It was, apparently, her favorite television program. For any rogue spring chicken reading this column, one who never watched the “Yes, Minister” video -- or indeed who has no knowledge of what a video is -- the plots revolved around the tug-of-war between an elected minister and an unelected bureaucrat. The ambitious but inept minister for administrative affairs tries to enact all sorts of radical, if self-serving, measures and is systematically thwarted by his permanent secretary. One thinks he is in charge, the other knows he is. Most of the episodes ended with the triumph of the status quo and the minister put in his place.
“In private industry if you screw things up you get the boot; in the civil service if you screw things up I get the boot,” the minister complains.
The series had a successful run on Turkish television and inspired a purely Turkish version in 2004. The curious thing, of course, is that the original British series began life way back in 1980. In Turkey the tension between bureaucrat and politician was of an entirely different order. The military had taken control of the country, the press was under the censor’s thumb and the entire democratic process mothballed for what turned out to be three years. Even after the return to elected politics, there was no need to keep up the fiction which lay at the heart of the British sitcom, that the elected government was in control of the country and that the civil service was merely there to serve. The new prime minister, Turgut Özal, had been a minister for the economy for the initial period of martial law. The one area in which politicians were expected to know better than the generals was economic management. This was a happy coincidence because if you had your hand on the Treasury and privatization issues and government tenders this allowed you to reconstruct a political machine.
So there was a rough division of labor. Unlike “Yes, Minister,” this was not the result of a discreet conversation in a gentlemen’s club but set out for all to see in the 1982 Constitution. As I argued in my previous column, many politicians were happy with this state of affairs. There were whole areas of governance -- including the vexing issue of Kurdish identity -- where it did not have to accept responsibility. When Amnesty or Reporters Without Borders made their damning reports, the government could legitimately shrug its shoulders and say, “I’d like to change things, if only I had the power.” However, I also argued that this long-standing complicity between state and government has been in the process of breaking down. It is not a secret that the military and large swathes of the bureaucracy are mistrustful of the Justice and Development (AK) Party government and have done their best to undermine its rule. That party in turn has tried to pursue its unelected opponents. The Ergenekon trial, the prime minister’s obduracy in approving the last round of military promotions, the pressure it exerts on an opposition press, indeed the whole constitutional referendum are part of its attempt to gain the upper hand.
At the same time, the hour glass is running out on the time when the Turkish public will accept that government should not be held accountable for its misconduct or mere incompetence. We have seen how the government is trying to blame anonymous bureaucrats for defending the indefensible and pleading in front of the European Court of Human Rights that the murdered newspaper editor Hrant Dink was guilty of neo-Nazi like hate speech. What ever happened to ministerial responsibility? We have also seen the government blaming the preventable deaths of recruits in Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) attacks on the carelessness (or far worse, connivance) of the military in which they were serving. If the prime minister can interfere in the chain of command, why can he not get his minister of defense to report to Parliament what went wrong? It might get away with it now, but the time for excuses is running out.
