By Christopher Torchia
Have Turkish institutions been infiltrated by a shadowy "deep state"?
The slaying of a prominent ethnic Armenian journalist has renewed debate about whether a network of renegade agents within the state, driven by hardline nationalism, is targeting reformists and other perceived enemies.
Skeptics say the claim fans conspiracy theories and only creates a bogeyman for Turkey's ills.
Whatever the truth, the investigation into the murder of Hrant Dink - who was loathed by nationalists because he urged Turks to recognise the mass killings of Armenians during World War I as genocide - is under scrutiny despite its seeming success. Seven suspects, including the teenager who allegedly pulled the trigger and the man accused of supplying the gun, have been arrested since the killing two weeks ago.
Uneasy questions are being raised about who holds the levers of power in a nation where tensions between secularists and Islamists, and liberals and rightists, have created deep faultlines in society.
The consensus among many government critics is that the plot to kill Dink involved more than a few nationalists, and that a professional group with considerable resources at its disposal may have played a role. Police say they have uncovered no evidence suggesting a wider conspiracy, and investigators have promised to follow all tips despite scepticism about how aggressively they will do so.
The idea of "deep state," or "derin devlet" in Turkish, has been around for decades. One definition says it is a clandestine group within the security and intelligence services, as well as the state bureaucracy, that resists change, sometimes violently.
Another theory says it is not a single group, but a set of beliefs that espouses the centrality of the state in politics, and whose protectors include the judiciary and the educational system. The expression is so common that Turks often joke about it, blaming some unforeseen development in the workplace or daily life on the "deep state."
Little hard evidence has emerged that a "deep state" exists, but even Turkey's prime minister has given the idea credence.
"The 'deep state' has become a tradition. It is a term that has been used since the Ottoman period," Erdogan told reporters on Sunday aboard an airplane bound for an African Union summit in Ethiopia.
"We can describe it as gangs inside a state organisation, and this kind of structure does exist. Our state and our nation have paid a high price because we have not been able to crack down on such networks," the daily Zaman newspaper quoted the prime minister as saying.
The topic is so murky that Yeni Safak, an Islamist newspaper, once addressed the cloak-and-dagger concept with a reference to the signature introduction of fiction's most famous spy, James Bond. "My name is State, Deep State," read the title of a 2005 column.
The prominence of "deep state" in the Turkish imagination exposes concerns about the accountability of the military and other institutions in a nation that seeks to seal its modern status by joining the European Union, a bid that is virtually on hold because of a dispute over divided Cyprus.
The military has staged three coups in modern Turkey, and remained influential after ceding control to civilian governments. Supporters view it as a guardian of secular values, a vital tool in the fight against separatist rebels in Kurdish-dominated areas, and the champion of Turkish Cypriots whose government is unrecognised by any other nation.
Dink, who was shot outside his Istanbul office on January 19, had been prosecuted under a broadly defined law that bans the denigration of Turkish identity, and he had suggested that judicial rulings reflected behind-the-scenes allegiance to the state rather than the rights of citizens.
"The great force, which was just there to bring me down and which let its existence be felt at all stages of the case with methods unknown to me, was again behind the curtain," Dink, 52, wrote obliquely in one of his last columns in Agos, the weekly Turkish-Armenian newspaper that he founded.
Dink said he received constant threats for his espousal of minority Armenian rights, and he criticised top authorities for apparent indifference.
"Other opponents of the bureaucracy have suffered a similar fate," said David L Phillips, a friend of Dink who served as chairman of the Turkish-Armenian Reconciliation Commission and is now executive director of The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity, based in New York City. "The 'deep state' has a history of eliminating its opponents."
One case that fuelled speculation about the "deep state" was the 1996 Susurluk scandal, named after the town where a car crash revealed alliances between state officials and mobsters. Passengers who died in the wrecked Mercedes included Istanbul's No. 2 police officer and a fugitive hit man.
A probe confirmed suspicions that officials were using radical nationalists and criminals to intimidate or kill perceived enemies. A 1997 government report accused some police and politicians of hiring hit men to target journalists, Kurdish rebels and Armenian activists since the 1980s.
Erdogan pledged an investigation "at full speed" into Dink's killing and his government removed the governor and police chief of Trabzon, the city on the Black Sea coast that is home to suspects in the murder.
A year ago, a Turkish teenager shot dead a Roman Catholic priest in Trabzon; investigators believed that attack was linked to Islamic anger over the publication in European newspapers of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
Erdogan, a moderate whose Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party is distasteful to some in the secular military, has indicated that authorities need to tackle more than just youthful triggermen likely to get relatively lenient sentences if prosecuted as minors.
But Justice Minister Cemil Cicek was ambivalent in an address to the Ankara Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday.
"It is not a legal definition, but a political one," Cicek said. "Whether there is a 'deep state' or not depends on where you stand in politics."
Nationalists have speculated that reformists targeted Dink to create a liberal backlash. The killing has stirred the debate on possible amendments to Article 301 and, according to the conspiracy theory, could make it easier for U.S. lawmakers to pass a resolution urging the U.S. government to recognise the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire as genocide. - Sapa-AP