by Nat da Polis

With the conviction of the leaders of the secret organisation, whose aim, the court ruled, was to destabilise the government, the Kemalist Era has come to an end. Now, Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism has no one to block its path. This represents the revenge of a traditional Turkey whose new ideology combines elements of the old Kemalism with political Islam in opposition to the existing military-secularist complex.

Ankara (AsiaNews) - As the verdict against 275 people, military and civilian, was read one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of modern Turkey, the 'Ergenekon affair', has come to a close.

According to the prosecution, a secret organisation had plans to destabilise the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan through a series of subversive actions (including the murder of the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew). During extensive investigations, some 500 people, mostly military, were arrested on charges of trying to overthrow Erdogan and his administration.

Yet, many observers cannot but view the whole trial process as an attempt by Turkey's Justice and Development (AKP) government to weaken the power of the country's civil and military bureaucracy by associating the accused with the military's past penchant for coups.

Indeed, for Köksal Şengün, the judge who first heard the case, there were "no direct links with the acts for which they [the accused] have been charged". The fact that he was taken off the case is a sign that the trial had taken a very political turn.

What is more, many saw the decision to impose heavy fines and a life sentence on General Ilker Basbug, former head of General Staff of the Turkish Armed Forces, as a victory for Prime Minister Erdogan against the country's powerful military establishment, guardian of the Kemalist vision of the Turkish Republic.

The latter was built on the notion of a benevolent state, a legacy of Ottoman times, combined with hyper-nationalism and secularism. In Turkey's Kemalist state, secularism did not however entail a separation of state and religion, but rather the subordination of religion to the state.

Following the republic's establishment, the state forcibly brought Islam's various schools under a single banner, that of "One race, one nation, one language". For non-Muslim communities, that meant being methodically ethnically cleansed.

Under Kemalist rule, Turkey's 'Western' model meant putting Islam under the thumb of the state, like everything else, without democratic checks and balances. As part of the system, Turkey's Armed Forces would play a key role in cracking down on an attempt to deviate from the norm.

In its long history, the Kemalist system has been based on all-powerful state agencies. For writer and journalist Stavros Lygeros, Kemalism sought to subjugate religion for ideological as well as practical reasons. Under the old Ottoman system, Muslim clerics and confraternities had been the pillars of the regime centred on the power of the sultan, who was also caliph, i.e. head of the worldwide Muslim community. Now both clerics and confraternities would be subordinated to the state.

However, far from Turkey's cities, in the more remote parts of the country, most Turks had submitted to the new Turkish Islamic state after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, but they had not truly accepted it.

After various attempts to raise their head, foiled time and time again by various military coups, the more religious segments of Turkish society got their revenge with Erdogan, whose growing power reached its apex in the 2011 election when he was able to win over large segments of the urban middle classes tired with military-bureaucratic establishment.

However, Erdogan's neo-Ottomanism is not a revival of the old Ottoman system but rather a blend of Kemalism and political Islam. Over the past few decades, some Kemalists and Turkey's Islamists have found more common ground. Islamists have also been more open to economic liberalism at the expense of Kemalist Turkey's traditionally statist economy.

Whichever way the appeal process will go, what is certain is that the ''Ergenekon trials' mark a turning point in Turkey's history, driving a last nail into the coffin of Kemalism. At the same time though, it also represents the start of a new struggle against the new regime and its ways of conceiving and exerting power as evinced by the ongoing fight over Istanbul's Gezi Park.

Announcing what was to come, Orhan Pamuk, Turkey's Nobel Prize winner, noted that all these decades, since the founding of the republic, the military's grip on power was never left unchallenged. Now the same is in store for the newly all-powerful provincials who seized the Kemalist citadel.

• turkey
• ergenekon
• trials
• ottomanism
• military
• kemal
• pasha
• ataturk