The No-More-Mr-Nice-Guy law

Last weekend, public attention in Turkey was focused on the limited military operation in Syria. Some 100 Turkish armed vehicles and 570 soldiers crossed the border to relocate the tomb of Süleyman ?ah, the grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, from Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) territory to a safer Kurdish zone. The opposition has engaged in a lot of nationalist brouhaha about this supposedly unpatriotic move by the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government.

In my view, all this brouhaha is nonsense, as the government did the right thing by saving Turkey from a tight spot within our ever-more-dangerous southern neighbor. However, simultaneously the same government was taking a really worrying step somewhere else - in the national parliament. What I am referring to is the new set of amendments to the Domestic Security Bill, which are being passed despite the opposition's rejections and protests. As Amnesty International summarized nicely in a report it published the other day, these legal changes "threaten human rights, including the prospect of increased arbitrary detention, excessive use of firearms by police and politically motivated criminal investigations."

In particular, the authority given to the police to use firearms in the face of political protests is quite worrying. So far, the police have been authorized to use only tear gas, rubber bullets and batons to subdue angry protestors. Even those have caused several deaths in mass demonstrations such as the Gezi Park protests of June 2013, but now the police will be able to use live bullets. God knows what that could lead to.

The government defends itself by saying this authority is not being given for no reason. They point out that some protestors in...