Turkey’s 94-year-old former president Kenan Evren is due to go on trial on Wednesday to answer for his leading role in the country’s last coup, more than three decades after he seized power. Evren and his co-conspirator Tahsin Sahinkaya, 86, will try to justify their decision to oust the civilian government on September 12, 1980, and establish a brutal military regime which was accused of widespread human rights abuses. The pair are in poor health and they could end up being cross-examined in their hospital beds rather than appearing in the dock at an Ankara high court. The military, which has long seen itself as the guarantor of secularism in Turkey, has staged three coups — in 1960, 1971 and 1980 — as well pressuring an Islamist-rooted government to relinquish power in 1997. But the 1980 coup was the bloodiest of them all. Hundreds of thousands of people were arrested, about 250,000 were charged, 50 were executed, dozens more died of torture and tens of thousands were exiled. Evren and Sahinkaya are the only members of the military junta that seized power in 1980 who are still alive and their trial is seen as another episode in the current government’s campaign against the once untouchable top brass.
