The opposition is angry. They think that this law accounts for playing with the judiciary, the military and the soul of the Constitution. Weren't they proposing a constitutional amendment so that the perpetrators of the 1980 coup would be prosecuted? But they were not expecting such a swift change in the law, and they were not hoping that it should cover other criminal cases falling into the jurisdiction of high criminal courts. Now, they are asking that the president veto the bill. Otherwise, they will rush to the Constitutional Court in order to save the day -- save “the unaccountability of soldiers to civilian courts.”But the opposition of the opposition parties to the bill is not about the civilian prosecution of military personnel; it is rather about the last article of the bill, which suggests that the new law should be applicable to court cases that are already under review at the time of the passing of the law. This article has no practical implication for the time being. The Ergenekon case is already a civilian case and the seemingly related “plot” case has already been declined by the military prosecutor. The opposition is either reading into the intentions of the government, or it has secret intentions of its own.
The Honduran coup is something the Ergenekon prosecutors should read about. It is not that there is an Ergenekon finger in it. But the patterns are quite similar to what Ergenekon people wanted to have in Turkey.
To be frank, I didn't like President Manuel Zelaya's “one man's show” either. But it seems that there was only “one man” in the country, and he was forced to play the “lonely democrat.”
The media representation of the Honduran political crisis is a qualified crime of misinformation and disinformation. A brief introduction to Honduran politics that brought Zelaya to power and ousted him will show the differences and similarities between Turkey and Honduras.
Zelaya is not a new name in Honduran politics. He was elected as the fifth president of the country, which had passed through two military coups d'état and was ruled by the military for two decades after 1963. The rule was then passed to an elitist cadre of ex-army generals, judges and life-long politicians that represented the interests of foreign companies in the Honduran Congress, rather than those of the Honduran people. Zelaya served as a deputy in the National Congress for three consecutive terms between 1985 and 1998. He held many positions within the Liberal Party of Honduras and was a minister for investment in a previous government.
Before being elected as the president, he worked under Prime Minister Carlos Roberto Flores and introduced an Open Counties Program to decentralize decision-making and return power to the local communities. Neither congressmen nor judges and prosecutors liked that scheme. This would account for denying the traditional elite their privileges.
During the election campaign, Zelaya promised to double the police numbers and to initiate a program of re-education among the Mara Salvatrucha gangs. Well, both bothered the army. Mara Salvatrucha gangs are the main drug dealers of the Americas, and the army relies on their existence as the pretext for its powerful say in politics and international relations.
Now, this President Zelaya, who has already angered the Americans by dragging his country to the pro-Chavez Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas alignment, who has confronted the foreign-run business sector, who has mobilized the peripheral segments of the society to the central towns like Tegucigalpa, the capital city, who has angered the military and the central judicial bodies by suggesting a decentralization of power, was pushing for a re-writing of the Constitution. He claimed that the current Constitution was biased against the rich and the elite. His opponents claimed that he was trying to change the Constitution in order to be able to run for the presidency for a second or even an indefinite number of times.
Zelaya wanted to have a constituent assembly prepare the new constitution. The Congress didn't like that. He suggested going for a non-binding referendum. He claimed that this was just to see whether the nation wanted a new constitution or not. His opponents claimed that he would use the results of this referendum in order to delay the presidential elections set for January 2010. The Congress initiated a vote to label him mentally incapable of ruling. It also passed a bill, out of the blue (!), preventing the holding of a referendum within 180 days before a general election. The Supreme Court declared the non-binding referendum as unconstitutional. The army chief of staff rejected the orders of the president to distribute the referendum ballot boxes. He was sacked by the president, but the Supreme Court ordered that he should return to his office.
On Sunday, an hour before the ballot boxes were to be opened for the referendum, the Honduras army arrested President Zelaya and exiled him to Costa Rica.
As I said, Zelaya was not the democratic leader the Honduran people deserved to have, but the junta regime is certainly not the option against a legitimately elected president.
Thank God, our Parliament is not a parliament of the elites.
Benzer Haberler 
