May 1, 2011

Gülen paranoid

Abdülhamit Bilici

Reading some Turkey-originated media articles demonizing the Gülen movement and spreading the paranoia that people associated with the movement are turning a highly democratic country into an empire of fear, I start to realize that I have been very naive, unaware, disloyal and ungrateful.

It appears that I am not aware of the fact that our democracy has been smoothly functioning like clockwork for many decades, that our courts have been administering justice at the speed of light and that our prisons are filled only with people who are convicted by courts. I feel that I am too blind to see that the popular saying “Don’t hire a lawyer; instead hire a judge” was invented to depict the status of the judiciary in Patagonia, so I didn’t know that the country where members of the Supreme Court of Appeals, as the highest legal authority, asked some influential people, “Do you want us to quash or uphold it?” was Uganda. And no one from our country has ever applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) with complaints about human rights violations. The members of the judiciary who would diligently hail every coup and rush to attend every briefing invitation from the junta members were actually the citizens of Papua New Guinea. I did not know that Fethullah Gülen had to live in self-imposed exile for 13 years now with the accusation of treason by the same judiciary.