This article was originally written by İrfan Aktan Aktan: Dear İrfan, what has happened in the eight years since July 15th, what has changed, what has not changed, you said anti-law, but what happened to that, we said let’s make an online program together, let’s talk, and I thought I would write down what his questions made me think, you know, words can’t fly.
What has happened in the eight years since the July 15 coup attempt? Review by Ali Duran Topuz
Five-day competition
Eight years have passed. It was a bloody, dark day and night. The story goes that “Gülenist” soldiers attempted a coup to remove the current government, and not only soldiers but also scholars (symbolized by Adil Oksus), the police chief (symbolized by Mithat Aynac), and other high-ranking officials were involved. On that day, all the parties in parliament opposed the coup, including not only the ruling party, Mr. Ak Pati and the MHP, but also the main opposition party, the CHP, and the opposition party, the HDP, which the opposition did not want. After that, it is said that the celebration was averted. The party representatives posed for photos together, etc. Then on July 20, something else happened.
The situation was abnormal and not normal, and it was necessary to declare a state of emergency. A decree system was adopted, which was no longer a law but an order. The five-day performance of “politics and society joining hands to repel the coup” from July 15 to July 20 came to an immediate end, and the parliament was dissolved as if the coup had succeeded, negotiations were shelved, and politics was now politics alone. A demonstration by the two ruling far-right parties. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, leader of the People’s Party at the time, even took a walk from Ankara, where politics had been abolished, to Istanbul, demonstrating with his actions how the possibility of politics in the capital had become zero.
Referendum reveals: A divided society
What form this administration, whose construction began by decree, would take became clear in a constitutional referendum on April 16, 2017. This referendum was also planned by the government as a move to legitimize the new administration. With 51.41 percent in favor and 48.59 percent against, it showed a society divided rather than a lack of legitimacy for the new administration’s activities. Moreover, the referendum was held under pressure reminiscent of the period after September 12. However, those who bought the horses overtook Üsküdar again. In fact, the polarization was a political-economic choice, since the neoliberal understanding of politics wanted to plunge society into a state of war.
Of course, the laws that were emerging at that time did not fall from the sky, but were a synthesis of the accumulation of various legal (or more precisely, illegal) practices in Turkey’s recent and distant history. The government had fully learned the lesson of using the law as a means of repression, and it further exploited that lesson with its own spiteful additions. Some resembled the practice of the independent courts, some were reminiscent of the Dersim trial, and many were reminiscent of the understanding of law of the “successful” coups of May 27/March 12 and September 12. Even if the coup was thwarted, the government was not going to waste time in the face of such criticism, although it would still activate the state of emergency regime as if a coup had taken place. The “exception law/law of exception” practices that I have listed are in fact not an adequate explanation of the well-known illegal cases of the “Gülenist cases” of the late 2000s, namely the KCK, Ergenekon, Sledgehammer cases, and none of them are the judicial practices we have seen since July 15.
Reverse logic in small cases
The Gülenist cases were not opened under the conditions of a state of emergency, and there was a lack of legal basis that would have allowed such proceedings to proceed. But it was happening, people were being arrested and threatened with heavy penalties, and moreover these cases were happening. Penalties were given. Moreover, calling them “Gülenists” is only partially correct, because Gülen and his community were not doing these things alone in an uninhabited space, but were doing them hand in hand with the AK Party regime in power, armed. Besides these big cases, there was one that did not attract much attention. That is the Revolutionary Headquarters case. In this case, there was something odd about the indictment against the defendant accused of “being a member of an illegal (left-wing) organization.” The prosecutor stated that we conducted technical follow-up investigations on the defendant for two years and wiretapped his phones, and in the two years we could not find any trace or indication of the organization or his membership in it. This shows how clandestine the organization and organizational ties are. According to the law, the defendants had the benefit of the doubt, according to the law, no one can be convicted without evidence, but the prosecutors were arguing that the absence of evidence was the strongest evidence against the defendants. In other words, legal regulations and laws were being used to achieve the exact opposite of the interests they aimed at and protected. I called this process, this procedure of reasoning, this method of reasoning “anti-law”. This was not a form of special law, because special law is still law. Certainly, it restricts freedom, restricts rights, reduces predictability, destroys trust in the law. But it is not a zero law. The ruling party, through the alliance it built with the Gülen community, made sure that such an understanding of law was established within the system. But there was still a point to be explained. What is the possibility that such blatant illegality, illegality that goes beyond even the emergency law, could continue and survive? And of course, does this attitude have an origin, a source?
Ministries, Dersim trial, Tunceli Law
In reality, of course, there were dates that were not indicated under the dates and event names. Independence Tribunal yes, May 27 yes, September 12 yes, etc. But there was also the “Eastern Independence Tribunal” and the Dersim Trials. There were also SSC exams in the 1990s.
Looking here, we see something more than just “emergency law.” The legal profile of the new regime that began to be constructed after the July 15 coup attempt in fact benefits not only from a particular understanding of the “legal” in this second series of trials, but also from the “history of the emergency.”
This second series was the colonial law, whose forces were again violently renewed just before the coup. A curfew was declared under the State Administration Law, rights and freedoms were abolished and garrisons were declared based on the decision of the state governor. “There is a moat, the state is being challenged.” Commanders and station chiefs were given the power to operate and execute. The murdered were tied to armored vehicles and dragged, and the government was angry not at those who dragged them, but at those who took the photos, saying, “We did it because there could have been danger,” and they wanted us to believe that everything was normal. For them it was a booby trap. ” The captured people were stripped naked and tied to electric wires and trees, and were searched for weapons. The naked bodies of the murdered were thrown in visible places and exhibited, and critics were accused of supporting terrorism. The naked violence of the state was against naked bodies. There was no intermediary or interface called “law.” The Constitutional Court said nothing about the curfew based on the Zero Law.
Colonial Law
The theory of emergency is based on the development of Western European history in distinguishing between normal and emergency states. For example, one of the most famous of these, Agamben, provides an impressive theoretical development with deep and nuanced analysis, but there is one thing that is not in his field of interest: the practices of European conquerors against the “natives”. Where they arrived, his theory of law/state of exception did not find answers.
Of course, this does not diminish the value of the thinker’s work, but it explains why the concepts he contributed to his work cannot fully meet at least some aspects of what we experience. The legal attitude towards the Kurds in Turkish history is in the genealogy of the “anti-legal” spirit that has become more prominent in Turkey since July 15. The Tunceli Law and the Dersim Trial, especially in their wording, are so serious that they cannot actually be explained by “emergency laws”. These are practices that the colonial powers considered appropriate for “natives” who they did not consider human, and which no longer formally resemble law.
Let me finish by spending a bit more time on Agamben. The Italian philosopher Agamben, while following the European tradition of considering the state of emergency, focuses on the relationship between civil war, riots and resistance. His concern is how the state of emergency, i.e. the suspension of law, is considered legitimate and how this “illegal” is transformed into law. He also observes that there is currently a tendency for the state of emergency to turn into a normal management technique. Agamben’s opposition to COVID-19 measures from a fairly early stage was a natural consequence of this concern.
When blood matches wolf teeth
Because normalizing something illegal as if it were law will only make the bad world we know even worse. He received many responses, but he was right because this information records that there are also absolute illegal states beyond the state of emergency, as the Kurds who live under a state of emergency always know very well. The anti-law is a reverse law that updates the colonialist law that has been used as the basis of relations with the Kurds throughout Turkish history, a law that does not consider one party, let alone a human being. A citizen, it is considered equal to an animal or a thing. The new regime continues to build as a local version of the global, that is, a necessity of neoliberal dictatorship. If the anti-law becomes a fundamental law as the construction continues, it is not only because the government sees the Kurds as a threat, but also because it is necessary to prevent opposition to the poverty that the Kurds cause from turning into political opposition and rebellion. The reverse application of reasoning seen in the legal field over the past eight years seems to have become well established in the law, but the problem does not stop there, and the inductive and corrupt reasoning seen in the law spreads to all fields. It recently appeared in the question “Is the sign of the wolf’s head a common symbol?” It is pointless to say that “wolves” are one thing and the “sign of the wolf’s head” is another, because these arguments do not work among people. People who consider themselves to be from the lineage of wolves and the lineage of sheep and goats, people who can sink their teeth into that meat. At least this applies to the founders and defenders of the new regime.
