ISTANBUL — The charges filed against 20 senior military officers in Turkey this week mark the most serious development to date in a series of alleged plots against the government by members of the armed forces. It all started with Nokta (‘Point’), a small weekly news magazine. In its edition published on 29 March 2007, it ran details of diaries found on the laptop computer of retired Admiral Ozden Ornek, former commander of the Turkish Navy. In them the admiral allegedly wrote of various action plans, which he purportedly discussed with many of his military colleagues, intended to undermine the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Islamist-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP). Shortly after this, Nokta’s offices were raided by the police at the request of a military prosecutor, and the magazine was closed down, never to reopen. Three months later a large quantity of grenades and explosives were discovered by police hidden in the roof of a house in Istanbul. Over the following months, these two cases were tied by state prosecutors into a much larger conspiracy they called Ergenekon. Bogged down Around 200 people, including some senior military […]