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The Case Against
Turkey's Ruling Party by Michael
Rubin Sometime this summer, Turkey's
Constitutional Court will decide whether Prime Minister Recep Tayyip
Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) violated the
"principles of a democratic and secular republic" that undergird the
Turkish constitution and should be barred from politics. Across the Turkish
political spectrum, most officials expect the Court to rule against the AKP,
thus dissolving the party and banning Erdoğan and his closest aides for at
least five years. Although the prime minister,
Foreign Minister Ali Babacan, and influential AKP advisers have tried to depict
this as the unjust outgrowth of a dispute over headscarves in public
universities—and perhaps even a "judicial coup"—the case is
legitimate. Erdoğan's supporters often
point to his embrace of the European Union accession process as proof of his
liberalism. But Erdoğan has used the EU accession process to unravel
Turkey's system of checks and balances. He cares little for EU institutions.
When the European Court of Human Rights upheld a ban on headscarves in public
schools—the same ban that the Turkey's own Constitutional Court later
upheld—Erdoğan chastised the European justices for applying civil law to a
religious matter, declaring, "It is wrong that those who have no
connection to this field [of religion] make such a decision…without consulting religious
scholars." Europe's encouragement of
Turkish reforms has been important. In a mature democracy, the military should
remain aloof from politics. Brussels should be applauded for pressuring Turkey
to reform its National Security Council to give the powerful body a civilian
majority with a civilian head. By failing to encourage the creation of an
alternate check-and-balance mechanism to replace the military's traditional
role as guardian of the constitution, however, the EU committed diplomatic
malpractice. Erdoğan seized the opportunity to run roughshod over Turkish
secularism and democracy. Indeed, despite its
self-description as secular, liberal, and democratic, the AKP is quite the
opposite. Babacan ordered Turkish officials to remove references to secularism
from Turkey's position paper ahead of EU negotiations over education policy.
Domestically, the AKP has placed religion above the law. Turkey has long
regulated supplemental Koran schools, ensuring instructor qualifications and
imposing minimum age requirements to prevent indoctrination. When Saudi mullahs
fanned out across Europe, the Middle East, and Central Asia to promote a
radical version of Islam, they largely bypassed Turkey. No longer. Not only did
the AKP loosen limits upon the religious schools, but it also eviscerated the
penalties for violations, leading some illegal madrassas to begin advertising
openly. As he consolidates power,
Erdoğan has become the Turkish Vladimir Putin. Upon taking office,
Erdoğan sought to lower the mandatory retirement age for public servants
from 65 to 61, which effectively allowed his party to appoint almost half of
the nation's prosecutors and judges. With patronage appointments, the prime
minister transformed technocratic bodies such as the Savings Deposit Insurance
Fund (TMSF), an entity empowered to seize private businesses and media outlets,
into virtual party wings. The TMSF today is staffed almost entirely by
appointees transferred from Saudi-based financial institutions. Placement in key ministries and
government departments used to depend on success in civil service exams.
Erdoğan imposed a subjective interview process that enabled him to choose
political loyalists. The practice spread to state-owned industries; Turkish
Airlines, for example, began quizzing employees on the Koran. Women have
suffered the most. As analyst Soner Çağaptay observes in Newsweek,
"under the AKP, women are largely excluded from decision-making positions
in government and the workforce, relegated to the confines of their
homes." The AKP has even resorted to
wiretapping the conversations of its political rivals. Late last month, Vakit,
an Islamist paper close to the AKP, published a wiretap conversation between
the opposition's deputy leader and a governor. This episode, which the media
have called "Turkey's Watergate," has sent chills through the secular
elite. The AKP has also sought to
diminish the power of Turkey's independent judiciary. In May 2005, AKP
co-founder and parliamentary speaker Bülent Arınç said that if the
Constitutional Court continued to declare AKP legislation unconstitutional, the
AKP might simply dissolve it. When the Danıştay, the country's
supreme administrative court, ruled against the previous government's seizure
of a bank and Erdoğan's transfer of its European subsidiary to a political
ally, the prime minister ignored the ruling. Contrary to AKP claims, this
summer's Court decision will not mark the end of Turkish democracy, but rather
its rebirth. Erdoğan, too, will begin a new chapter. Even if he is banned
from politics, a quirk in Turkish election law would allow him to seek office
as an independent. In other words, Erdoğan could conceivably wind up
presiding over other AKP alumni as an independent prime minister. Here, the issue is less
ambition than immunity. When Erdoğan leaves parliament, he will face a
multitude of corruption charges. While compiling his immense wealth, he has
refused to give a full financial disclosure. As the clock runs out on his
premiership, Erdoğan has dispensed with even the appearance of legality.
He has used the AKP's parliamentary majority to suppress investigation of a
recent TMSF deal in which an opposition newspaper and television station were
sold to an Erdoğan ally after the prime minister interceded illegally. On
June 18, Habertürk's Fatih Altaylı reported that the Austrian energy firm
OMV has submitted an affidavit swearing that Erdoğan told OMV the way to
unfreeze a $3 billion energy project would be to dump its longtime Turkish
partner and work instead with his son-in-law. Perhaps it should not be a
surprise, then, that Erdoğan has used what could be his last weeks as
prime minister to appoint political loyalists to the Sayıştay,
Turkey's supreme court of accounts and audits, which will soon investigate his
conduct. Michael Rubin, a resident
scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly. |
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