A criminal complaint was recently filed by the İstanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office against the content of the portal, where registered members can log in and submit definitions for and comments about words, notions, events, companies and persons. Following the complaint filed by Public Prosecutor İsmail Onaran, an investigation was launched yesterday on the grounds that Kaplanoğlu, Purut and Arabulan violated Law 5816 on crimes against Atatürk.
The investigation was heavily criticized by liberal academics as soon as it became public knowledge. Professor Bekir Berat Özipek of İstanbul Commerce University said he was concerned by the charges against the website owners and director, adding that it was not a problem of a single incident, but in fact signals a larger issue pertinent to democracy in the country.
“Turkey is being democratized. There have been significant changes as part of the European Union [accession] process, but there are still remnants of the single-party era, which the country has difficulty leaving behind. The inability to criticize Atatürk is also one of the obstacles before democracy and, in particular, the freedom of expression,” he noted in an interview with Today’s Zaman.
Özipek also argued that because Atatürk cannot be criticized in any way inside Turkey, it also makes resolving some of the country’s most problematic issues rooted in the early years of the republic more difficult. “Legally protected leader cults do not exist in a democratic system, as is also the case for non-objectionable persons and posts. These practices constitute not only a heavy violation of freedom of expression, but also obstruct discussing the roots of some important problems such as the Kurdish issue. In fact, the first step for resolving these issues is to detect when and how they arose in the first place,” he said, suggesting that similar laws restricting people’s freedom to express their views should be removed from Turkey’s body of law.
Professor Levent Korkut from Hacettepe University, who is also the chairman of the Civil Society Development Center (STGM) in Ankara, said Turkey should avoid deifying its leaders if it wants become a real democratic regime. “Take Abraham Lincoln, for example. He has been one of the most important leaders in US history, but he is also one of the leaders who has been mocked the most in political satire,” he added.
