'Balyoz case has weakened Turkish armed forces'

The army received a serious blow in terms of losing its well-educated cadres and human capital due to the 'Balyoz' case, which terminated the careers of hundreds of staff officers, including generals and admirals, says veteran journalist Sedat Ergin who holds a journalism award for investigating the case The "Balyoz" (Sledgehammer) military coup plot case was a grave miscarriage of justice, according to veteran journalist Sedat Ergin, who has written more than 70 articles about the legal proceedings that lasted nearly 5 years.

While all 236 suspects were acquitted March 31, the case has inflicted grave damage upon the Turkish army. "The cadres of the Turkish Armed Forces have been liquidated through the butchered law," said Ergin, the editor-in-chief of daily Hürriyet.

You are one of the few, if not the only journalist, to have read nearly all the existing documents including the indictment on the Balyoz dossier. When you examined the case, what was the general picture you encountered?

 The problem with Balyoz is that there are two kinds of evidence; the first group consists of a planning seminar conducted by the 1st Army in March 2003. There is no suspicion about their authenticity.
The planning seminar is accepted as a trial for a coup in the indictment.

The second group consists of digital evidence. They are about the plans and implementation of the coup and consist of tasking army members [expected] to take part in the coup; these lists are about who will do what during the coup.

If you look at the first group and ask whether the seminar was a trial for a coup, I am not convinced that this was a preparation for a coup.

But when I look at the speeches made during the seminar and the...