The ‘holy alliance’ of the status quo

Thus stakes are high for the people of this country as well as Turkey's Western allies, who may lose Turkey to their authoritarian competitors in the East as pro-status quo forces are deeply anti-Western, anti-market economy and anti-globalization.

The pro-status quo forces comprise the senior state bureaucracy, including the military and the judiciary, their political representative -- the Republican People's Party (CHP) -- and the so-called white Turks, a coalition of losers in a truly democratic system, a competitive market economy and a globalized social network. So they fight hard.

The holy alliance of the status quo has pushed the judiciary to the stage these days. As one of the most conservative institutions of the alliance, the judiciary is happy with a kind of juristocratic system in which senior judges have limitless and unaccountable power. Elections in high courts are based on an inbreeding system where they chose among themselves -- a system capable of reproducing itself over the years in which judges of the same background, worldview, professional ethics and legal philosophy elect one another.

With this you end up with a member on the Supreme Board of Prosecutors and Judges (HSYK), the top judicial organ, trying to replace judges and prosecutors working on the Ergenekon case and the JİTEM killings case in southeastern Turkey in an attempt to obscure the investigation and trial process, a clear intervention in the court's independence by the supreme board itself. What is more, this HSYK member was photographed by one of the suspects of the Ergenekon trial. So, as the Taraf daily's Ahmet Altan put it, you have a member of the supreme board who is a friend of the Ergenekon suspect and a foe of Ergenekon judges and prosecutors and is still sitting comfortably in his post.

In this system, you have a court of appeals which ruled the other year that the suspects in the Şemdinli case -- one involving military personnel who were caught red-handed while raiding a bookstore with hand grenades in 2005, killing one and injuring five -- should be tried by a military court, overruling a decision of the civilian court that sentenced two soldiers to 39 years each. This case revealed the deep state structure in the Southeast and the dirty war it waged against the Kurds there.

Moreover, the top judicial institution, the HSYK, fired public prosecutor Ferhat Sarıkaya, who had prepared the investigation and opened the case. This punishment was not seen as enough so the HSYK disbarred him. Remember, all this happened after then-Chief of General Staff Yaşar Büyükanıt described those caught in the Şemdinli incident as “good guys.”

Take the case of another senior judge, Osman Paksüt of the Constitutional Court, whose wife is a suspect in the Ergenekon case and stands accused of meddling in a closure case filed against the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) with her friends in the Ergenekon group. The senior judge, taped discussing the case with some Ergenekon suspects over his wife's cell phone, still comfortably sits as a member of the Constitutional Court.