The Ergenekon case was one of a series of investigations targeting high-ranking military personnel, politicians, journalists and civil society figures accused of forming an armed organised crime empire and using their influence to attempt to overthrow Turkey’s ruling AKP government.
With the acquittal of the suspects ends a saga that has deeply and irrevocably changed Turkish history, causing deep rifts between the country’s social groups that have allowed the AKP to consolidate its power.
Hundreds of high-profile suspects were rounded up and placed in pre-trial detention for years in the Ergenekon trial, which began in 2008, and other, similar cases.
At the time, the trials were lauded by press in Turkey and abroad as a blow to the secular military officers who had guided Turkish politics for decades. As prime minister at the time, Turkey’s current president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, expressed his support for the investigations, calling himself “the prosecutor of the trial”.
The suspects were accused of forming an organisation called “Ergenekon” after a Turkic myth held dear by Turkish nationalists, and carrying out a series of operations, including false flag bombing attacks, in an effort to destabilise the country with a view to overthrowing the AKP.
Monday’s ruling declared that no such organisation had existed, therefore acquitting the 235 suspects of “forming and managing, membership of, or aiding and abetting an armed organisation”.
Suspects were always targeted in the same way, scholar and Ergenekon expert Gareth Jenkins said, with an anonymous tip-off to police followed by the recovery of digital documents during searches of the suspects’ homes of workplaces.
Much of that evidence has been discredited by forensic investigators. A famous example of the kind of flaws plaguing the trials had a Microsoft Word document that was said to contain a plan produced in 2003, but written in a font released in 2006.
The ongoing cases against activists accused of “attempting to overthrow the government” in protests in 2013, and against thousands accused of membership of or aiding terrorist organisations since the coup attempt have shown the same tactics laid out in the Ergenekon trials live on in a different form, and on a grander scale.
Over 100,000 civil servants, journalists, academics and activists have been arrested or dismissed from their positions since the coup attempt.