The ruling AKP is playing the game according to the formal rules of the Parliament. They are correct from a procedural point of view.
But it does not mean that they are acting responsibly in the investigation of the horrific train crash that killed 38 passengers and injured many dozens.
The reason is simple: the “speed-train project” in question was blessed and supported energetically by the same AKP government to showcase AKP’s can-do efficacy – despite many warnings from the scientific-engineering community that they were playing with fire.
In the extraordinary meeting of the Turkish Parliament’s General Assembly on August 4, the AKP closed ranks and vetoed 319-171 a parliamentary inquiry proposal targeting the Minister of Transportation Binali Yildirim.
The deputies, who had to interrupt their summer vacations for the vote, immediately went back to the vacation resorts from where they were fetched.
Forgotten in the perfunctory exercise was the crucial fact that democracy is not only a matter of form but content as well.
AKP’s Istanbul Deputy Nusret Bayraktar, who used to be the mayor of Istanbul’s Beyoglu district when Recep Tayyip Erdogan was the Greater Metropolitan Mayor of Istanbul, perhaps expressed the sentiment of a majority of AKP deputies when he suggested while speaking on behalf of the AKP’s Parliamentary Group that the accident was “the work of the evil eyes.”
According to a Turkish folk belief, things that are looked at too hard with admiring eyes get jinxed.
If I didn’t know that Mr. Bayraktar truly believes in what he is saying, I would be tempted to offer that he is attempting at black humor. But unfortunately, he wasn't.
The year is 2004. And the speaker for the ruling party in Turkey is explaining something as terrible but ultimately also as mechanical as a bad train accident as the work of “evil eyes.” It is a disheartening picture indeed.
Sakarya Province Director General of Health Services Specialist Doctor Aziz Ögütlü has resigned from his post yesterday since he felt he was personally responsible for the higher-than-actual casualty numbers released by (not himself but) his subordinates during the early days of the accident.
Those AKP higher-ups behind the speed-train project evidently have neither the courage nor the responsibility to follow in the steps of the conscientious doctor from Sakarya.
Thanks God there are still noble administrators in Turkey who are well aware that, to use an Americanism, “the buck stops with them.” I wish more of them were working under the roof of the Turkish Parliament.