Turkey: We’re counting days to an authoritarian Islamist regime

MEHMET Y. YILMAZ

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said “We’ll eradicate Twitter, mwitter,” before adding he does not care what the international community will say.

He also said nobody should expect the AKP government to abide by the latest European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decision which called Turkey to create the mechanisms to let the jailed leader of the illegal Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) Abdullah Öcalan apply for conditional release in his 25th year in prison.

In reality, Erdoğan should be one of the people who know very well that Turkey has to abide by the ECHR’s decisions as a rule of national law.

Another fact is the ECHR’s decisions must be held superior to the Turkish law when there is a contradiction. There is only one meaning for the Prime Minister’s defiance of the international community and the ECHR, which is: The prime minister has declared that Turkey is turning away from being a part of democratic Western civilization.

If he succeeds, he can indeed be at ease.

Just like Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Russia and countries like these do not care about the rules that the democratic Western system upholds, neither will Turkey!

It is hard to understand how to try to be a member of the EU, while saying, “I’ll do it the way I want, regardless of what they say.”

Apparently, the prime minister is so bored of legal rules to render an account to the democratic world that he’s counting down the days until having the authoritarian-Islamist regime he has in mind. When prime minister gave the signal…

We know Prime Minister Erdoğan very well. Sometimes during election rallies, he is buoyed by his own voice and says the first thing that comes to his mind.

I thought the same thing happened when I first heard Erdoğan’s speech in Bursa.

“We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic,” the prime minister said.

But hours after these remarks it was announced that Twitter was banned based on three court decisions. We later learned that the court rulings were given earlier. It is obvious that when the prime minster gave the signal, officious officials in the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) took this as an order and shut down access.

We witnessed concepts such as DNS and VPN quickly become a part of our daily lives.

There is no question that court orders should be applied, although we saw police chiefs resisting prosecutor’s orders after the Dec. 17, 2013 corruption probe. The prime minister said he would not follow a court ruling ordering the halt of the construction of a new prime ministry building in Ankara, but in a state of law everybody should obey the court’s decisions. Hence, the responsibility of taking Turkey out of the situation it was put in falls on the courts’ shoulders. I want to hope the Turkish Bars Associations’ objection to a higher court will soon get a result and we are better than at least China, even with our limited democracy.