Before first coming to power at the end of 2002, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) had vowed to fight corruption, poverty and legal prohibitions, a discourse that appealed to a large segment of Turkish society at the time because its rhetoric was in perfect harmony with the expectations of most voters.
But having arrived at the end of its third consecutive term in office since the 2002 general election, the AK Party is deeply involved in the very vices it had once promised to fight and the situation has turned into a nightmare for many. As things stand, the ruling party -- which came to power only a year after it was established -- has now a stance diametrically opposed to ideals for which it once set out to fight for. Ertuğrul Yalçınbayır, the founding secretary general of the AK Party, realized as early as 2007 that the party had left its original course.
According to Yalçınbayır, who cut off ties with the party before elections in 2007, mismanagement in the party and a failure to take decisions after broad consultations led to corruption in the government. Yalçınbayır, who also served as a deputy prime minister in the first AK Party government, told Sunday's Zaman: “The AK Party came to power because it inspired hope in people, but it has turned into a nightmare due to mismanagement and the failure to monitor the mismanagement.”
It was back in 2007 that then-Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan started to hold all the reins in the party. Particularly after winning elections for a third time in 2011 with half the vote, the AK Party, apparently intoxicated with power, became more and more authoritarian and started to use the powers of the state against dissidents, considering itself to represent the state.
As was adroitly expressed by English historian John Acton more than 100 years ago, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
The elimination of those who spoke out against mismanagement intimidated those who chose to remain in the party into self-censorship. “When the freedom to express one's views was restricted, corruption began. When the rot is there, it is not possible to fight bans or corruption and you cannot eradicate poverty,” Yalçınbayır, said. Never a truer word spoken!
The general public got acquainted with the authoritarian face of the government mainly with the environmentalist Gezi Park protests of the summer of 2013, which rocked the country. Then-Prime Minister Erdoğan described Twitter as a “nuisance” at the time because it allowed young people to easily communicate with one another to organize protests.
Erdoğan revealed his true colors when he described those who took part in protests as “looters” to demonize them.
The entrance to Gezi Park -- a rare green space in İstanbul, close to Taksim Square where Erdoğan was pushing for the building of an Ottoman-style barracks replica that would house a shopping mall -- was barred.
According to Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat, another founding member of the ruling party who cut off ties with it years ago, the AK Party has become a nightmare for Turkish society because it has abandoned the course it once espoused.
While serving as deputy chairman of the ruling party, Fırat resigned from his positions within the party in late 2008. Then, he resigned from the party entirely in July last year, saying that the moral burden of staying within the party had begun to feel too heavy.
Then came an even bigger eye-opener for all. Two sweeping graft probes that went public on Dec. 17 and 25, 2013 revealed that leading members of the government were involved up to their necks in corruption. All that has happened since the two graft probes became public provides ample evidence that Turkey has failed in the fight against corruption, with the government having done its best to sweep claims of widespread corruption under the rug.
“Unfortunately, the rot [in the ruling party] has paved the way for the institutionalization of corruption,” said Yalçınbayır, who is a lawyer by profession.
The Dec. 17 graft probe implicated 53 people, including bureaucrats, prominent businessmen and people from the inner circle of then-Prime Minister Erdoğan. Four former Cabinet ministers -- Economy Minister Zafer Çağlayan, Interior Minister Muammer Güler, EU Affairs Affairs Minister Egemen Bağış and Environment and Urban Planning Minister Erdoğan Bayraktar -- left their posts due to allegations of corruption a week after the Dec. 17 probe went public.
All the prosecutors and high level police officers who were involved in the probes were first removed from their jobs and are currently facing prosecution.
Voice recordings leaked over the Internet following the graft probes revealed that Erdoğan and some of his family members were also personally implicated in corruption. A public prosecutor and a police chief who took part in the probes also confirmed this in recent months, saying that the evidence indicates that Erdoğan is also involved in corruption.
But the prosecutors appointed to replace the original ones in the investigations dropped charges against all the suspects last year.
Then, being in power with a clear majority in Parliament, the AK Party hushed up the investigations after Parliament refused at the beginning of this year to refer the four ministers accused of corruption to court for trial. According to the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP), the total of the alleged government corruption represents a sum as large as TL 247 billion ($113 billion).
Noting that the ruling party has become and more authoritarian under Erdoğan, who headed the AK Party government until he was elected president in August last year, Fırat said: “Not only were the [legal] prohibitions introduced following the military coup [of Sept. 12, 1980] not lifted, but more bans were introduced.”
Turkey perceived as increasingly corrupt
The government's effort to cover up corruption has taken its toll on Turkey. Turkey's perceived corruption level worsened the most of all countries surveyed in a global perception of corruption index for 2014, dropping by five points to 45 on a scale of 100, according to Transparency International (TI).
The country currently ranks 64th out of 175 countries on TI's 2014 Corruption Perceptions Index. Along with China and Angola, Turkey is perceived as increasingly corrupt, according the TI report, which was released at the beginning of December. The Berlin-based organization warned that Turkey is increasingly becoming associated with graft and that this bodes ill for future investment in the country.
Gov't pushes for Internet bans after graft probes
To block the leaking of voice recordings and further evidence about corruption over the Internet, the government has introduced tighter legislation that allows it to immediately block any such content.
It also attempted to introduce bans on Twitter and YouTube following the graft probes, but the bans were short-lived because the Constitutional Court removed them, saying that they violated the Constitution.
Shortly after the 2013 graft scandal broke out, the government passed amendments to the Internet law that enabled the Telecommunications Directorate (TİB) to block access to a certain website within hours, without a court order. Internet providers were also required to keep records of users' activity for two years and make them available to authorities upon request.
In amendments to the law in September of last year, the government expanded those powers, allowing TİB -- which is headed by a former intelligence official -- to block sites if deemed necessary for matters of "national security, the restoration of public order and the prevention of crimes.” TİB was also authorized to obtain Internet traffic data from ISPs without a court order and will provide these data to the relevant authorities if a court order so demands.
Like Yalçınbayır and Fırat, Nurettin Aktaş was a deputy of the AK Party when it first came to power. “The rot in the party began as it drifted away from its founding mission. Those deputies who criticized [the party] for drifting away from its mission were excluded,” Aktaş told Sunday's Zaman.
However, after an appeal by the CHP, the Constitutional Court cancelled TİB's authority to block access to a website and its authority to collect Internet traffic data without a court order. More recently, the government -- which has been much criticized by the opposition for turning Turkey into an intelligence state -- introduced yet another amendment to the Internet law, authorizing the prime minister or a relevant Cabinet minister to ban a website or have specific content removed when public order or national security are at stake.
Despite its pledge to remove the shackles on democracy, the government has not -- in its more than 12 years of single-party rule -- removed the much-criticized 10 percent election threshold, nor has it changed the Higher Education Board (YÖK), which it so harshly criticized before coming to power.
Thanks to the threshold, the AK Party has obtained disproportionally high numbers of seats in Parliament because the threshold system favors parties with the largest share of the vote.
In yet another move, the government passed a law in March last year that banned privately owned preparatory schools. The legislation, which requires the closure of all prep schools before Sept. 1, 2015, has been much criticized for violating the Constitution and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). There were, as of December 2013, 3,858 prep schools in Turkey, attended by over 2.2 million students. Out of the 739,000 high school seniors who take the university entrance exam to continue their education, 550,000 attend prep schools.
Media freedom in shatters
The freedom of the media has been significantly curtailed in the past couple of years, as dissenting opinions have been expressed more frequently because of the increasing authoritarianism. After the Gezi Park protests, many media members lost their jobs because of government pressure.
A report titled “Media-Government Relations in Turkey,” which was made public in early May, said that members of the media in Turkey have been operating in a climate of self-censorship for years due to pressure from the government and the close relationship between media owners and government officials.
President Erdoğan and the ruling AK Party have been attracting growing criticism for their attempts to silence the critical media in the country. Not a day seems to pass without journalists facing harsh forms of repression; a number of them are either in jail, have lost their jobs or are dealing with legal charges brought against them, either by the government or Erdoğan.
“While media owners that support the government are rewarded with public tenders, opposing ones are punished. These punishments come in the form of taxes, lawsuits and sometimes as sanctions from the Radio and Television Supreme Council [RTÜK],” said the report.
In its media freedom report for the first quarter of 2015, the Contemporary Journalists Association (ÇGD) said Turkish media is experiencing its worst period in the Turkish Republic's 92-year history because the ruling party's pressure on the media is greater than that of any previous government. According to the report, in the period from the start of January until the end of March 2015, 13 journalists faced investigations while 30 were laid off arbitrarily.
Most recently, the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament (EP) strongly condemned President Erdoğan's recent threat directed at the Cumhuriyet daily's Editor-in-Chief Can Dündar for having published a report on weapons illegally sent to rebel groups in Syria in an operation conducted by Turkey's intelligence agency.
In a press release issued last week, EP Rapporteur for Turkey Kati Piri also criticized the ongoing pressure on the media by Erdoğan and the government, calling on the Turkish government and the judicial system to “immediately stop applying unacceptable pressure on journalists.”
Fight against poverty has failed
The government has also been unsuccessful in its fight against poverty. In fact, it has been accused by the opposition of “managing” poverty to keep getting the votes of the poor instead of trying to eliminate it altogether.
Yalçınbayır is of the same opinion: “Poverty has unfortunately been exploited. People whose poverty has been exploited through aid provided by the government do not question the broken promises of the government.”
According to an official report released in April, child poverty still remains an alarming concern, with 32.4 percent of minors in Turkey classified as poor. And, according to data released by the Turkish Statistics Institute (TurkStat), the number of individuals under the age of 17 in Turkey stood at 22.8 million at the end of 2014, accounting for 29.4 percent of the total population of 77.7 million. Out of 22.8 million children, 7. 4 million were recorded as living in poverty. Given that there were 16.7 million poor individuals according to TurkStat, the figure implies that almost half of poor people are minors.
The opposition has also been criticizing the government for the very high number of poor people -- almost 17 million -- despite the government discourse that the country has gone through rapid development during its terms in power. A report published in April of last year by Bahçeşehir University's Center for Economic and Social Research (BETAM) revealed an even bleaker picture, reporting that two out of every three children in Turkey are at risk of poverty, based on European Union standards.
According to data published early last month, Turkey is ranked bottom of many indices drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), painting a grim picture of the country's social and economic life compared with other OECD-member countries. The gap between Turkey's rich and poor was more clearly explained by Credit Suisse's 2014 Global Wealth Report, which said 10 percent of the Turkish population holds 78 percent of the total wealth.
CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu has repeatedly said during his election campaign that 1 percent of Turkey's population controls 54.3 percent of the national wealth, 15 percent more than the 39 percent of the national wealth held by the top 1 percent in 2002, when the AK Party came to power.
According to a report released in December last year, out of the 29.3 million people who are able to work in Turkey, 21 million -- 72 percent -- earn less than TL 2,030 ($750) a month, the amount set as the poverty line for one worker in Turkey, a recent report on the Turkish labor force has revealed.
In the report released by the Independent Turkish Health Care Workers' Union in the light of figures from the Labor and Social Security Ministry and TurkStat, there are 21 million people whose monthly income is below TL 2,030, including 3 million unemployed, 3.45 million domestic workers, 5.7 million agricultural workers, 5 million minimum wage earners and 4 million other employees in the private sector.
Other than the 3.1 million people who are officially registered as unemployed, there are yet another 3 million people who are not designated as unemployed in official data because they stopped looking for work long ago.
The minimum wage in Turkey is no more than TL 949, which comes to $356.
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