Reading, Watching, Listening #11

The Can Atalay affair, Turkey in NATO, Ankara's Transatlantic Charm offensive

Hi folks,

I’ve been going through a pretty intensive few weeks, mostly due to manuscript editing. I’m hoping to take a breather next week, which means more substack writing.

Below are some of the things that got my attention this week.

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The Can Atalay affair

I can’t help but start with this.

As some of you might be following, parliament nullified Can Atalay’s status as an MP from Hatay yesterday. Atalay is one of several people imprisoned on bogus charges involving the 2013 Gezi Park protests. He was also elected as an MP from Hatay in last year’s elections, meaning that he gets immunity from said bogus charges. The Constitutional Court has repeatedly ordered that it was unconstitutional for him to be imprisoned, and that he be released immediately. The palace has refused to do so. As I’ve written earlier, they’ve simply had another high court rule that the Constitutional Court’s opinion on the Constitutionality of their actions was invalid.

That is the most brazen subversion of the constitution we’ve seen the AK Party engage in.

The parliamentary procedure to strip an MP of their status entails the speaker of parliament reading the decision in session. That should have been the AK Party’s Numan Kurtulmuş, but he wasn’t there, and neither were his immediate deputies, and it fell upon Bekir Bozdağ to read the decision. Erkan Baş, the leader of the Workers Party of Turkey (TİP), of which Atalay is a member, went up to speak before the reading.

Here’s part of his speech that’s especially striking:

Numan Kurtulmuş does not read this decision, is not in the country when it is being read. Celal Adan does not read it, Sırrı Süreyya does not read it, Gülizar hanım does not read it, [these are the other deputies] but Bekir Bozdağ reads it. This is an irony of history for us! Because he is the one who deserves to read it! He deserves it!

This is something where no one can say “I will not read this decision.” And 3 minutes, 5 minutes ahead of parliament’s opening, they get together the Advisory Council, and like purse-snatchers, with indefensible cowardice, try to ram this through parliament.

Who does this?

Friends, we all know each other. There is a rule. Sometimes you take the people who you know are guilty - the mafia does this way too - sometimes they take the people they know are guilty and they have them do the dirtiest work. You can only get Bozdağ to be the MP who killed justice in Turkey! Nobody else could go up and defend this.

Among all the things the AK Party has done, this was somehow uniquely toxic. They had never gone against the constitution as overtly as they did here. They never messed with parliamentary representation the way they did with this. Even when they stripped HDP leader Selahattin Demirtaş of his MP status, they got CHP approval. This was different. And that’s why nobody wanted to touch this. Kurtulmuş is from the old school, and he got on the AK Party train pretty late. He didn’t want his name on this.

What, you may wonder, condemned Bekir Bozdağ to the shit detail? Well, he was a pretty ardent Gülenist who defected during the Erdoğan-Gülen “Civil War” in the mid-2010s. That’s why his loyalty is always in doubt, and why the palace have him do their dirty work. They made him Minister of Justice, made him purge his own, then stack the courts with palace loyalists.

And it’s true, he has very low standing in the AK Party, and he doesn’t get any respect anywhere else either. Erkan Baş was saying all these things about him right in front of him. That’s why he keeps pointing behind him in the video. He’s pointing at the speaker’s chair, where Bozdağ is sitting.

Bozdağ couldn’t say a thing in response. He just took it.