Divorce Istanbul-Style Why Turkey's nasty Gulen-Erdogan fight is making for some strange bedfellows.

 

 

 

 

 

                                                        ISTANBUL — How quickly Turkey has turned.

•                                                BY PIOTR ZALEWSKI 
• Last August, after five years of hearings and indictments that ran into the thousands of pages, a Turkish court convicted more than 250 people of conspiring to topple the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Ergenekon trial, as it was called -- named after a shadowy group believed to be part of Turkey's so-called deep state -- was seen as an attempt by Erdogan to undermine his main opponent, the secular military. And it appeared to have served its purpose: The day after the convictions, Yalcin Akdogan, one of the prime minister's leading advisors, praised the verdict as "the greatest legal settling of accounts in the history of the republic."

Nearly five months later, Akdogan reversed course. Many of the officers sentenced in the Ergenekon case had actually been framed, he wrote in a December column in the Star newspaper. The real culprit, he suggested, was the Gulen movement, a powerful Islamic order suspected of setting up a large fiefdom inside the Turkish police and judiciary. "Everybody knows that those who have plotted against their own country's national army … could not have acted for the good of this country," Akdogan wrote.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/01/14/divorce_istanbul_style_erdogan_turkey_gulen_movement