Worse than the fund disaster

Timur Soykan wrote on his X account, “If the allegations are true, this scandal is very different. This time, AKP Deputy Chair Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya did not steal from the treasury or from the resources the public created with their labor. She did not siphon off funds from tenders. A new stage has been reached. She directly took people's money through fraud...” 

Yes, now people's money and directly people's lands, villages, pastures, and plateaus are being stolen... Yes, in Turkey's metropolitan cities and smaller towns, they have done everything for the sake of rent-seeking, and they continue to do so. In Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antalya, Samsun, Ordu, and in almost all provinces and districts, whatever belonged to the state and the nation was sold to cronies under the name of “privatization” or public sales. 

Factories and production centers were sold to crony companies; most were shut down, and the land of many of them in city centers was used as new rent-seeking areas. The massive lands in city centers belonging to the Turkish Armed Forces were seized under the pretext of “we will build a public garden,” and later, it was turned into a “rent garden” for some, not for the public. They told lies without shame, without hesitation, looking straight into our eyes. 

There is much to be said, but the recent FUND DISASTER we experienced is a summary of the AKP's 25 years... A period where rent-seeking is glorified over production, profiteering over work, and looting over merit...

In this country, producing, working, and earning money with the sweat of one's brow have become crimes. The homes of farmers who spent the whole year working their fingers to the bone to bring forth their produce turned into houses of mourning during harvest time—the time for weddings and holidays. They deceived the people with a base price of 250 TL and stole the hazelnuts from the producers' hands at 145 TL. 

Our farmers, the most concrete example of working and producing, are crying tears of blood during the harvest season. It makes no difference whether it is hazelnuts, grapes, lemons, or pistachios... At harvest time, the farmer is left to face the ultimatum of “either give it for pennies or let it rot”... A year's effort and labor are stolen from their hands in a week through shady games. The people are lulled to sleep with talk of markets, demand, and stock exchanges...  

Now, the villages and production centers that feed and sustain this country are being sold to companies under the name of “licenses” through tenders held behind closed doors in Ankara. In the Black Sea, Thrace, the Aegean, Central Anatolia, Eastern Anatolia, and every corner of Turkey, the nation's mountains, pastures, plateaus, villages, water resources, and forests have been licensed to domestic and foreign cartels and companies under the guise of “we are mining.” To those who cry out, “But we are farming here... We have lived here for generations... We are feeding our children...” they are told, “Deal with it yourselves.” 

“Energy and Mining” have become sacred words. But what about the “right to life,” what about the “right to access food,” and what about the “right to access water...” No one mentions these at all... The producing farmers of the villages are being turned into slaves of the mines. 

Since the media and free press have been largely silenced and those who want to practice journalism are under heavy pressure, we only learn the truth when they fall out with each other. We learned in the recent past how bribes and black money changed hands and how they were put on a tariff... This one was accused, that one was accused, and it was covered up. As the late scholar Yaşar Nuri Öztürk said, our people were deceived “by using God, religion, and the most innocent and sacred feelings.” 

During the late Ecevit era, a government was toppled by a cash register thrown at the steps of the Prime Ministry... Now, forget the cash register; desperate people are throwing their lives away... Poverty and hunger suicides have turned into massacres... Like the cult suicides seen in the US and Japan, our retirees and workers are in such a state of rebellion that they are killing themselves... While all this is happening, one of the highest-level officials of a government that claims to run this country invests 163 million TL and earns more than 2 billion TL in a year... It is so normal... They have become so accustomed to this order.. 

Was the incident involving former Capital Markets Board (SPK) President Ali Fuat Taşkesenlioğlu and his sister, AKP Erzurum MP Zehra Taşkesenlioğlu, any different... The man serves as a manager at Bank Asya for 16 years, and then he is appointed as the President of the SPK... Then there are the allegations that Ms. Zehra has tens of millions of dollars in cash, properties, yachts, mansions, and mines in Africa... An AKP lady who can give her husband 2.5 million dollars just to buy an office... And what about former State Airports Authority (DHMİ) manager Mehmet Cemil Acar, in whose home 26 kilograms of gold bullion, 1 million 320 thousand dollars, and 121 thousand Euros were found...  

Do you know what one of the first things the AKP did when it came to power was? They abolished the Ministry of Finance Inspection Board and the Board of Accountants, which were the most deep-rooted audit institutions of this country... Yes, auditing was what they feared most. It still is... Even the reports revealed by the Court of Accounts, despite all the obstacles and missing documents and information, are enough to explain the plunder that is taking place... 

Yes, the fund disaster that occurred is huge, to the extent that in a democratic country, the government could not stay for even a minute. When 300 miners died in Soma, when the train massacre occurred in Pamukova where 41 of our citizens lost their lives, when more than 50 thousand of our people lost their lives in the Hatay earthquake disaster, when 9 workers were left under the soil in Çöpler in plain sight, and in the fire at the Grand Kartal Hotel in Bolu Kartalkaya where 78 people, 34 of whom were children, lost their lives, while the negligence and incompetence were blatantly obvious, those who did not take responsibility and “did not ask to be excused from their duties” are asking to be excused from their duties today... 

Yes, the fund disaster is huge, but a much bigger one is being carried out under the name of mining. The property and assets of this country's citizens are being looted under the pretext of “we are mining.” The forests, pastures, plateaus, and villages of this nation are being seized under the pretext of “we are mining.” People whose living spaces are being plundered and seized are being told to “leave and go.” This is called savage capitalism. This is called colonial mining. This is the real, greater danger awaiting Turkey, even bigger than the fund disaster. Millions of our producing people are being torn from their living spaces and are being turned, or are intended to be turned, into consumers on the outskirts of big cities. 

In Thrace, hundreds of thousands of decares of land are being transferred to companies at once with an urgent expropriation decision. The fertile lands of Thrace, which feed and irrigate the millions in Istanbul, are being buried in concrete. Now, the same region is intended to be made the center of colonial mining. 

Everywhere there is urgent expropriation, that is, urgent dispossession; everywhere there is urgent deforestation... A government that tries to stay on its feet in its country with the strength it gets from Trump, but can give its citizens nothing but poverty, hunger, dispossession, looting, plunder, and rent-seeking profiteering, will sooner or later receive the answer it deserves from the citizens, and in the harshest and clearest way possible... 

İbrahim Gündüz