The account of 27 May will be settled on 12 September

Although a "temporary" intensity formed around the provision on repealing the provisional Article 15 included in the constitutional amendment package to be put to a referendum on September 12, this is not merely a matter of putting the September 12 coup on trial. On the contrary, as the Constitutional Court rapporteur Osman Can very aptly observed, the target of this referendum fits more with settling accounts with an order that was reinforced in many respects on September 12 but established more fundamentally by the May 27 coup.

The mother of the coup order in Turkey's recent history is May 27, and the order established on May 27 officially gave the Turkish Republic a new format. March 9-12, September 12, February 28 and April 27 all took place on a ground made possible by that format. How much cruelty and torture was inflicted at the end of each of them, how many violations of rights and law there were, is, besides this, a secondary matter.

It is said that 15 packages of amendments were already made to the 1982 Constitution, in order to make the present constitutional amendment seem ordinary. In the program Tersi ve Yüzü that Ferhat Kentel and I present on Mehtap TV, however, Osman Can was explaining that none of the regulations made so far in the 1982 constitution that expanded rights and freedoms were of much importance. According to this, what matters is the establishment of a judicial system in which these legal regulations or texts can truly be applied in favor of rights and law.

This is a truly important point because, as Can again pointed out, the 1961 Constitution, which some circles cannot praise enough, has fully 62 articles on rights and law, but none of these articles was able to constitute a guarantee of human rights and democracy in Turkey. Because, although these articles were mentioned in the constitutions, many of them could be revoked by the judicial system established by that same constitution.

The role cut out for the judiciary within the system, through an ingenious architecture, allowed it to invalidate constitutional guarantees as well, so that whatever the laws mention, a judicial decision could render it meaningless. That is why the libertarian character of the 1961 Constitution remained merely a legend spread through the material means that the coup makers provided to their own loyal circles, while it was reflected on the essence of democracy or on the rest of the people as a layered ideological-authoritarian state practice.

Thanks to the unstoppable development of the democratic process, the will of the people reflected up to parliament was thus cut off by the senate and the judicial system; the Assembly was dragged into an inertia in which in practice it could not legislate and therefore could produce no politics. It cannot legislate because a significant part of the laws it makes are either annulled by the Constitutional Court or vetoed by the senate. The political apparatus, unable to produce politics because of the obstructive institutions placed in the constitution, turned to areas outside politics, and thus began destroying the respectability of political power as well. Because the paths a politician turns to when he neglects his own occupation are the paths of sharing opened by dealing with bread-and-job issues, which is the area in which a politician can most easily go astray. This inefficiency that politics was subjected to in the process thus led the public to seek non-political centers and wrote popular invitations for them.

In the September 12 referendum there is an Article 15 directly related to the September 12 coup, but the most important subject of this referendum is the high judicial institutions, as the most important institutions that an entire order of coups established to secure itself, beginning with May 27. The reorganization of the domains of the Constitutional Court, the HSYK and the military judiciary will be a revolutionary step against the May 27 coup order.

That is why extending the subject beyond September 12 to a debate about May 27 has properly widened the horizon of this reckoning.

Otherwise, the matter is truly a reckoning not with a certain set of people but with a mindset.

The matter is, beyond whether the actors of September 12 are personally tried or not, about developing a high sensitivity against the idea of staging a coup.

That is why it would be much more meaningful for September 12 to take place as a reckoning, beyond September 12 and rather than September 12, with May 27, where the main idea of all the coups was formed.