‘We have only one country to live in’ -- Turkish citizens’ fight for democracy
TURKS who crave democracy are appalled by the apparent fraud in Sunday’s referendum. They are disappointed by the Supreme Election Council’s rejection of all appeals, but they’re not giving up.
“We have only one country to live in. We can’t go anywhere else,” lawyer Hilmi Gullu said, days after the disputed result empowered President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to change Turkey from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential system with few checks and balances.
“We have to pursue the will to be a democratic state under the rule of law. If we lose that, we will have nothing,” Gullu added.
Three opposition parties complained to the Supreme Electoral Council, focusing on the fact that the SEC had decided, during the voting, to accept as valid ballots those that did not bear the stamp of authenticity. The SEC broke its own rules, but said it had to respond to the fact that thousands of votes had been cast with unauthenticated ballots.
“The rules cannot be changed while the match is being played,” said Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP estimates that there are 2.5 million unauthenticated ballots. As it was Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) which asked the SEC to validate them, it is assumed they were Yes-votes.
In the end, the Yes-vote won by only 1.4 million votes… 51.4% voted Yes; 48.6% voted No.
Turkish social media blossomed with videos and photographs that allege rigging. One of the most widely watched videos shows men at a table stamping ballots with the seal of authenticity. A woman, presumably the person filming the scene with a cellphone, warns the men they are committing a crime. The man closest to the camera turns and laughs at her.
A photograph on Twitter shows a hand-written tutanak or tally sheet for 12 polling stations in Sanliurfa, a province in the under-developed south-east of Turkey. Not one polling station has recorded a single No-vote.
The pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) says provincial governors in the south-east told local officials they would get into trouble if there were No-votes on their tutanaks. The HDP legislator for Bingol, Hisyar Ozsoy, said five district headmen had complained of pressure from the governor.
The election-monitoring group No and Beyond reported as many as 961 polling stations did not receive a single No-vote – an impossible result in such a close race.
On Wednesday evening the SEC judges, by 10 to one, threw out all the complaints. They did not give a reason.
For three nights in a row, Turks have protested against the referendum result. The demonstrations were not huge – 2 000 people in Istanbul; 150 outside the SEC building in Ankara – but they broke out across the country… Izmir and Eskisehir in the west, Tekirdag in the north, Mersin and Antalya in the south and Gaziantep in the south-east.
As one who grew up in Joburg in the days of prime ministers John Vorster and PW Botha, this reporter, now a Turkish citizen, was reminded of the despair of South Africans who opposed apartheid. As then, there are good-hearted people in Turkey today who see the wrong being done; they condemn it in words and pictures, but they cannot stop it.
“The outcome (of the referendum) will always be marred by the electoral fraud and the illegal decision of the SEC,” said Dogu Ergil, a retired professor of politics of Ankara University. But he is impressed by the optimism of the No-voters, who seem to be buoyed by the sense they hold the moral high-ground.
“The Yes-voters are fighting to hold on to government, but the No-voters are putting up a fight to uphold democracy – which is more important,” Ergil said.
A lawyer who volunteers for the election-monitoring group Ankara’s Votes, Mehmet Gulerman, said he took heart from the No-camp’s performance against staggering odds. The government ensured the Yes-campaign received 90% of TV time, its advertisements dominated the billboards, and the opposition’s most charismatic politician, Selahattin Demirtas of the HDP, and 140 journalists were locked up in jail on terrorism charges.
“Despite all that, still half the country resisted the change of the constitution,” Gulerman said. “So, personally, I am hopeful towards the future.”
He also saw the size of the No-vote – 48.6% of the country – as a slap-down to many Turks who thought their votes would not make a difference because “Erdogan will win anyway”.
“If people had thought the AKP would win,” Gulerman said, “I don’t think they would have gone and voted No. The desire to be on the winning side has a huge impact on the people’s voting preference.”
Gulerman and Gullu are looking towards the presidential elections in 2019. “The opposition has to work,” said Gulerman, “they have to come up with good candidates.”
The singular achievement of the No-campaign was its drawing support from left-wing and right-wing, Turkish nationalists and Kurdish nationalists. As the sociologist Sencer Ayata wrote in BirGun newspaper, the referendum was the first time that “such a wide spectrum” of society came together.
This enabled the No-vote to win in Istanbul and Ankara, the two biggest cities in the land where the city councils are run by Erdogan’s AKP. Erdogan grew up in Istanbul, served as mayor of Istanbul, but on Sunday 51% of the city rejected him.