Actor / 01The military wing and the West Working Group
The engine was the General Staff; the real innovation was the West Working Group (BÇG), created in April 1997. With no legal basis whatsoever, it profiled politicians, journalists, businesspeople, foundations, religious communities and tens of thousands of ordinary citizens against the criterion of "reactionary tendency". The profiles were operational, not merely informational: they fed directly into public-service purges, tender and credit decisions, and military council expulsions. The indictment in the 2012 February 28 trial placed BÇG documents at the centre of the case as proof of the coercive character of the process.
The era's prominent names include Deputy Chief of Staff Çevik Bir, General Staff Secretary-General Erol Özkasnak, and Chief of Staff Hüseyin Kıvrıkoğlu, remembered for the "thousand years" dictum. For their prosecution and their 2024 pardon, see the Timeline.
Actor / 02The media: rule by memo
February 28 is one of the darkest chapters in Turkish press history. Major media groups carried briefing-room notes to next morning's front pages, used military-sourced memos ("andıç") to target journalists and public figures, and caricatured the pious wholesale through staged scandals of the Fadime Şahin type. The June 1999 Gülen cassette campaign was the mechanism's most refined product: recordings of unclear provenance and contested integrity, served simultaneously to multiple channels inside a prefabricated "plot to seize the state" frame, with the verdict delivered in headlines before any court convened.
Communications scholar Erkan Yüksel's Medya Güvenlik Kurulu ("The Media Security Council", Anadolu University, 2004) was among the first academic studies to systematically document the synchrony between NSC agendas and newspaper front pages the empirical basis for calling the process a "media-assisted intervention".
Actor / 03Big capital and the professional bodies
The "initiative of five" TÜSİAD, TOBB, TİSK, Türk-İş and DİSK provided the civilian storefront of pressure on the government. While Anatolian capital was blacklisted under the "green capital" stamp, the big media-finance groups were rewarded with state-bank credit and privatisation tenders. February 28 was, among other things, a market-sharing operation.
Actor / 04The judiciary and the Higher Education Council
Footage of judges and prosecutors applauding General Staff briefings announced the suspension of the separation of powers. The RP and FP closure cases, Erdoğan's poem trial, the State Security Court proceedings against Gülen and the disciplinary purges of thousands of civil servants were all conducted in that climate. YÖK carried the education front the coefficient rule and the headscarf bans and the "persuasion rooms" at university gates became the era's emblem.
Actor / 05The politicians: resisters, submitters, winners
Erbakan chose resistance and was removed. Çiller oscillated; the DYP dissolved. Mesut Yılmaz filled the vacuum the process created. Ecevit stood out in the 1999 cassette storm by defending the movement's schools abroad. The most durable gain accrued to the younger Milli Görüş cadres who were not the direct target: inheriting the victimhood narrative, the AKP took single-party power in 2002. For the analysis of that paradox, continue to The Victimhood Dividend.