Date of the scandal, not the coup attempt

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan reiterated his claim once again in France, the one he repeats every day, the “graft operations of Dec. 17 and 25, 2013 were coup attempts against the government.”

However, he can never explain what kind of a coup attempt this is.

We know from experience who would stage a coup in Turkey. And right now, the military has no such intention.

It is obvious what happened on Dec. 17 and 25, 2013. A businessman’s distribution of bribes was revealed through photographs, documents and taped transcripts. A Cabinet minister’s code name is on a bribery list. The same minister has accepted a very valuable watch from the same businessman, as well as a free trip to Mecca on a private plane.

Another minister relocated a police chief the same businessman does not like, allocated security guards for him, and phone tapping records have revealed that the money the minister had received reached $10 million.

To another minister, millions of euros have been given in shoe boxes, suit bags and in silver chocolate trays. In the home of a general manager of a bank, millions of dollars stacked in shoe boxes have been seized.

There are unidentified individuals who have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the prime minister’s son’s foundation. It is deduced from the phone conversations between the prime minister and his son that there is an enormous amount of money stacked in the house. The amount of money is so much that the money still remaining in the house is 30 million euros.

Is it not possible to understand how investigating these became a coup attempt?

If we were to talk about a coup because of this incident, we can only talk about a coup that has resulted in the government destroying the constitutional principle of the separation of powers.

Dec. 17 and 25, 2013, are not the dates of a coup d’état; they are dates revealing one of the most disgusting corruption relations in the history of Turkey.

If this is really a coup attempt against the government, then why are you stopping its investigation? Why don’t you facilitate the formation of a parliamentary investigation committee? 

 Next, private universities

Kenan Evren and Tahsin Şahinkaya have been sentenced because they staged the Sept. 12, 1980 coup, but this coup is continuing its existence with all of its institutions.

The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) government has no problem with them; on the contrary, it wants to use them to the end.

There is an omnibus bill debated in Parliament’s planning and budget commission on further strengthening the Higher Education Board (YÖK), an institution of the “military tutelage.”

According to this, the board of trustees of foundation universities will be determined by a two-thirds majority of the YÖK General Assembly. Also, academics from state universities would be banned from lecturing in private universities.

There are two reasons why this amendment is being made. The first is taking revenge on the graft operation by seizing the administration of these universities, some of them set up by the Gülen Community. The second is to be able to fill up all these administrative positions of foundation universities with pro-AKP people.

Transforming universities into science generating autonomous institutions is not what they care for. They only care about the fight with the community and seizing every institution.