On the one hand, it transformed Parliament into a place where the wishes and expectations of the entire nation will be strongly manifested through 85 percent representation, and on the other it facilitated a single-party government while meeting the expectations for stability in administration at as high a level as possible. At this point, nobody can possibly doubt the place of the government, which will be given a vote of confidence, or the president to be elected by this Parliament, which has been endowed by the people with full authority and which will enjoy the highest level of representation ever seen in the history of the Turkish Republic. There is nothing more natural than to expect Turkish politics to normalize in this current political situation. Despite this, we have recently been observing that Republican People’s Party (CHP) circles, which did not get and which are insisting on not getting the message of July 22, are bluntly expressing their discomfort and uneasiness caused by this promise of normalization and are showing that they are suffering from “indigestion” caused by the recent developments.
According to these circles, there has never been an “abnormal” situation in Turkey that would cause us to speak of a process of normalization. According to these noble people -- who deem a military guardianship over politics to be a perfectly normal thing; who are not troubled in the least by the courts becoming involved in politics and exercising the authority of the legislators by putting itself in the place of Parliament -- the highest levels of the bureaucracy consisting of appointed and therefore politically unaccountable people, including the Higher Education Board (YÖK), which dominates and subdues institutions of higher learning and stands in defiance of the elected government all the time, should be viewed as an extremely ordinary thing.
The group of public servants that form the bureaucratic, judicial and military government -- which we must now believe take unfair advantage of the current system now that they are showing such a great resistance to any change looming in the horizon -- acting like the sole owner of this nation, country and the regime and doing their utmost to cripple the deeds of any government they lay their hands on, must also be received as perfectly normal.
The most interesting of all is that -- which must stem from the habit of considering the rooted anomalies that have existed since the foundation of the republic as normal -- when the term “normalization” is mentioned; this group makes serious efforts to have it understood as the elimination of the abnormalization process that was created in the aftermath of Feb. 28. However, what Turkey needs is a rooted “normalization” that will be secured through the establishment of a fully democratic and secular state of law that will restructure the system by uprooting all the rooted anomalies.
In order to realize such a rooted normalization, we should on no condition settle for only eradicating the anomaly generated by the 367 condition of the Constitutional Court and by the e-memorandum of April 27. The complete removal of the traces of the despotic and arbitrary practices of the Feb. 28 process that derailed our democracy, turned law into a doormat and suspended human rights will also not be enough.
Even revising the 1982 Constitution, which our people were forced into accepting by the military regime to wear as a straitjacket in the aftermath of the coup of Sept. 12, 1980 is not enough. It will even not be enough to heal the trauma inflicted on the Turkish democratic culture by the memo issuers of March 12, and the stagers of the May 27, 1960 coup, who were so wrathful as to hang elected ministers and a prime minister.
What needs to be done is a revision of the entire system from top to bottom through a social agreement, and all the anti-democratic elements that institutionalize our bitter memories and which debilitate our democracy need to be done away with, and redefinitions of the positions and roles of our institutions and foundations within the democratic parameters need to be established. The sorely needed normalization means rebuilding the regime of a republic within a genuine democracy, a genuine secularism, the principles of a real state of law and maximum respect for human rights.
In brief, the abnormality is not a situation we have suffered for the last 10 years with ups and downs; therefore, normalization shouldn’t be limited to the improvement that will be achieved by eradicating the devastation inflicted over the last 10 years.
This country should be so normalized that not a single person should feel any stronger or weaker than the next person before the law. The people’s will must be the only criterion for the legitimacy of the government. The “government” of any institution, foundation or group with self-declared power and not authorized by the will of the people should never be taken into regard. All sorts of anomalies that have provided grounds for the top men on the higher education board to have dauntlessly remarked, “The government may have political power, but this power is nothing compared to the power of the state,” should be courageously thrown into the garbage by severing all their historical ties.
Only when we can do all of this can we talk of real normalization.
