Turkey’s acquaintance with Hanefi Avci dates back to the so-called Feb. 28 Process in the late 1990s when he emerged as a brave police chief standing up to the secularist putchists and exposing their violations on the TV screen. Years later, in 2010, he was back in the headlines with a book claiming that the repressive state machine, controlled by secularist generals in the past, was now the tool of the Fethullah Gulen community. Gulenist police, he wrote, had taken control of police intelligence, purging rival colleagues along the way, and were now using their power to lay traps for political rivals.

After reading his book, it was obvious to me that Avci was not one of those hard-core secularists averse to the Gulen community because of its religious values. The concrete incidents he recounted and the sociological analyses he made on closed, tight-knit ideological communities sounded convincing to me. I became even more convinced when Avci was soon put behind bars by the same police and prosecutors he accused in the book. He was indicted for membership in an obscure Communist organization, a charge that was not only thin but actually backed up Avci’s charges that Gulenist police made things up to carry out political arrests.

Following Avci’s arrest I wrote a number of articles in his defense, which led some colleagues, who advocated a relentless onslaught on the “putchists,” to chastise me, including in a column titled “What are you doing Mustafa?”

Then, in a couple of years the atmosphere in Turkey changed. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and the Gulen community fell out, and Avci’s claims became the No. 1 topic in the pro-government media. The new political climate resulted in a sound Constitutional Court ruling that led to Avci’s release from jail in June.