This is not my head. It's the head of a potential expert for Turkey's Central Bank
After long deliberation, I’ve decided to vote NO in the September 12 referendum on AKP’s constitutional amendments.
Before making up my mind, I’ve considered the new articles without prejudice and I’ve evaluated what would happen without the ones that would be abolished.
Finally, I came to the same conclusion with Soner Cagaptay, who wrote a few months ago that “the changes would give the AKP, which already has control over the executive and legislative branches of government, the powers to appoint high court judges and shape the judiciary in its image. This would be the end of checks and democracy.”
By not allowing citizens to vote each article seperately, the AKP government has confirmed the allegations that it tries to hide dangerous articles in this constitutional package. There are some articles that can really make Turkey a better democracy; but I refuse to vote YES for the whole package because of those dangerous ones.
Turning the high court judges into mere pawns of the government is certainly not a good idea. And it has nothing to do with ideological preferences. It is bad under AKP as it will be bad with any other future government, because it has got the potential to ruin our daily lives as well. Its consequences may turn the government into an openly-fascist regime from a veiled one where scores of political prisoners are still kept behind bars without knowing the crime.
Take a personal example from one of my friends, who is a financial expert. He had a job interview with the Turkish Central Bank (TCB) last month. TCB officials accepted the application of 36 people while rejecting 30 of them without publishing any evuluation. My friend told me that almost all the winners seemed professionally incompetent, but they were all sporting AKP-style moustaches.
So the losers entered a lawsuit against TCB, arguing that the employment procedure was not constitutional. High court judges ruled that TCB must renew the whole interview procedure. However, instead of obeying the court order, TCB amended its charter to guarantee that its new employees will remain at their suspiciously easily-taken jobs, before making new interviews with the losers and ultimately eliminating them all again. The losers are at the mercy of the Council of State once more, but they know that TCB will anyway not apply another decision that will definitely favor them again. After summarizing his story, my friend concluded:
"With these constitutional amendments, all high courts including the Council of State will be dominated by the AKP government. Then they will able to favor or employ anyone they like without facing any legal hurdles. So this referendum will be about getting rid of the constitution, not having a better one."
