‘Unarmed’ we intervene, unnoticed we remain: The deviant case of ‘February 28th coup’ in Turkey

When a military staged an intervention during the Cold War, students of civil-military relations could quite easily tell if it was a coup d’état. This no longer seems to be the case. The reason may be the regnant understanding of coup d’état as a violent (bloody), swift, and extralegal/extra-constitutional seizure of power by first and foremost military officers or members of state apparatus after a long time of secret planning. This article takes stock of political complexities surrounding coups in our times by studying the nationally and internationally neglected case of February 28th (1997) coup process in Turkey as a ‘deviant case’, based on newly-revealed military documents as primary sources and several previously unstudied memoirs by army officers of the period. It argues that the February 28th coup was deliberately stretched over a long process, it was violent but not bloody, was staged almost openly through ‘theoretically constitutional political operations’ and psychological warfare against the elected government. Several select ‘civilian’ groups from the media, judiciary, trade unions, and non-governmental organisations were happily enlisted by the military as active participants in the coup caravan and without them as unique and pioneering a coup as the February 28th could not be executed. © 2015 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies