Çeviriler

What the citizens of Turkey did on the night of 15-16 July 2016 should be remembered along with other acts of heroic mass defiance and self-sacrifice in the face of murderous force exercised by the state: Tiananmen. Prague. Rabia Square.

The failure of the international press is all the more notable because the only thing they had to do was to get someone who knows Turkish to sit and monitor the Turkish TV channels. There was no excuse for maintaining a “we don’t know what’s happening” or “it looks like régime change in Turkey” narrative anytime past 02:00 Turkish Standard Time (15th July, 23:00 GMT).

Back on television, incredible things were happening. The citizens of Istanbul and Ankara had taken to the streets, surrounded the junta’s troops, and either convinced them to surrender or wrestled them into submission.

Many details are still somewhat vague, but by morning (on the 16th) it was clear that the coup plotters had aimed specifically at capturing or even killing President Erdoğan. A prominent Gülenist by the name of Tuncay Opçin (who appears to have fled to the U.S. last year) tweeted, about 36 hours before the event that “they” would “catch him in bed and hang him at dawn.”

Over the past several months rumors had been circulating that Gülen’s adherents in the Turkish security forces were mobilizing for yet another extraordinary initiative, perhaps a putsch. In response, only a couple of days ago the AKP leadership announced that this year’s High Board of Military Appointments would be focused on purging Gülen’s followers from the security forces. For Gülen’s cultists, it was now or never.