The fear of losing power feeds insanity…

Begüm Burak

The current developments that occurred in Turkey draw a rather bleak picture for democracy… And this picture is being drawn by the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government.

The recent conflict between the government and the Constitutional Court concerning the lifting of the ban on Twitter has revealed to what degree the government's pathological stance vis-à-vis the issue of the rule of law has reached. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has announced that he did not find the decision of the Constitutional Court to lift the ban on Twitter to be “national.” A few days later, the head of the court, Haşim Kılıç, said that the decisions taken by the court cannot be “national” because such decisions are based on universal rules.

On the other hand, the fabricated news constructed by the pro-government media shed light upon what a tragic process the actors in the media have been going through. Lately, the Sabah daily depicted Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen in a collaboration with the bloody terror organization the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Gülen's lawyer has stated that this news is part of a smear campaign.

Moreover, the Akit Daily a few days ago did an interview with head of the Workers' Party (İP) Doğu Perinçek. Perinçek stated that he will cooperate with Prime Minister Erdoğan to end the Gülen movement. It is noteworthy to say that Perinçek has been viewed as “a member of the Ergenekon terror organization who used psychological war tactics efficiently” in the decision of the Ergenekon case. Now, his desire to cooperate with Erdoğan to end the Gülen movement is both a shame for the government and the members of the AK Party as well. This is because they still prefer not to resign from the party.

The government which had been saluting the Hizmet movement and Hizmet-inspired Turkish schools around the world all of a sudden (after Dec. 17) put an end to this positive rhetoric and stance towards Hizmet and labelled Hizmet a “parallel state structure.” Now, the Turkish schools abroad are targeted and the government is taking steps to shut down these schools.

As seen, an atmosphere of fear and insanity is rising day by day… The rule of law and press freedom have received deadly blows. The asymmetrical war opened against the Gülen movement is a major attack on civil society in Turkey. The attempts to shut down the Turkish schools abroad threaten the Turkey's “soft power.” The government has been designating the political sphere as a battlefield since the beginning of the corruption scandal and this designation (popularly speaking, “political engineering”) is unlike what the government claims -- not realized by a parallel state structure but by the effort of the ruling elites.

On the other hand, yesterday, leader of the main opposition party Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu waspunched on the face by a 28-year-old man under the roof of the Turkish Parliament. All these events argue that the insanity spreading over the political arena originating from the ruling elites' fear of losing their power has already begun to reach other areas as well. Unless the political authority puts an end to its unlawful attempts and abandons hate speech, Turkey may inevitably see darker days.

Published on Today's Zaman, 09 April 2014, Wednesday