The referendum campaigns will not be about the package

The Supreme Election Board (YSK), treating the referendum as an "election," did not recognize the legal amendment enacted a while ago that would have shortened the referendum period from 120 days to 60, on the grounds that it could not take effect before a year had passed. It thus decided that the referendum would be held 120 days after 12 May, the day the President approved the package. That the referendum day, once this legal period is counted out, falls on 12 September is a meaningful coincidence.

The YSK's treatment of this referendum as an election rests on a forced interpretation. It clearly shows that the YSK, too, is working in parallel with the other high judicial bodies. The YSK, whose members are drawn from among the members that the Court of Cassation and the Council of State select from within their own ranks, is no different in its ideological and political leanings from today's high judicial bodies. From the sum of all of them emerges a powerful ideological judicial bloc. When an opportunity arose for one part of this bloc to make the steps taken toward the democratization of the Constitution more difficult, it could not have been expected to pass it up.

Holding the referendum four months later instead of two months later offers them many expected benefits. First, this period removes any excuse, or impossibility, for the Constitutional Court of being unable to take up the matter because of a tight schedule. Second, a referendum issue stretched out over time is expected to produce weariness among the public. It may also be expected that the public will forget the actual subject of a referendum that stays on the agenda for a long time, and that a psychological distance will form toward an issue that has remained on the agenda for so long. Of course it cannot be certain that this will happen, but in the end it is a hope. On the contrary, the longer it stays on the agenda, the more likely it is that the status quo bloc will lose value.

However, we must take into account that the public cannot be expected to grow weary merely on its own because of the referendum period being extended in this way. We must take into account that there will be a series of events, actions and initiatives designed specifically to make the public weary in this direction. The summer months are especially favorable months for terrorist incidents, and we must think that the terrorist incidents, which have already begun to escalate, are directly related to the referendum. The shock the CHP has suffered because of Baykal will not hinder the struggle waged in this direction at all. Because this cause of the CHP is a struggle carried on together with a series of power blocs beyond the party organization of the CHP. Indeed, despite the scandal it is going through, the party has already completed the 110 signatures and headed for the Constitutional Court.

No one should expect a debate on the substance in the referendum. The struggle is calculated to work entirely by creating waves of psychological effect, and these waves are expected, over a long period, to produce certain results against the government or against the package. It is a somewhat bankrupt calculation, but one that will do a great deal of harm. Here too, unfortunately, the most convenient field will again be the Kurdish issue. The funerals that can be calculated to become routine in Anatolian cities, for martyrs fallen in operations whose tempo keeps rising, and the protests designed against the government during these ceremonies, will be treated as part of the referendum campaign. The murderers of these martyrs, or the accomplices of the murderers, will in fact be among those who attend the funerals of those martyrs in order to protest.

Add to the psychological wave that the funerals of martyrs will create the effect of mishaps that may occur on the Kurdish side. The KCK operations may perhaps have caught red-handed an organized structure that fundamentally sabotages the democratization process in the open, but the impression that the wet was burned along with the dry, and that there have been cases of excessive detention, is a widespread one. Among these detainees there are some who are so ill that their lives are in danger. What it might lead to if the case of Kuddusi Okkır, the Ergenekon detainee who contracted cancer in prison and died, were repeated in this process must be taken into account, and measures on this must be taken now.

Even if the referendum is held 120 days later, there seems to be no serious problem as to the approval of the package by the public, but the stretching out of this process gives more time to the desperate attempts of certain people, which may cause the process to be lived through more painfully than necessary, and unnecessary and heavy costs to be paid.