The former commander of Turkey's land forces has been jailed pending
trial in a widening investigation of the toppling of Turkey's first
Islamist-led government in 1997, state media said on Thursday.
General Erdal Ceylanoglu, who is believed to have ordered tanks onto the
streets outside the capital ahead of the military intervention 16 years
ago, joined dozens already remanded in custody ahead of the court case.
The inquiry into the ousting of former Prime Minister Necmettin
Erbakan is part of a wider extensive judicial investigation into the
once-supreme Turkish military, whose power has been sharply curbed over
the past decade. In power since 2002, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan's
Justice and Development Party, AKP, which itself has Islamist roots,
has made curbing the military's political influence one of its main
missions, and state prosecutors have pursued officers suspected of
conspiring against current and former governments. Political reforms
in 2010 to remove the immunity of old coup leaders have given
prosecutors room to delve deeper into Turkey's history. The sight of
police seizing grey-haired former generals, unthinkable a decade ago,
has become a familiar one in Turkey in recent years. Erbakan, who
died of heart failure aged 85 in 2011, pioneered Islamist politics in
Turkey, a largely Muslim country with a secular state order, and paved
the way for the subsequent success of Erdogan's AKP. The
investigation into the events of 1997, dubbed the "post-modern coup" for
its bloodless nature in contrast to three outright coups in 1960, 1971
and 1980, has special significance for Erdogan who was a member of
Erbakan's party. Also detained overnight was retired major general
Yucel Ozsir. Their detention comes only two weeks after the jailing of
four other retired generals in connection with the coup. Turkey's
state media Anatolian said the two generals were remanded in custody
late on Wednesday after being summoned to an Ankara court along with two
other retired generals and a serving colonel who were later
conditionally released from custody. The two generals were taken to a
maximum security prison in Sincan, a town outside Ankara where
Ceylanoglu is charged with commanding tanks onto the streets during the
upheaval in 1997. While Erdogan has promoted the trials as part of
the process of ending the generals' political power, he has more
recently called for the investigations to be wrapped up more quickly and
has hit out at the lengthy pre-trial detentions of hundreds of officers
on conspiracy charges. More than 300 military officers were
sentenced to jail in September for plotting to overthrow Erdogan in
2003. Nearly 300 other people — including politicians, academics,
journalists and retired army officers — are on trial on charges of
orchestrating political violence
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