Last year, more than 300 members of the Turkish military (including retired Turkish Army Gen. Çetin Doğan, above) were sentenced to up to 20 years in prison in a massively controversial trial involving an alleged coup plot to overthrow Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan. It was the largest conviction of military personnel in history. And now the detainees might be set free. Turns out maybe all the evidence against them wasn’t exactly true, or even real, making their imprisonment sticky by international standards.
A recent statement from the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention might blow the case open. It declares “the detention of all 250 Sledgehammer defendants to be in violation of international law.” And it says the detainees have experienced a “deprivation of liberty,” regarding three articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Turkey’s Court of Appeals is now reviewing the so-called Sledgehammer trial and the fate of the 250 defendants still in prison.
“This is the first time we are facing a statement like this, at least the first time since we’ve been in power,” says Adnan Boynukara, the senior consultant for the Turkish Ministry of Justice. “Most of the controversy surrounding the Sledgehammer trial is technical details, and I can’t tell if this statement will help the appeals court understand it better. But the appeals court should examine all evidence and hear defense lawyers.”
It all started with a suitcase that appeared at the offices of the independent Turkish newspaper Taraf. The suitcase was filled with documents allegedly disclosing an attempted military coup plan from 2003 to overthrow the pro-Islamist Justice and Development Party government.
Taraf was a strong critic of Turkey’s military and its influence on politics, and the military had already staged four coups in the previous 50 years. The paper ran the story and revealed “Operation Sledgehammer.”
The alleged plot includes downing a Turkish military jet in Greek airspace, bombing two mosques, targeting Armenian intellectuals and arresting liberal journalists to set the groundwork for a coup—but it never actually happened.
The defendants in the Sledgehammer case always argued that the probe was politically motivated and the trials were unjust. Prime Minister Erdoğan is known for curbing the military’s influence on politics. Since his election in 2002, there have been five separate investigations into alleged military wrongdoings. Accusations range from espionage to establishing a prostitution ring. But Sledgehammer overshadows them all.
The U.N. group’s opinions are advisory, not binding. According to U.N. protocol, the Sledgehammer statement was delivered to the Turkish government two weeks before it reached the defense. Turkey’s government was silent about the July 6 dated document, but the defense released it as soon as they received it on July 22.
“[The statement] should and must have an impact on the decision,” says defense lawyer Hüseyin Ersöz. “Even though it is nonbinding, it will show if rule of law exists in Turkey.”
Dani Rodrik of Harvard University
The statement indicates that Turkey has violated Articles 9 and 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as Articles 9, 10 and 11 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Those articles are related to arbitrary arrest and detention, right to a fair trial and failure to provide periodic review of the decision. The statement also requests that Turkey provide compensation to the detainees.
“The Sledgehammer trial was not aimed at uncovering real crimes and punishing true culprits,” explains Harvard economics professor Dani Rodrik, whose father-in-law is one of the alleged plotters of the coup. “These are witch hunts directed at presumed opponents of the government. Staging the trials around fabricated evidence has the advantage that you can control the boundaries of who gets dragged and who walks free.”
Rodrik and his wife, Harvard professor Pınar Doğan, read the original indictments and say they found many inconsistencies. Their research notes many examples of forgery in the evidence presented to the court. Several institutions mentioned in the so-called coup documents from the suitcase did not even exist in 2003. A hospital called Medical Park Sultangazi in the documents did not acquire that name until June 2008 (it was still known as Sultan Hospital in 2003), and a license plate given for a Range Rover SUV was not registered until 2006. Also, some of the documents were typed using Calibri, a Microsoft font introduced in late 2006.
For Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey expert affiliated with Johns Hopkins University who has written extensively on the Sledgehammer trial, it all comes back to that suitcase. “The media’s role was especially crucial in perpetrating it,” he says. “Many of the things reported, such as bombing of mosques, are not even in the indictment. The problem with these cases is that once absurdity begins, there’s no end.”
Taraf did not respond to Vocativ’s request for comment.
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