SILIVRI, Turkey: A Turkish court yesterday began hearing a case against 86 people accused of plotting to overthrow the government after a chaotic opening that forced an immediate adjournment.
The judge ordered a pause within minutes after lawyers protested they could not work properly in the tiny courtroom, packed with supporters of the accused, spectators and an army of journalists.
“I have been doing this job for 50 years and never saw such conditions,” one of the lawyers said as others complained they did not have space even to use their laptop computers — the charge sheet alone is about 2,455 pages long.
The court later resumed the case, but said it would first hear the testimonies of the 46 suspects remanded in custody.
The remaining suspects will give testimony in separate hearings, it said.
The judge also ordered that a video screen be set up in an adjoining room for journalists and relatives of the defendants to watch the proceedings at the courtroom in a prison complex in Silivri, a town near Istanbul.
The case against the so-called Ergenekon group has deepened the rift between supporters of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and hard-line secularists, who see the case as a government-backed campaign to bully opponents.
The suspects were to answer about 30 separate charges ranging from membership in a terrorist group and instigating an armed uprising against the government to arson and illegal possession of weapons.
They include retired army officers, leftist politicians, journalists, members of secularist associations, academics and underworld figures.
They were charged as part of a probe into the discovery of hand grenades in Istanbul in June 2007, which is still continuing, with more suspects — some of them in jail — awaiting charges.
Scores of activists from the left-wing Labour Party, whose leader Dogu Perincek is among the suspects, demonstrated outside the courtroom, waving Turkish flags and brandishing posters of Kemal Ataturk, modern Turkey’s secularist founder. The secularist Cumhuriyet daily, whose 83-year-old chief columnist Ilhan Selcuk is also among the accused, said the suspects were indicted “without any evidence” and charged that “this is not a trial... but a political feud.” Several pro-government newspapers, on the other hand, hailed the case with almost identical headlines: “The trial of the century.” The prosecution argues the suspects instigated violence and planned assassinations to foment political turmoil in the country and topple the AKP.
