Ergenekon, in a half-baked drama

Although the Ergenekon case is subject to the legal process in all its dimensions, by its nature it is a political case. Those being tried attempted to intervene in the country’s political order by illegitimate means. Whether rightly or wrongly, the political positions and influence of those subjected to such an accusation, and the political consequences of the trial process, cannot be ignored. When those being tried and the reason for the trial are politics, ignoring the political character of the case comes across, at best, as a little naive.

However, the fact that the case is political or related to politics should not mean that the trial process is managed by politicians or is a field for settling scores among politicians. Those who try to discredit the importance of the Ergenekon case frequently cling to this argument in order to damage the legitimacy of the case. Although what has taken place in the trial process has at times provided grounds for this argument to be taken into consideration, the search of Prof. Türkan Saylan’s house in particular can be seen as the best sign of how innocent the trial process is of this accusation.

To put it more plainly, if the centre of power were steering the Ergenekon case in line with its own political aims or score-settling, no one would have touched Türkan Saylan. No politician in Turkey lacks the political sense to ignore that the political damage of this would be far greater than the moral pleasure to be gained from settling scores. So Prof. Saylan’s house can be searched only as a result of a will, devoid of politics, working at the limit of a purely legal objectivity.

At this level of objectivity, if Prof. Saylan’s technical-surveillance trails lead there somehow “when necessary,” that is, at the investigation stage of the trial process, there is no reason, and there can be none, that could prevent the search of her house.

Yet when the reactions shown to the search of Saylan’s house are considered together with earlier examples, it appears that an interesting list of “untouchables,” “those who cannot be meddled with,” “those who may never be looked at askance,” is being set up against the legal order. That discomfort is felt that in the Ergenekon case the law is being applied equally to everyone, and moreover that this is being voiced so openly, is an instructive case that will go down in Turkey’s legal history.

The reactions shown in advance, without knowing why the house of the ÇYDD or of Türkan Saylan was searched, try to recall a permanent order of “exception.” Why should Saylan’s house not be searched? Because she is very respected? Have we moved to an order requiring that any citizen of Turkey be regarded as more respected than another, and not noticed? Has the Republican regime, which abolished statuses such as effendi, pasha, agha and sheikh and made all citizens equal, changed without our noticing?

Only certain political considerations are needed so that Saylan or the other defendants are not touched even though the law requires it. So the trial process works that far from politics. Shouldn’t one look at it from the positive side a little too?

Where the argument of respectability falls short, it is said that Saylan should not be touched because she is ill, but this too is decided by politics; on this matter, politics rather than law is addressed, the politician is accused and demands are made of the politician. Thus it is requested that politics openly intervene in the trial process. Why, one wonders?

Moreover, among the trial processes we are used to in Turkey, the case conducted most gentlemanly, even if not perfectly, is the Ergenekon case. By contrast, it would be fair to say that it has also been the case in which the greatest number of dramas of victimhood have so far been written and played out in the face of trial processes.

In half-baked dramas, old age, respectability, illness, service records, circles, all are used at once, roughly, accompanied by cheap emotional exploitation. How can scholarships that will be disrupted because of confiscated computers, and students who will be victimised, be used to produce a presumption of innocence? It is hardly understandable how a two-day examination can create such great victimhood in the payment of scholarships?

From the search of Prof. Saylan’s house by a decision that is not political at all, an attempt is being made to produce the world’s great drama, a hero of freedom out of her person, the portrait of a humanist full of love for humanity. As beautifully depicted in the MFÖ song, “it is a half-baked drama enough to make strangers laugh.”

Yet Prof. Saylan is not someone we do not know. In every case in which she has come to public attention outside her profession, the only message she has given to people, the only feeling she has tried to instil in her supporters, is nothing other than hatred toward people who are not like herself. While she does not refrain from describing the educational activities she herself carries out as “enlightenment” and those carried out by others as “brainwashing,” she has so militant an attitude that she does not refrain from calling the broad masses of the public whom she calls “brainwashers” or “the brainwashed” a “herd,” even from a patient’s chair. While supporting the anachronistic headscarf ban that extinguished the lives of many times more girls than the number she prides herself on bringing into education, she has neither seen, nor tried to understand, nor felt compassion for the hundreds of thousands of real dramas she caused. In her black-and-white world she has strangely drawn concepts such as modernity, Atatürkism, progressivism and secularism not as contributions to the country’s peace but, on the contrary, as constant fields of tension, exclusionary borders, discriminatory lines.

No one has the right to declare guilty Saylan, whose house was merely searched in this case and who was not even taken into custody, but, with your permission, let us not accept the humanist-innocence portrait produced on the occasion of this event either.