MIND YOUR STEPS!
by Kerim Balci

Today’s Zaman
April 1 2008
Turkey

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been asking the same question
for some time now: What step backward do the nongovernmental
organizations want me to take? What do they want me to step back
from? And why?

There is no clear answer to these questions. In fact, the only
possible addressee of this call to step back is the government. Can
the judicial system listen to the NGOs and step back from its duty to
receive a filed case? Or will the Ergenekon junta lend an ear to the
NGOs’ call for the good of the country and step back from their coup
plans and psychological warfare? Can the media group that belongs to
one person who is not-understandably anti-Justice and Development
Party (AK Party) change its attitudes about colonial secularism in
one night and step back from humiliating publications? No! The only
actor in Turkish politics that has been stepping back for the past
six years is the governing AK Party.

Lo! This is not praise. On the contrary, it is because of the AK
Party’s previous backward steps that the NGOs are not giving their
full support to the democratization process but asking for one further
step backward. A selective list of the AK Party’s backward steps
explains this. When the Þemdinli events exploded, Erdogan promised
the nation that his government would shed light on the dark and
dirty relations between the soldiers and the terrorists. "Until the
end!" he said. "Until the end we will go!" The end came even before
the beginning. The "good boy" of the provocative attack is now on
duty and the prosecutor who filed the case against the "good boys
in uniform" should be writing his memoirs somewhere in the middle
of nowhere, probably to be published posthumously. And this was
done to the backdrop of the Susurluk scandal, which was covered up
by the AK Party’s predecessor, the Welfare Party (RP), amid similar
promises of "Until the end!" Through their unwillingness to cope with
the undemocratic forces, disclosed in their lack of determination
to investigate the dirty relations of the state organs and mafia,
they brought about their own ends. Between idleness in the face of
Susurluk and the Feb. 28 postmodern coup, there was an invisible but
indivisible link!

When Hrant Dink was murdered and the masses vulgarized the murder
through "We are all Armenians" slogans, my newspaper said that the
attack was a bullet fired at democracy. When the Council of State was
attacked, certain mass media outlets "deciphered" the event as a return
of "Turco-Islamist terrorism." We warned on that day that the barrel
was pointing at our tranquility. In all these events, the AK Party was
given the greatest support of all time by the democratic forces of this
country to fight non-democratic forces — and they lost that chance.

The government’s latest willingness to dig into the depths of the
Ergenekon junta is first of all late. It is not only late, but its
incentives are ill-perceivable. The prime minister is rightfully
claiming that the media and to some extent the legal assault on his
party is motivated by the government’s fight with the Ergenekon junta,
but it can also be claimed that the government’s willingness to fight
the junta was motivated by the secularist assault on the party. Of
course the questioning can come to the point of "Which came first,
the chicken or the egg?" But it was the government’s duty to keep
the issue from coming to that point.

Though the government was late, this doesn’t mean that it deserves
to be abandoned. We are in the same boat as the prime minister and
those who want to drown him are actually preparing the end of our
democratization process. It is our duty to support the government in
stepping forward in the face of the Ergenekon junta, but it is the
duty of the prime minister to make us believe (and keep his word)
that he will step further steps on other freedom-related issues as
well. It is not only the prime minister who needs to mind his step,
all of us need to…

–Boundary_(ID_/TmkGzab1DWUiaclgs6iCw)–