goats on the Ankara plain:  
the sheen of blond, silky, long furs.
The fat plump hazelnuts of Giresun.
The fragrant red-cheeked apples of Amasya,
olive
fig
melon
and of all colors
bunches and bunches of grapes
and then the plough
and then the black ox
and then: ready to accept
everything
advanced, beautiful and good
with the joyous admiration of a child
my hard-working, honest, brave people
half hungry, half full
half slave …

1940

It gets dark at five
with clouds on the attack.
They clearly carry rain.
Many
Pass low enough to touch…
The hundred watts of our room
and the tailors’ oil lamp are lit.
The tailors are drinking linden tea…
Which means winter’s here…
I’m cold.
But not sad.

This privilege is reserved for us:
on winter days in prison,
and not just in prison
but in the big world
that should
and will
be warm,
to be cold
but not sad …

1940

The heat is like nothing you’ve ever known, 
and I who grew up by the sea-
the sea is so far away …

Between two and five
I lie under the mosquito net,
soaking wet,
motionless,
eyes open,
and listen to the flies buzz.
I know
in the yard now
they’re splashing water on the walls,
steam rising from the hot red stones.
And outside, skirting the burnt grass
of the fortress, the black-
tiled city sits
in nitric acid light …

Nights a wind comes up suddenly
and suddenly dies.
And the heat, panting like a beast
in the dark, moves on soft furry feet,
threatening us with something.
And from time to time
we shiver in our skins,
afraid of nature …

There may be an earthquake.
It’s just three days away.
It rocked Çapanoğlu Yozgat.
and the people here say:
because it sits on a salt mine,
Çankırı will collapse
forty days before doomsday.

To go to bed one night
and not wake up in the morning,
your head smashed by a wooden beam.
What a blind, good-for-nothing death.
I want to live a little longer,
a good deal longer.
I want this for many things,
for many very important things.

1940

Wednesday today - 
you know,
Çankırı’s market day, 
Its eggs and bulgur,
its gilded purple eggplants
will even reach us,
passing through our iron door in reed baskets …

Yesterday
I watched them come down from the villages
tired,
wily,
and suspicious,
with sorrow under their brows.
They passed by – the men on donkeys,
the women on bare feet.

You probably know some of them.
And the last two Wednesdays they probably missed
the red-scarfed, “not-uppishy”
lady from Istanbul …

1940

One afternoon
we sat
at the prison gate
and read Ghazali’s rubaiyat:
“Night
the great azure garden.
The gold-spangled whirling of the dancers.
And the dead stretched out in their wooden boxes.”

If one day,
far from me,
life weighs on you
like a dark rain,
read Ghazali again.
And I know,
my Pirayende,
you’ll feel only pity
for his desperate loneliness
and awful dread
of death.

Let flowing water bring Ghazali to you:
“The king is but an earthen bowl
on the Potter’s shelf,
and victories are told
on the ruined walls of the king of kings.”

Welling up and springing forth.
Cold
hot
cool
And in the great azure garden,
the eternal
ceaseless turning
of the dancers.

I don’t know why
I keep thinking
of a  Çankırı saying
I first heard from you:
“When the poplars are blooming in Ghazali,
but
the master doesn’t see
he cherries coming.
That’s why he worships death.
Upstairs, “Sugar” Ali plays his lute.
Evening.
Outside, children are shouting.
Water is flowing from the fountain.
And in the light of the guardhouse,
tied to the acacias, three baby wolves.
Beyond the bars
my great azure garden opens up.
What is real is life …

Don’t forget me, Hatçe.

1949

If instead f being hanged by the neck
you’re thrown inside
for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, and people,
if you do ten or fifteen years
apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
“Better I had swung from the end of a rope
like a flag” -
you’ll put your foot down and live.

It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
to live one more day
to spite the enemy.

Part of you may live alone inside,
like a stone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
must be so caught up in the flurry of the world
that you shiver there inside
when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.

To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
is sweet but dangerous.

Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
and for spring nights,

and always remember
to eat every last piece of bread -
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.

And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
to the man inside.

To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.

I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
ten or fifteen years inside
and more-
you can,
as long as the jewel
on the left side of your chest
doesn’t lose its luster.