The rise of the Palace State

The concern with informations about the situation in Turkey which informs the articles by İhsan Gümüş can also be followed in materials published, for example, by Amnesty International16 or Human Rights Watch. A few paragraphs from the ‘World Report 2019’ of Human Rights Watch will show what picture of the situation can be gained from these documents. The authors write in their country report on Turkey:17

Terrorism charges continued to be widely used. As of June [2018], almost one-fifth (48,924) of the total prison population (246,426) had been charged with or convicted of terrorism offences, according to the Ministry of Justice. Those prosecuted and convicted included journalists, civil servants, teachers, and politicians, as well as police officers and military personnel.

Of the 48,924, 34,241 were held for alleged Gulenist (FETÖ) links, and 10,286 for alleged links to the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), and 1,270 for alleged links to the extremist Islamic State (ISIS) group.

Many terrorism trials in Turkey lack compelling evidence of criminal activity or acts that would reasonably be deemed terrorism, and the practice of holding individuals charged with terrorism offenses in prolonged pretrial detention raised concerns its use has become a form of summary punishment.

The present book confronts the reader with a difficult question: What can be done to support the victims of persecution and oppression in Turkey? What can be done to break the admiration for the Turkish government’s ‘FETÖ’ campaign? What can be done to give the tens of thousands who have fallen victim to the Turkish government a new life? What can be done to inspire more voices in Turkey and abroad with an orientation towards human rights as they are expressed, for example, in the European Convention on Human Rights? What can be done in the interest of peacebuilding and peace education in Turkey and beyond? What can be done to have a fruitful debate about the foundation upon which religions can flourish in a peaceful, pluralistic, modern world of human rights, freedom of religion, and responsible democracy? The book by İhsan Gümüş provides informations about the chain of actions which has led to the continuing situation of crisis. This is an important first step.

The book comes at a favourable moment. In the German context, a better understanding of the reality of persecution in Turkey has been made possible through the book by Ahmet Altan, Ich werde die Welt nie wiedersehen. Texte aus dem Gefängnis (2018). The book is also available in an English version, I will never see the world again (2019), with a compelling foreword by Philippe Sands. Another author and great writer to think of is Aslı Erdoğan, whose Nicht einmal das Schweigen gehört uns noch (2017)18 and Das Haus aus Stein are amazing documents of humanity and wisdom. The preface to the German translation of Das Haus aus Stein of January 2019 evokes the author’s own experience as a prisoner in Turkey. The journalist Meşale Tolu has published a report on her time in prison, as a young mother together with her child, from April to December 2017: “Mein Sohn bleibt bei mir!”. Als politische Geisel in türkischer Haft – und warum es noch nicht zu Ende ist (2019). The forthcoming book by Deniz Yücel, Agentterrorist. Eine Geschichte über Freiheit und Freundschaft, Demokratie und Nichtsodemokratie (2019) will be a significant addition to this list.19

A democracy is a country in which power is held by elected representatives – this is one of the most basic definitions of a democratic state. The political system of a democracy can only work if freedom of the media, tied to high standards of media ethics, and free and fair elections are guaranteed. The political system of a democracy can only work if the elected representatives know what their responsibilities are. No democracy, no constitutional system that is orientated towards the protection of human rights can work ‘without the support of a strong, popular culture of liberty’. The book by İhsan Gümüş has the potential to motivate people who want to live in freedom and want to see others live in freedom to overcome moral obtuseness.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-25885817; https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/a-rare-meeting-with-reclusive-turkish-spiritual-leader-fethullah-gulen/278662/.

2. German edition: Kein Zurück von der Demokratie. M. Fethullah Gülen, ed. by Faruk Mercan and Arhan Kardas, 2018, with an introduction by Arhan Kardas and a foreword which I contributed. The English edition contains an appendix with five articles by Gülen in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Le Monde from February 2015 to August 2016. Meanwhile one more article in Le Monde of 26 February 2019 can be added to the list.

3. German edition: Wenn dein Land nicht mehr dein Land ist. Oder sieben Schritte in die Diktatur, 2019.

4. https://de.ejo-online.eu/author/christoph-bultmann.

5. https://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp.

6. https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/suche/pressekonferenz-von-bundeskanzlerin-merkel-und-dem-tuerkischen-praesidenten-recep-tayyip-erdo%C4%9Fan-1532384.

7. German edition: Euphorie und Wehmut. Die Türkei auf der Suche nach sich selbst, 2015.

8. See also the postscript ‘The predicament of the Gülen movement in the aftermath of the July 15th coup attempt’ in Anwar Alam, For the sake of Allah. The origin, development, and discourse of the Gülen movement, 2019, 271-94.

9. https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/activity-reports.

10. http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/XRef/Xref-DocDetails-EN.asp?fileid=23665&lang=EN.

11. Resolution 2156 consists of 40 sections and contains important sections on the persecution and oppression of the Kurdish population and representatives of the parliamentary party HDP in Turkey.

12. For the votes see: http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/Votes/DB-VotesResults-EN.asp?VoteID=36533&DocID=16218&MemberID=.

13. See the press release of 5 April 2018 about a fact-finding visit to Turkey from 28 to 30 March 2018 by the co-rapporteurs for the monitoring of Turkey by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Marianne Mikko (Estonia, SOC) and Nigel Evans (United Kingdom, EC) (http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-en.asp?newsid=7013&lang=2) and their report of 17 June 2018 (http://website-pace.net/documents/19887/4268449/AS-MON-2018-07-EN.pdf/3b75884c-6a63-46cb-b366-f902732df2b2) which was released on 26 June 2018 (http://assembly.coe.int/nw/xml/News/News-View-en.asp?newsid=7140&lang=2). – See also the press release about a visit to Turkey by the Commissioner for Human Rights of 8 July 2019 (https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/turkey-needs-to-put-an-end-to-arbitrariness-in-the-judiciary-and-to-protect-human-rights-defenders).

14. See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/delegations/en/d-tr/documents/ep-resolutions.

15. See http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2017-0306_EN.html?redirect, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2018-0040_EN.html?redirect, http://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-8-2019-0200_EN.pdf?redirect.

16. See especially ‘Turkey: Weathering the storm: Defending human rights in Turkey’s climate of fear’ of 26 April 2018 (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/eur44/8200/2018/en/).

17. See https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/turkey.

18. French edition: Le silence même n’est plus à toi, 2017; the German edition has a foreword by Cem Özdemir.

19. Meanwhile see his Wir sind ja nicht zum Spaß hier. Reportagen, Satiren und andere Gebrauchstexte, ed. by Doris Akrap, 2017.

INTRODUCTION

What is intended with this Book

This book is born of articles (they were seven in sum) that appeared on the Platform for Peace and Justice (PPJ) in 2017 – 18. Following their original publication, these articles,with a scrutiny of relevance and an update of the matters according to the course of events, have now been turned into the chapters of this very book. Therefore, each chapter says more than what the former articles said.

Online governmental and media archives were also critical for this book. I therefore gave the relevant links to the press news and legislative sources like Official Gazette, public announcements, media reports etc. I may be wrong, but it is my worry that the regime, in the near future, might prevent researchers from having access to such links and sources.

For the sake of readability, I have tried to avoid cluttering the text with footnotes or excessive references, quotations, and citation marks. Instead, I provided the reader with a detailed list of the decree laws issued during the State of Emergeny (SoE) (Table 8). Yet details (publication date and publication number in the Official Gazette) of other laws which I am referring to in the book can be traced from the footnotes. Through various tables, I tried to summarise the size of forfeiture and predation operations in monetary terms. I hope this approach, more or less, will allow further studies of researchers as well as providing an easy reference. I also believe it is a necessary moral endeavour.

In doing so, namely, working with a huge amount of legal documents, referring to dates and numbers through tables and footnotes, what concerned me was the following: although it all happened before our eyes, the events and conditions might be forgotten in a world on the move. Then, researchers, for example when studying the SoE regime, may find it difficult to consider the relevance of the documents and to connect the legislative operations with the actual cases. This may also be the case in the assessment of the original intentions at that time.

The prevailing aim of this book is not to show the atrocities which many Turkish citizens experienced during the SoE, but rather to deepen our knowledge and understanding of authoritarianism, to provide an up-to-date explanation of its roots, and to offer our thoughts on how a better foundation for an electoral democracy could be constructed in the future.

To this end, I rather examined consequences of the organised legislative operations (i. e. deliberate complication of domestic remedies, revival of civil death, black laws, immunity- impunity, forfeiture and predation strategies, paramilitary formations, normalcy of the SoE, court packing, concentration of power etc.) that have received less attention of scholars, lawyers and journalists most of whom focused on the justification of the operations in question.

My analyses have involved, to a large extent, a great deal of documentary research on the legal evidences against ill-fabricated narratives of the regime such as infiltration into the state, encroaching upon the army, orchestrating the coup attempt of 15 July 2016 etc. That is why the book provides great numbers of references, footnotes, and lists of legislations indicating that the servants of the regime worked hard to legitimize organised crimes like theft, plundering, murder, violence, and persecution. Within this book, I will demonstrate that “grand corruptions” (see chapter 6) and politically organised crimes have been documented even by the perpetrators themselves in the form of black laws, decrees, circulars, judicial decisions and so forth.