As we have become accustomed to encountering actions that lay waste to democratic and fair judgments, it had crossed our mind that a ferocious and raving circle could take things this far. However, we did not dwell on the possibility, saying, “No, they wouldn’t dare such a thing.” Expecting this much from those who resorted to a midnight e-memorandum, those who provoked a certain segment of society to take to the streets while heaping all sorts of insults on the other segment, those who invented the problem of the “367 requirement” -- at the cost of contravening the law -- just to keep Sezer as president and those who tried to prevent the general elections by attempting to engage the country in a war in 2007 cannot be considered unreasonable. However, we are only human, and we are innately predisposed to looking at future possibilities optimistically, and we thought that this segment, however enraged it may be, would not dare to draw the country into a political turmoil and chaos it could not handle, thinking that they were on the same ship as us. But today what we understand from their efforts to have the ruling party shut down is that we have been a bit too optimistic.
It’s really questionable to what extent those who have opened a closure case against the AK Party on grounds that it has become a center of anti-secular activities are actually secular. Doesn’t secularism entail being at an equal distance from all faiths? Shouldn’t it be the religious minorities that should be the most content with those calling themselves secular with this understanding of secularism? Of course, it should. But is this the situation in Turkey? Of course not! Don’t you think that it is really interesting that the segment of society most feared by Turkey’s various religious minorities is the neo-nationalist secularists, who perceive secularism as entailing animosity toward anything religious and who have become the strictest xenophobes?
We should still analyze the mood of this despotic and fierce minority that has adopted an utterly repressive and primitive understanding of secularism. As people stepped up their democratic demands in recent years and as they have become more successful in carrying to power their expectations and demands, this secularist minority started suffering consecutive humiliating defeats. This rabid minority, which has always adopted a stance against the will of 80 percent of the population, has gotten used to employing every sort of instrument to disregard and cast a blight on the public will. This primitive and anti-democratic attitude has sometimes manifested itself in the form of the military’s intervention in the political sphere, other times in the relentlessly unfair repressiveness of university rectors and, as seen in the most recent example, occasionally in the form of judicial organs turning into political/ideological instruments by violating the boundaries of the law.
This disgruntled and grumpy minority, which we can also call the “old elite,” apparently sees the judiciary, which can disregard rights and laws when it is “necessary,” as the sole instrument with which to perpetuate their hegemony over the people, having finally concluded that military interventions backfire sooner or later and that the despotic influence of university rectors will fade over time. For this reason, although the immediate connotations of “judiciary” in the world are rights, laws and justice, the situation is different in Turkey. Go and ask an average Turk in the street if you want. They will tell you that their confidence in judicial organs and the justice they are supposed to provide has been seriously shaken because of their extremely political and arbitrary decisions.
The Turkish judiciary, which seeks to establish a despotic “judiciocracy” by pressuring democratic institutions or by directly shutting them down, stopped fulfilling its function of providing justice a long time ago. The judiciary we are talking about is one that has the gall to easily acquit semi-military armed organizations that devise plans to assassinate the prime minister. It never takes action against any conspiracy or movement that targets civil political and democratic institutions. It doesn’t move a muscle for taking the necessary legal steps against retired army generals who twice attempted to stage a coup to bring an end to the constitutional order. It condones all the anti-democratic initiatives that undermine the public will and harm public interests. However, it goes to the bitter end to fight and punish those who try to prevent such anti-democratic initiatives. Just the controversial Şemdinli case alone would be enough to prove our claim.
When we view events from this perspective, is Minister of Culture and Tourism Ertuğrul Günay, who we know to have always acted within the boundaries of democracy and reason, even when he was in the Republican People’s Party (CHP), not right in saying, on the subject of the closure case, “It saddens me to understand and see that those who don’t want Turkey to develop have infiltrated very important and key posts”?
Günay’s statement is as true as the reality of the betrayal perpetrated against this nation by those who have infiltrated the posts in question.
