As if cursing…

Civil coup, one-party dictatorship, neighborhood pressure, civil fascism, civil tutelage... None of these concepts was produced to make an existing situation intelligible. They are not an equivalent answer given to a debate; they are like hurled taunts, like cursing. There is no way to produce an argument using these concepts. The concepts are in any case expressions used to belittle someone, to put someone in their place, to be able to vomit out one's feelings. Yet fascism is a concept that must be examined coolly and be the subject of strong sociological analyses, but in Turkey, unfortunately, this concept has never been the subject of a proper analysis; rather, it has been used as a swear word that people use to insult one another.

That matters have come to this point means, it seems, that nobody has anything left to tell anybody, nobody has anything left to hear from anybody.

This is undoubtedly a sad state of affairs. Turkey debated neighborhood pressure for months. In a debate that under normal conditions could have been quite productive, the concepts used were seen as harassing remarks hurled at the opposing stands. Whatever intention these words were thrown with, they were received in the opposing stands in keeping with that intention. They made no contribution that would ensure agreement. Otherwise, while hundreds of thousands of headscarved women still cannot go to school or take part in working life, while it can still be received as an ordinary and justified discrimination that people are not appointed to certain posts because their wives wear headscarves, to listen intently to one or two forced stories and raise from them the conservatives' pressure on people with a secular lifestyle was no different from cursing "the opposing stands." As if this order were not the work of a deep structure that had seeped into the judicial system, the points of tutelage and the military strongholds and whose influence has not disappeared at all. Yet in Şerif Mardin's original use too, neighborhood pressure could have been a productive debate, not as the pressure of different lifestyles on one another, but generally as the pressure on one another of people of the same lifestyle, belonging to the same reference group.

The attitude of those who today can find their way, because of people being tried in the Ergenekon case, to talk of a civil dictatorship or civil fascism is truly no different from cursing the human mind. They do not hold back from displaying the harshest opposition to the government whose pressure they speak of. The pressure they meet most in response is the question of what a tremendous contradiction this is. And so it should be. Nobody wants more than that, but that they cannot tolerate even this much criticism and immediately drag the matter into a "yours is blacker than mine" exchange shows that the situation is truly grave.

One may concede some merit to the criticisms of the trial procedures in the Ergenekon case. It is not possible to say that no mistake at all is being made in this case. It may also be that the very concept of Ergenekon is gradually turning, like all other words, into a "swear word" rather than a statement of fact, and that too can be criticized separately, but for God's sake, before we get to that point, should we not first call to account the intrigues, murders and concrete criminal formations put forward in the name of Ergenekon?

Even while the trial is ongoing, the intentions and desires of the organization's extensions outside, as they have come to light, suffice to prick the conscience of anyone who calls himself human. Against those whose designing of intrigues that would make innocent people look guilty has been proven by wet signatures, should the first thing to come to mind in the prosecution be the pressure on civilians? Are we to leave to their fantasies those who tried to put the whole country into a cage? Does such a thing happen?

Did the assassination of Bülent Arınç have to take place for the investigation into the plot against him to be taken seriously? Police officials were rightly criticized not a little for not taking seriously the intelligence that fell into their hands in the murder of Hrant Dink. When so much pressure is applied over the fact that intelligence against a senior statesman is being taken seriously and pursued, whom does that serve?

In fact, when those detained in Ergenekon are compared with the treatment of defendants in other cases, perhaps nobody even needs to defend them. Because in no case are the defendants' rights observed this much, nor the trial procedures followed this carefully. Anything beyond this means owning the acts for which the Ergenekon people are being tried, and that is the truly grave side of the matter.

Among these acts, in all their dimensions of intrigue, are the Council of State murder, the murder of Hrant Dink, thousands of unsolved murders in the Southeast, the cage action plans, weapons buried in the ground enough to equip a small-scale army, and a whole network of dirty and dark relations. These acts are of course before the judiciary, of course their guilt has not yet been determined by the court, but as it is put very tersely in police-station jargon, "these weren't collected from a mosque courtyard, my friend!"

One has to be a bit too brazen even to take refuge in the presumption of innocence of those who have not been convicted.