“Where shall I begin? -Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end”.
So goes the line from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.
These days, recounting real life stories about Turkey is increasingly resembling the world of chaos and nonsense created by a mysterious and dark Victorian writer.
Just when you think it cannot get any stranger, more and more curious things happen.
Six months after a violent coup attempt and under a brutal state of emergency, a constitutional overhaul giving expanded presidential authority to the already all-powerful President, was rushed through the parliament.
Between approval by the governing party’s deputies (plus their newly-found ultra-nationalist allies in parliament) and until its signing-off by the President last week, another purge has taken place. 4,464 public workers were dismissed, among them 330 academics, from Turkey’s oldest and best known universities.
The date of a national referendum on constitutional changes was announced as April 16, on Easter Sunday.
Voters will have two choices on the ballot paper; white representing yes and brown representing no to changes.
Even though the run-up to Turkey’s referendum fully resembles an election campaign, with President Erdogan and members of the government already campaigning for a “Yes” vote, national legal frameworks that normally regulate elections are missing.
For the government’s opponents, having any kind of space in the public debate is a major struggle.
If anything, violations of the right to freedom of opinion and expression have become much more widespread.
Naysayers are harassed, threatened or arbitrarily detained.
A well-known television presenter was sacked for showing his colour as “brown” in his tweets.
Turkey has obligations under international human rights law to guarantee free and fair exercise of people’s civil and political rights.
Among them lies ensuring “a free press and other media to facilitate debate on public issues without censorship or restraint, in particular in the context of elections. The public also has a corresponding right to access information freely.”
Under the state of emergency, there is not even a pretense of providing unimpeded access to the media on a non-discriminatory basis for all political groupings.
A decree, published in the Official Gazette on February 9, removed the obligation from private channels to allocate airtime to all political parties in accordance with The Supreme Election Board’s rules.
The main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, said that “there was only freedom to say ‘yes’ during the referendum campaign”.
The government is not only taking unfair advantage of its political and economic power to restrict public debate, but it is also intimidating voices of dissent.
Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has accused the Republican People’s Party (CHP) being on the same camp as the illegal Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Gulenists, followers of the exiled Islamist preacher Fethullah Gulen, held responsible for the July 15 coup attempt.
President Erdogan also said that people would not cooperate with terrorists and that they would show their reaction against the July 15 coup attempt with their vote in the April 16 referendum.
Harassment of dissent is not prerogative of the government, either. The nationalist MHP, the fourth party in parliament that is supporting the constitutional change, is expelling 4 prominent party deputies for not toeing the party line by declaring they will vote “no” in the referendum.
Another nationalist politican, Meral Aksener, who was expelled earlier, was prevented from speaking at a rally on Saturday. The electricity was cut in the hall where she was due to campaign for the “no” camp. She spoke in dark with a megaphone.
By restricting politicians’ ability to campaign freely and by introducing curbs on media freedom, Turkish authorities are not only undermining the legitimacy of the vote, but also tarnishing the country’s international standing.
More importantly, they are causing lasting damage by encouraging polarisation in a society more dangerously divided than at any point in its recent history.
This post is also available in: Turkish
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