" ... Kemal Kerincsiz is a Turkish lawyer. He's also the guy who tried to prosecute Turkish Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, and several other writers for “insulting Turkishness”. And he's been arrested — along with 32 others, including several military men — for being part of a massive conspiracy to commit violent acts against enemies of the state. The conspiracy is called “Ergenekon”, and the story is still coming out.
The strange thing is that I had to discover this on the blog of science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. There were articles in Reuters and the AP, but the major western news outlets seem to have pretty much ignored this. But it's quite a story:
[... ][The] investigation uncovered evidence of active plots to assassinate Pamuk, three politicians, and a prominent journalist and to stage a series of bombings in the coming year, according to reports appearing in the Turkish Press. One source, CNN Turk, has reported that Kerincsiz and twelve others have been charged with inciting people to armed revolt.
Kemal Kerincsiz was behind a number of notorious court proceedings in Turkey in recent years. In May 2005 he filed a complaint that led to the cancellation of an academic conference entitled “The Ottoman Armenians in the Period of the Declining Empire,” and when journalist Hrant Dink received a suspended sentence that same year for “insulting Turkishness,” Kerincsiz appealed seeking a harsher punishment. [This is the same Hrant Dink who was killed last year in Istanbul.]
All this happened in late January. Turkish prosecutors have clamped down hard on news leaks, so there hasn't been a lot of hard news in the last three weeks. Still, bits and pieces are emerging:
Revelations emanating from the investigation thus far have shown that many of the attacks attributed to separatist or Islamist groups or seen as hate crimes against minorities were actually “inside jobs.”
The investigation into the gang… has exposed solid links between an attack on the Council of State in 2006, threats and attacks against people accused of being unpatriotic and a 1996 car crash known as the Susurluk incident, which revealed links between a police chief, a convicted ultranationalist fugitive and a member of Parliament as well as links to plans of some groups in Turkey's powerful military to overthrow the government….
The gang is a part of a structure named Ergenekon, declared a terrorist organization by the İstanbul Chief Prosecutor's Office, an aggregation of many groups of varying sizes, many of which have in their names adjectives such as “patriotic,” “national,” “nationalist,” “Kemalist” or “Atatürkist.” Ergenekon is the name of a legend that describes how Turks came into existence…
The investigation has found that the Ergenekon phenomenon, also referred to as Turkey's “deep state,” stages attacks using “behind-the-scenes” paramilitary organizations to manipulate public opinion according its own political agenda…
~ Read more at A Fistful of Euros blog ~
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