Parliamentary immunity, terror and politics

The first constitutional amendment of the 26th Term of the TBMM was enacted as of yesterday. That this amendment is a law bringing the lifting of the immunities of elected deputies is, in a way, the hidden irony of the matter. From the beginning, AK Parti, in order to expand the field of politics and to prevent the tutelage of the military, the judiciary, the bureaucracy or any other center over politics, did not look warmly on lifting deputies' immunities. By contrast, CHP for the last 14 years had built almost all its politics on the lifting of deputies' immunities. In all elections there was almost no more important subject that it promised the people.

While CHP presented this subject to the people as a promise, the clearest indication that this subject was not at all on the people's agenda was the responses the people gave to it at the ballot box. Because when CHP, as a politician, voiced this demand, it was in fact doing nothing other than narrowing the field of politics. CHP generally acted in politics like a representative of non-political actors, working like a Trojan horse of non-democratic centers within democracy.

By contrast, AK Parti always looked at the question of lifting immunities with distance, because it saw very well that a regulation in this direction, on a ground where the existing judicial order and the greedy tutelage-seekers over politics were present, would bring no benefit to politics, to democracy or to the nation.

Yet the process that has brought AK Parti to the point it defends today on immunities has been precisely a process in which the need to protect the limits of trust and seriousness of politics arose acutely. While immunity provides politics with trust and protection against non-democratic centers, this shield of protection had this time come to be open to misuse by terror hubs outside politics, in a way that threatened precisely that area of trust, the decency of the political sphere. The only area in which deputy immunity could come onto the agenda is the area in which a political party or deputy normalizes a practice intertwined with violence.

PKK militants had an opportunity granted to them throughout the resolution process. This opportunity promised that whatever they said they had been unable to do in the political sphere until now, they could do with ease in the renewed field of politics. The only thing asked and expected was that they bid farewell to arms. When they bade farewell to arms, a wide political field awaited them, including parliamentary activity.

The PKK abused the resolution process in an utterly immoral way. While it was expected to bid farewell to arms, it made the largest accumulation of arms in its history during this period. It took thousands of young people, many of them of child age, to the mountains and armed them. Seeing the inaction displayed by the security forces out of respect for the resolution process as a weakness, they tried to occupy that field leaving no gap at all. Meanwhile they made the HDP entirely subordinate to themselves and went down the path of normalizing this immoral relationship between them. As a political activity to be substituted for armed activity, the HDP, far from objecting to this relationship, acted like a complete orderly.

At the moment when the resolution process ended and the PKK began to attack Turkey like a legionary fighter of foreign powers, the HDP began to act as the spokesman of this enemy force under the roof of the TBMM. It began to use the privileges it held as deputies as a propaganda opportunity facilitating the activities of the terrorist organization and giving legitimacy to those activities. Meanwhile, while terror attacks targeting civilians took dozens of lives every day, the HDP deputies in complete blindness continued to openly support this terror activity.

In the end, in terms of democracy and political legitimacy too, the situation became one that could never be tolerated. Had this too been tolerated, things could have gone in the direction of a place where it would be considered normal for parliament henceforth to turn into an arena of struggle among parties with armed forces subordinate to them. Deputies who describe the state's security forces' struggle against a terrorist organization that takes dozens of innocent lives every day as a war between two equal forces, and who describe from the Assembly rostrum as a "massacre" the state's operations against a terrorist organization that lays mines and attempts to occupy cities, is something that not only Turkey but no democracy could accept. Can you imagine, in any European democracy, one or several deputies who sympathize with the DAESH terrorist organization giving speeches every day for hours trying to portray DAESH as innocent, and in return accusing the European states fighting it of massacre?

What was done to DEP deputies in the nineties is constantly being recalled as if a threat. First of all, in the nineties the political sphere was not that wide; moreover, although the relationship between deputies and terrorist organizations was not so obvious that day, what was done to them produced a kind of hero. Today, on a ground where the political sphere has expanded so much, on a ground where recourse to terror is condemned as an accursed crime, the so obvious relationship of some deputies with terror leaves them no area of innocence or victimhood, let no one take offense.

On the contrary, the terrorist organization with which these deputies are in cooperation victimizes dozens of families every day. Moreover, the struggle waged against an organization that is committing a betrayal of Turkey, which has become the world champion in humanitarian aid, and through Turkey of the entire Islamic world, of the world of the oppressed, is, unlike in the nineties, now bringing even the Kurdish people closer to the state.

This is a tendency exactly the opposite of that of the nineties. In the nineties the fight against terror was alienating the Kurdish people from the state, because the political sphere was narrow, because the state was conducting this struggle by unjust ways, was committing great injustices while struggling, and was only striking without listening. Yet today the political sphere is extremely wide, the state listens to the Kurdish people to the last point it can listen and identifies with them, and all the hypocrisies of the PKK and its affiliated political organizations are coming out one by one.

Still, it is worth saying that all this situation has become possible largely thanks to the resolution process that was lived; had the resolution process not been lived, the fight against terror today could not have been so effective.

Frankly, the resolution process perhaps caused the PKK to fatten for a while, but in the end it also ensured that all its secrets came out.