Government’s embarrassing silence

Last Friday a statement made by the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) on the Kurdish language debate went almost unnoticed. This silence may have something to do with the decreasing weight of the military on political issues. No one may have cared what the generals were thinking and saying about the Kurdish question.

Whatever the reason, that silence was not good for the consolidation of democracy in this country. The military should have been reminded forcefully that it was none of their business to make a remark on the Kurdish language. But all political actors, with the exception of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP), remained silent. Neither the prime minister nor any other political figure in the government went public, opposing the position of the military revealed through a statement placed on the TSK’s website.

On the contrary, politicians, including the parliament speaker, heavily criticized the BDP for bringing up the issue of bilingual social space in southeast Turkey. The latter even called on public prosecutors to make a case on the BDP’s stance on bilingual social space, which is a disgrace to the democratic credentials of the parliament speaker.

The ruling party did not pass the test on this case at the detriment of its own legitimacy and democratic credentials. Is it the military that decides how to address the Kurdish question? If they are in charge of defining the problem and drawing a line for resolving the question, what then is the role of the government and Parliament?

The government should see clearly that such statements from the military are attempts to hijack the role of the government. It then becomes impossible to erode the image that the government is soft, unreliable and ready to sell the country out, and thus it is the military that the people must turn to and rely on.

It is really hard to swallow a statement by the military in which it asserts that the debate on bilingualism, the usage of Turkish and Kurdish in southeast Turkey “goes against the founding philosophy of the Turkish Republic.” What does the military know about the “founding principles”? And how were they informed about their content? And, above all, what does it have to do with the military’s profession, which is to defend the country against external aggression?

Consider the mindset of the Turkish military revealed with this latest statement. It is as if they are not men in uniform trained in combat, but wise experts on history, language, and political science. They proclaim: “Language, culture, and ideals of unity are the indispensable aspects of being a nation. The result of a lack of linguistic unity has been portrayed by many painful examples in history.” Really? I think they seem to know about everything but their own profession because they pay the least attention to it.

This is not all. “The TSK has and always will continue to stand for and side with the protection of … the nation-state, the unitary state, and the secular state,” the statement claimed.

No democratic government can swallow a military that positions itself to tell political actors the “true way of conducting politics.” This cannot be the business of the military. One likes or dislikes the argument for the bilingual use of Turkish and Kurdish. Politicians and the public should debate it. But if politicians treat the military as the final “arbiter” in this debate, then we cannot claim to have achieved democracy and the end of military tutelage.

A government that remains silent on an intrusion meant to limit political debates behind a façade of the “founding principles of the republic” cannot oppose further intrusions conducted in the name of secularism or any other pretext. Once the military is allowed to draw the boundaries of the political debate, as we know very well in this country, there will be no limit to their political ambitions.

Human rights as a prerequisite for peace and security

Last week Human Rights Day was celebrated around the world as well as in Turkey. Over the years slow but positive developments have continued on the codification of human rights in international law. It is certainly an impressive progress that we are talking about.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was merely a declaration without any legal power, stating the goodwill and moral commitment of the world’s nations. But now the international community has a series of conventions and protocols that legally bind the signatory countries concerning human rights. The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the most striking accomplishment of this process.

Human rights are generally based on moral values and philosophical preferences. As such they tend to be understood as abstract intellectual endeavors. Yet it is undeniable that respect for human rights has a more day-to-day outcome that includes security at the individual and national as well as global level. First, demands for human rights in its essence reflect the search for the physical and moral integrity of individuals. The idea of the inviolability of basic rights and freedoms aims at “securing” the individual as an independent and moral agent. Second, a working human rights regime constitutes one of the prerequisites for providing national security, that is, domestic peace based on a wide-ranging social consensus concerning the legitimacy of a political regime. Thus the maintenance of national security depends on the realization of individual security built on the respect for human rights. Third, individual and national security built through a human rights regime domestically is an indispensable part of global security. As such human rights are not only grounded on moral or philosophical arguments but also on a practical and pragmatic base.

The old notion of security was based on a concept giving priority to the protection of the state against external threats. Security was defined through penetration by outsiders. Now, crises that do not involve warfare and do not come from outside yet threaten the very wellbeing of nations are catching the attention of both policymakers and the public at large.

The revival of nationalism and micro-nationalism in the post-Cold War era has reinforced the need for international protection of human, and particularly minority, rights. What the rise of ethnic clashes has also shown was the interaction and interdependencies between domestic peace and regional/international security: Both secessionism and suppression of ethnic identities proved to be insecurity-generating policies for the international system.

Post Cold War developments have shown that human rights should be conceived as a necessity for strengthening national and international security and thus they are an asset, not a liability. As a result, the place of human rights in international politics has also been legitimized by an increasing understanding that the international protection and promotion of human rights contributes to national and international peace. Thus the debate now seems to be set in a way that human rights and national/international security are complementary concerns and objectives. One does not necessarily exclude the other; instead, both can be secured at the same time.

There is wide agreement today that human rights have become a global issue within which there has emerged a multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that involve but also transcend nation-states. As a result, violations of human rights in one country may create unprecedented consequences for other countries, peoples, and individuals. While territorial boundaries are becoming more penetrable, transnational implications of human rights violations turn out to be unavoidable. This adds to the source of tension among states. The most striking case that illustrates how human rights violations have transnational impacts and how they create security threats for other states is the massive flow of refugees. The cases of Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Iraq and recently Kosovo clearly illustrate that violations of human rights cannot be contained within national boundaries and that they have transnational implications which in the end provoke and necessitate regional or international interventions, further complicating a basically domestic problem.

While the respect for human rights enhances national security, states that are involved in systematic violations of human rights endanger not only national but also international peace and security.

This leads to an understanding that the search for global peace and security starts with improving human rights conditions at a domestic level since there exists a clear-cut linkage between national and international security. Human rights considerations thus give birth to a notion of global security. The link between individual, national and global security justifies concern about the fate of individuals everywhere as part of a search for global security.

Fifty years after the Universal Declaration it has become even clearer that peace requires respect for human rights at national and global levels.