One of the major criticisms directed towards the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government is its persistent avoidance of institutional changes to deeply entrench the democratic reform process in Turkey.
Given that the culture in state agencies and the mentality of the people who work there will not change overnight and that such a transformation requires a generational turnover, the only thing we can pin our hopes on in the meantime is to overhaul state institutions to speed up the democratic process.
Take judicial problems in Turkey, for example. The mentality of judges and prosecutors has not yet changed fundamentally, especially among the older ones, but the 2010 public referendum that revamped the judicial council, a body that sits at the heart of Turkey's justice system with substantial powers of investigation and promotion, has really made an impact on convincing many members of the judicial community to uphold individual rights and liberties at the expense of protecting the state's interest. On the issue of press freedom, we media professionals have immediately felt the impact of this change as many cases launched against the Zaman media group, some in the prosecution stage and others in the trial phase, were thrown out after 2010.
However this approach is not a general characteristic of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AK Party government in Turkey. Boasting a personality cult, Erdoğan runs a tight ship with ad hoc measures and power-brokerage tactics, pushing his opponents into a defensive posture while commanding the allegiance of his own loyalists and tolerating no questions. He does not seem to like the idea of institutional change to make the reforms permanent. Since Erdoğan's backroom politics with arm-twisting tactics is not sustainable in democracy, he has started to face stronger challenges to his leadership. By sidelining stakeholders on a given issue and avoiding compromises, he has actually strengthened the anti-Erdoğan camp. He does not leave much room for his bureaucrats to smooth out differences or sort out problems because he has taken very sharp positions on domestic and foreign policy issues.
Given his ambitions to run the country as he pleases, Erdoğan seems to have lost interest in overhauling the military-era constitution of 1982 and is keen on keeping archaic and undemocratic state structures intact. This is because he needs these structures to create what his aides often call a “new Turkey,” which is another way of saying that Erdoğan aims to raise a nation in his own image. He pushes his own values and way of life via his rigid Islamist agenda through these state structures. Shifting the responsibility of drafting a new constitution to a stillborn commission in Parliament where every single member can veto any and everything was a clever tactic for Erdoğan, who knew all along that nothing would come out of this bizarre commission.
The trouble is that Erdoğan is making the same mistake which once-powerful generals had made in this country for decades before coming to a complete halt. Fearing their own citizens and their choices of elected governments in Turkey, the military set up three main checkpoints through which it could always control the state and exert immense pressure on the government. One is the presidency with significant powers to appoint key members of the judiciary and state elites. Another is the National Security Council (MGK), where military generals all lined up across a table facing government ministers and policy decisions were dictated to the government as though a shadow and invisible cabinet in the MGK has the real power. The last is the Higher Education Board (YÖK), a centrally controlled interagency to monitor and supervise all universities, steer educational policies and shape higher educational institutions in Turkey.
The military lost these checks to Erdoğan and President Abdullah Gül, with some leverage still retained at the MGK through bi-monthly meetings. This is only a conjectural change, however, because the very archaic structures remained intact without the required institutional change to make them more democratic, transparent and accountable. In other words, the owners have changed but the very structure which the people of this country have been complaining about for so long has remained intact. What is more, there is no guarantee that a reversal of this shift back to the military will not happen again.
Instead of designing state structures based on principles and values with strong checks and balances, it feels like we are reshuffling power from one group to another. That creates huge resentment in many circles within Turkish society from liberals to conservatives because they feel they have been marginalized, stigmatized and discriminated against. Just as it was wrong for the military to forcefully impose neo-nationalist and hardcore secularist values on society, it would also be wrong for Erdoğan to try and force politically charged Islamist ideals upon Turkish society. Many worry that the Erdoğan government is tilting towards an Islamist agenda by using and abusing state structures entrusted to him by the people of this country.
The MGK, unlike its peer institutions in the US and Europe, is not an agency that helps the government formulate better policies to stem security challenges which the country is facing. It was set up by the military to mostly concentrate on domestic threats that might threaten the privileged position of generals. It deals with all security and non-security related issues, from defense to education. It was not surprising to see that the military-dominated MGK saw Kurds, Alevis, leftist groups, conservatives, liberals, non-Muslims and even Christian missionaries as a major threat to the survival of the Turkish state. In the eyes of the generals, everyone except for the elites in the establishment running the country is an enemy of the state.
In the light of this misplaced threat assessment, Fethullah Gülen, a well-respected Islamic scholar whose interfaith and intercultural teachings place special emphasis on education, was seen as a threat by the military-dominated MGK as well. He was not the only one among conservative groups who was wrongly targeted by the generals who eventually found themselves on the wrong side of the law with their secret plots to overthrow government in the landmark Ergenekon and Sledgehammer cases. Since the 1960 military coup, the military has always shown its deep mistrust of politicians and maintained persistent hostility against various groups in Turkey. No surprise there. But the growing body of evidence that Erdoğan's elected government may be taking a similar position is a somewhat unnerving development.
The Taraf daily's report on Thursday that the ruling AK Party government signed on to a planned crackdown on the Hizmet (Gülen) movement in the MGK meeting of Aug. 25, 2004 has come as a shock to millions of people in Turkey. The secret plan committed the government to implementing a series of measures to curb the activities of the Gülen movement. It advised the government to adopt legal measures that would impose harsh penalties on Gülen-affiliated institutions while instructing the intelligence agency and the interior, foreign, finance and education ministries to monitor their activities. The two-page document was signed by Erdoğan, then-Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül, then-President Ahmet Necdet Sezer, Cabinet members, Chief of General Staff Gen. Hilmi Özkök, Land Forces Commander Aytaç Yalman, Naval Forces Commander Adm. Özden Örnek, Air Forces Commander Gen. İbrahim Fırtına and Gen. Şener Eruygur.
The government took a defensive position against the background of this scandalous and shameful revelation, saying they did not act on the recommendations issued by the MGK although they admitted to the authenticity of the document. The opposition parties are up in arms against Erdoğan and have asked the government to explain itself. The main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) accused the government of practicing two-faced politics contrary to what it preaches, while other opposition parties invited prosecutors to look into the matter. Erdoğan touts himself as a stand-up guy who took a strong position against military incursions into politics. But he signed the document at the MGK meeting, raising speculation that he wanted the state to crack down on the Hizmet movement, which he reportedly saw as a rival to his own Islamist agenda. It may very well be that there was mutual interest between Erdoğan and the military overlapping here.
Embarrassed by the leak and fearing a backlash from Gülen sympathizers, numbering in the millions, Yalçın Akdoğan, an AK Party deputy and a close aide to Erdoğan, denied that the government implemented the MGK decision, while Deputy Prime Minister Bülent Arınç said the government had never enacted the actions suggested against the Gülen movement and its manifestations. However, given that another deputy prime minister, Bekir Bozdağ, admitted on the record on Dec. 26, 2011 while responding to a parliamentary inquiry that the government had acted on two security-related suggestions from the MGK between 2007 and 2011, we do not know whether Erdoğan's government has actually implemented the suggestions of the 2004 MGK advisory. Bozdağ revealed that the government took two decisions, one on April 2, 2007 with a cabinet decision No. 2007/11958 and the other on Nov. 27, 2010 with cabinet decision No. 2010/1116, to satisfy the MGK's security decisions. Since these cabinet decisions are secret and not publicized, we do not know their content, but they raise fears that the old habits of an authoritarian government rule are still there.
The recent controversial move by Erdoğan to shut down privately run prep schools (some quarter of which are operated by Gülen-affiliated businesses) and increased scrutiny by government inspectors of schools, businesses and civic organizations which are seen as close to Gülen fuels suspicions that Erdoğan may have set out to finish off the Hizmet movement in Turkey, something which powerful generals failed to do.
Published on Today's Zaman, 29 November 2013, Friday
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