The Prayer Bead Investigation

"The Twin Cases" are still haunting Turkey.

Now we have no doubt that the first case about the banning of AKP is political and this is totally natural because it is all about a political party.

But the second case, which is actually about a spoilt plan of a military coup, has become political as well and this is abnormal. The AKP government started to use some prosecutors and police chiefs to pressure the political opposition in a case which should ideally be based on penal laws and be restricted with those who can be indicted by sound evidences.

However, this is not we see in this case.

Imagine the prosecutor who counts his beads -prayer beads- for two hours while interrogating a journalist, relying on evidences like irrelevant fax messages, asking "the suspect" questions about why he has been photographed once with a university rector who opposes the government.

Imagine the police officer who had detained Sinan Aygün, the President of Ankara Chamber of Commerce. After finding 2.5 million Euro in Aygun's personal vault at his home (a reasonable amount of money for a leading businessman who had recently sold one of his shops in Ankara), the police officer had shouted mockingly:

"You always claim that you are an admirer of Atatürk, but we didn't see any Atatürk picture on the banknotes that you have in your vault."

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Maybe these are enough to prove that the Ergenekon investigation is a covert operation by the government, being operated not through honest law-enforcers, but through the extensions of ideological and religious groups inside the judiciary and the police.

We should see the different government reactions to the Twin Cases through this lens.

The recent show of hypocrisy from Dengir Mir Mehmet Firat, AKP Vice President, sums it up very well:

On May 4th, Mr. Firat said that the case against AKP "is harming the country and those who brang it to the Supreme Court should be prosecuted and penalized."

And this is what Mr. Firat said on July 1st about the Ergenekon case and the questions on the unlawful -and somehow brutal- detainments during the investigation:

"Everbody must respect judicial decisions."