A revue of the history of the Republic of Turkey shows that all good things Turkey enjoys today are the result of having followed Atatürk’s blueprint for Turkey and all failures resulted because of gross deviations from or complete ignorance of these blueprints. These plans were developed over a long period of time in Atatürk’s mind, beginning perhaps during his War College years. During the General Staff College years, he and his close friends were reading the precursors of the French revolution, the so-called French Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot, and Rousseau. They wanted to find the reasons why Europe was flourishing while the Ottoman Empire was crumbling and what could be done to save the Ottoman Empire. What was the reason for West-European nations to have become so much stronger and more powerful than the rest of the World during the last 3 — 4 centuries and to have colonized most of the rest of the World? For one thing, West-Europeans were considerably better educated than the Ottomans. When the republic was established in 1923, literacy in Turkey was below 10 %. Whereas during the enlightenment (that the Ottoman Empire completely missed) the Europeans had learned to make their daily decisions based on science and not on religion, tradition, and superstition. They learned how to "use their heads". A more rational behavior of large masses made nations more knowledgeable and hence stronger.

Thus, as soon as the Republic of Turkey was established, Atatürk passed through the parliament the Law For The Unification of Education. Turkish children were taken from the hands of ignorant hodjas (Moslem clerics) and put in modern secular schools, where they were taught plenty of math and sciences and taught to think for themselves. In 1928 a Latin alphabet replaced the old cumbersome Arabic script. The new alphabet was taught to the population in a great national literacy campaign where those who had learned it taught the others. Atatürk expressed this educational revolution in his statement, "The truest guide in life is science and technology, to deny it is ignorance and stupidity". More than anything else the secular education system is responsible for creating what foreigners call the modern Turkey of today.

However in recent years the reactionaries tried to undo this important progress by opening up imam-preachers schools to the general public, where students were fed ready-made ideas without being allowed to discuss them and were discouraged to think for themselves. The military had to step in and requested the eight-year obligatory school system, which forced the middle-school sections of imam-preacher schools to be closed. It is now hoped that boys and girls in the secular middle schools would learn to think for themselves and would not be easily brainwashed when entering the imam-preacher high school. This is a half measure. Actually all the imam-preacher schools must be closed, because they poison the minds of youngsters in making them hate Atatürk and all his reforms and principles. Atatürk's blueprint for the enlightenment of Turks worked very well. It made the Republic of Turkey survivable.

After the Independence War, Turkey had no industries at all. A national industry was built with taxpayers’ money as a nucleus. The state would build and operate these plants and then sell them to private owners and use the sale revenue to start still other industries. These factories would be "a sort of umbrella under the shade of which private industry would flourish." I was one of the students who were chosen in competitive examinations and sent to Germany to study chemical engineering. I spent the first ten years of my professional life in one of these plants, in Karabuk. These government plants were an excellent beginning for an industry and were first quite successful. After Atatürk, during the presidency of Inonu, these plants continued to be technically very successful. They were operated by Turkish graduates of the best Western engineering schools. However, Inonu made these temporary government industries permanent, as in socialism. He also had them managed for political purposes, instead of commercial purposes. The advent of multi-party democracy in Turkey in 1950 further deteriorated the management of these industries. Parties that held the Ministry of Industry portfolio filled the plants with their supporters, thus made them absolutely uneconomical. A few years ago these government-owned industries and utilities (Now called KITs) were losing $7 billion a year, a real financial black hole.

Again Atatürk’s blueprint for a temporary government industry as a nucleus was correct and successful. Its degeneration into a permanent industry that was then used by parties for political patronage cost Turkey as much as $7 billion every year. The ruling socialists still drag their feet in privatization and seem to have no intention of selling these financial black holes. That is the same amount that the military campaign against the PKK had been costing Turkey.

For governing the country, Atatürk set a very democratic principle: "Sovereignty belongs unconditionally to the people". That statement is still in Article 6 of the present constitution. In the 1930’s, our teachers told us that that principle would be slowly materialized, as the citizens become better educated. As a matter of fact, in those years citizens elected the so-called "second electors" who voted for the peoples’ representatives. In 1946 the

"second electors" were abolished and citizens began to vote directly for their representative. Also, Inonu allowed a multi-party system and in the next election in 1950 his Republican Party lost to the Democrats in a landslide. During the 50’s, the Democrats misused their veto-proof majority and began to believe that they could do anything, even if it is unconstitutional. One of their unconstitutional actions triggered a military coup in 1960. The generals organized the preparation of a new constitution that would prevent the Democrats to have a veto-proof majority, which was approaching dictatorship. They assembled a group of university professors to do that. The new constitution introduced proportional representation that not only prevented veto-proof majorities, but also resulted in Turkey to be governed by week coalition governments of parties who had contradictory principles and programs. Thus, nothing constructive could be produced. Once again the election law was changed and the election of candidates of peoples’ representatives in primary elections became possible. This practice properly placed the sovereignty in the hands of its owner, by making to choose his own representatives. Turgut Ozal changed that. He abolished the primaries, and gave party bosses the right to draw up the candidates’ list. Of course, in their own districts, the bosses put their own names on top of the list. People would vote for parties, not for representatives, and the ratio of party votes determined the ratio of candidates from various parties to go to the parliament. Thus, PARTYCRACY was created. Such a seemingly small change to give more power to the party bosses had unimagined negative and destructive consequences to Turkish politics.

There is no bond between the voter and his representative. The citizen cannot influence nor control his representative. In the United States, when there is an important problem, the press and the media bring it to the attention of the public. Then, people write to their representatives, so it is discussed in Congress and is resolved one way or another. In Turkey, the press and the media do their job quite well, but the action stops there. People do not write to their representatives, and even if they would write to them, the Peoples’ Representative would not care and would not do any thing. He is not accountable to the electorate; he is accountable to the party boss.

The representative feels loyalty to the party boss who puts his name on the candidates’ list. He has no loyalty to the voter. Thus he is really the party bosses agent, not the peoples’ representative.

The party boss is always re-elected, because he always puts his own name on top of the candidates’ list in his own district. Even when he is an abject failure, he is never replaced.

Only yes-men survive as representatives, others are dropped from the list. Thus, parties cannot rejuvenate themselves. There is only one opinion in any party; it is that of the boss.

In this system that I call PARTYCRACY, corruption and wrongdoing are never exposed or punished. The various party bosses negotiate among themselves and the dirt is "whitened", i.e., the perpetrators are found innocent by mutual agreement among parties. Thus, partycracy encourages corruption, as we saw happening in the bank scandals, recently.

This present system of Partycracy is anything but what Atatürk intended as democracy and it is obviously contrary to Article 6 of the Constitution. The combination of proportional representation and of Partycracy finally brought Turkey to the pitiable conditions of today. The worse propriety of Partycracy is that it cannot be changed democratically, because the people, who would be voting for a change, are those who exercise the sovereignty that was taken from the people. They would not willingly relinquish power. Thus, some sort of a force must be applied to the parliament to bring that change. I have maintained that Partycracy is unconstitutional (Against Article 6) but neither Mr. Vural Savas, nor President Sezer, to whom I wrote, used it to force the passage of a new election law. The only other alternative would be the insistence by the military in the National Security Council that a new law be passed. But so far the military has been unwilling to interfere other than against breeches of secularism. It is very worrisome and very dangerous for Turkey to keep on being misgoverned, plundered, and mismanaged under Partycracy.

Again, Atatürk’s principle of sovereignty was a very democratic one, the breech of which brought Turkey much weakness and unhappiness. In the foregoing, I have demonstrated only a few such examples. Of course, many more examples could be cited. In all of them, Atatürk’s blueprint was well thought and brought good results when followed, and bad consequences when abandoned.