It’s not about a conflict between the government and Hizmet movement

Gültekin Avcı

Insanity ripples through the country, the media and the people. If graft or corruption is the prevailing form of life spreading from the state to society, and if this form of life is supported by people, then we are hitting the bottom day by day. A prosecutor can say “We can detain 500 thousand people if necessary” and still hold his post as if he said quite an ordinary thing. Whereas in Europe mental health of such a prosecutor would be called into question and most probably examined.

In Turkey, however, dominant political powers pat him on the back. A Twitter user and whistleblower known by the pseudonym Fuat Avni claims that a total of 400 people including 147 journalists will be detained, but his tweets are not found surprising by at least half of the society. These tweets do not seem surprising because the rule of law is done away with, morality degraded, with exploitation of religion peaking and graft and corruption abounding.

The Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) have already been suspended. We have been going through a coup process since Dec. 25. The country’s lands are marketed using such nice-sounding words as resolution and peace. Some religious scholars, who generate legal opinion for many networks of illegal and immoral interests, have sprung up.

Nepotism has become a rule and self-seeking become venerable. We are on a disastrous course in the fullest sense of the word. These are signs of doom that you may find when leafing through some pages. It must be acknowledged that Erdoğan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government have overturned the existing regime.

Gone was a democratic constitutional regime despite its many defects and deficiencies. All the laws the government passed conflict with the Constitution and the ECHR. When a government’s actions and almost all the laws passed by it conflict with the Constitution, that means the existing regime was overturned and a new regime is being established.

Packages giving administrative chiefs judicial powers, allowing police forces to detain people without approval from a prosecutor, emphasizing reasonable suspicion, legalize the codes of “single-party Turkey” established by the AKP. Hasn’t the Interior Minister Efkan Ala himself said “We will change the constitutional order”?

But the opposition press reveals how every step the government is taking murders democracy and law. Currently the greatest obstacle on their way is the press. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of totalitarian rule is the consolidation of the media in one hand.

Why do they want to take 150 journalists into custody? There are no murder, guns, munitions, bombs, terrorist activities, nothing at all. There is no coercion or violence that justify mentioning a coup. If the real reason is the corruption probe, then we must remind that such probes and detentions are an everyday occurrence in Europe.

What’s there? There is the opposition press resisting the AKP’s coup with reports on plots and crimes that the government tries to conceal.

Only 2 to 3 media groups stonewalled, so to speak, the government’s despotism. Why the media? It’s because however grave your pains and observations, your outcries end in smoke when you cannot make yourself heard.

What’s the good of an outcry when nobody hears it? Neither the growls of a tyrant nor the screams of a victim are heard then. Free press serves as a loudspeaker for the cries of oppressed masses. And the AKP wants to turn off a few loudspeakers that it could not get hold of yet. So that it can prevent the cries of the downtrodden from getting heard. So that people cannot remember law, ethics, religion, and democracy. What’s important for the AKP is to detain as many journalists as possible and interrogate them.

The outcome of investigations or proceedings is not important. Because the AKP achieves its goals till these journalists get through unlawful practices by means of a verdict of non-prosecution or acquittal. The potentates’ primary purpose is to intimidate. They create fear through detentions and conviction through arrests for their own base.

The AKP aims to finish the job not through final court orders but detention and investigation processes. And even before a bill of indictment is written. For they know that if a lawsuit is filed, final court orders will not conform to their wishes.

For example, the conflict between the government and the Hizmet movement has already outgrown its original dimension. It has been going on as a fight between democracy and dictatorship for months on end. A fight for both today and the future.

There is no knowing what will happen tomorrow in Turkey. For predictions about tomorrow can be made within the scope of a series of norms and values. But there is no distinctive value left in Turkey. In place of values, there are the ambitions of dominant potentates. As winters are pregnant with springs, this oppression will also be followed by those who call whoever responsible to account.

Published on BGNNews, 13 December 2014, Saturday