The effects and vestiges of this unfortunate event -- which dealt a severe blow to the progress of Turkish democracy and left behind the current Constitution, which restricts freedoms and includes many anti-democratic elements, as a legacy -- still cast a dark shadow over Turkish politics. Analysts say that if Turkey wants to be a truly democratic and civilized country, it has to settle its accounts with the perpetrators of this coup, noting that this will also prevent similar moves from being attempted in the future.Considering the fact that the improvement of Turkish democracy has been halted many times through military interventions, Bugün's Gülay Göktürk thinks the prospects of yet another military intervention in Turkey will disappear only if the Turkish military gives up on seeing itself as the “savior of the nation” and the nation also gives up on seeing it as such. “The majority of people in society should see collaboration with coup perpetrators as the most embarrassing offense,” she says. Göktürk hopes former President Kenan Evren, who staged the 1980 coup while he was chief of general staff, will reveal a list of deputies, academics, journalists and members of the judiciary who came to him and requested that he stage the coup. “If only he could do this before his death, only the names he could remember would be enough. I wish he could present us with the blackest list of our republic's history. Doing us such a favor will not absolve him of his sins, but he will have done a very useful thing in his long life,” Göktürk says.
Zaman's Mustafa Ünal complains that Turkey is the only country in the world that has yet to settle its accounts with coups, noting that Turkey has to try the coup perpetrators if it wants its democratic regime to be permanent. Recalling the fact that coup perpetrators have their signatures on Turkey's current Constitution and that even its name is the Sept. 12 Constitution, he says this shows us where to begin settling our accounts with the coup; namely, getting rid of this Constitution, which embraces the spirit of the coup. “Greece and Spain confronted coup perpetrators. Why should Turkey not do this?” Ünal asks.
“Members of the military who came to power in this country through the Sept. 12 coup have caused the greatest damage ever to this country. We have to remember this and settle our accounts with this coup if we want to be a civilized nation,” says Vatan's Okay Gönensin, who stresses that Turkey is still suffering as a result of the wrongdoings of the administrators of the coup regime. Recalling the fact that 50 people were executed, 299 tortured to death in prison, 650,000 taken into custody, 230,000 made to suffer in military courts and 14,000 stripped of their citizenship during the coup era, Gönensin says the crimes committed by the perpetrators of the Sept. 12 coup are no less brutal than crimes committed by the most tyrannical military dictators in Latin America. “Even though 29 years have passed since, we have to settle our accounts with the perpetrators of the Sept. 12 military coup if we really want to be a civilized country,” suggests Gönensin.
