BY MURAT YETKIN
RADIKAL- The following issues should about the prosecutor's indictment seeking the closure of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) should be made clear:
1. Saying Chief Prosecutor Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya's indictment was politically wrong doesn't mean that what he did violated the law. He just used his authority under the Constitution and the law. He made a claim, and the judiciary will decide if it's valid or not, and it makes no legal difference whether that party won 47% or 2% of the vote. There's the difference of specific weight and this difference isn't legal, but political. In other words, what's being debated is whether his indictment complies with politics, not the law.
2. As long as our Constitution and laws allow parties to be closed based on ambiguous and open-ended definitions, similar cases may well be filed in the future. Here, the responsibility lies with the executive and legislative branch. Crimes which require the closure of a party might be limited to directly using, praising or encouraging violence, as in many European countries.
3. When politics start to discuss it, the meaning and importance of the nearly 47% of votes won by the AKP in last July's elections come up. In democracies, whoever captures the executive branch single-handedly uses his mandate proportional to his power to remake laws. But in modern pluralist democracies, the strength of a mandate doesn't depend on the majority of votes. That's why three powers were defined: the judicial, legislative and executive. Even the UN Charter says that democratic rights shall not be used in a way to limit rights and freedoms.
4. I don't want you to think that I believe the AKP deserved this case, but since it came to power it has focused all its political capital on the headscarf issue. This move can be said to have pushed the judicial branch's limits. So the limits of both the judicial branch and politics should be redrawn.
5. Democracies grow and mature on big cases based on claims that the limits of the judicial branch and politics violate those of each other. The Leyla Sahin case at the European Court of Human Rights and our headscarf are linked by the common denominator of the government's move and the closure case.
It would have been better if the die hadn't been cast, but, as it is now, we should wait for the judiciary's decision. What's interesting here is that a cause-effect relationship was implied in government circles between the Ergenekon probe (into an alleged right-wing terrorist group) and the closure case. According to Culture and Tourism Minister Ertugrul Gunay, the `deep state' was disturbed that certain places and people would be exposed through the Ergenekon investigation and so made Yalcinkaya file the closure case.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory. But if the government suspects this, the closure case will be dragged out. Is there any reason why the government shouldn't deal with the Ergenekon gang? Has somebody blocked the government from conducting police operations and bringing suspects to court? If somebody has done this, the government must ensure that those hurdles are overcome and justice is done. As there are suspicions that there's such a cause-effect relationship, the government should deal with this gang and uncover all the dark relations. This way, on the one hand, two important legal processes at the Constitutional Court (constitutional changes on wearing headscarves at universities and the AKP closure case) will define the limits of politics and the judicial branch, and on the other, it would be removed from dark and dirty relations. Every cloud has a silver lining. I wonder what the silver lining here will be.