This nation cannot stomach this controversy
An interesting incident was experienced in Istanbul’s Sabancı Museum last week. Somebody close to a very important individual called the museum officials and told them that the person in question wanted to visit the Joan Miro exhibition with his wife. But they first had a request.
This request was that no special measures would be taken for this visit. In other words, they would visit the exhibition like two ordinary citizens, and afterward the couple would eat the special menu meal at the Changa Restaurant inside the museum.
The two people who were to visit the museum were the 11th President of the Republic of Turkey Abdullah Gül and his wife Hayrünisa Gül.
They came quietly, visited the museum and went. I learned about this in Hürriyet writer Kanat Atkaya’s column, which I have been reading with particular pleasure these days.
The moment I read it, I remembered the trouble I experienced at a reception the other day, during a scuffle created by a Cabinet minister's army of bodyguards.
The same Abdullah Gül went to the courthouse the other day to make his statement before the public prosecutors in a case involving himself.
These are good acts. These are elegant acts that we have forgotten in the heavy, conservative atmosphere of rudeness and the hurricane of hubris.
These are meaningful acts at a time when politicians are squeezed between shoe boxes and suit bags with their extremely full pockets; at a time when businessmen, who we had not even heard of yesterday, send millions of dollars to Ankara and thumb their nose at justice.
These acts not only earn honor for those who did them. They are also acts that bring honor to democracy and a civilized society.
After Bülent Arınç’s recent extraordinary announcement, now Gül’s actions…
These acts are the signs that the “founding fathers” of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) are lifting the cover of “hubris” that has settled over the party…
Now, it is Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu’s turn. The time has come to close and never to open again this hubris that has occupied the country, this belittlement, this alienation, this intimidation, suppression and this unanswerable state.
And a last word:
Those millions that have been “zeroed” will not be accounted for; the millions that were sent to Ankara will not be investigated, those dirty smells coming out of shoe boxes will not be disinfected. These files will be closed before they were even opened…
However, for the first time in the history of this republic, a former president will go and testify in a case that has not been closed for years.
This nation, right now, is not able to stomach this contradiction.
Voice from the grassroots or orders from above?
Turkey will chair the G-20 of the world’s strongest economies from Jan. 1, 2015. Davutoğlu, by attending the meeting in Brisbane, has officially started Turkey’s chairmanship term of G-20. The main theme of the G-20 in the upcoming term will be the Global Fight against Corruption.
Davutoğlu has two roads ahead of him: Either he will continue covering up the very serious corruption claims, continue hiding them and be totally defeated in the fight against corruption. Or he will create a milestone in the fight against dirtiness, corruption, theft, shoe boxes and pools that are trying to be covered up with the “conservative wrapping.”
The term presidency of the G-20 can be the period to clear the “conservatism” that was smeared with corruption in Turkey.
This is the question that Turkey is curious to know the answer of: Will Davutoğlu take those steps that will make the Justice and Development Party (AKP) come back to being a “white” (AK) party, as it claims?
If he listens to the voices coming from the grassroots, then yes he can make this transformation. But if he listens to the orders from above, he definitely cannot…