Turkey never had a tradition of constructive opposition, but this much destructiveness is also something we are not used to. There should be a difference between criticizing and attacking. The opposition is breaking hearts and impudently threatening to break heads, too.An opposition that criticizes the army for not being critical enough of the government is hinting where it positions the army. For them, the army is there to intervene whenever the elected government strays from the traditional way of doing -- in fact not doing -- things. An army that does not intervene, that does not block governmental democratization policies, that does not obscure the search for a solution to security problems deserves, according to them, to be accused of treason.
Why this unwillingness to cooperate with the government to end this vicious cycle of terrorism? Why this willingness to see more and more sons and daughters of this country kill each other? Why this insatiable thirst for blood?
Can we simply reduce the issue to the plain logic of not wishing for the government to succeed, even if the result is desirable?
About a month ago a media extension of the heedless opposition reported about a huge amount of money entering the country without any official record. “The money that saved the AKP,” read the spot of the report. The report itself was a rootless fabrication of an advocate who apparently wanted to be famous, but the style and logic of reporting deserves attention. The report claimed that $18 billion entered the country from Iran and helped the state budget overcome a financial crisis. Does this account for saving the country or the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government? What kind of logic works behind a publication policy that is happy to see the government bungle the management of the economy? Aren't we, the people, the ones that will suffer from any economic failure?
It seems that we can simply reduce the issue to that of plain cursed logic: If something good needs to be done, we should do it; the bad ones, we are already doing.
Now comes the vital question: Does the government need to attain the contentment of these people while providing for the basic human rights of the citizens of this country? Is it democratic to ask an opposition which is not democratic to participate in a democratization process?
First of all, basic human rights cannot be made subject to any discussion or vote. Education in one's mother tongue is a basic human right. A government cannot go and ask even the general public whether to grant that right to a particular linguistic group or not. The consent of the opposition parties is asked for only when the government is planning to implement a policy of positive discrimination. If a government is trying to create new job opportunities in an already underdeveloped region of the country and if the opposition is clamoring with the claim that its consent was not asked for, let that opposition stay in the opposition forever! That consent ought to be asked for only when the government decides to give preference to the people of a certain linguistic group while employing people all over the country.
Both the government and the National Security Council (MGK) made it very clear that the recent democratic initiative aiming to curb the human resources of the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) organization will not offer anything more than basic human rights to the Kurds. Things done up until now are only semiotic gestures, like calling Güroymak by its original Kurdish name, Norşin, and letting a soccer team name itself Dersimspor, Dersim being the old name of Tunceli and its surroundings.
A democratic initiative should be democratic in nature. It should incorporate civil initiatives also. But does it need the consent of an opposition that advocates a continuation of restrictions on basic human rights?
