Social demands are not within the AK Party's remit

The CHP members who met with an AK Parti delegation on resolving the headscarf problem laid out their red lines, but because they could not get a firm word from the AK Parti members on their conditions, they gave up supporting a solution to the headscarf problem at the universities. Among the pledges the CHP members made conditions for their support and wanted to get from the AK Parti members were reportedly the abolition of YÖK, the lifting of immunities, and another that the demand for freedom of the headscarf not be raised later in primary and secondary education and in public institutions.

These conditions are of course not new; the CHP's wearing down nearly every reconciliation or political environment with the government by making it conditional is the CHP's typical model of apolitical conduct. Whatever the case on other issues, its making a bargaining matter of rights and freedoms every time is something for which, as a political party, it will in the end pay a very heavy bill. There have been many who have pointed this out, but it is still worth repeating on every occasion.

The headscarf ban, which has essentially no legal ground, has so far been kept going thanks to the power of the legal and military bureaucracy, which the CHP somehow found a way of using as its backyard. That is why a reconciliation in which the CHP was not included could not take effect in practice until now. And the CHP, having found de facto legal support for a fascistic practice, could, for better or worse, defend its own discriminatory-Islamophobic and hate-driven approach.

But since the judiciary's quality of being the CHP's backyard is quickly disappearing, from now on it will not be so easy for the CHP to defend this approach. History nevertheless offers the CHP an opportunity it does not deserve. It gives it a chance to stand by the solution even though its own approval is no longer needed at all. It cannot even manage to make use of this opportunity; perhaps divine justice requires this. We cannot know.

The headscarf ban has become a practice that is impossible to sustain at one stage or another. Whether the CHP wants it or not, the solution has set out on its way. No legal regulation is needed for this either. There is already no prohibitive imperative provision in our current laws. The Constitutional Court has no authority such as "banning," and the meaning of a ban is found only in the reasoning of a decision it made in 1989. Therefore there is no need to defy the Constitutional Court by suspending this ban. Indeed, to lift the ban arbitrarily put into practice by YÖK's decision, the decision YÖK took is essentially sufficient. There is no need to go any further.

On the other hand, we must not pass over what a strange mentality the "pledge" condition the CHP set for supporting the solution reveals. Two kinds of pledges are demanded. The first is a pledge that the headscarved women who will be "allowed" to enter the universities will not put pressure on those who are uncovered. However you look at it, it is a demand that is the product of a strange, sick, pitiable wretchedness. While the rights of those whose rights have been usurped for years are being returned "as a favor," they are being asked not to do the same oppression to others. Shall we pass over this as words spoken out of a kind of fear of revenge and retaliation?

Of course let us pass over it, because as it leads to questions such as who really is the addressee of this word, who will give the pledge, who can by what right demand such a pledge from whom, it is impossible not to be driven mad.

The other pledge demand is no less strange. Permission will be given at the universities, but in return "it will not be demanded that those working in primary and middle schools or public institutions also work with headscarves!"

That such a condition is put forward in a political bargain sheds enough light on the levels at which politics wanders, but thank God the AK Parti members did not give the pledge the CHP members wanted on this, and the sought-after consensus could not be reached. May God grant them sense. How could the AK Parti give a pledge on this matter? Are today's or tomorrow's social demands within the AK Parti's jurisdiction? Suppose the AK Parti made such a pledge; if tomorrow millions of people who have nothing to do with the AK Parti made such a demand, would it be the AK Parti that had broken the pledge?

Society has a dynamic existence. Some issues that look very much like luxuries today can turn in the future into demands on which irresistible masses insistently concentrate. Can a mortgage be placed today on the demands of tomorrow's people? The AK Parti itself may today be refusing in any way to meet such demands. But then, how far can politicians go on ignoring these demands?

The time has now come to give up the arrogance of proprietorship of the "if we give this they will ask for that" kind. Who is giving what to whom? Democratic politics is increasingly invalidating a ground on which rights are given by someone "as a favor." Those who make rights and freedoms a matter of bargaining are increasingly falling outside the political process and history. The addressee of the matter is those who remain within the process and history.