In recent years Turkey has been moving toward becoming a country of stability, trust and progress in terms of democracy, politics and economics in its trade and commerce, in the way it is handling the effects of the global crisis, in solving problems with neighboring countries and trying to resolve all the ethnic, religious and cultural problems, which have accumulated since the founding of the republic. So, why are some people not happy about such developments and projects but rather attempt to stifle these efforts and those carrying them out?The judicial and military bureaucracy, certain business groups and media bosses are resisting any change and acting as a unified opposition front against Parliament and the incumbent government. They stymie the granting of full cultural and human rights to ethnic and religious communities, they delay legal amendments, a new constitution and Turkey’s accession to full EU membership and they block the professionalization of the military under the Ministry of Defense and Parliament.
This new opposition front wants inconsistency, instability and inefficacy in Turkey. It aims to render Parliament and the government unable to carry out their functions and thus create an artificial and suffocating environment of sociopolitical conflict, tension and chaos.
In such an environment, the deep-state elements could recapture the reins and have the full control they enjoyed previously. They want to prepare the necessary conditions for the junta to take over as stated in the records of recently disclosed junta meetings. They want the hit men of the junta and Ergenekon to terrorize, subdue and persecute all who might oppose their schemes, exclusivist privilege and unassuageable lust for power and resources. They want to continue the hegemony and tutelage of the “white Turks.” They want an inward-looking and alienated, Baathist type of rule under “a coup that would last a thousand years,” as several of their junta generals said publicly.
Their latest strategy is to urge the government and the country to go to an early election; under electoral regulations in Turkey, this means the incumbent government is dissolved, ministers in major departments are replaced and the government is not able to replace, promote or assign bureaucrats or government workers to certain key positions as they become empty. In this way, in the electoral period the deep-state elements within the judicial and military bureaucracy can eliminate prosecutors, judges and other white-collar workers as they wish and appoint those who serve their ends. As a result, the current personnel who have uncovered and grasped the leash of the deep state will be unable to prosecute the coup lovers and junta if the country goes into early elections.
All that has been accomplished toward eradicating the junta and deep state so far will be lost again. Meanwhile, the culprits will start hiding and destroying all the documents, recordings, weapons and munitions caches that they store for their plots. They will be concealed in new places for future use and apparently will disappear into thin air. Once the perpetrators and incriminating evidence have vanished, who will the judges start to prosecute? They will turn on all those who did their job honestly and who they assume to be against them.
Turkey has learned now that to achieve this outcome the junta had already planned its own government, ministers and staff to control supermarkets, banks, foreign investments and even headmasters of secondary schools; it decided, for example, who would detain more than 200,000 people just in İstanbul and in which stadiums and other private complexes. The Turkish public has been inundated with recordings and details of deep-state documents in the media. Despite all the antagonism from the opposition front, the courts are currently working on these sources, too.
Turkish opposition parties do not think or act like those in developed countries. They have never presented the electorate with a better plan or policies to serve the nation and humanity. All they offer is populist, dialectical, frivolous irrational shouting, gibberish and belligerence in Parliament and the public squares. We must wonder what their deep-state brothers and bosses have offered them in the event of an early election. Otherwise, how could the opposition parties agree to play the electoral game knowing that it will be to their utter detriment? What could they hope to gain by an interregnum that would certainly sustain and further deep-state hegemony, tutelage and fascist exclusivism?
