Fifty years after the country's most infamous military coup, Turkey finally appears to be strenghening its democratic institutions.

BY ALI ASLAN | MAY 28, 2010

On May 27, 1960, Turkish military officers arrested democratically elected Prime Minister Adnan Menderes, and members of his cabinet. Menderes was placed on a trial before a military-orchestrated special court on charges of treason, and was subsequently hanged. For the last half century, Turkey has been struggling to overcome this original sin in civil-military relations.

Finally, there are some encouraging signs that Turkey has made progress in forging a stable democratic system. Turkish militarists are increasingly the subjects of legal and societal scrutiny -- despite their best attempts to turn back the clock on Turkey's democracy.

Contrary to the views of some Turkish and Western analysts, the primary struggle within Turkey is not between Islam and secularism, but rather between a militaristic pseudo-autocracy and liberal democracy.

In June 2009, the daily newspaper Taraf courageously published what the editors said was a leaked military document that included covert operations to undermine the elected Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government and marginalize its base of support. Among the tactics was the planting of weapons in the dormitories of students sympathizing with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gulen and later confiscating those weapons in order to depict the movement, which is resolutely non-violent, as a terrorist organization.

Attempting to contain the fallout from these revelations, Chief of General Staff Gen. Ilker Basbug rushed in front of the cameras and vowed the document was just a "piece of paper," setting the tone for others in Turkey's nationalist-secularist circles. To them, this could only be a fabrication of the "Islamists," who would like to discredit the military, the self-proclaimed guardian of self-styled secularism. They constantly overlooked reports submitted by top official forensic institutions in Turkey to civilian prosecutors confirming the authenticity of the document. In March, the military prosecution also concluded that the signature on the document belonged to Dursun Cicek, a colonel working for the Turkish General Staff at the time.