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Trial Is Latest Round In AKP Attack on Military

Tulin Daloglu writes that the current trial of former military leaders is another sign that the AKP’s democratization agenda is really about curtailing any threat from the military.
A man looks at portraits of people who were executed, disappeared or died in jail during military rule after a 1980 coup, as protesters demonstrate in front of a courthouse in Ankara April 4, 2012. Thousands of mainly leftist protesters gathered outside the court, waving flags and shouting slogans demanding justice and the prosecution of more than just the coup ring-leaders. More than 30 years after the September 12, 1980 military takeover, an Ankara court began hearing the case against 94-year-old Retired

The Justice and Development Party (AKP)'s 2002 rise to power as Turkey's first Islamist-based, single-party government, ending a long period of coalition governments, came as the US was responding to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Since then the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with revolutionary changes in the Arab world, have thrown the region into turmoil. A political and economic disorder persists as actors in the region and from afar jockey to shape their preferred futures.

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