My friend -- a PR company owner -- and I were discussing obeying rules, and the rule of law in Turkey, in general. I told him how unthinkable it was a decade ago for drivers to put on their lights in the daytime as many people in Europe did as a safety precaution. I remember being warned by a police patrol that I had “forgotten” to switch off. My estimation now is that 7-8 percent of car owners keep their lights on, and this is an encouraging sign. “That’s nothing,” my friend countered. “It was when I, to my astonishment, noticed that Turks actually do their best to abide by the ban on smoking in indoor public areas that I started to believe something is fundamentally right in the very core of this society.”
When I stopped in Çanakkale to have dinner in my favorite fish restaurant, one of the best in the northern Aegean, the owner of “Yalova” looked sad when I mentioned that the place was half empty. “It is the ban,” he said. “People stay at home instead of trying to defy it or pay under the table for not being seen to have a cigarette in their mouth.”
Should we be optimistic, when we imagine all this in the context of new reforms by way of implementing laws?
Yes, but to a certain extent. While we see a society quietly going to the polling stations and freely choosing the party they prefer, and then placidly following when the legislative body passes laws, there are those who obviously see something wrong in this “normal” process.
The recent two examples expose what implications the new process may have, not on individuals, but on a sector and a powerful institution.
When the largest and most influential media group here was subjected to a tax inspection and inquiry about irregularities in its stocks and imports, the immediate outcry was “press freedom is in danger!” Those who joined the chorus -- mainly from within that very group’s outlets -- never mentioned the golden rule that laws are there to be obeyed and implemented when there is a suspicion of a breach. It would give them credibility, then, when they rightfully question what they see as the “draconian” penalties imposed.
The original of the so-called “piece of paper” that turned up, detailing a plot against the elected government is even more spectacularly revealing in this context. As soon as the document’s authenticity was established, the communiqué by the top command was not at all about the illegal activity (“constitutional crime”) but when and how and by whom this document had been leaked. While the leader of the main opposition, Deniz Baykal, also elected, “dances with the wolves” and refuses to discuss the heart of the matter, thereby refusing to protect the elected parliament of this country, the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Ankara defies the law passed in July and launches an investigation of the case. It demands, illegally, the original document from the civilian prosecutors (an offer that was rejected) and focuses on “how this leak could have happened in the headquarters.”
The pattern is very clear: If what daily Taraf yesterday reports is true (and there are strong indications in the communiqué in that direction), the chief law expert at the headquarters will do his best to divert the course from the “crime” and attempt to focus on “taking over the entire investigation from civilian prosecutors.”
What is taking place is the apparently deliberate creation of “legal chaos” through which the undemocratic segment within the army -- however upward-reaching in the vertical structure -- again hopes to get away with what almost all legal experts see as a crime.
It means the military, revealed and “caught” for the umpteenth time in the past decade and before in its involvement in issues it has nothing to do with, refuses to understand that it is not “untouchable” no matter what crime it commits.
But just as the oversimplification of a threat to “press freedom” does not work in tax inspections and other inquiries into media companies, the worn-out army slogans such as “We stand as a fortress of steel against all enemies of this republic!” echo only in the void. It is a new Turkey taking shape, with an inevitable need to redefine the criteria of a new type of patriotism and to shape a new consensus on the rule of law.
