Sezai Temelli
“The budget, which was created bypassing the will of the people and parliament, has a content that is devoid of law, economics and politics. In fact, it looks more like an irrational account of a system far removed from reality – something akin to the presidential system of government, rather than a budget,” writes Sezai Temelli* for Yeni Özgür Politika.
This government, which ignores democratic politics and its institutions, suspends the law with the implicit understanding of a state of emergency [referred to as OHAL in Turkey], normalises the state of exception, and imposes authoritarianism with widespread violence, and has become detached from economic reality so much that it has dragged both the economy and the country into a major collapse by imposing a nonsense called the “economic model.”
The serialised publication of the palace [i.e., President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s presidental palace], prepared with the logic of “we did it, it happened,” without adhering to laws, regulations, customs or jurisprudence, virtually invites all kinds of illegality.
There is a budget for the the Constitutional Court in the budget of 2022, but there is a mentality that wants to close the Constitutional Court that prepared the budget.
The government that attacks and threatens the Constitutional Court to shut down/ban the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), ignoring all legal wisdom, sets a national budget with a sense of “blackmail” to it.
Judicial authorities have budgets, but no independence or impartiality.
Whilst the largest conspiracy case in history, fictionalised as the ‘Kobane case,’ shows the exhaustion of judicial independence, the collapsed judiciary accelerates the collapse of the country.
Repeating judicial reforms, following one after another, have turned the country into the biggest centre of human rights violations. Torture and all kinds of violence in prisons are now widespread and systematic.
The death of Garibe Gezer is the latest case of injustice, an endless cruelty that has been ongoing for years.
As long as there is “the isolation,” you can’t create grounds for negotiation in this country anyway. Where there are no grounds for negotiation, there is no budget.
The concept of isolation today is actually a concept of power that ignores the will of parliament to negotiate. Isolation is further proof of why we cannot jointly create a budget.
The isolation in Imralı [Prison, where Abdullah Öcalan, the leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the PKK, has been jailed since 1999], which corresponds to the most extreme form of violations of human rights, is a process in which all illegalities are fed.
We must also understand that there will be no recourse to law and democracy if the parliament, which is itself a platform for negotiations, cannot oppose the imposition of an illegal act that lacks any reasoning for negotiation and talks.
As long as we are not able to overcome the isolation of Imrali, we will never be able to reach the ground/basis for democratic negotiations for the resolution of the Kurdish question, which is our key issue.
We have two fundamental, structural problems: the Kurdish question and the poverty question. As long as we cannot solve these two problems together, we will continue to live in cycles of collapse.
The government, which feeds itself with deadlock, instead of solving these problems, presents us with an annual budget – again a war-and-profit-based budget – that reflects its chronic illness.
One of the most decisive dynamics of the economic and political crisis is the continuing war policy and the war economy. Fascism continues to feed on war. The fascist government that caused this collapse by allocating $850 billion to war over the past decade has dragged the country into a severe spiral of debt, deepening poverty, multiple crises and eventual collapse.
The alternative to such a budget is a democratic state budget. If we don’t want to be condemned to a vicious cycle of pulling capitalism out of its current crisis and nurturing it for new crises, we must create a democratic economy today for a democratic nation, a democratic republic.
With our conception of radical democracy, we must raise our struggle for bread and freedom to create budgets compatible with the programme of democratic economy, to protect the autonomy of local budgets, and to defend the peace economy against the war economy. (…)
The picture we see of the debates over the budget are also worrying for us. Despite such a great collapse, feeling content with the heated but all so routine negotiations, naively thinking that the exchange rate would be enough to overthrow the government is not meeting the expectations of the peoples. For the door to be opened by the historic moment, you have to force the door open …
*Sezai Temelli is the former co-chair of Turkey’s pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party and currently HDP’s MP for Van (Wan).
