The reform of the judiciary is intended to address, if not fully, the concerns of many seeking to defend their rights at the courts and for justice to be served in a country where the supremacy of the rule of law is violated by those holding the power.
The reform package on the military has been intended to narrow the Turkish Armed Forces’ (TSK) overwhelming powers in areas that do not relate to military crimes. The amended package abolishes the provisional Article 15 of the Constitution, which prohibits the trial of the members of the National Security Council (MGK) that was formed after a coup in 1980. The package also paves the way for trials of parliamentary speakers, chiefs of General Staff and senior commanders by the Constitutional Court if they commit crimes whilst in their positions.
Individual applications for complaints to be made to the Constitutional Court are intended to address Turkey’s record at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. It is currently ranked second after Russia in the number of applications to the court. To reduce the number of Turkish files going to Strasbourg further improvements in the law are also required.
Turkey’s Kurds are suffering the most from criminal penalties over remarks that are wrongly regarded most of the time as violations of laws relating to the indivisibility and territorial integrity of the nation.
The package also abolishes the ban on right to general strike, paves the way for citizens to become members of more than one union and gives civil servants and other public officials the right to collective bargaining.
The abovementioned issues should have been explained to the public so that they know what they are voting for. Instead party leaders have engaged in a fierce war of words and have been trapped in narrow politics. The latest polemic among politicians has centered on the recently declared cease-fire by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) during the holy month of Ramadan. The cease-fire is to last until Sept. 20, almost two weeks after Ramadan comes to an end.
Leaders of opposition parties have used this cease-fire as an opportunity to accuse the government of allegedly engaging in dialogue with the PKK’s imprisoned leader, Abdullah Öcalan. The aim of such destructive propaganda by the opposition parties is to reduce public support for the reform package at the referendum. Whereas, the opposition parties should have taken the declaration of a cease-fire as an opportunity to create a consensus with the public for a non-military solution to the decades-old terror problem, which could then also contribute to decreasing the grievances of Kurds in particular and citizens in general.
The 26-year-old conflict with the PKK has resulted in the deaths of around 50,000 people. Extrajudicial killings during that period, mostly among the Kurds, are estimated at around 17,000 while financial losses as a result of the war are estimated to be about $1 trillion.
Reliance on a military solution during all those years have not stopped the violence but consumed economic and human resources.
Yet politicians in the opposition on the one hand continue exploiting public sentiment as a means to attack the government that is trying to find a non-military solution to this chronic and devastating problem. On the other hand, the TSK has consciously or unconsciously provoked the violence in the absence of political directives in handling the terror problem. Now the TSK is being subjected to serious accusations of security flaws in the fight against terror.
It is a fact that every democratically minded nation seeking to solve its chronic problems will sometimes bargain secretly with illegal elements when necessary to end, in the Turkish case, the decades-old terror. It is obvious that the military methods have been unable to achieve a solution to the problem. On the contrary, they have further agitated the Kurdish population of the country.
The PKK’s cease-fire came as a political tactic to provide respite for devout Kurdish Muslims in the Southeast mainly during the holy month of Ramadan. For this cease-fire to be transformed this time into a continuous peace process, thoughtful politics by the Turkish state should be introduced at a time when the PKK has laid down its arms.
This time a light can be seen at the end of the tunnel for a solution since over 500 nongovernmental organizations, mostly from the Kurdish region, have been actively involved in calls to end the terror while urging the state to find a peaceful means to end the bloodshed.
