Turkish Courtroom Chaos Delays Trial of Alleged Coup Plotters

The start of a long-awaited trial billed as an attempt to expose Turkey's so-called "deep state" was delayed yesterday after the court was overwhelmed by nationalist demonstrators and journalists. In an atmosphere of rising tension, the hearing in the town of Silivri, near Istanbul, was adjourned for several hours after the judges decided the tiny courtroom was too overcrowded for the trial to begin.

As hundreds of Turkish flag-waving supporters of the 86 accused gathered outside, lawyers inside complained that the crowded conditions prevented them from working properly. When the trial eventually started several hours later, it was adjourned until Thursday.

A hardline nationalist-secularist group called Ergenekon is accused by prosecutors of plotting a series of violent acts designed to provoke a military coup and unseat the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development party (AKP) government. The 2,455-page indictment accuses the group of planning political assassinations and bombings to create chaos and fear.

It is alleged that the group bombed the offices of the secularist newspaper, Cumhurriyet, and tried to make it look like the work of Islamist extremists. A list of purported assassination targets is said to have included the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Nobel prizewinning novelist Orhan Pamuk and the former armed forces chief of staff, Yasar Buyukanit.

Among the accused are a retired army brigadier general, the leader of an ultra-nationalist party, academics, mafia-linked figures, a secular newspaper columnist and Kemal Kerincsiz, a nationalist lawyer responsible for a spate of prosecutions against prominent writers, including Pamuk, for "insulting Turkishness" under Turkey's notorious Article 301.

The investigation was opened in June last year after a cache of grenades was found in a house in Istanbul.

Its scope has broadened so much that several of the key figures arrested have not been indicted for today's hearing and are expected to face trial later. These include two senior generals arrested in July - Sener Eruygur, the former head of the paramilitary gendarmerie and secretary of the pro-Ataturk Kemalist Thought Association, and Hursit Tolon, a former 1st army commander who is the most senior person linked to the investigation.

The armed forces, which sees itself as the guardian of Turkey's secular constitution, deny involvement.

The investigation's supporters depict it as an attempt to unearth unaccountable elements said to have existed within Turkey's military-security apparatus for decades and believed to be responsible for a host of atrocities, including in the long war against Kurdish militants. But critics have dismissed it as a politically motivated bid by the Islamist AKP to weaken the military and other pillars of the secular state.