This road is no road

The opposition to the constitutional amendment proposal has already begun, in all its fury, over the list submitted to the TBMM.

When you wait for the storm that arose over the submission of different lists to the Assembly to subside, the picture that emerges says nothing other than that the opposition's job is not at all easy. The proposal, for which 184 signatures were sufficient, has already secured far more than needed. What need can there be for the Speaker's signature? Even if such a signature was affixed by mistake (or, in the prime minister's famous phrase, "even if it happened that way"), in the end, in the official application, who can get what away from whom? Won't the signatures in the official application be taken as the basis?

Why bear down so hard on a billy goat from which, it is obvious from the start, no butter will come? Do these flounderings harbor a hope of "what if it works"? What is it?

Those who say that the other parts of the amendment package are entirely garnish and that what matters is the arrangements on judicial reform are by no means unjustified.

Actually, who would not want a wholesale constitutional amendment? The heart desires more. It would not have been bad at all if there had been arrangements on the democratic opening, if the threshold had been lowered, if immunities had been settled on a standard. But everything aside, there is no doubt that today we have no more urgent problem than a truly independent and impartial judicial system. The situations that emerge every day concerning the judiciary show ever more clearly that everything we have so far complained about on behalf of the system stems from the absence of a legal system that works in accordance with universal standards of law and far from arbitrariness. To see that justice does not issue from the chain of bliss set up among the HSYK, the Council of State and the Court of Cassation, it is enough to look at the judicial record registered for Turkey during the time these institutions have worked.

Four de facto coups and dozens of coup attempts took place under the spectatorship of these judicial institutions, and until now there has been no will to prosecute them. Meanwhile, in just ten years 17 thousand unsolved murders, of every age, were produced. The judicial institutions failed to remain even an impartial witness to what was happening. On the contrary, they came to the fore with interventions that every time blocked attempts to clarify the unsolved murders.

It is certain that the judiciary needs serious reform, but it is equally certain that this is a need, far beyond the AK Parti's desire to put the judiciary under siege, that is made compulsory by Turkey's sociological development. The part of the constitutional amendment proposal concerning the judiciary is not the result of the AK Parti's creative fantasies. All of them are arrangements forced by EU norms, contemporary legal norms, and Turkey's sociological development.

The CHP and MHP, which are the opposition today, must know that if they were in power tomorrow they would be obliged to go further than these arrangements. Since they never consider that tomorrow they themselves will have to make the arrangements they oppose today, it probably means that they harbor not even an expectation or daydream that they will ever come to power.

Baykal and the CHP members, who announced before the package was even disclosed that they would oppose it and would even go to the Constitutional Court, evidently see the Constitutional Court as an instrument of power under their hand, a "backyard." The constitutional court and the other judicial institutions have become such a trusted support that there is no fear even of this relationship being exposed. After all, the judiciary is the most solid support of this closed-circuit order, and it is in safe hands.

Meanwhile, it is noteworthy that in this process Baykal frequently likens what the government is doing to the historical role of the Umayyads.

It is really impossible to understand what Baykal is trying to do with this. His likening the intervention that tries to take the judiciary out of his sphere of influence and domination to the intervention of the Umayyads may open the door to a very clear sectarian incitement. Is he tacitly accepting the Alevi structuring said to exist in the judiciary and trying to send them a message? Or is he subtly trying to work the Sunni-Umayyad-AKP identification frequently resorted to in the language of some leftist Alevi organizations?

Whatever he is doing, he must know that the analogy he draws has a dangerous field of association. He must know that what was lived in the time of the Umayyads was neither as simple as he now portrays it, nor is there any benefit in relating any social group or event today to any incident of that period. Whatever he wants to do, this road is no road.