In a Dec. 11 interview about his new novel, Nobel laureate Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk commented on the ongoing reverberations of the large-scale corruption scandal that erupted in Turkey a year ago. “We have plenty of good reasons to oppose the incumbent government,” Pamuk told the Cumhuriyet daily. Asked to elaborate on those reasons, he said, “Let me tell you two of them. The first is freedom of thought and expression and the [government’s] repressive rule. The second is the things we became aware of after [the probe of] Dec. 17, that is, a disgraceful corruption. These two are reasons enough for a lifelong opposition to a government.”
Pamuk’s remarks show that the corruption cases and allegations against the government that emerged from the operations and probes of Dec. 17 and Dec. 25 last year have left scars in the popular conscience. Millions of dollars stashed in shoe boxes, bribes delivered to their recipients in chocolate packages, a gigantic gold smuggling scheme conducted through an Iranian “businessman,” the arrest of ministers’ sons, the resignation and dismissal of ministers and shameful corruption conversations wiretapped legally and illegally are some of the episodes of the probes now engraved in public memory.
President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister at the time, and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) government mounted an extraordinary effort to thwart and then cover up the probes at the expense of overstepping the law and eliminating judicial independence. They started by interfering in the judiciary to prevent planned detentions in the Dec. 25 probe, which targeted crony businessmen. The pro-government media, meanwhile, portrayed the probes as a coup attempt orchestrated by the Gulen community.
The de facto coalition between the AKP and the Gulen community devolved into an open war. The government removed from office thousands of police and judicial officials on the grounds they belonged to the “parallel state” — the name it gave to the Gulen community. Some police officers were jailed pending trial.
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