Perhaps you should also go to the President together for the commanders in prison!..

For three days, the visit of CHP Chairman Özgür Özel to AKP Leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been the talk of the town. A voice came from the heavens and the tongues of the pro-government media were loosened; they called it a “historic meeting”... “A spring atmosphere is blowing in politics”... “Politics has entered a softening process”!..

At the end of the day, it was just a meeting between the leaders of the ruling party and the main opposition party, which came in first in the March 31 local elections. But with these comments, they don't even realize that they are actually admitting to what they and the government have done to the stature and weight of our democracy through their supreme efforts.

Let us underline the following:

The meeting did not take place at the Palace or the Çankaya Mansion, but at the AKP Headquarters... While referring to his interlocutor, Özgür Özel said he “found the opportunity to speak with Mr. Erdoğan”... Erdoğan, for his part, never mentioned his role as President, instead using the phrase “a positive development between the ruling party and the main opposition.”

In short; even though the state's TRT, the pro-government newspaper Sabah, and even the AKP Headquarters presented it as “President Erdoğan will receive/has received Özel,” in reality, two party chairmen met.

WHAT PARDON?... A CONSTITUTIONAL OBLIGATION

The reason we emphasize this is because, as Özgür Özel had announced long before, he was supposed to discuss the situations of Çetin Doğan, Fevzi Türkeri, Yıldırım Türker, Temel Özkaynak, and Erol Özkasnak, who are in prison in the February 28 case, during his meeting with Erdoğan.

According to what has been written in the media; Özgür Özel asked for “the situation of the February 28 figures to be brought to the agenda and for them to be pardoned, citing Çetin Doğan's health problems.” Erdoğan replied, “Let us evaluate it.”

And furthermore, after meeting with Özel, Erdoğan summoned Minister of Justice Yılmaz Tunç to the AKP Headquarters for a brief meeting!..

If these reports are true, let us remind you of the following, point by point:

Yes, the 80-90-year-old generals had very serious health problems even as they entered prison, and the government very much wanted these commanders to write a “pardon petition.” While the commanders did not accept this, a pardon petition was obtained from the late Lieutenant General Vural Avar when he was on the verge of death. In other words, for Özgür Özel to ask the AKP Chairman to “pardon” them when the commanders have no such demand is an absurdity in itself.

Following the passing of Vural Avar, the Ministry of Justice issued a circular regarding “chronic illness, disability, and old age” and made changes to the work and procedures carried out by the Forensic Medicine Institute in this regard. As a result, the generals in prison were referred to the Forensic Medicine Institute again and were issued reports of “old age.”

Article 104 of the Constitution states that the President “shall commute or remove the sentences of individuals due to chronic illness, disability, or old age.”

Indeed, after the report issued by the Forensic Medicine Institute, Erdoğan removed the sentences of some of those commanders and they were released.

But 5 are still inside. Their reports have been waiting in front of Erdoğan for exactly 13 months. Yet the Constitution is clear; signing those reports is not a favor, it is an obligation.

Özgür Özel, instead of reminding him of this obligation, talks about a pardon. And AKP Chairman Erdoğan—not knowing, perhaps, that the reports are waiting in front of President Erdoğan—gives the answer, “Let us evaluate it.”

So, wouldn't it be better if the two party chairmen visited President Erdoğan together and asked him to fulfill the requirement of the Constitution and sign those reports?!

The second issue; everyone knows that the February 28 case was also political and the defendants did not receive a fair trial. Özel could very well have brought up a retrial for the February 28 case, just as he did for the Gezi convicts.

IS THIS HOW ONE FOLLOWS A FATHER'S CASE?

After all this, let us share some inside information.

We heard that about 15 days ago, Özgür Özel called Çetin Doğan's wife, Nilgül Doğan, and after saying that he had prepared a file on the situation of the commanders and would bring it up in his meeting with Erdoğan, he said, “I consider Çetin Doğan like my own father. I will fight for him just as a person would fight for their father.”

We ask: if what is told about the meeting is true, “is this how a person fights for their father?”

PLEASE PAY ATTENTION TO THE DATE OF THE REPORT

We said, “A retrial should also be brought to the agenda for the February 28 case.” Let us continue from there.

Following the Supreme Court of Appeals' decision to overturn the verdict for some defendants, this case is being retried. A new hearing will be held on Monday, and if the court accepts the request of the defense attorneys, Namık Kemal Zeybek, who was a Minister of State and Government Spokesperson in the Refahyol Government, will be heard as a witness.

Let us briefly recount what happened during this retrial process.

The Ankara 5th High Criminal Court, which is hearing the case, decided to comply with the Supreme Court of Appeals' ruling and, after receiving the Prosecutor's opinion on the merits, accepted some of the defense attorneys' requests to expand the prosecution. One of these accepted requests was to send the entire case file to the Forensic Medicine Institute on November 21, 2023, to examine whether there was forgery in the so-called evidence. This meant an admission that the so-called evidence used as the basis for the verdict was suspicious, meaning a fair trial had not been conducted.

According to the claim of one of the defense attorneys, Aykanat Kaçmaz, the majority of the so-called documents, which were called “the original evidence of the case file,” were documents that had been involved in the Balyoz and Ergenekon plots and whose forgery had been proven, and the documents that were in Word format in those files had been converted to PDF and used in the February 28 file.

The case file, which runs into hundreds of thousands of pages, was sent to the Forensic Medicine Institute for this examination.

And the breaking news; 15 months later, the Forensic Medicine Institute sent its report on this to the Court.

The answer given to the court's question after the examination, which was understood to have been conducted on February 8, 2024, using a sampling method, was in summary as follows:

“Since information belonging to the original file may be lost when PDF, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint files are converted between each other, it may not be possible to state with certainty the type of these files before conversion... It is not possible to determine through images whether the documents found in the JPG and BMP extension files located on CD No. 5 are Word documents... Since we could not determine whether the Word (.doc extension) files found on the CD were converted from a PDF file to a Word file or not, it is not possible to answer the questions of whether the Word file or the PDF file was created first.”

Furthermore, although there was no such allegation and the court did not ask a question in this direction, the Forensic Medicine Institute made the following assessment regarding CD No. 5, which is considered the so-called evidence of the case:

“Since it was determined that it is a CD that has not been rewritten and was written in a single session and a single track, no changes have been made to the documents on the CD in question after the CD was written.”

Let us come to the most interesting detail: the date of the Forensic Medicine Institute's report is February 28!..

What a great coincidence, isn't it?!

Müyesser YILDIZ

May 4, 2024