Turkey came through a rather tough year. A struggle that began on Dec. 17, 2013 rocked the entirety of 2014. Well, what was this struggle? And what has been done?
The police and judiciary were brought under control by a structure that acted on a certain agenda and was ordered by Fethullah Gülen, the leader of a religious community. The members of this structure were placed in certain critical echelons of the state. Of course, the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government was not unaware of this. The government gave the green light to the placement of this group by purging the old staff that maintained Kemalist and military tutelage. Moreover, this old staff wanted to overthrow the AK Party in cooperation, as it considered the AK Party a religious party. The closure case that was filed against the AK Party in 2008 was a clear example of this. In short, there were three alternatives for the AK Party: It would run the risk of being removed by being overthrown in a military coup as it was staged against other parties in the past, it would be closed by the judiciary or it would save itself by paving the way for the reshuffling of staff. The AK Party chose the third one and made room for Gülenists, which was a handy choice for it.
Of course, the AK Party was unaware that this staff wanted to impose a new dominance against itself. The Gülen Movement, which claimed that they were against a tutelary military, conspired to eliminate anyone who they considered a potential threat to them and schemed to bring tutelary bureaucracy for themselves regardless of whoever came to power through elections. This was somehow a copy of the Iranian regime, which they had always deemed an enemy. So, regardless of who won the elections, there would be an unchangeable leader of the state - an ayatollah - who was Fethullah Gülen in their eyes.
When they understood that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan would not accept such a tutelary system, they began conducting secret attacks within the state. First, there was an attempt to make government policies a subject of the judiciary. On Feb. 7, 2012, National Intelligence Organization (MİT) Chief Hakan Fidan, who was sent by Erdoğan to Oslo to a meeting regarding the Kurdish issue as a special envoy, was interrogated. Then came the attacks that were set to gradually topple the government. The Dec. 17 operation was the peak point of these attempts, all of which were staged to overthrow the Erdoğan government with unlawful case files, illegal wiretapping, defamation campaigns and fabricated evidence.
This summary of 2014 in Turkey is the answer given to these attempts. The court rendered a verdict to dismiss the Dec. 17 case files and the parliamentary inquiry committee voted against sending four ex-ministers who were allegedly involved in corruption to the Supreme Court. These two developments should be evaluated based on the illegal Dec. 17 process that could not find credibility in any legal process as it was an obvious attempt to bring tutelage.
Of course, this does not mean that the problems in Turkey have come to an end, quite the contrary. The uphill struggle is now starting to make the country a state of law, to escape any kind of tutelage and to get truly democratized. Real cleansing is impossible without real transparency. The state should be completely purified and confidence in justice should be bolstered so that we can establish the true rule of law in the full sense of the word.
