Turkey faces more trying times

As alleged coup plotters stand trial, Turkey's leading human rights lawyer remains cautious about the outcome of her campaign for justice.

Eren Keskin, the lawyer, believes Turkey has a long way to go on the path of change.

ISTANBUL // Never afraid to voice inconvenient opinions, Turkey's leading human rights lawyer, Eren Keskin, has been speaking out for years against the political power of the military in her country. Now, some of the people she has criticised are facing justice for an alleged coup attempt against the government.

But it is too early to celebrate, Ms Keskin says. Sitting in her office in a quiet street off Istiklal Caddesi, or Boulevard of Independence, Istanbul's main shopping prospect, Ms Keskin said this week that although the trial against the alleged coup plotters was a positive development, "Turkey will not turn into a truly democratic country in the next two years. Prosecutors can only go up to a certain point".

Ms Keskin was referring to the so-called Ergenekon trial in a prison outside Istanbul. State prosecutors are trying to prove that some hardline secularists, among them former generals, serving officers and policemen as well as lawyers, journalists and academics, formed a secret organisation called Ergenekon that tried to bring down the government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the prime minister. Several dozen people have been standing trial since last autumn, with 50 defendants expected in the dock this summer.

Some of the accusations included in the charge sheet against Ergenekon sound familiar to Ms Keskin, 49. She has campaigned for years, with limited success, to get military officers convicted for what she says are crimes committed in the Kurdish region. Instead, she has been taken to court herself numerous times for denigrating the military or the Turkish nation. Twenty-one court cases are under way against her, she said. In at least one, she could lose her licence to practise law if convicted.

In a country that has seen four elected governments ousted by generals since 1960, efforts to hold members of the army accountable for alleged wrongdoings are a highly sensitive issue. Ms Keskin has represented women who say they have been raped by soldiers and has worked on cases of people who disappeared in the Kurdish region in the darkest days of the conflict between the Turkish army and the rebels of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, who took up arms for Kurdish autonomy in 1984.

One of the military officials that Ms Keskin gathered information on was Levent Ersoz, a former general who was on duty when many suspected PKK supporters disappeared without a trace. Human rights activists and relatives think they were killed by security forces. Gen Ersoz is a key suspect in the Ergenekon case. "We had a file on Ersoz as early as the year 2000," Ms Keskin said. "Back then, no one was interested; there were one or two little stories in the papers at most. Today, it's different." The Ergenekon trial marks the first time that high-level members of the military face charges of plotting to overthrow the government, leading some observers to hail the trial as a victory for democracy and others to criticise what they call mudslinging.

This week, the Ergenekon investigation was widened yet again when police raided offices of leading academics and made several arrests. Mr Erdogan's opponents say the investigation has turned into a witch-hunt. An opposition leader, Deniz Baykal, called the latest arrests a sign that Mr Erdogan's governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, was conducting its own "coup d'état" against political foes.

For all the controversy surrounding the Ergenekon trial, Ms Keskin said the court procedure was unlikely to uncover the true dimensions of the actions of Gen Ersoz and others. "He conducted a real terror regime down there," she claimed. "Is it possible that this went on without the military leadership noticing it?" According to media reports this week, Gen Ersoz warned he could "tell all" unless the army leadership took steps to protect him. Ms Keskin said the army was trying to portray some former officers such as Gen Ersoz or Veli Kucuk, another ex-general and Ergenekon suspect, as "bad", while shielding the military leadership from being dragged into the investigation.

There was no public pressure from within Turkey to make the trial go all the way, she said. For all her doubts about the trial, Ms Keskin said: "This process will not revert again. It will not be quick, but the path of change has started." [e-mail]