'I heap little cubes of sugar into the dark red tea in my tulip shaped glass and I feel right back at home in Turkey. I am chatting with an old acquaintance from Ankara in the Mesopotamian Cultural Centre near Taksim Square in Istanbul. The fact that the Kurdish Cultural Centre is named so equivocatingly is significant in and of itself because the owners are still not allowed to use the word 'Kurd' in official titles.

The centre's large windows face onto Istanbul's largest shop-lined high street, Istiklal avenue, which right now, although as packed as ever with pedestrians, is obstructed by police cars. Our window faces directly onto a narrow alleyway between two large, beautiful residential houses at the end of which the entrance to the office building of the TV station Ulusal Kana [JC1] l is seen. The police are raiding the TV channel's headquarters because of the so-called ‘Ergeneko [JC2] n' scandal which is right now shaking up the Turkish political landscape.



Ergekon is the name of a shady underground organisation whose sinister plans for a 2009 coup d'etat have just been thwarted. Apart from being assumed of being intimately interwoven with the almost mythical Turkish 'deep state' forces, it is also linked to the military and state bureaucracy. And so some assume that the recent lawsuit filed against the AKP by the Constitutional Court is simply an effort in obstructing investigations in the Ergenekon case.


This law suit is also much talked about right now. If it goes through though, it only proves what observant outsiders understood long ago: that Turkey is nothing but a military dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. Ümit, my interlocutor at this tea table, laconically analyses it in the following way:

'In the 70's the same members were part of a party called the MSP which finally got closed down with the 1981 putsch. They reformed in the Eighties as the Refah party -and not much later they got closed down again for being anti-constitutional. Now it happens all over again to the AK. Nothing much has changed in Turkey.'

 '
Despite this rather pessimistic perspective, I have heard another, much contrary opinion: Eventually the main beneficiary of this 'scandal' may turn out to be the AKP [JC3]  itself. Why bother putting through reforms if they'll be able to portray themselves in the glorious light as 'defenders of democracy' already? The AKP are very well placed to argue their way out of the whole thing by sounding off about democracy, comfortably resting on the 46% majority they won in the last elections, the sort of results which could make almost any Western European governing party green with envy.



And of course this is only the latest in a row of scandals -the past months were pregnant with them. Such a steady flow of dirty linen certainly helps divert the public's gaze from the issues that are supposed to matter this year: Economic progress and making progress in negotiations to join the European Union. .