The structure of the republic was so that the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) would be the guardians of the regime, ready to intervene at any time they saw a deviation from the centralist and tutelary system that put the bureaucracy in charge of the administration of the nation. The judiciary would watch over the political class that would emerge out of the election process, which increasingly reflected public will and was never seen as a criterion of legitimacy by the ruling bureaucracy. The heads of the judicial organs (high judges) would be appointed by the president. And the TSK would keep an eye on who is elected president of the country. (Many of our presidents have been of military origin.) The CHP, until the 1950s, offered the mantle of public endorsement to this monolithic body where the separation of power -- although a constitutional dictum -- never was. The CHP represented the unity of the state-party-nation in a corporatist arrangement where the ruling groups replaced politics and popular will.The separation of the state and the society (nation, as often alluded to) was firm and presented as the nature of statecraft. The existence of separate military judicial organizations, with the power of litigating civilians and violating the rule of law, and the principle of a “natural judge” was never questioned. Or better, such matters were never allowed to be questioned because it was deemed to be anti-military and tantamount to treason. You would end up in a military court and would be sentenced to long years of imprisonment.
However, Turkish society did not remain put as the bureaucracy wanted it to be. As the level of education, contact with the outside world, affluence and political participation and consciousness rose and social classes proliferated, the need for a more responsive and functional political system arose together with the need for a legal system to match it. The Justice and Development Party (AKP) is the product of this need and change. It neither reflects the mentality of the old elite nor the interest of narrow social groups they represented. The AKP reflects the expectations and the will of a wide variety of social classes that were either not represented or nonexistent prior to 1950. That is why this party is the representative of change, though it harbors conservative parochial and peripheral groups on the whole. Its change-oriented stance is not necessarily of its making, but rather the exigency of the situation and social groups who chose not to remain in a frozen system that neither represented nor included them.
It is obvious that the Turkish political system has to be rendered more pluralistic and popular and more in tune with the rule of law, where class or group privileges do not allow unaccountable enclaves to survive. This would begin with the replacement of the military-made Constitution of 1982, which ensures the authoritarian and tutelary character of the regime. A reform program would follow, ending the two-tier character of the Turkish judicial system that allows the military to remain outside civilian litigation (meaning rule of law). This legal bifurcation has legitimized military coups and military suzerainty over the regime and left Turkey outside the European circle of law and political maturity. So the recent legal change that allows for the prosecution and litigation of military personnel who have engaged in illegal political activities (such as attempting or engaging in coups) in civilian courts is very important and is just a beginning.
What we see today are the birth pangs of a new system with new political and legal criteria that will unleash the energy of the nation, which has been heretofore halted by the straightjacket of a “republicanism” that was virtually a bureaucratic oligarchy. Obviously this change will be resisted by the military and the judiciary as well as the CHP, which derives its status less from popular will but more from the guardianship of the status quo and the support of the old elite who defend their positions as guardians of secularism. Yet, forces of change emanate from both the spirit of the times and the long inhibited will of the Turkish people. If Iran wants to be the Turkey of today, the Turkish people want to reach the future that was denied to them. We are indeed witnessing interesting times. Although it may be interesting, it may also not be as pleasant as we want it to be.
