Ahmet Şık's questions to Ali Yerlikaya regarding Bora Kaplan

Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) Istanbul MP Ahmet Şık made harsh criticisms regarding the budgets of the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Labor and Social Security at the Parliamentary General Assembly.

Referring to the fact that the Ministry of Interior has come to the agenda through the Ayhan Bora Kaplan investigation, Şık called on Minister of Interior Ali Yerlikaya. Şık argued that this ministry and the Ministry of Labor play a critical role in the continuity of the Palace regime.

'AN EFFORT TO MAKE CITIZENS SLAVES AND THE GOVERNMENT SERVANTS'

Ahmet Şık criticized the policies of these two ministries and summarized the main goal of the regime with these words:

“The summary of this order is as follows: Let the person in the Palace and his circle manage the country arbitrarily; let the country's resources be handed over to a handful of bosses and the wealthy. Let looting, plunder, and lawlessness continue unabated in the country. While citizens are condemned to poverty and unemployment, let crimes be covered up; let every dissenting voice be silenced by using values such as the call to prayer and the flag.”

Pointing to the Ayhan Bora Kaplan investigation, Şık stated that the Ministry of Interior has become a tool for a policy of unaccountability, and claimed that these ministries work only to make the public dependent on capital and the government.

AYHAN BORA KAPLAN INVESTIGATION

Noting that the job of the Ministry of Labor and Social Security is to provide the conditions for a system of slavery, Şık noted that the Ministry of Interior steps in to overcome the obstacles in the way of making the exploitation order sustainable without problems.

Stating that everyone who seeks their rights finds law enforcement against them, Şık addressed Minister of Interior Ali Yerlikaya by recalling the Ayhan Bora Kaplan investigation.

Describing the Kaplan investigation, Şık asked how the police chief who entered into a bribery relationship is still continuing his duty. Şık said the following:

"During Süleyman Soylu's term as Minister of Interior, mafia leader Ayhan Bora Kaplan, who had immunity, was arrested following the change in the ministry. In the verdict hearing held on December 3, the court of first instance sentenced Kaplan to 68 years in prison. This is, of course, not the final decision. The matter will first go to the Court of Appeal and then to the Court of Cassation.

Since the day Kaplan was arrested, a lot of oddities have occurred, centered on the Ankara Police Department and the Ankara Courthouse. The oddities continued 1 week after the sentencing of Kaplan, who was alleged to have been protected and shielded during Süleyman Soylu's term as interior minister, and who went in front of TRT with his men equipped with long-barreled weapons upon Soylu's phone call during the July 15 coup attempt.

If you remember, Serdar Sertçelik, the secret witness of the Kaplan file, had escaped while under house arrest with an electronic shackle. Later, Sertçelik had also published some audio recordings regarding his claim that some names, including high-level government officials, were tried to be placed in his testimony through police coercion.

For those who have forgotten, it should be remembered that MHP Chairman Devlet Bahçeli described what happened at the Ankara Police Department as a “coup attempt against the government” and used the term “coup plotters” for the police officers involved in the investigation.

Following these developments, Deputy Ankara Police Chief in charge of the Organized Crime Branch Murat Çelik, Organized Crime Branch Manager Kerem Öner, and Deputy Manager Şevket Demircan were arrested on charges of a 'coup'. At the same time, the police chiefs, who were also the names who detained Ayhan Bora Kaplan on September 7, 2023, were released after their 4-month detention in the case opened for 'misconduct in office', despite being accused of being 'coup plotters'.

Those police chiefs, who were released to be tried without arrest by applying judicial control measures and whose trials are ongoing, were reinstated to their duties last week. While police chief Murat Çelik, who is alleged to have donated the bribe money he received from Ayhan Bora Kaplan to the Menzil sect, was assigned within the General Directorate of Security, Şevket Demircan and Kerem Gökay Öner were appointed outside of Ankara.

The police chiefs were detained again 3 days ago. The accusation this time was leaking information about the Ayhan Bora Kaplan file to Cevheri Güven, a Fethullahist media member living abroad. Police officer Serkan Dinçer, who works at the Ankara Narcotics Branch, had also been arrested before for the same accusation. The police chiefs were released after their statements at the prosecutor's office."

Şık asked Yerlikaya the following:

"We ask the Minister of Interior, who puts police against everyone who seeks their rights:

• Was the Ministry of Interior and the Ankara Police aware that these police chiefs would be detained in the Cevheri Güven investigation?

• Is there any work being done to find those who leaked the investigation to media outlets close to the government while the police chiefs were still being questioned by the prosecutor's office and the incident had not been announced?

• Does this detention practice and investigation have anything to do with your predecessor Süleyman Soylu and his team?

• Does Ankara Deputy Chief Public Prosecutor Veysel Kaçmaz, who gave the instruction for the coup investigation against the police chiefs and is known to be close to Süleyman Soylu, have anything to do with this new investigation?

• Are the allegations that police chief Murat Çelik received a $300,000 bribe from Ayhan Bora Kaplan's lawyer and gave it to the Menzil sect true?

• Are the allegations true that the meetings and negotiations for this bribery, which is the down payment of a total amount of 6.5 million dollars, were recorded by the police brother of Alp Arslan, who was the assistant to the former Ankara Police Chief Servet Yılmaz, who was in the team of Minister of Interior Süleyman Soylu, and who was dismissed from the profession on charges of taking bribes from Kaplan, and who works in the Izmir Police Intelligence Branch?

• How can the police chief who entered into a bribery relationship still continue his duty?

• Are the allegations true that Serkan Dinçer, who works at the Ankara Narcotics Branch and was arrested for leaking information to Cevheri Güven, acted on the instructions of Murat Çelik?

• Is it true that Ayhan Bora Kaplan gave information and documents regarding who he bribed in the police and judiciary to some names he trusted and threatened to reveal this information to the public if the 68-year prison sentence given by the court of first instance is not overturned?

• Are there any members of the judiciary involved in the investigation among those Ayhan Bora Kaplan bribed?

• Is the chain of oddities in the investigation conducted regarding Ayhan Bora Kaplan aimed at covering up the fact that many bureaucrats in the police and judiciary community took bribes from the mafia?

• Why and what message is being given to the political power with these investigations and the oddities in the Ayhan Bora Kaplan file that cannot be explained by coincidence?"

"A MINISTRY OF A MECHANISM THAT PRODUCES CONSENT FOR EVERYONE TO BE EXPLOITED"

Continuing to address the Ministry of Labor and Social Security and Minister Vedat Işıkhan, Şık said, "We are facing a ministry of a mechanism that, while it should protect the most basic rights of laborers, attacks these rights every day, turns a blind eye to work-related murders, and produces consent for everyone, from children to young people, from young people to retirees, to be exploited."

Stating that this ministry is the most useful apparatus of a government that praises flexible work, spreads insecurity and lack of future to the entire laboring segment, and walks hand in hand with capital dominance, Şık drew attention to the data on purchasing power, poverty, debt, and unemployment that are melting every day.

Şık spoke as follows:

"At the root of the problems of laborers, whose every moment of life and future are controlled by being indebted, are lack of organization and decreasing unionization rates. We all know that the rate of workers covered by collective bargaining agreements is in a terrible state in Turkey. Because there are serious legal and structural obstacles in front of organization. These obstacles make the laborer dependent on the job despite all conditions and pressures, and the employer makes non-unionization a condition within these pressure mechanisms.

Or the unregistered workers, whose numbers are constantly increasing and who work for even less than the minimum wage... We cannot even talk about them being unionized or having collective bargaining agreements. Although official unionization rates are around 14 percent, the majority of this consists of public and municipal employees. Here too, the government imprisons the civil servant in a unionism that has become rotten and an apparatus of the government with pro-government unionism. Turkey is the country with the lowest collective bargaining coverage rate in the OECD. While the collective bargaining coverage is around 10 percent for all workers, it is even below 5 percent in the private sector.

We are not at war, but news of child deaths does not stop coming from all over the country. In his poem 'On Death', Nazım Hikmet says, 'For death to be fair, life must be fair.' But these children, who share the class position of their families, also die in the way that position points to. Their unfair lives end with unfair deaths.

MORE THAN 1.5 MILLION CHILDREN ARE TRAPPED IN THE WHEEL OF EXPLOITATION

The deaths of all of them, why and how they died, how they lived, and how they will be saved from this hell are like a common rule. The government, which tries to keep the millions it has made dependent on the lie of stability by indebting them with social aid turned into charity, does the same for children. The Presidency of Religious Affairs, the Ministry of National Education, sects, and the Ministry of Labor have joined hands and are weaving the violence of capitalism and reactionism into every area of children's lives.

The government, which is quite skilled at turning crises into opportunities, did not delay in turning the ever-growing poverty into a cheap labor opportunity for capital. They grew the child labor army through public policies and made child labor legal. With the MESEM project, which makes children slaves to capital, more than 1.5 million children are trapped in the wheel of exploitation as cheap labor in the industry today, while they should be in schools. It is not an exaggeration to call it exploitation. Because the salaries paid to students according to the size of the workplaces are 3, 4, and 10 thousand liras per month. So who pays this money? No, it does not come out of the bosses' pockets. The salaries of the children, along with their insurance premiums, are covered by the Unemployment Insurance Fund. In other words, the salaries of child laborers are paid with premiums deducted from the salaries of adult workers.

With the MESEM mechanism, which supplements the cheap labor reserve with child laborers, children die in the factories, construction sites, and work sites where they are forced to work while they should be in class during school hours. While the right to life is ignored, death screams from everywhere.

"907 CHILDREN LOST THEIR LIVES IN WORK-RELATED MURDERS"

Arda Tonbul, Murat Can Eryılmaz, Erol Can Yavuz, Alperen Kocayavuz, Eren Dağ, Ulaş Dumlu, Alperen Enes Ural, Zekai Dikici, and Ömer Çakar, the youngest of whom is 14 and the oldest 17, are the names of children who were killed in different cities, some by being crushed in construction machinery, some by falling from a height, or by being electrocuted.

The murderer of them all is none other than this rotten system and the government that manages to show the most exquisite examples of the ideological position it belongs to. The dominance of capital and the government reproduces itself over and over again through exploitation in working life, through the education system at school, through pressure at home, and through inequality in the social sphere. We are all witnessing the collective deaths of children who lost their lives behind this reproduction. The exploitation of child labor, which leans on the reality of poverty in its most naked form, causes children working in insecure and heavy conditions to lose their lives in work-related murders. According to the reports of the Workers' Health and Occupational Safety (İSİG) Assembly, at least 907 children have lost their lives in work-related murders since 2002, when the AKP came to power."

"WE ARE BIGGER AND MORE CROWDED THAN OUR FEARS"

"We have no choice but to defend that we are rights holders, to claim our rights, and to be persistent in this," said Şık, concluding his words: "Because we, all of us, are bigger and more crowded than our fears. It is possible to object to the oppressor, the despot, regardless of what understanding they have, and to oppose all kinds of injustice. For this, it is enough to have a pride not captured by arrogance, loyalty not to a leader but to the people and the righteous, a dignity not crushed for one's own benefit, and a conscience related only to being human. I wish everyone a life as long as their conscience and honesty, as fair and equitable as they are."

News Source: 12punto