What is this drifting apart at the Feast of Sacrifice?

The sacrifice is a festival of drawing near. People divided and driven apart by the preoccupations of daily life and the quarrels of political life draw close to one another through the blessing of this festival. With the sacrificial animal slaughtered, while a person draws near to God by leaving behind everything that distances him from God, he draws near to other people through the miraculous atmosphere of the festival. If, despite so many things in the society we live in that are inclined to separate people from one another, ties have still not been severed, the spiritual effect of the sacrifice has a great role in this.

We entered the festival, which in its essence is an occasion for closeness and affection, with a decision the Danıştay gave out of its chronic attitude based on hatred and estrangement. The Danıştay, evaluating on the application of the Istanbul Bar Association YÖK's earlier decision that ended the most merciless, most racist and discriminatory coefficient practice of the 28 February days, issued a stay of execution and, by dealing a blow to the atmosphere of peace that society at large had achieved, chose estrangement and driving apart. With this choice, to the extent that it moved away from law and justice, unity and affection, it moved close to hatred and enmity, arbitrariness and lawlessness. Vocational high school students too became the instruments of this drawing near, of this sacrifice.

When spoken in the language of the Sacrifice days we have lived through, what has happened is exactly this.

This was not the first time the Danıştay had faced an application on this subject. Earlier, on a complaint again about YÖK's coefficient practice, it had said that the coefficient practice was entirely at YÖK's discretion and that it itself had no authority on the matter. Nevertheless, that in the latest application it ignored its own view and displayed a complete example of arbitrariness surprised no one. Because in Turkey everyone now knows that law and texts do not work on the basis of positive reasoning. The regarding of the court as the property of the kadı has become thoroughly familiar; because everyone has prepared himself for the fact that what matters in a case that comes before the judiciary is not its content but who the defendant or plaintiff is. For that reason, the Danıştay's ignoring its previous decision and contradicting itself is of course not accepted but is seen as a normal situation.

A rule of judges that has drifted thoroughly away from law is the greatest threat to the rule of law. Yet judges who drift away from law and from the nation on which they base the legitimacy of their decisions are approaching a spiral of power in which, when necessary, a reckless authority throws dice on their coffins. That the members of the Danıştay, who had once again drawn the public's anger because of a similar arbitrary decision, could not have failed to decipher the codes of the Ergenekonist attack directed at them is surely impossible. What does it signify that even that insidious attack did not warn them about how they had been made a tool in the calculations of a power center that sacrificed them after a decision of the same kind? What kind of sense of belief and partisanship is this? Truly, it is not possible to answer this with a normal mind.

Experts shout every day that vocational high schools have not delivered what is expected of them in training the intermediate personnel industry needs. Everyone sees that the fact that those who go to vocational high schools have to give up going to university at a very young age, so that these schools have gradually ceased to be in demand, has lowered the quality in these schools further. The YÖK decision was precisely responding to the wishes of the people concerned to end this irrational practice carried on for years. The Danıştay is perhaps the only institution that cannot know how technically distorted the matter is and whose word on it cannot be trusted. That is precisely why, in such decision-making processes, having the institution of the "expert witness" guide the judiciary is the most important and apt invention of contemporary legal systems. The Danıştay's only connection with the subject is its antipathy, even hatred, toward the imam-hatip high schools. Even because of this hatred, it should have stayed away from this subject. Because on this matter the Danıştay was evidently going to act not out of its reason, the legal texts and the interest of the country, but out of its antipathy to the name Imam-Hatip, so it was in any case impossible for it to give a fair decision.

That vocational high schools take the exam under conditions unequal to those of regular high school students because they already provide a profession is a thoroughly fabricated justification. Since vocational high school students inevitably already put less intensive effort into university than regular high school students during their high school education, they sufficiently show the difference expected of them. This disadvantage of theirs already creates sufficiently unequal conditions for them.

Moreover, the decision the Danıştay gave on this matter is at the same time a futile one. Technically it will not achieve the result it wants, because the annulment of the decision would return the coefficient rule not to its application in the 28 February days but at most to before that.

At the same time it appears to have learned no lesson from the general failure of the 28 Februarists. Whatever the fears produced by the 28 Februarists and the measures they took on the basis of those fears, these served only to hasten the realization of their fears further.