A Question of Order by Basharat Peer

Author:Basharat Peer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780997126433
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc.
Published: 2017-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

The Feast of the Generals

On July 20, 2010, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan gave a nationally televised speech to the AKP members of Parliament. Erdoğan is known for his menacing tone, but this afternoon he turned to poetry, as he had in 1997 when he was jailed for reciting what the courts considered an Islamist poem. But now he was in charge, and he used the occasion to talk about the notorious 1980 military coup that saw the junta murder young Turkish men across the political divide. Erdoğan spoke of Necdet Adalı, a 22-year-old leftist who was sentenced to death by the military three years after his arrest. The poet Nevzat Çelik’s “The Dawn’s Song” reimagined Adalı’s last letter to his mother before his execution:

One morning, Mother, one morning

When you open the door to brush your pain away

Many of my peers

Whose names are different, whose voices are different

With flowers in their arms

Will a new country bloom.

Erdoğan cried as he recited the poem. The tears were designed to garner support for his next major political move, one targeted at the decades-long entrenchment of the unelected wings of the Turkish state: the military, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy, all of them long dominated by the Kemalist elite.

Erdoğan wanted to change the constitution, which had been written by the military after the coup. He planned a referendum on a broad package of 25 amendments which would reduce the jurisdiction of the military courts, empower civil courts, remove immunities for the generals who were behind the 1980 coup, strengthen data privacy laws, expand collective bargaining rights, and increase welfare provisions for children, the elderly, and the disabled. He scheduled the vote—a single yes or no for all 25 amendments—for September 12, 2010, the thirtieth anniversary of the 1980 coup.

One of the amendments in the package increased the number of judges in the country’s powerful Constitutional Court from 11 to 17. The additional judges would be appointed by the president—who at the time was Abdullah Gül, Erdoğan’s trusted right-hand man and the co-founder of the AKP—and approved by a majority vote in Parliament. Erdoğan claimed that the move would democratize the highest court of the land, but opponents saw it as a court-packing plan to control the judiciary, which had supported the military and banned the Islamist predecessors of the AKP and various Kurdish parties. Breaking the Kemalist hegemony in the Constitutional Court would certainly remove the old threat of closure of the AKP for “violating” secular norms of the republic.

Erdoğan framed the referendum as settling the score with the military. On polling day, the amendments passed with 58 percent of the votes. Erdoğan had once again leveraged the support of the electorate to deal the Kemalists a decisive defeat.

The courts were to become a key ally to Erdoğan in his plan to chip away at the military’s power and its interference in government and civil society. The old Kemalist junta was the target in two polarizing cases in Turkish courts that spanned eight tumultuous years between 2008 and 2016: the Ergenekon and the Sledgehammer trials.

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