Mysterious goings on in Turkey, as a shadowy group of arch-nationalists with alarmingly close links to the army and government is arrested for conspiring to murder those less patriotic than themselves. Among their key targets was novelist and Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk recently escaped a prison sentence himself, having been accused of insulting the Turkish state by speaking out against the Armenian genocide. The group is also suspected of involvement in the murder of ethnic Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in Istanbul last year. Indeed, soon after Dink’s funeral a right-wing extremist who was implicated in the shooting warned Pamuk to “wise up.” Do not be surprised if it emerges the group was also behind atrocities attributed to the PKK.
One of the conspirators, the former major-general Veli Kucuk, is the first officer for decades to be questioned by police. Progress? Perhaps not – the same weekend as the arrest of the ultra-nationalists, a political science professor was given a fifteen-month suspended sentence for criticising their hero, Ataturk.
