According to Milliyet’s Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, the draft to change the MGSB or “Red Book,” so named for its secrecy, has been sent to the Interior Ministry, the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and the General Staff by the Prime Ministry and the National Security Council (MGK) General Secretariat. In the draft, religious communities including the Süleyman Hilmi Tunahan movement, the Gülen movement and the Nursi movement that had been openly cited as internal threats in the previous supplements of the Red Book are not cited in the new version.
The news has not yet been verified. No democratic state in the world has a place for extrajudicial executions in their official documents. The ending of the oppression of those who have never been involved in criminal cases or who have never even carried a pocket knife is a nice but belated step.
Especially in the high judiciary, there is an attempt to protect, but also a resistance to protecting the statue quo. The process of the Ergenekon case made anyone with mercy and conscience realize that military tutelage, the strong structure that is fortified with constitutional institutions, is maintained by unlawful imposition and tyranny despite what society wants.
The regime of tutelage is a product of a pro-tutelage mindset. The approach of this mindset is to ignore the nation, the raison d’être of the state, and who they vote for through the ballot box. The following was highlighted for the first time by a friend of mine in Abant. The statement in the third article of the Constitution reads, “The state of Turkey is an indivisible unity with its country and nation…” Here is the most striking statement of the pro-tutelage mindset; our country and nation belong to the state. Because of this reason, all authority on the nation belongs to the state. In other words, it belongs to the republic’s elites who decide on behalf of the state. Of course, aligning/adjusting this nation, as they do not have the merit to govern themselves, must have been within the duties and responsibilities of the state elites. The regulations of societal engineering, some called this “balance regulation,” since the coup d’état of May 27, 1960 has been done for this purpose. Every coup adjusted the tutelage to its own book and constitution and the Red Book was renewed each time.
What bothers tutelage are those it cannot scare and control. Tutelage always named them internal threats. Those innocent people were treated like criminals for years through the laws that limit their freedom of thought and expression, and religion and conscience. The media that we know has been only occupied with the people who just wanted to live according to their beliefs and who expressed their loyalty to the values, which make the core of this nation. But the cruelest of all is the treatment by real reactionists, who strive for the single party period while the world is changing, of the children of this nation as reactionists, and their waving secularism as opposed to religion over the heads of the nation like the sword of Damocles.
They have never given up. With unprecedented courage never before seen in any democratic state, they dared to try and close the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) which came to power receiving 47 percent of the vote. Since they could risk economic chaos in the aftermath of the closure, they fined the party instead of closing it. But what did they say: The AK Party is the focal point of activities against secularism.
The AK Party was trying harder than all previous governments to join the European Union (EU), a fact of which they are proud and which they call their project. A large and reasonable religious mass insisted that the democratic secularism of the EU would be a healthy ground for social compromise and provided much support for EU membership. This bothered them. They attempted to inlay derail the EU process and they keep on trying to obstruct it.
The removal of calling the children of this nation an internal threat is, of course, a step towards democratization but what matters most is the change of the pro-tutelage mindset.
The state cannot have a country and a nation. The nation has a state and a country. When the nation is substance, the state becomes democratic, everybody comes within the scope of law and the country finds peace and becomes prosperous.
