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BAYKAM: AKP NOT IN SEARCH OF REAL DEMOCRACY
Baykam said: "This is only a beginning. Everybody talks about democracy. Nobody really cares about it. Nobody tries to construct it really. Nobody wants to give the power to the people. Nobody really wants to understand that democracy is also a political system that has to protect itself. Nobody wants to understand that democracy can only exist in a secular society. Nobody understands that if you don't fight against the mixing of religion with politics, you cannot have a free society"
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: 12.04.2010 |
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Kemalist stalwart Baykam: 'Nobody really wants to understand that democracy is also a political system that has to protect itself. Nobody wants to understand that democracy can only exist in a secular society. Nobody understands that if you don't fight against the mixing of religion with politics, you cannot have a free society, a free generation, free art, free press'
Turkish Kemalist stalwart Bedri Baykam outspoken in opposition to AKP
Bedri Baykam has been involved in art since he was very young and has been a supporter of the principles laid down by modern Turkish founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk since his early youth. His father, Dr. Suphi Baykam, was a deputy and spokesman for the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, which Atatürk established.
Over the years, Baykam has been an outspoken member of the CHP and has even been a candidate for president of the party. Most recently, he has prepared a new set of rules and regulations for the CHP that will be introduced to the party at its congress in May. Despite his heavy political agenda, however, he is also organizing an exhibition that opens next week in Paris.
Coming from a Kemalist perspective, Baykam said he was not in favor of the proposed constitutional amendments from the Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
“The AKP is not trying to make a Constitution for Turkey. The AKP is trying to make a constitution for the party that they want to impose on the country,” he told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
“This is like a Constitution that would turn [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and [President Abdullah] Gül into almost like a double dictatorship where they appoint anybody ranging from the ‘Islamicist Conservative Council of Television Production’ to the way they now appoint university deans. They want to appoint all the people in the law and judiciary system. And they want themselves, or one of them, the president, to appoint almost all of the constitutional court members. And they even take the joke as far as saying that if a state prosecutor is thinking about closing down a party, he should ask permission to do that of the Parliament. ‘Can I close you?’ ‘Do you want me to close you?’”
Declaring the situation amusing, if not tragic, he said: “This is like the best jokes of Nasrettin Hoca. Even Nasrettin Hoca did not have so much imagination in preparing jokes like this. And the point is that this which is like the joke of the century is talked about seriously in the Turkish press and political arena. People are going to laugh a hell of a lot when they look back on those years and what the AKP was trying to do to Turkish democracy. And unfortunately some press people are scared; unfortunately some press people cannot write freely. Some of the big press groups have fired some of their most important writers on the demand of AKP and they thought this would leave them in peace. But they have seen that this wasn’t the case and they still have big backlashes even after they fired their most important writers.”
Baykam said it was incorrect to suggest that the increasing civilianization of Turkish politics will result in more democracy. “Well, the AKP has proven that getting more civilians doesn’t mean getting more democrats. They have made it a so-called more civilian Turkey that has become a totally Islamo-fascist country so they have proven that there is no relation between a country that is civilian or military and the country that is democratic.”
Noting the fear many in Turkey now have of wiretapping, he said: “[People] are even scared to talk in their own kitchen because everybody has convinced everybody that those mobile phones can even record when you’re not talking to each other, even it’s shut, even if you take out the battery, even if you throw it down the sink.”
‘State terrorism’
Declaring the AKP to have a “terrorist-state spirit,” Baykam said: “Anybody who buys the joke that this government is democratizing Turkey is either the stupidest person on earth or the biggest sell out. I don’t think anybody who has got a regular I.Q. that knows anything basic about democracy, seeing what the AKP is doing to this Constitution and to Turkey, seeing how they got in control of the Sabah and ATV newspaper … and how ridiculous the partisans who bid were and how so many other things are distributed as wealth and contracts between the AKP and societies [can believe what’s happening].”
Baykam further criticized the government’s perceived attacks on the military, as well as the incarceration of writer Mustafa Balbay, TV channel owner Tuncay Özkan, a TV owner, Workers’ Party leader Doğu Perinçek and organ transplant doctor Mehmet Haberal
“The basis of democracy creates a climate against the ruling party. I am not among those naïve people who would buy that and think they were doing this for democracy. It’s more than a joke. They want to have zero control over themselves from the judiciary system like the separation-of-power system. They want to eliminate this. They want to control the judiciary system as much as they control this funny thing [Supreme Board of Radio and Television] RTÜK. They keep talking about the headscarf, about tolerance. We faced with people who have fewer tolerances on lifestyles, on alcohol, on unity so for them tolerance is only the name of imposing their own lifestyle. And the funny thing is that the AKP has called it democracy.”
Baykam said until the “post-modern coup” of Feb. 28, 1997, which unseated the Islamist Welfare Party, the government had tried to install shariah law. “After the famous Feb. 28 decree imposed by the [military] security council, they changed tactics, especially with the AKP. This is now their new tactic. They said, ‘We’re going to do exactly the same things. We’re going to make a defense of exactly the same lifestyles, philosophy. We’re going to try to impose the same Middle-Ages mentality on Turkey but instead of calling it shariah, we’re going to call it democracy. This is a decision they have taken and they have been applying. … It’s wonderful. It was a very, very clever move. The problem is that not everybody swallows that.”
Baykam said the most problematic change being proposed is the nomination of the Constitutional Court members, 16 of them, by the president because it would “finish the judiciary.”
He also complained about the government’s proposed changes to the way political parties are shut down.
“They said, ‘Well, a party can be shut down only if it uses terrorism.’ This is more than ridiculous. This is a law for a marginal party that would be an ethnic party so they could say before they close it down that they have relations with a terrorist group, etc. But what if we’re talking about state terrorism? What if we’re talking about a party in power that uses its own legal strength as police and law mixed in one and if they use it in a terrorist way and get rid of democracy and human rights and eliminate all their opposition through so-called legal means? Who is going to fight against that? You’re not going to call this terrorism. You’re going to say we’re doing it with the police. This is wrong; this is the state doing it. They don’t want anyone to stop them on that issue,” he said.
“So they want a government that operates without any limits, without any danger of being closed down no matter how much they would abuse the Constitution and there would be no judiciary system to stop them and no military to stop them nor any press to stop them because the press is also paralyzed. So they want a one-party system where they control the law, the press, the military, the universities, the youth and where they even control your reservations in heaven or hell,” he said.
Reiterating his objection to the entire constitutional package in general, Baykam said the documents should not go to a referendum at all given the abuse of power the amendments represent.
“But talking in general, when you make a constitutional change like this, every law should be voted on separately. It is ridiculous. They want to impose some good things mixed with all the worst and terrible ones and they want to put them in the same package so just by putting the light on the positive elements they want to make it pass. Like every other move they have done, they think that they are very shrewd. So of course it should be voted separately, talking in general, but if you ask me, this should not be voted at all.”
‘Killing democracy in Turkey’
Arguing that the package is the final stroke in the AKP’s plan to “kill democracy in Turkey,” he said: “The AKP has made many moves and they have taken control of the Parliament and of most of the municipalities. Now they’re in control of more than half of the press and now they’re trying to kill the judiciary system and later their next move is to kill the CHP.”
For Baykam, it is evident that the AKP is trying to grossly violate the principles of secularism. “I can see all these moves as the person who has been warning society for 25 years against the mixing of Islam with politics and if AKP was a legal party in a country in which secularism is a must in the Constitution and in the political parties law, then the foreign press would not have been talking about the Islamist government in Turkey. … This proves how much they have mixed politics with religion and how unconstitutional that is and how ridiculous that is and how illegal that is and now that they can’t behave according to the Constitution, they want to make the Constitution that fits them.”
Transforming the CHP
“So for democratizing Turkey we want to change the way that political parties are handled. I’m trying to make a big move in the CHP to democratize CHP at the May 22 congress,” Baykam said.
“We have held many panel discussions with a variety of people so I’m really putting the pressure on the CHP to democratize it. Now [party leader] Deniz Baykal has started talking in the last month, ‘Maybe we’ll open the doors to women and youth.’ Well actually no. I say this shouldn’t just be window dressing. You must give quotas to women, to youth in Parliament. You must give 25 percent to women; you must give 25 percent to youth. You must let people choose their own Parliament members and not appoint them yourself. So I’m trying to impose democratization on the CHP so they become the first party in Turkey to become a democratic party.”
Baykam, however, said other parties instead of the CHP are beginning to copy his ideas. “The funny thing is that Baykal is not listening to me. But [Şişli Mayor and Turkey Movement for Change Chairman] Mustafa Sarıgül is busy copying my ideas. Those were the ideas I cared the most about when I was a candidate for the presidency of the CHP in 2003. But now I’ve turned them into rules for the CHP constitution. Baykal doesn’t want to see this preparation but Sarigül and [Democrat Party Chairman] Husamettin Cindoruk are getting more influenced by it.”
He further criticized the government on its failure to remove the current election threshold. “This [10 percent threshold] is very undemocratic and sad. If you ask me any party that gets 2 percent should be represented, even 1 percent. If it’s not to have a seat, it should at least be represented. We should go back to what was called the ‘Milli-yi Vakia’ [needs explanation] in the 1960s.”
Criticizing those who say this would open the way for instability, Baykam said: “You call this stability, the AKP controlling everything and trying to kill the parliamentary system and the constitution and democracy? I’m sorry. I prefer the worst coalition than having this one single-party offensive on democracy.”
Arguing that the AKP does not want to enter Europe, Baykam said: “It’s a big lie. They pretend to want to enter Europe so the army does not move against them. Moreover, the European Union does not want to take Turkey either. They have pretended to want to take Turkey into the EU just so that they would have a bigger market. Even [former French President] Jacques Chirac said we could talk 20 years and we won’t know if we would have free circulation rights. And only one single country vetoing Turkey – on Armenian issues, Cyprus issues, Turkey issues – is enough for a refusal.”
Noting the exaggerated celebrations for the beginning of Turkey’s EU negotiations, he said: “In 20 years we don’t even know if Europe will exist. If you don’t see the hawks in this relation on both sides, you’re more than naïve. On the other hand, Europe understands absolutely nothing of Turkish politics if they really believe that the AKP is like a conservative Christian party who wants to democratize Turkey, they’re really not following at all what’s happening in this country. They’d better come and assist the court cases of Ergenekon and follow them and what we write about Turkey so that they can really have a grasp of what’s going on in Turkey.”
In conclusion, Baykam said: “This is only a beginning. Everybody talks about democracy. Nobody really cares about it. Nobody tries to construct it really. Nobody wants to give the power to the people. Nobody really wants to understand that democracy is also a political system that has to protect itself. Nobody wants to understand that democracy can only exist in a secular society. Nobody understands that if you don’t fight against the mixing of religion with politics, you cannot have a free society, a free generation, free art, free press and you cannot even have a respectful religion because all these people are using the weaknesses of democracy and the weakness of people’s love for God or religion and turning it into money and power for themselves. Anybody who cannot see what’s happening will be liable in front of history and in front of.”
Saturday, April 10, 2010
SOURCE: Hürriyet Daily News
GÜL DEMIR - NIKI GAMM
Turkish Kemalist stalwart Bedri Baykam outspoken in opposition to AKP
Bedri Baykam has been involved in art since he was very young and has been a supporter of the principles laid down by modern Turkish founder Mustafa Kemal Atatürk since his early youth. His father, Dr. Suphi Baykam, was a deputy and spokesman for the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, which Atatürk established.
Over the years, Baykam has been an outspoken member of the CHP and has even been a candidate for president of the party. Most recently, he has prepared a new set of rules and regulations for the CHP that will be introduced to the party at its congress in May. Despite his heavy political agenda, however, he is also organizing an exhibition that opens next week in Paris.
Coming from a Kemalist perspective, Baykam said he was not in favor of the proposed constitutional amendments from the Justice and Development Party, or AKP.
“The AKP is not trying to make a Constitution for Turkey. The AKP is trying to make a constitution for the party that they want to impose on the country,” he told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review.
“This is like a Constitution that would turn [Prime Minister Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan and [President Abdullah] Gül into almost like a double dictatorship where they appoint anybody ranging from the ‘Islamicist Conservative Council of Television Production’ to the way they now appoint university deans. They want to appoint all the people in the law and judiciary system. And they want themselves, or one of them, the president, to appoint almost all of the constitutional court members. And they even take the joke as far as saying that if a state prosecutor is thinking about closing down a party, he should ask permission to do that of the Parliament. ‘Can I close you?’ ‘Do you want me to close you?’”
Declaring the situation amusing, if not tragic, he said: “This is like the best jokes of Nasrettin Hoca. Even Nasrettin Hoca did not have so much imagination in preparing jokes like this. And the point is that this which is like the joke of the century is talked about seriously in the Turkish press and political arena. People are going to laugh a hell of a lot when they look back on those years and what the AKP was trying to do to Turkish democracy. And unfortunately some press people are scared; unfortunately some press people cannot write freely. Some of the big press groups have fired some of their most important writers on the demand of AKP and they thought this would leave them in peace. But they have seen that this wasn’t the case and they still have big backlashes even after they fired their most important writers.”
Baykam said it was incorrect to suggest that the increasing civilianization of Turkish politics will result in more democracy. “Well, the AKP has proven that getting more civilians doesn’t mean getting more democrats. They have made it a so-called more civilian Turkey that has become a totally Islamo-fascist country so they have proven that there is no relation between a country that is civilian or military and the country that is democratic.”
Noting the fear many in Turkey now have of wiretapping, he said: “[People] are even scared to talk in their own kitchen because everybody has convinced everybody that those mobile phones can even record when you’re not talking to each other, even it’s shut, even if you take out the battery, even if you throw it down the sink.”
‘State terrorism’
Declaring the AKP to have a “terrorist-state spirit,” Baykam said: “Anybody who buys the joke that this government is democratizing Turkey is either the stupidest person on earth or the biggest sell out. I don’t think anybody who has got a regular I.Q. that knows anything basic about democracy, seeing what the AKP is doing to this Constitution and to Turkey, seeing how they got in control of the Sabah and ATV newspaper … and how ridiculous the partisans who bid were and how so many other things are distributed as wealth and contracts between the AKP and societies [can believe what’s happening].”
Baykam further criticized the government’s perceived attacks on the military, as well as the incarceration of writer Mustafa Balbay, TV channel owner Tuncay Özkan, a TV owner, Workers’ Party leader Doğu Perinçek and organ transplant doctor Mehmet Haberal
“The basis of democracy creates a climate against the ruling party. I am not among those naïve people who would buy that and think they were doing this for democracy. It’s more than a joke. They want to have zero control over themselves from the judiciary system like the separation-of-power system. They want to eliminate this. They want to control the judiciary system as much as they control this funny thing [Supreme Board of Radio and Television] RTÜK. They keep talking about the headscarf, about tolerance. We faced with people who have fewer tolerances on lifestyles, on alcohol, on unity so for them tolerance is only the name of imposing their own lifestyle. And the funny thing is that the AKP has called it democracy.”
Baykam said until the “post-modern coup” of Feb. 28, 1997, which unseated the Islamist Welfare Party, the government had tried to install shariah law. “After the famous Feb. 28 decree imposed by the [military] security council, they changed tactics, especially with the AKP. This is now their new tactic. They said, ‘We’re going to do exactly the same things. We’re going to make a defense of exactly the same lifestyles, philosophy. We’re going to try to impose the same Middle-Ages mentality on Turkey but instead of calling it shariah, we’re going to call it democracy. This is a decision they have taken and they have been applying. … It’s wonderful. It was a very, very clever move. The problem is that not everybody swallows that.”
Baykam said the most problematic change being proposed is the nomination of the Constitutional Court members, 16 of them, by the president because it would “finish the judiciary.”
He also complained about the government’s proposed changes to the way political parties are shut down.
“They said, ‘Well, a party can be shut down only if it uses terrorism.’ This is more than ridiculous. This is a law for a marginal party that would be an ethnic party so they could say before they close it down that they have relations with a terrorist group, etc. But what if we’re talking about state terrorism? What if we’re talking about a party in power that uses its own legal strength as police and law mixed in one and if they use it in a terrorist way and get rid of democracy and human rights and eliminate all their opposition through so-called legal means? Who is going to fight against that? You’re not going to call this terrorism. You’re going to say we’re doing it with the police. This is wrong; this is the state doing it. They don’t want anyone to stop them on that issue,” he said.
“So they want a government that operates without any limits, without any danger of being closed down no matter how much they would abuse the Constitution and there would be no judiciary system to stop them and no military to stop them nor any press to stop them because the press is also paralyzed. So they want a one-party system where they control the law, the press, the military, the universities, the youth and where they even control your reservations in heaven or hell,” he said.
Reiterating his objection to the entire constitutional package in general, Baykam said the documents should not go to a referendum at all given the abuse of power the amendments represent.
“But talking in general, when you make a constitutional change like this, every law should be voted on separately. It is ridiculous. They want to impose some good things mixed with all the worst and terrible ones and they want to put them in the same package so just by putting the light on the positive elements they want to make it pass. Like every other move they have done, they think that they are very shrewd. So of course it should be voted separately, talking in general, but if you ask me, this should not be voted at all.”
‘Killing democracy in Turkey’
Arguing that the package is the final stroke in the AKP’s plan to “kill democracy in Turkey,” he said: “The AKP has made many moves and they have taken control of the Parliament and of most of the municipalities. Now they’re in control of more than half of the press and now they’re trying to kill the judiciary system and later their next move is to kill the CHP.”
For Baykam, it is evident that the AKP is trying to grossly violate the principles of secularism. “I can see all these moves as the person who has been warning society for 25 years against the mixing of Islam with politics and if AKP was a legal party in a country in which secularism is a must in the Constitution and in the political parties law, then the foreign press would not have been talking about the Islamist government in Turkey. … This proves how much they have mixed politics with religion and how unconstitutional that is and how ridiculous that is and how illegal that is and now that they can’t behave according to the Constitution, they want to make the Constitution that fits them.”
Transforming the CHP
“So for democratizing Turkey we want to change the way that political parties are handled. I’m trying to make a big move in the CHP to democratize CHP at the May 22 congress,” Baykam said.
“We have held many panel discussions with a variety of people so I’m really putting the pressure on the CHP to democratize it. Now [party leader] Deniz Baykal has started talking in the last month, ‘Maybe we’ll open the doors to women and youth.’ Well actually no. I say this shouldn’t just be window dressing. You must give quotas to women, to youth in Parliament. You must give 25 percent to women; you must give 25 percent to youth. You must let people choose their own Parliament members and not appoint them yourself. So I’m trying to impose democratization on the CHP so they become the first party in Turkey to become a democratic party.”
Baykam, however, said other parties instead of the CHP are beginning to copy his ideas. “The funny thing is that Baykal is not listening to me. But [Şişli Mayor and Turkey Movement for Change Chairman] Mustafa Sarıgül is busy copying my ideas. Those were the ideas I cared the most about when I was a candidate for the presidency of the CHP in 2003. But now I’ve turned them into rules for the CHP constitution. Baykal doesn’t want to see this preparation but Sarigül and [Democrat Party Chairman] Husamettin Cindoruk are getting more influenced by it.”
He further criticized the government on its failure to remove the current election threshold. “This [10 percent threshold] is very undemocratic and sad. If you ask me any party that gets 2 percent should be represented, even 1 percent. If it’s not to have a seat, it should at least be represented. We should go back to what was called the ‘Milli-yi Vakia’ [needs explanation] in the 1960s.”
Criticizing those who say this would open the way for instability, Baykam said: “You call this stability, the AKP controlling everything and trying to kill the parliamentary system and the constitution and democracy? I’m sorry. I prefer the worst coalition than having this one single-party offensive on democracy.”
Arguing that the AKP does not want to enter Europe, Baykam said: “It’s a big lie. They pretend to want to enter Europe so the army does not move against them. Moreover, the European Union does not want to take Turkey either. They have pretended to want to take Turkey into the EU just so that they would have a bigger market. Even [former French President] Jacques Chirac said we could talk 20 years and we won’t know if we would have free circulation rights. And only one single country vetoing Turkey – on Armenian issues, Cyprus issues, Turkey issues – is enough for a refusal.”
Noting the exaggerated celebrations for the beginning of Turkey’s EU negotiations, he said: “In 20 years we don’t even know if Europe will exist. If you don’t see the hawks in this relation on both sides, you’re more than naïve. On the other hand, Europe understands absolutely nothing of Turkish politics if they really believe that the AKP is like a conservative Christian party who wants to democratize Turkey, they’re really not following at all what’s happening in this country. They’d better come and assist the court cases of Ergenekon and follow them and what we write about Turkey so that they can really have a grasp of what’s going on in Turkey.”
In conclusion, Baykam said: “This is only a beginning. Everybody talks about democracy. Nobody really cares about it. Nobody tries to construct it really. Nobody wants to give the power to the people. Nobody really wants to understand that democracy is also a political system that has to protect itself. Nobody wants to understand that democracy can only exist in a secular society. Nobody understands that if you don’t fight against the mixing of religion with politics, you cannot have a free society, a free generation, free art, free press and you cannot even have a respectful religion because all these people are using the weaknesses of democracy and the weakness of people’s love for God or religion and turning it into money and power for themselves. Anybody who cannot see what’s happening will be liable in front of history and in front of.”
Saturday, April 10, 2010
SOURCE: Hürriyet Daily News
GÜL DEMIR - NIKI GAMM
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