28 February is a matter of lesson

There are great lessons to be drawn, for those who can understand, from the fact that on the 13th anniversary of 28 February, which was planned to last a thousand years, not a single servant of God nor even a modestly valid argument remains to defend it.

Starting with a reminder of this lesson should be the most fitting approach to 28 February today. This lesson is not merely an occasion to renew faith with a sense of absolute rightness over what certain people did, or to curse those who have now become too wretched to defend themselves. Such a lesson surely demands a much deeper feeling or state of being. Rather than a sense of revenge or immoderate triumph, a consciousness that requires one to grasp, at least a little, the secret of man's mortality, limitedness and transience in this world...

Not more than two years ago, one could still come across pens that, even while conceding all the evils of the 28 February process, nonetheless spoke of a few positive sides of it, even of its having occasioned very beneficial results. Is it not truly a lesson that today nobody remains who recalls those times with even this much of a benefit?

It is of course true that the pious segment learned from what it lived through in the 28 February coup and developed a far more rational and measured political line, but it is unthinkable that it owes the coup the slightest gratitude merely for that. On the contrary, its having seen the dimensions of the bloc of oppression it was subjected to and developed an appropriate language of struggle against it confers no virtue whatsoever on that bloc of oppression. While the pious segment in Turkey, which itself represents the people, was developing its most virtuous political line, that power bloc kept putting its own intrigues, coup plans and greedy lust for power into practice.

In the light of the legal process we are living through today, we understand much better what went on in the 28 February process. We can see very clearly that the process contained no deep plan, that it rested only on an alliance formed by the immoral, which gave an appearance of power in those days. The "thousand-year" lust uttered in the intoxication of power of those days is nothing but an ignorant expression of the high arrogance and disdain of the actors of the event. No one aware of being human can talk so big. History is full of cautionary tales of impotent gods who, falling prey to this very arrogance, claimed eternity or absolute power and ended in wretchedness. Today the places of those petty gods are swept by the winds.

28 February may have given those who did it a sense of a thousand years of eternity. Truth be told, for those subjected to its tyranny it gave a sense of endless darkness. To this day, from the headscarf to the coefficient practice, the practices that are products of 28 February continue to victimize countless people. These unlawful practices may even have given people a sense of normality.

From whichever side you look, 28 February is the name of a process in which immoral and extra-legal practices were staged. However, the fact that the law, which should have identified these illegalities and determined them to be practices deserving heavy punishments, was in the hands of judges recruited by this process delayed, to some extent, the emergence of this dimension. The immoral intervention that unjustly seized all the legitimate institutions of the country unfortunately, at the first stage, made the high judiciary a partner in the coup order by briefing it at its headquarters with false and misleading information. The continuity plan of 28 February was ensured only by the jurists' becoming partners in the process. Today it is seen that the 28 February watch is still being kept by judges who run to briefings in their robes.

At the conference on the Rule of Law and the Judiciary in the Democratization Process, organized last week in Ankara by the Strategic Thinking Institute, Taha Akyol drew attention to the ways legal discourses appear in the media. In a survey he conducted in his own newspaper for the years 1997-1998, Akyol found that of the usage rates of the concepts "independence of the judiciary" and "impartiality of the judiciary," the former was used at a rate of 98 percent and the latter (impartiality) at only 2 percent. By 2006 this ratio had nearly equalized. The period in which the independence of the judiciary was constantly remembered while its impartiality was almost never remembered is precisely the 28 February years.

Whether the judicial power, which was exercising its independence to the full in this period, was using this independence on its own behalf or in fact on behalf of the military is actually of no importance. What matters is that no share of this independence was left to the law. Just as no share of the autonomy of YÖK, exercised to the full in this period, was left to universities and scientists.

It must be noticed that putting the military at the top of this whole chain of tutelage is, for precisely this reason, far from explanatory. Indeed, 28 February and all the other coups are based not so much on things the military pulled off alone as on an immoral alliance, and in this alliance greedy people from every segment can take part.

Unfortunately, as with all other coups, it was again politicians who, although they could have prevented 28 February, did not, and moreover who immediately welcomed it on account of the prospect of power it contained.

There are many lessons to be drawn by today's politicians who deign to see an opportunity for themselves in possible coup intentions, simply by looking at the fate of those politicians.