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ANKARA: Mind Your Steps!

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  • ANKARA: Mind Your Steps!

    MIND YOUR STEPS!
    by Kerim Balci

    Today's Zaman
    April 1 2008
    Turkey

    Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been asking the same question
    for some time now: What step backward do the nongovernmental
    organizations want me to take? What do they want me to step back
    from? And why?

    There is no clear answer to these questions. In fact, the only
    possible addressee of this call to step back is the government. Can
    the judicial system listen to the NGOs and step back from its duty to
    receive a filed case? Or will the Ergenekon junta lend an ear to the
    NGOs' call for the good of the country and step back from their coup
    plans and psychological warfare? Can the media group that belongs to
    one person who is not-understandably anti-Justice and Development
    Party (AK Party) change its attitudes about colonial secularism in
    one night and step back from humiliating publications? No! The only
    actor in Turkish politics that has been stepping back for the past
    six years is the governing AK Party.

    Lo! This is not praise. On the contrary, it is because of the AK
    Party's previous backward steps that the NGOs are not giving their
    full support to the democratization process but asking for one further
    step backward. A selective list of the AK Party's backward steps
    explains this. When the Þemdinli events exploded, Erdogan promised
    the nation that his government would shed light on the dark and
    dirty relations between the soldiers and the terrorists. "Until the
    end!" he said. "Until the end we will go!" The end came even before
    the beginning. The "good boy" of the provocative attack is now on
    duty and the prosecutor who filed the case against the "good boys
    in uniform" should be writing his memoirs somewhere in the middle
    of nowhere, probably to be published posthumously. And this was
    done to the backdrop of the Susurluk scandal, which was covered up
    by the AK Party's predecessor, the Welfare Party (RP), amid similar
    promises of "Until the end!" Through their unwillingness to cope with
    the undemocratic forces, disclosed in their lack of determination
    to investigate the dirty relations of the state organs and mafia,
    they brought about their own ends. Between idleness in the face of
    Susurluk and the Feb. 28 postmodern coup, there was an invisible but
    indivisible link!

    When Hrant Dink was murdered and the masses vulgarized the murder
    through "We are all Armenians" slogans, my newspaper said that the
    attack was a bullet fired at democracy. When the Council of State was
    attacked, certain mass media outlets "deciphered" the event as a return
    of "Turco-Islamist terrorism." We warned on that day that the barrel
    was pointing at our tranquility. In all these events, the AK Party was
    given the greatest support of all time by the democratic forces of this
    country to fight non-democratic forces -- and they lost that chance.

    The government's latest willingness to dig into the depths of the
    Ergenekon junta is first of all late. It is not only late, but its
    incentives are ill-perceivable. The prime minister is rightfully
    claiming that the media and to some extent the legal assault on his
    party is motivated by the government's fight with the Ergenekon junta,
    but it can also be claimed that the government's willingness to fight
    the junta was motivated by the secularist assault on the party. Of
    course the questioning can come to the point of "Which came first,
    the chicken or the egg?" But it was the government's duty to keep
    the issue from coming to that point.

    Though the government was late, this doesn't mean that it deserves
    to be abandoned. We are in the same boat as the prime minister and
    those who want to drown him are actually preparing the end of our
    democratization process. It is our duty to support the government in
    stepping forward in the face of the Ergenekon junta, but it is the
    duty of the prime minister to make us believe (and keep his word)
    that he will step further steps on other freedom-related issues as
    well. It is not only the prime minister who needs to mind his step,
    all of us need to...

    --Boundary_(ID_/TmkGzab1DWUiaclgs6iCw)--
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