Events were held across Türkiye on Thursday to remember the victims of the Sept. 12, 1980 coup. The coup, which followed a decade of political turmoil, ended political murders and other incidents but thwarted the country’s democratic process and paved the way for more coups in the following decades.
The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), which lost its supporters to executions by a military junta, held events in several provinces, including in the capital, Ankara, where its members gathered at Ulucanlar, a notorious junta prison where Idealists affiliated with the party were subject to lengthy torture.
Erdal Solak was one of the Idealists who was incarcerated at Ulucanlar as well as Mamak, another junta prison in the Turkish capital. “They did not discriminate; they were beating you with batons, whether you are left-wing or right-wing,” he told Ihlas News Agency (IHA) on the anniversary of the coup. Solak was a political activist since his high school years and was jailed several times before the coup, only to be released in 1984 after a trial over his membership for what he calls an “imaginary political group concocted by putschists.”
The coup and process leading to it is known for mass detentions of some 650,000 people and trials where 230,000 people were tried. Courts controlled by the junta sentenced 517 people to death and 50 among them were executed.
Hakverdi Satılmış, for whom prosecutors asked for a death sentence, visited Ulucanlar, now converted into a museum, ahead of the coup's anniversary and recounted his times in the prison. Like Solak, Satılmış was jailed both in Mamak and Ulucanlar before and after the coup. "We had no energy left because of constant tortures. We were heading toward death fast. They then transferred each of us to different prisons," Satılmış, who was incarcerated in the same trial with 220 other defendants for his links to the MHP. He says the torture did not end in the decade that followed the coup. "Guards would beat newcomers before they are admitted into the wards. Every prisoner was forced to spend time in cells for days, regardless of the charges against them. Prisons had nothing, neither human rights nor hygiene," he told IHA.
The coup was planned months prior by Chief of General Staff Kenan Evren and his aides in the army, and was nicknamed “Operation Flag.” The putschists had originally planned to carry it out on July 11 but postponed it when the Süleyman Demirel government won a vote of confidence.
Nevertheless, the “National Security Council” of the putschists was still determined to grab power and launched the coup in the early hours of Sept. 12, 1980. They scrapped the Constitution and annulled Parliament before shutting down nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Political parties were shut down while top politicians, from Süleyman Demirel and Bülent Ecevit to Necmettin Erbakan and the MHP’s then-leader Alparslan Türkeş, were sent into exile and banned from politics.
On Oct. 9, 1980, the first death sentences were carried out. Necdet Adalı, a left-wing activist accused of involvement in the killing of right-wing people and Mustafa Pehlivanoğlu, an “ülkücü” (Idealist), a right-wing activist, were hanged on the same day. Both were in their 20s when they were hanged and both were implicated on similar charges, though without any substantial evidence. Their hangings marked the beginning of the putschists’ policy of equal treatment for people of different ideologies. “We hanged one from the left and one from the right,” Kenan Evren famously said years later while speaking about the hangings. For him, it was an “unbiased” approach. Among those from the “left” was Erdal Eren, a 17-year-old boy accused of killing a military police officer before the coup. The country’s Court of Appeals, the highest judiciary authority, overturned the death sentence for Eren twice but the National Security Council ignored the verdicts and ordered his hanging. Though the execution of underage convicts was against the law, the council came up with a solution: changing Eren’s age on his ID, thus making him eligible for the death sentence. Eren was hanged at a prison in the capital, Ankara, on Dec. 13, 1980. “Should we not hang them but feed them, then?” Evren infamously said while defending Eren's hanging.
Evren and Tahsin Şahinkaya, the only other surviving coup leader, were tried in 2012 for their role in the putsch. They were sentenced to life but never served a term as both were in ill health and died in quick succession.
