Radikal.com.tr - 2013 Gezi park events, no doubt one of the signature events in Turkish history, caused an unbelievable increase of criticism against the AKP government which has been power since 2002 by winning 3 successive elections. The events in one way paved the way to spell out the mentality and future course of events in the form of “old Turkey” and “new Turkey” and to sociologically focus on the media and personal rights and freedoms as the fundamental requests of mothers, artists, academicians, gays, unions and fan groups. Many communications and political experts stated that AKP government managed this crisis very badly during this process. On the other hand, both the AKP government and the protestors agreed on an important problem in Turkish politics during AKP rule, which obviously is interesting as both sides share the same view: The ineffectiveness of opposition parties.
If you ask PM Erdogan, almost all negativitiy in Turkish politics, from 1993 Sivas events to Reyhanli attack to Dersim events, Kurdish problem and 12 September regime change is because of CHP which has not been in power for a long time. The ineffectiveness of the opposition resulted in the need for people to get their voices heard and the protests lasted for days in several cities in Turkey. If we look at the final tally, 4 dead, 8000 injured with 60 in critical condition, 11 lost their eyes, 103 had concussion. Another component of the tally is the reaction with strong criticism from Turkish publishers association, Turkish bar association, Turkish physicians association, authors such as Yasar Kemal and artists such as Idil Biret with the “we are worried” advertisement.
Undoubtedly, during Gezi parki protests, social media, whether by AKP or what we can call anti-AKP factions, was heavily used as a reflection and direction of media censorship and auto-censorshp. Many news got disseminated from social media into mainstream media and some “supporter” media did not cover many important news and therefore social media became the primary source of what’s happening and disinformation and as such is both commended and criticized. In fact, social media was defined as “society’s plague” by PM Erdogan. The cencorship and auto-cencorship exhibited in mainstream media resulted in an explosion of traffic in Turkish social media sites and the fact that people considered news sites, parliament members’, entities’ social media accounts as the healthy source of information became one of the signature and unexpected features of the “new Turkey” that gave meaning to Gezi Parki events compared to many other events in Turkish history. One of the accounts widely followed by people that they came across while they were trying to raise their voice on the streets and on social media due to the ineffectiveness of the opposition was Parliament’s twitter account. During Gezi parki events, everybody somewhat became a citizen journalist and expressed their fast, healthy reaction with “disproportionate intelligence” and Parliament account also got its share of this disproportionate intelligence.
Youth who were defined and who define themselves also as apolitic before Gezi events, white collar worker and roughly 90% of Gezi parki protestors who based their actions against vandalism, discrimination and violence were not aware of the Parliament’s General Assembly and their official Twitter account. Even though the account has been active since March 2012, the fact that most of the opposition proposals were rejected attracted the attention of one ordinary citizen following the Parliament’s Twitter account, which then raised awareness of the broader population and put AKP government in a difficult position of not accepting any opposition proposals in the name of democracy: AKP government has not been allowing opposition and representing opposition in the Parliament!
This was against the notion of majority ruling the minority concept that PM Erdogan himself is against. Several columnists also expressed that ideal democracies have “pluralism” rather than “absolutism”. In fact even though PM Erdogan reacted to Gezi Park events by saying “democracy is all about the ballot box”, one of AKP founders, first AKP government prime minister and current President Abdullah Gun, contradicting Erdogan said “democracy is not only about the ballot box”, which then brought the question into attention of all political parties as to whether the populations represented by the opposition parties are represented in the Parliament sufficiently through the proposals.
Is opposition’s ineffectiveness because of government rejection of the opposition? In 440 days between March 28, 2012 and June 18, 2013, an interesting picture emerges that illustrates the effectiveness of and the chances given to the opposition, when we look at the 3223 tweets from the Parliament’s twitter account. The analysis of the picture illustrated by the Parliament’s twitter account on how effective the opposition is from the opposition’s perspective is given below. During this time, based on the official Twitter account data and considering all enquiries by all parties in the Parliament; all of 50 proposals by AKP were accepted whereas all 216 proposals by the opposition got rejected.
Distribution of acceptance and rejections in enquiries given by the parties in 440 days Without focusing on the 2B, Forest Law, Petroleum Law sort of legislation that AKP passed in the Parliament and by only taking the oppositions parties’s perspective, CHP is the party with the most number of proposals with 103, MHP follows with 59, and BDP follows with 54; whereas all 216 proposals were rejected due to the majority impact of AKP’s members of the parliament.
Reasons of the rejected enquiries made by the opposition parties about AKP officials When we look at the contents of the rejected enquiries made by opposition parties, the conclusion is that most are reactions to Gezi events and many other problems before. The enquiry related to the investigation of disproportionate force used by police on protestors which even the Prime Minister officially accepted but did not result in any resignations or the enquiry related to the use of the tear gas, which has been accepted to be a chemical weapon by Turkish physicians association, Turkish torax association and resulted in heavy criticism from European Parliament, International Amnesty Organization, US Senate and United Nations, were proposed by CHP but got rejected.
Other than that, MHP also made enquiries and got rejected on the reasons of the Reyhanli events which resulted in the deaths of 53 citizens. The enquiry on the deaths in Uludere was also made by CHP and BDP and got rejected.
Below is the list of all enquiries made by the opposition parties and got rejected. When we look at their contents, the democratic rights and freedoms demanded during Gezi Park events, hate crimes, prevention of the celebration of national holidays, expression issues such as the media rights, Reyhanli, Uludere, 1993 Sivas events, Kahramanmaras events, all of which have never been settled in public’s conscience as well as vocational issues such as farmers, cotton producers, rangers, members of Turkish armed forces, relatives of martyrs, injured, teachers, students, environmental issues such as nuclear plants, forests, hydroelectric plants, 2B, thermal plants, issues related to secularism and holy places and corruption allegations have been brought up by opposition parties and presented to be able to represent the Turkish citizens but were rejected by AKP’s majority.
This had me, somebody who have always been in the opposition to the governing party, regardless of which party it is, surface the question that we asked at the beginning. In fact, opposition focused on the issues relevant to the public, presented under the roof of the Parliament, in short did their jobs but under the roof of the Parliament where ALP has the majority, all of those inquiries were rejected. In addition to the 440 days where we were not able to gather data, how many enquiries were rejected during the 11 years of AKP rule? This question comes up and is intriguing. If some of the opposition enquiries were accepted, we could have discussed the effectiveness and passivity of the opposition parties during the 440 days, however, if none of them were accepted under the roof of the Parliament begs the question as to whether there is democracy in Turkey or in the Parliament, requires us to demand that we need pluralist and not absolutist democracy in Turkey and therefore need the election threshold to be removed and say #direnmuhalefet, #direndemokrasi and #direnTBMM.
http://www.radikal.com.tr/turkiye/140_vurusta_reddedilen_tbmm-1140259
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