Turkish Government Holds Crisis Talks As Former Generals Arrested

Turkey's political leaders held crisis talks with the army high command yesterday after a wave of arrests over an alleged coup plot provoked alarm among senior officers.

Police detained 37 people - including three retired generals and two serving officers - in raids on Wednesday, prompting the army chief of staff, General Ilker Basbug, to call a meeting with the prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Basbug later met Turkey's president, Abdullah Gul. The president also held an extraordinary meeting with the interior minister, Besir Atalay, while a high-ranking military official held a meeting with Istanbul's police chief, local television reported. News of the meetings panicked the Istanbul stock market.

Wednesday's arrests were the latest stage in a long-running investigation into a shadowy nationalist group, Ergenekon, which is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Islamist-leaning Justice and Development party (AKP) government.

About 200 people have been arrested, and 86 are standing trial, including retired officers, journalists, academics and nationalist politicians.

Prosecutors present this as an effort to root out Turkey's so-called "deep state", which is accused of a stream of atrocities and politically motivated murders. But the latest arrests have fueled suspicions that the investigation has become an AKP-backed witch-hunt against its secularist opponents.

The arrested generals included Tuncer Kilinc, who in the 1990s headed a coup that unseated the government of the pro- Islamist Welfare party, a forerunner of the AKP.

Police also searched the home of a former chief prosecutor, Sabih Kanadoglu, who had previously accused the government of seeking a "religious dictatorship" and was the architect of a court decision that initially blocked Gul's election as president by parliament in 2007.

The arrests prompted a late-night emergency meeting of the military top brass. The army, which has toppled four governments in 50 years, sees itself as the guardian of Turkey's secular system, but is thought to have reluctantly consented to previous arrests in the Ergenekon saga.

Some analysts believe that yesterday's response shows its patience may be wearing thin. Gareth Jenkins, an Istanbul-based expert on Turkish security affairs, said: "The army will have issued a stern warning to the government to back off and that this has to be the last of such arrests. Most of those arrested on Wednesday were not involved in the Ergenekon plot.

"It was just a political move, and has destroyed any hope that the probe will find the real culprits. The question is what happens next. What we are going to see is a power struggle between two fundamentally undemocratic forces using their influence in the judicial system."