Is this state reason?

Aslı Aydıntaşbaş

Yayınlanma: 27.08.2018 - 10:20
Abone Ol google-news

I propose that the utterance “state reason” be removed from circulation. Not just any old how. What we need to do is directly remove this expression from the Turkish Language Institute dictionary.

If anyone uses it, they should be fined.

 Anyone who comes on telly and says, “State reason blah blah blah” should be banned from the screens in an instant.

Why? You have cottoned on. I no longer see anything out there resembling “state reason.”

OK, let’s accept it for a moment. Turkey will henceforth continue on its way as an authoritarian regime. There is still no state reason!

There are structures that keep shooting themselves in the foot and intensifying the troubles facing Turkey.

Even if these controlled or uncontrolled reflexes and structures within the state appear at every moment to be protecting the state’s interests, most of the time they are pursuing their own agendas. Why? To enable them to preserve their own posts and raison d'être. They desire to increase the dependence of the system and the elected on them by forever keeping alive the thesis that the state is under existential threat.

You know what I’m driving at, don’t you? Yes, unfortunately. The security focus that FETO elements tried to give to the state seven or eight years ago has become the slogan of those who, while appearing to be anti-FETO, are inclined towards the same arbitrary conduct as they were. This is camouflaged, now as in the past, with the notions of “nation-people-security.”

The aim, just as with FETO, is to make the political will dependent on it. And, in the process, to be able to control the state’s internal and external reflexes.

Shall I give an example? In your view, is it normal that, whenever the chance of rapprochement with Europe beckons, detentions are made on a mass scale that enrages Europe?

For example, the bundling off into custody of the human rights advocates on Büyükada took place prior to an important international summit. Osman Kavala was arrested one day before the EU leaders’ summit at which Turkey would be discussed.

 Let’s say these were coincidences.

OK, and the mass of arrests yesterday targeting the Saturday Mothers? It is odd for this to happen in precisely an environment in which warm messages are coming from Europe to Turkey, isn’t it? Think. A group that has been congregating since 1995 has held a peaceful action every Saturday in Galatasaray for 700 weeks. Yesterday’s meeting that coincided with the end of the Eid holiday would, under normal conditions, have passed off without a ruffle and many journalists would probably have been none the wiser.

So, what happens? Somebody jumps up and, with great fanfare, turns the action the Saturday Mothers have been holding for 23 years into an orgy of tear gas and arrests.

And it is curious that this was just as Turkey was seeking a route towards normalization with Europe. Tayyip Erdoğan’s Berlin trip is at the end of September. Ankara is contemplating symbolic moves that will soften relations with Germany to counterbalance the worsening relations with the USA. However, it is clear that certain parties are intent on sabotaging this.

Just like the breakdown of the cordiality between Donald Trump and Tayyip Erdoğan, the final thread that was holding Turkey-US relations together, over the Andrew Brunson crisis.

Over to you. Am I a conspiracist, or are certain parties using this kind of security focus to prevent Turkey from repairing its relations with the West and striving to set the ship on another course?

Or, has state reason gone fully bankrupt leaving it tossing around from here to there uncontrolled and unbridled?

 Bu mu devlet aklı?

 


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