It took some time, but now it won’t be long anymore before the lawsuit begins against the military junta behind the 12 September coup in 1980, the bloodiest takeover in Turkish history. For many years the responsible generals knew themselves protected by article 15 in the constitution, which ruled out their prosecution. The outcome of the referendum September last year brought an end to article 15, causing prosecution to become possible at last.
Retired General Kenan Evren was the leader of the 1980 junta. In a rest home for retired generals somewhere along the Aegean shore, he has dedicated himself to painting nudes and landscapes over the last years, but this carefree pastime seems to have come to an end. Recently prosecutor Murat Demir has been appointed by the chief prosecutor in Ankara to lead the investigation in a lawsuit against him. Demir will deal with the more than 1000 criminal complaints filed against Evren and his fellow generals since the referendum.
Demir says he will first gather evidence, before he has Evren and the others summoned for a statement. However, he has to hurry up. Two generals involved in the 1980 coup passed away already, while Evren has reached the age of 93 by now. Moreover, the other two still living generals of the 1980 junta, former Air force Commander Tahsin Sahinkaya and former Navy Commander Nejat Tümer, are not much younger. So when it comes to time, Demir does not have the luxury of the prosecutors in the ‘Operation Sledgehammer’ probe. That means the lawsuit against the much younger militaries, which have not perpetrated a takeover like Evren, but are accused of having planned one in 2002. Demir sees himself confronted with a much tighter time schedule than his colleagues. If he does not want to prosecute three deceased generals, he has to speed things up. Another complicating factor is that Evren made it quite clear already that he will commit suicide rather than being dragged before a judge.
Demir’s focus is on the period between 12 September 1980, the day of the coup, and November 1983. So his investigation is not aimed at those who were paving the way for the takeover during the seventies. Like Paul Henze, the station chief of the American intelligence service CIA. Although Henze left his post just before the coup to become security advisor of American President Jimmy Carter, he has often been mentioned as the dark force behind the 1980 coup. Henze instigated much of the political violence in the years before the takeover. Not an unimportant contribution, since the chaos following on political violence was the main argument for the generals to take control. The fascist Grey Wolves, the Counter-Guerrilla unit and the national intelligence service MIT were the operational forces in the creation of this violence, but it was CIA puppet master Henze who gave the orders. The testimony of a Grey Wolve on a later date says it all: ‘With the provocations by the MIT and the CIA the ground was prepared for the September 12 coup’.
Jimmy Carter phoned Paul Henze after the American President had been informed about the events in Turkey. ‘Your people have made a coup!’, Carter said. Henze confirmed with great enthusiasm: ‘Our boys have done it!’ Later on Carter explained: ‘Before the September 12 movement [sic], Turkey was in a critical situation with regard to its defenses. After the intervention in Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy, the movement for stabilization in Turkey came as a relief to us’. The takeover did not come as a total surprise for Carter however. This appears from a statement by his National Security Advisor Zbigniev Brzezinski made before the takeover: ‘For Turkey a military government would be the best solution’. Read more È
