Nobody with a sound mind in Turkey expected that they would support the forthcoming constitutional referendum. What I am referring to here is their unintended “support” for the referendum.I have been traveling around northeastern Turkey for the last week and have been speaking with everyone from villagers to public officials. It seems that in this nationalist heartland of Turkey there is no longer a great respect for the generals and that these people are able to discern between Turkish generals and their respected institution, the Turkish army to which they send their sons for compulsory military service. These people are aware of the political whims, desires, maneuvers and activities of such generals. They are equally aware of their blundering and unprofessionalism. They also suspect that generals somehow benefit from the increasing number of martyrs, as with every martyr the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) nationalist opposition to the AK Party theoretically would gain support. But as I said, it is only in theory, since the Turkish people deeply suspect that the bureaucratic oligarchy is engaged in yet another social engineering project.
Despite the bureaucratic oligarchy’s expectations, upon news of another martyr the public is now pointing the finger at the generals. First, the nation is suspicious of their suspected political involvement that has occurred many times before. But secondly, the public is rightly stating that this nation has given everything these generals have demanded of them and the government. Their budget is the only thing that Parliament never dared question. There are more than 1 million soldiers in our army, and these young men do not come from other planets, they are the nation’s beloved sons, husbands, fathers and brothers. People rightly ask, “For God’s sake, what else do our generals need to protect our sons in the army?” They have given up on asking for overcoming and defeating the terrorists, but they still expect the minimum: the safety and protection of their sons in the military who do not have extensive military experience. Even this shows the damage done to the military’s prestige by the generals.
Another important, but unoriginal, observation I heard from people in northeastern Turkey and that young people I had spoken with repeatedly said: While serving in the most dangerous regions in the southeastern parts of Turkey, they observed and experienced very strange things. Whenever they had an opportunity to annihilate 100-150 terrorists, their superiors in Ankara commanded them to leave the terrorists alone. I wrote above that this is unoriginal as I have heard this hundreds of times in different places from different former soldiers. One of them is my younger brother who served in Tunceli’s mountains. This anecdotal evidence supports the news last week over the Heron incident. The National Intelligence Organization (MİT) overheard, through wiretapping, a military officer telling a lieutenant colonel two-and-a-half years ago to either change the flight paths of the Turkish military’s own Herons chasing Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) terrorists or shoot them down. The military officer was bemoaning the fact that too many terrorists were being killed. The lieutenant colonel responded by saying he would deal with the “problem.” MİT informed the military. The commander of the land forces at the time, Gen. İlker Başbuğ, requested that military prosecutors open a legal case. But for the last two-and-a-half years almost nothing has been done, and the officers implicated have been promoted. It seems that Mr. Başbuğ has ignored the issue and has continued to live comfortably. The sad, or good, thing is that when the nation heard this shocking news last week, not surprisingly, nobody was shocked. It is not because this nation is dumb or desensitized, but because they know what is going on and are deeply aware of the deep state or, in other words, the bureaucratic oligarchy. That is why they will vote overwhelmingly in favor of the constitutional reform package in the referendum. They are aware that the AK Party is not perfect, but compared to the Kemalist nationalist coalition of the MHP, the CHP and the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) it is still the best choice. Moreover, they know very well that the referendum is not about the AK Party, which had to respond to public pressure. Our deep state elite must come out of their ivory towers and should speak in plain clothes to the intelligent youth in Trabzon, Rize, Artvin, Erzurum and so on. But doing so would mean an end to their continuing hope for an undemocratic Turkey.
