Its seven members include the minister of justice and his permanent undersecretary and their participation is necessary before the final roster can be published. This usually happens in June -- but this year the schedule has still not been posted and a lot of people think they know the reason why.The HSYK stands accused in the public mind of playing politics with the judiciary. The Moriarty on the committee, is someone called Ali Suat Ertosun and he has been reported holding clandestine meetings with suspects of the Ergenekon trial. The suspicion is that the HSYK is trying to change the composition of the courts and shuffle the prosecutors so the prosecution of this huge conspiracy accused of trying to pave the wave for a military coup will collapse. There are grim precedents for this. Legal investigation of many notorious cases in the past where the stage agents or military were apprehended doing dastardly things have failed when the HSYK pulled the plug on the court officials overseeing the proceedings.
Of course not everyone would be unhappy if the Ergenekon case were to collapse. It is a long and complicated trial and many of the accused are spending a lot of time in prison on remand while the courts painstakingly unravel the conspiracy. The longer the trial goes on, the more often well-know and once respectable suspects are rushed to the hospital with this condition or that, the more embarrassing the whole affair becomes.
What the Ergenekon trial has done is shone just how slowly the wheels of Turkish justice turn. Ali Suat Ertosun was known even before the word “Ergenekon” ever entered the Turkish headlines as the figure who oversaw the euphemistically entitled law enforcement operation “Return to Life” in 2000. This was a military-style assault that brought to an end a nationwide prison strike in which 32 inmates died. At the time, I spoke to the father of one of those who died. He said that his son (named Alp Ata Akçayöz after the founder of the Turkish state) had been deliberately shot from above as he tried to flee down a staircase from a cloud of suffocating gas. However, the father -- who happened to be a state prosecutor -- was denied access to the official autopsy. By coincidence I also interviewed another prisoner who said he witnessed Akçayöz's death. He himself had been blinded during the operation and beaten senseless when apprehended so that for days he could not even talk. We spoke some months after the incident while he was on his way for an eye examination some several months later. “Look what those fascists did to him,” the gendarmerie officer said in sympathy with his prisoner as he led him off in chains.
So when this government promoted Ertosun to the HSYK and when this president approved the appointment, they knew exactly who they were getting. The interesting thing about Akçayöz and the prisoner with one eye is that they hadn't actually been convicted of anything. They were, like the Ergenekon suspects, still on remand awaiting a final verdict in their trial. Akçayöz, according to his legally minded father, was confidently awaiting an acquittal.
I have spoken over the years to people who were arrested as lycee students for putting a radical poster on the wall, who then spent several years in prison awaiting trial, became radicalized, convicted of some offence while in jail and, in their late 20s, trying to cope with the world and with Korsakov Syndrome (an impairment of memory) acquired while on prison hunger strike.
At the moment there are some 200 children under the age of 16 in prison in Turkey awaiting trial for throwing stones during demonstrations in the Southeast. It was this government which passed legislation that they be tried in adult criminal courts rather than juvenile courts. Of course there are more than 2,000 other adolescents (between the ages of 12 and 15) incarcerated while they await trial. The average length of time spent in prison for such children before sentencing is 18 months.
It seems to me that much of the criticism of the HSYK is from those braying for blood in the Ergenekon trial. Of course it is important that justice be seen to be done in this case and that there should be no tampering with the impartiality of the court. However, it is important that justice be done in every other case and in every other trial.
