While some speakers rightly explained and stressed that the biggest obstacle to democratization in the country is not the army or the law but the undemocratic mentality of the higher judiciary that blocks and threatens to block socially forced democratic attempts of politicians who have not acted wholeheartedly anyway.The meeting detailed how not only the state but also society should have cause for concern and cautioned against undemocratic, intolerant attitudes toward the other, underlining that the bureaucratic oligarchy’s canny but skillful abuse of one section of society against the other resulted in processes in which the provoked should also be blamed in addition to the oligarchy. It is good that thanks to platforms such as Abant, intellectuals, opinion leaders, representatives from different sections of society and so on can now come together and decipher the bloody face of the socially Darwinist and crudely positivist bureaucratic oligarchy that does not have any intention of handing power over to the masses. Yesterday their main excuse for the tutelary regime was the masses’ ignorance. Today we can all observe that this excuse has been evaporating and that the bureaucratic oligarchy’s members have become the least knowledgeable about the facts and realities surrounding them. But still, tomorrow, even if the masses become “enlightened,” the oligarchy will come up with another excuse, arguing that the masses should be enlightened twice!
Nowadays, the biggest excuse the bureaucratic oligarchy and their neocon and Likudnik supporters abroad have is that Turkish society has been coming to terms with its history, culture, religion, etc., and that these are essentially and inherently undemocratic and anti-secular. This propaganda is what they have been spouting for the last several years and they deliberately disregard the fact that Turkish society is not looking backward but is simply reinterpreting its past and its religion in tune with today’s universal values and commonly accepted political standards. These lands had secular laws centuries before the establishment of the republic -- at the end of the 19th century, almost all codes were Western transplants, and this is what the bureaucratic oligarchy and their friends abroad fiercely want us to forget.
We had a constitutional multiparty regime well before the establishment of the republic in so-called “Islamic” Ottoman times, and it is the republican regime that discontinued the multiparty regime and ran the country from its establishment until 1950 with a one-party authoritarian government. The multiparty regime only came back to the country because of the threat of invasion by Stalin and our need for the support and protection of the democratic West. This is never taught in schools. Moreover, the bureaucratic oligarchy -- chiefly some coup-loving generals -- expect us to be eternally thankful to them, for they supposedly brought democracy to the country -- which is far from the truth, as I detailed above.
It is clear that the bureaucratic oligarchy and especially the higher judiciary, which do not have any democratic input and keep appointing people from the same ideological background to crucial posts, are the biggest obstacles to the democratization process in the country. But what about the weakest link? I think it is the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) politicians, at least some of them.
Paradoxically, for the moment, they are also our only hope until a renewed party emerges with a pro-European Union process and democratization agenda. They are the weakest link because some of them do not really think that Turkish society wants democratization or constitutional changes. Remember what I wrote here after last year’s Abant meeting: One AK Party founder, who is also a member of the party’s Central Executive Board (MYK), claimed that people gave them 47 percent of the vote just because people needed bread, not for democratization, an explanation that cannot explain why, if that was the case, the AK Party’s votes were about 26 percent before the military’s infamous April 27 e-coup and rocketed to 47 percent after that military intervention in the presidential elections.
Today, similarly minded AK Party politicians can claim that we should not mention the past, should not make references to Ottoman times and so on. Unfortunately, they do not show any sign of understanding the above argument about the Ottoman processes of democratization and legal secularization and its vital relation to our future but simply think that some people want to turn back to Ottoman times. They must be remembering their colleagues in the Necmettin Erbakan tradition whose past sins and immature and childish remarks cost practicing Muslims and the whole nation a lot. This faulty past continues to be the weakest link in our democratization process, in addition to the rotten apples within the AK Party.
