Caption contest, anyone?

From StefanoScalia via Anonymous Arabist

 
Mustafa Ozer/AFP-Getty Images

For 86 years, since modern Turkey was founded by an Ottoman general, the Army has been the country’s most trusted institution. It has launched four coups in the past four decades, each with broad popular support. Now, fol-lowing charges against top brass for plotting a coup and organizing death squads against Kurdish activists, the honeymoon is over. A recent poll by the Ankara-based MetroPOLL Social Research Center shows 65 percent of Turks do not want the military involved in politics, even as commentators; nearly 40 percent say former top general Kenan Evren should face trial for his role in a 1980 coup. The shift in opinion is a shock for the Army, which sees itself as the people’s protector against corrupt politicians. Yet memos leaked last month appear to show Turkish officers working to subvert the Islamist-rooted AK Party government—despite its large democratic mandate. The papers reveal plans to orchestrate press smears against AK, and to invent a fake terrorist organization linked to an exiled Islamic scholar who is close to AK Party leaders. The memos may even be an elaborate fake, but they place the Army and the AK Party on a collision course. The party is fighting back by restricting the powers of military courts, and strengthening the capacity of civilian courts to prosecute military suspects. The age of the untouchable Turkish Army, and the popular coup, may be closing.