Turkish military at uncomfortable crossroads

There has never been much love lost between the Turkish military and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP), which came to power in 2002.

The generals believe the AKP has a hidden agenda to subvert the country's secular system.

The AKP, for its part, sees the military as standing in the way of democratic reforms essential to Turkey's attempt to join the European Union.

But a string of allegations about coup plots by the military - and this week's arrest and formal indictment of seven senior military officers, including four admirals, a general and two colonels - have brought these tensions to a new level.

They raise fundamental questions about whether peaceful cohabitation is possible between the staunchly secular military and a governing party with Islamist roots.

And for Turkey's Western allies, they raise troubling questions about where the country could be heading.


Ataturk's legacy


Opinion polls routinely confirm that in a country where politicians are widely seen as corrupt and self-serving, the armed forces are Turkey's most trusted institution.

But for the role of the army after World War I - when under the leadership of the republic's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, it won the independence struggle - modern Turkey would not exist.

Moreover, the generals and their allies in the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the media, see the armed forces as the ultimate guardian of Ataturk's legacy.

The army has intervened to overthrow elected governments three times since 1960 - four, if one includes the so-called "post-modern coup" of 1997, in which it forced from office the country's first Islamist prime minister.

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To wage a war of attrition against the AKP, which has already won two convincing election victories, could simply ensure it wins a third.

There is no credible political rival on the horizon.

Besides, the current chief of the Turkish general staff, the widely respected Gen Ilker Basbug, says coups are a thing of the past.

Still clinging to its traditional role as guardian of the nation, but aware the tide of history is moving against it, the Turkish military finds itself at an uncomfortable crossroads.