By YUSUF KANLI
TDN- Friends in the diplomatic community of Ankara are more confused than ever these days... Most of them are talking with bold statements questioning the compatibility of party closure with the notion of democracy, while some are just trying to understand the complex workings of the political as well as judicial mechanisms in this country, re-acknowledging the Byzantine political heritage in the mental setup of the peoples of this land...
Of course it is wrong to claim that in democracies, parties cannot be closed by the courts... What's worse is to claim that a party that received the support a few months ago of one in every two eligible voters of a country cannot be closed down. This is an argument totally incompatible with the notion of equality and supremacy of law and the equality of all those in front of the legal principles of a democratic state adhering to the supremacy of law. A party outside of Parliament or a party with 21 deputies can be closed down, but a party that received 46.5 percent of the vote or which has 340 of the total 550 seats of Parliament cannot be shut down! That's nonsense.
Every democracy has its own peculiarities, historical phobias and corresponding self-defense mechanisms... In democracies, parties can be shut by courts, but for such a drastic move to be taken the judiciary needs to include something in the indictment beyond just gossip, press clippings and clandestine voice and video recordings... Anyway, in contemporary legal understanding, intentions that have not been transformed into action - and even if transformed into action - are, as long as they entail no violence, not crimes and therefore no cause for punitive action.
The problem that we have in Turkey nowadays, therefore, is not and cannot be the closure case itself, as long as there are clauses in the Constitution and the law on political parties regulating the closure of parties. The problem - very much like contentious Article 301 of the Penal Code that we have been condemning as a chain on free thought - is the vague and rather ambiguous wording of these legislations that allow a prosecutor to base his indictment against a party on gossip and press clippings rather than on concrete examples of the wrongdoings of the parties... In Article 301, intentions become punishable, even those that might not indeed even be expressed but which some people thought someone most probably might have and thus could pose a threat to some fundamental elements of the Turkish state. Lofty penalties follow, such as party closure, cutting of treasury assistance to the party, banishing from active party politics some prominent members of that political group.
Any hope for 301?
What do you think? Is it possible that after this nasty ordeal Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdodan will finally comprehend our complaints regarding Article 301 and decide to take action on it? Anyway, Foreign Minister Ali Babacan has repeated the government's long-time rhetoric that the amendment of the contentious article will come to Parliament "soon." Is he sincere? Has this government ever concentrated on Article 301 or any freedoms other than the headscarf?
We cannot, of course, predict what the Constitutional Court's decision will be on this case. So far, the appointment of a rapporteur to examine as the structural requirement compatibility of the indictment submitted by the chief prosecutor of the Court of Appeals indicates that the high court will play the game according to established judicial rules rather than the much-speculated political approach... By the end of next week, or early the following week, the rapporteur will submit its report and the court will decide whether to process the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) closure demand. If it decides to open the case, a process that may take at least six months will get underway.
Speculating on the outcome of the case now or writing scenarios by taking into account which court member was appointed by which president and prejudice what their final decision be is a waste of time... However, how will it be possible for a government to preserve its integrity and continue making decisions which by the nation cannot be supported while the nation's own feature will be under the dangling sword of a closure case that could take several months and which is based on some assumptions, intention-reading and preconceived perceptions?
That is, it is not odd to see the prosecutor filing a closure case against the majority party in Parliament as long as that's possible under the existing legislature of the country. This issue will definitely hurt Turkey, and the more contentious we make this closure case, the bigger its harm on all of us will be.
But as the saying goes, "there is some good in everything bad..." Realizing that we are all in the same boat will perhaps stop us from trying to hunt each other, since at the end of the day we are indeed firing on ourselves, on our own interests...