Turkish Court Sentences 70 Cadets to Life in Prison Over 2016 Coup

The revanchist mood that swept through Turkey’s politicized legal landscape taints the very notion of justice. Handing life sentences to 70 cadets over the 2016 coup is the latest proof.

As entire Turkey is locked in a prolonged political debate over the merits of troop deployment in Libya, the afterlife of the 2016 coup still continues to devour many lives on dubious legal grounds. On Friday, 70 Air Force cadets were sentenced to life in prison over the charge of coup involvement.

But for any sane observer, the legal rationale presented by judges is no less than a travesty of justice. Shifting the onus of the entire coup whose true nature still eludes us on a group of young cadets is nothing less than a blatant miscarriage of justice. Ahmet Nesin, an exiled Turkish journalist who worked hard like a self-employed sleuth to unravel the mystery surrounding the coup, dismissed the court ruling as a farce. This verdict, he reasoned, only serves to amplify the already existed suspicion over the government’s own role to facilitate the premature insurrection in a controlled fashion in order to advance its own political agenda in the aftermath of the coup.