“Let’s suppose you’re Prime Minister again,” I asked, perhaps I should have said President now, “what would your priority be?” The weather outside is overcast, with lighting flashes; a storm is about to start. There were a few days left for the opening of the Party’s headquarters. We hold our meeting in the reception room inside a three-story house with a garden, where he currently works from, in Beysukent suburb of Ankara. Future Party (FP) head Ahmet Davutoğlu paused for a moment, and then said “freedom of thought.” “Why?” I asked. “Because no one in Turkey should fear prosecution for expressing their ideas,” he said. “Besides,” he added, “if people cannot express their ideas freely, we cannot even objectively identify problems.” “There’s the example of Osman Kavala,” I began to say, as he interrupted me, declaring that “there are a lot of names.” “I cannot tell you that I would set Kavala, or other thought prisoners free the next day if I was in office. Because that would be interfering with the court’s workings, something we struggle with at present. We must build an environment where courts take independent and impartial decisions. We cannot solve these with a single person in a single move. Judges who convict under pressure will begin doing what the law says. The ruling cases of the Constitutional Court and the ECHR will become applicable, starting a real normalization. But the point here is to achieve a real normalization that transcends people and issues. To do this, everyone should act together to establish a state of law, the structure of which wouldn’t be possible to alter…
Why didn’t he do it as Prime Minister?
Now it was my turn to interrupt. “In this case,” I said, “why didn’t you do those when you were Prime Minister?” Davutoğlu used to be the chief foreign policy adviser to -then- Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan between 2003-2009, then Foreign Minister between 2009 and 2014, and following Erdoğan’s election as President, Prime Minister and Chairman of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). Davutoğlu has resigned from AKP to establish his FP in 2019. A shadow dragged across his face. “There were troubles,” he said. Davutoğlu has said earlier that Erdoğan had wanted to see him “puppet Prime Minister.”
“When I was Prime Minister,” he continued, ”I did my best to preserve freedom of thought and freedom of the press. Even amid the fight against terrorism, which was a challenging time. In my prime ministry, not a single example can be cited where I have intervened directly or indirectly with any media or media member.” I paused. So did he. “There is one exception,” he then answered. (*) “That was when prosecutor Mehmet Selim Kiraz got martyred. I asked the newspapers not to use the photo where he has a gun pushed against his head. For me, this was not a matter of freedom of the press; it was about media ethics. Nowhere in the world can such a picture be tolerated. I criticized this attitude when a media outlet printed the picture. Then that news outlet published an editorial criticizing me. But even after this extremely harsh article, my attitude did not change.”
“The people should trust me because…”
“So,” I asked, “the people trusted you once. But even though you were Prime Minister, you are saying that you couldn’t get through the troubles. Why should the people trust you again?” After all, all of the AKP decisions during a whole period bore his signature. The Syria policy, alleged corruption cases… Eager, he inclined out of the chair he sat on. “The people should trust me because I trust the people, and know that the people will trust me,” he said. “After the June 7 election in 2015, as promised, I didn’t leave my country without a government, despite AKP not holding the majority in the Assembly. Under the most challenging conditions, as terrorist attacks carried on, I conducted the fight against terrorism within a democratic rule of law.
“When I was forced to leave Prime Ministry in May 2016, there wasn’t a single barricade or ditch [a major PKK offense strongly countered by security fortces -my] left in our provinces and districts, as promised. And again, as promised, I fulfilled all election promises made before November 1, 2015. The increase in the minimum wage by 30% in three months was notable. Most important of all, I demonstrated that power can be achieved in this country without corruption.
No AKP “Golden Age”
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