Hürriyet attackers still at large

No legal action has been taken against those who attacked daily Hürriyet’s headquarters on Sept. 6 and Sept. 8.

It is known who they are, where they reside, where they live. There are video recordings of the crime they committed. The one that led the mob does not deny his crime; each time he says he will repeat the same act.

He brags, saying, “We have stripped them of their immunity.” He keeps saying, “We should have beaten them before.”

And the “independent” Turkish judiciary does not move a finger about this heavy crime committed in the midst of the city. This is a situation that shows what kind of city we live in.

Those responsible for protecting our lives and livelihood, those committed to implementing the law, don’t move because they are afraid of the winds that may blow from above. Don’t they know that the more they remain inactive the more the attackers will be encouraged and increase their aggressiveness? Or is that the intention?

Debates on the constitution

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said during the ceremony to commemorate Mustafa Kemal Atatürk that the republic has not registered any loss during their governance.

“We need to get rid of the concerns of the regime. There is no need to exhaust ourselves by talking about it,” he said.

If what he intends by the “regime” is the republican administration, obviously we have no problem with that, except those who are longing for the sultanate.

But if our problem is a “democratic, liberal republic,” we are right at the point of having debates on the regime.

We can’t do otherwise as we currently live under the conditions of “illiberal democracy.”

There is a general agreement on the drafting of a new civilian constitution. But there is a point where this agreement gets disrupted. That is the proposal tabled by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) during the previous parliament which blocked the constitution commission and resulted in the failure of having a new constitution.

It looks quite clear that this proposal is an issue that the AKP will be insisting on at present as well.
When there is a proposal that unites all the power in one man devoid of all mechanisms of checks and balances that will secure the separation of power, what else are we to discuss other than the future of the regime?

The prime minister is right, but…

Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu said, “We have a system that has not made a choice between a parliamentary system and a presidential system. I live with this problem. The issue is not about the power of our president. But there is a system prone to having problems between the president and the prime minister.”

Indeed, this is a problem that is created by the constitution drafted after the Sept. 12, 1980, military coup. In other words, the prime minister is correct. 

The powers of the president are more than what a parliamentary regime requires.

But does the way to correct it pass from turning into a presidential system or having a properly functioning parliamentary regime? This is what we need to discuss. Making the parliamentary system function requires more than limiting the powers of the president. They are amendments that will arrange the separation of powers between the legislative and the executive such as renewing the political parties’ law and the election law. We don’t even need to change the constitution for that. Another issue is to have an independent judiciary by saving it from the interventions of political power.

And it is much easier to do it through new constitution instead of turning into a whole new system.