The question of “Where are we heading?”

There have been very few things in recent weeks that have brought a smile to our faces. Just as we were feeling a bit of joy over Daron Acemoğlu receiving the Nobel Prize, we were shaken by yet another gang scandal. I say "another" because we no longer even know how to process these gang reports. Although, shortly before writing these lines, I watched the video released by 140journos regarding a gang within the judiciary, and I realized that if we are waking up to a gang scandal, we are still in a relatively good position. That is, the situation has somehow come to light. Because I now have the conviction that these things we are so worried about are just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, I am in the period of my life where I ask the question “Where are we heading?” the most. I am sure many citizens feel the same way I do.

In recent days, we have been confronted with a gang named the “newborn” gang. According to allegations, gang members in certain private hospitals would admit healthy newborns to intensive care units to defraud the Social Security Institution, causing them to die from neglect, or, according to new claims, would show babies who had already passed away as if they were still in intensive care to bill the institution. It is a horrific event that families lose their babies just so some corrupt individuals can make money. No matter what we write about this, I do not think we can understand or describe what these families are going through. However, I would like to touch upon a few deadlocks, especially regarding health and justice. Because these will affect our future not just individually, but as a society.

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the cost of education and referred to privatization and capitalization. Unfortunately, this process is the same in healthcare as it is in education. You are forced to find in private hospitals the services you cannot find in state hospitals. This is such a process that often there are no appointments, in some branches you cannot even find a doctor, and if you do, those doctors are crushed under the obligation to see patients every few minutes, and sometimes citizens are directed to private facilities due to a lack of equipment or beds. We have seen with recent events that these private hospitals, which we would not exactly call “first-class,” all have more newborn intensive care units/incubators than state hospitals. Don't you think that is quite strange? It is not strange at all in a system where, in addition to the piles of taxes that salaried employees pay to the state, they also pour money into private or supplementary health insurance for health services they cannot receive. Moreover, this is not just a transformation that can be dismissed by calling it the sectorization or privatization of the health field. At one point, network maps showing the relationships between media organizations and politics were being made and published on social media. If a health version of this were made, we would benefit greatly...

After all that has happened, I am especially sorry for the doctors who are trying to do their jobs properly. Because from now on, the transfer of a baby to intensive care, even for legitimate reasons, will always leave a question mark of “what if” in people's minds. Speaking of doing one's job properly, a few things must be said for the justice system/judiciary. With the footage where the prosecutor conducting the investigation was openly threatened, we have concretely seen the processes we suspected were happening within the judiciary. So, what are we grateful to the prosecutor for? Actually, for doing their job properly, right? Moreover, we no longer see anything strange in this either... It was for this very reason that I referred to the video I mentioned at the beginning of the article. Imagine that, according to the allegations, a prosecutor forms a gang within the judiciary, profits from case files, and when they are reported for a series of disgraces ranging from drug use to sexual intercourse at the courthouse, the authority to whom the complaint is made turns out to be a “baron.” In my previous article, I pointed out that our state of social insanity is actually closely related to the problems in the justice system. A judiciary—and politics—that has lost the concept of justice unfortunately has the power to offer us nothing more than further scandals. I think the question “Where are we heading?” is exactly about this.

Within this entire landscape, I would like to close the article with a concluding section. Prof. Kaboğlu won the bar association elections held over the weekend in Istanbul. One of the first statements made by the new president of the Istanbul Bar Association was that the first four articles of the Constitution could be changed in a positive sense. The fact that a legal expert and a bar association president could hope for a positive step from the process we are going through made me and citizens like me, who have been asking “Where are we heading?” more frequently, ask this: Are we talking about the same country?