Only way to solve the law problem is a peaceful solution to the Kurdish issue

HASAN CEMAL

Yes, there’s a war in the state. Or, a chaos that’s increasingly deepening.

There’s a lot of dust in the air. The National Intelligence Organization (MİT) is in a fight with the police. It’s reported there’s also scuffle within the MİT.

Meanwhile, the government takes a stance:

While MİT top executives are called to testify by the office of the public prosecutor, two department heads from Istanbul Security are relocated.

Police, almost simultaneously, catches two MİT members monitoring Mehmet Baransu from the daily Taraf.

While all of these are happening, a scandal involving phone tapping in Taraf erupts. Documents, apparently leaked by police, reveal that MİT has obtained phone tapping permits from the court by using phony names.

Meanwhile, the allegations of the office of the public prosecutor against the MİT are “served” to the media. It is claimed that those MİT executives who are called to testify were in suspicious relations with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the KCK, which is Kurdistan Communities Union, the alleged urban wing of the PKK.
 
Ankara coridors are boiling.

It is said that: Government sources are against MİT executives testifying because the court might decide on arrests.

Without going into detail, when the current chaos in the state is viewed from a distance, then it is easy to diagnose: This is the judicial problem of Turkey.

The state needs law in this country. This need has to be met urgently.

If Turkey was truly a state of law, all of these wouldn’t have been experienced.

In democracies, state means a body of rules. In democracies, state means complying with the law.

Here, however, the state is not like that. It wasn’t like that yesterday; it is not like that today.

Starting from way back in the Ottoman times, since the founding of the republic, since stepping into multi-party democracy after World War II, this state has never felt itself bound by law. It easily stepped outside the law.

The military-civilian bureaucracy that founded the state always considered themselves above the law.
Also as a result of the self-assumed role of the savior, it felt free to bend and curve the law as it wished to.

The coup d’états were that, as well as the military tutelage. A serious struggle has been performed against this lawlessness especially since the beginning of the 2000s together with the Justice and Development Party (Ak Parti) government.

I have also supported this struggle. I supported it in the name of democracy, in the name of law.
But this struggle has started being tossed around. The swing from one end to the other has brought new concerns, new question marks regarding being a state of law.

It didn’t fall into place. The state of law hasn’t arrived yet.

Call if a war or call it chaos, there is no other explanation for what is happening in the state today.
Solution?

It is to hold on to the rope of democracy; to hold on to the rope of law.

And there is only one way to this: To put the Kurdish issue on the peace track.

Unless the Kurdish issue is disconnected with violence and arms, a democratic state of law, with all its rules and institutions, cannot be established in Turkey.

Without blocking the road to the mountain, without moving the PKK down from the mountain, without widening the scope of libertarian politics, democracy and rule of law in this country will always remain second class.

This is the experience for years.

For this reason: The political power, in other words, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, that launched the peace process in the Kurdish issue since 2005, which also included the “democratic initiative” and “Oslo talks,” had done what was correct.

The route that MÝT executives who seem to be at the target today had taken with the support of the political power, as I wrote yesterday, was correct.

Afterwards, Erdoðan changed this route. He again turned to “arms,” to the one dimensional “road of the security.”

As a matter of fact, the expiration date for using arms has passed for both the state and the PKK.
Cutting a long story short, without putting the Kurdish issue on the peace track, without disconnecting the issue from arms, the problem of law in Turkey cannot be solved.

Hasan Cemal is a columnist for daily Milliyet in which this piece appeared on Feb. 10. It was translated into English by the Daily News staff.

HASAN CEMAL - h.cemal@milliyet.com.tr