‘Useful amnesia’ an obstacle to real post-coup union: CHP’s Böke

ANKARA

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A senior main opposition party official has criticized the ruling party for obscuring the real causes of the July 15 failed coup attempt through “useful amnesia” it created during its 14-year rule, while calling for structural changes to turn “fake” social unity provided in due course genuine.  

“The possibility of social consolidation which emerged in the post-coup atmosphere cannot be realized by pretending to be side-by-side, by burying our heads in the sand as if our democracy does not have any problems or by preaching fake social solidarity clinging onto conspiracy theories,” Selin Sayek Böke, deputy leader and spokeswoman of the Republican People’s Party (CHP), told daily Cumhuriyet in an interview on Sept. 15. 

Böke argued that the underlying causes of the July 15 failed coup attempt should be sought in the structural changes undertaken during the 14-year rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), criticizing the measures taken by the government for creating “useful amnesia” which obscured those structural changes. 
“We criticized the AKP’s implementation of decree laws itself. They create an amnesia which makes people forget the fact that the corrosion of secularism, turning the state over to religious communities, bringing down democratic institutions, disabling checks and balances mechanisms to weaken the parliamentary power and making the judiciary a tool of governmental power paved the way to the coup,” she said. 

Stressing that social unity should be based on secularism, freedom, law and democracy, Böke said, “It would be an incorrect diagnosis if the underlying cause of military coup attempts, just like the treacherous July 15 attempt we experienced, is reduced to solely military-civil relations.” 

“If it is considered that the civilian government protecting and supporting religious communities, deploying them into the state on purpose, openly paved the way for the coup, the dimensions which cannot be reduced to civil-military relations will became evident,” she stated. 

According to Böke, this amnesia created by the AKP helped the government “legitimize the destruction of freedom of the press and freedom of expression in the name of the struggle against the coup.” 

“In short, this wrong narration and the fake unity created around this narrative and the useful amnesia about the causes which brought Turkey into this situation fortify the one-man regime and speed up the institutional downfall which brought Turkey to the July 15 coup, let alone diminishing it,” she added.