Coup plots formed during fever of suspicion

"Enough. No more. The army's morale is broken," said General Ilker Basbug, the chief of staff of the Turkish army, but the humiliations continue.

Another 50 officers were arrested last week for suspected involvement in a 2003 plot to overthrow the government, including the current chief of the navy, a retired air force chief, and a former deputy chief of the army.

The plot, code-named "Sledgehammer", was revealed when the newspaper Taraf began publishing information gleaned from 5000 pages of stolen army documents that came into its hands early this year.

This comes on top of the Ergenekon scandal of 2008, in which several hundred people including generals were arrested for belonging to a secret organisation of that name that was also planning a coup.

In fact, however, the threat of a coup has been declining for years.

The information is only coming out now, but the actual coups were planned for 2003.

In at least one case, the army high command intervened directly to block it.

And today's army chief of staff has accepted the arrest of dozens of generals and admirals with nothing more than the above plea.

Turkey has been a democracy for half a century, but it was a rigidly secular democracy (in a 99% Muslim land) that allowed no reference to religion in its politics.

If any politician hinted that he had "Islamic" leanings, he faced prosecution.

If he became prime minister, he faced a military coup - four have occurred since 1960.

The reason lay in Turkey's history.

The Ottoman empire was an Islamic state, but in the end, all the Muslim subject peoples became nationalists and rebelled against Turkish rule.

Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) concluded after World War 1 that to survive, Turkey must become a strong, modern state - which at the time meant only one thing: it must become a fully European society.

Islam was a potential weapon in the hands of those who wanted to resist that change, and therefore it must be rigorously excluded from politics.

By the start of this century, Ataturk's goals had been achieved.

Turkey was a powerful state with a higher average income than several of its Balkan neighbours, and more people than all of them combined.

It was also a democracy in most respects, and even a candidate to join the European Union.

The ban on religion in politics survived, and so did the (unwritten) right of the army to enforce that ban.