Baykal's innocent commander and Doğan's longing for profiling

When pushed to the extreme, especially when it chases after rhetoric, reason sets strange and simple traps for a person. We seem to be facing exactly what a Greek proverb says: "God leads clever people astray with foolish things."

The reasoning that Deniz Baykal, whose intelligence and his, if not impressive, never-faltering oratorical skill cannot be doubted, has resorted to in order to stand by the HSYK members who stripped the Erzurum prosecutors of their powers seems to have thoroughly bewildered him. While trying to prove how right the HSYK was in this act of removing from their posts prosecutors who were at their duties, though it had no right at all to do so, he presents the prosecutors' treating the commander of the 3rd Army as a suspect as an unforgivable breach of rules.

"Turkey has three armies, and one of them is the 3rd Army... The person at the head of its army, who on behalf of Turkey will keep supreme a vast geography, its defense, its sovereignty, its law. Now they say to this person, 'you are a suspect.' If the 3rd Army commander is told he is a suspect, is there any way for us to be at peace?"

Now, can any legal principle be drawn from this reasoning? Are you aware of what this rhetoric, set up in a half-baked drama by Baykal, who for years has identified his one and only promise and message in politics as "lifting immunities," tells us? Is it not quite clear that here he attributes to certain people, let alone an immune status, an "innocence" from error and crime that belongs only to the religious world?

So, if certain people are at the head of the 3rd Army, they never make mistakes. Why would they not? Presumably it is thought that what they do by virtue of the office they hold becomes a rule automatically. It is thought that what certain people do on account of the offices they hold becomes a norm immediately, even if it is wrong.

This is the typical conservative attitude of the right-wing political philosophy influenced by Christian theology, and somehow it does not seem surprising at all to hear it from Baykal's mouth. For the politics the CHP represents has for quite some time spoken in the language of a theology peculiar to itself. In Christian political philosophy, certain political offices have an innate innocence. Even if they oppress, even if they deviate from certain principles, they are not objected to, because their having come to that office is by the appointment of divine will.

Yet the belief in innocence is contrary to human reality, and moreover the CHP people do not use this innocence even as consistently as Christians do. For example, members of parliament too are in some way made up of representatives whom the nation has elected with trust, but Baykal does not find such an innocence suitable for them; instead he attributes this innocence to the segments that he himself has chosen and that are made up especially of appointees. He expects us to believe that an army commander, to whom the security of only a part of this country is entrusted, may be innocent of error, but he does not even remotely consider granting the same innocence to the person who is the commander-in-chief of all the armies and the president or prime minister of the nation.

Somehow the people to whom Baykal attributes the position of innocence are made up of those who can most easily be caught by a properly functioning legal mechanism and who thus end up in Silivri. Because like all political theologies, Baykal's innocents consist of a special segment. His demanding, on behalf of social groups he does not belong to, the innocence he withholds from the segment of politicians he belongs to can be possible only thanks to another bond of affiliation.

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Another example of a theological language harmful to reason was displayed in the statements of AK Parti member of parliament Avni Doğan. His words, "If we stumble just a little, these Ergenekon people and so on will take a very bad revenge. In this country they have profiled everyone who covers her head, who prays and fasts. Now we are profiling them," were caught on camera.

These words are of the kind that cast a shadow on the legitimacy of the ongoing Ergenekon case, and are both extremely ugly in style and certainly far behind the political philosophy on which this case rests.

The aim of the Ergenekon case cannot be a kind of revenge and retaliation. Today the Ergenekon case or investigation is, long before it is about calling anyone to account or struggling with a past era, a struggle to somehow stop a coup culture that is still actually continuing, and endless coup attempts. Look, the attempts uncovered today are not those of five or ten years ago, nor even of the 28 February period, but brand-new 2009, even 2010 model coup attempts.

At this moment, even a justice targeted by the Ergenekon case is a remote possibility; the modest goal of eradicating coup lusts is at present the most realistic vision of this case. There may be those who find a place for their own suitable longings within this vision, but an AK Parti member of parliament has no right to harbor this longing or to express it this way. The ultimate vision of this case is justice, but even a feeling of revenge mixed into justice is the greatest enemy of justice.

Although Doğan defended himself by saying that what he meant by "profiling" in his words was "exposing," these words have damaged the hopes already nurtured for Turkey's struggle to become a state of law.