On: Turkish riot police storm opposition offices after leaders ousted

The news from the provinces, from a state that styles itself a republic, arrives like a dispatch from a battlefield where the law itself is under siege. The police, those custodians of public order, have been turned into the instruments of a private will, storming the very offices where opposition is given voice, and all this on the heels of a judicial decree that has torn the legitimate leaders from their posts. They will say, of course, that the court has ruled, that defiance of its order cannot be tolerated, that the state must enforce its own judgments. And to this, I would ask: what manner of judgment is this, that arrives not from a dispassionate weighing of evidence, but from a political calculation? What court, worthy of the name, serves not as the guardian of law but as the surgeon for excising political rivals? The complexity of their statutes, the labyrinth of their procedures - this is not the hallmark of a sophisticated jurisprudence. It is the strategy of tyranny, designed to confuse, to obfuscate, to provide a veneer of legality for the raw seizure of power.

To remove a man from his rightful office by decree is one injury to the Republic; to then send armed men to occupy the hall where free citizens gather to deliberate is to compound the crime with a desecration. The foundation of any free state is not the unanimity of opinion, but the security of dissent. When the opposition’s door can be broken down by the state’s own guards, the door to the Republic itself has been shattered.

How long shall we watch this pantomime of law? How long shall we pretend that a judge’s robe confers legitimacy upon a sentence written in advance by the powerful? The verdict is clear, though it was delivered before the trial began: the Republic there is dying, not with a cry from the people, but with the silent, steady turning of the legal mechanism against its own purpose.