Çeviriler

Trump has never borne the responsibility of elected office. Erdoğan, on the other hand, was first elected to office in the early 1990s, and has continually held public office since 2003, winning election after election by massive margins. Just this one point, with all its underlying corollaries (extending to a purely negative, reactive versus a positive appeal, or to a one-man populism versus a well-organized party, or the question of sustained, demonstrable public trust), is enough to illustrate that Tayyip Erdoğan and Donald Trump are categorically different.

If Mr. Cohen were to pause and consider the implications of his observation that“Turks do not want to go backward,” he might feel misgivings about the rest of his column. After all, it is exactly those same Turks who have repeatedly elected President Erdoğan and the AKP, by large and growing margins, over the past fifteen years. Again, it was exactly those same Turks who turned out en masse on 15th and 16th July to oppose the coup. As they stood against the tanks, were they going backward, do you think, or forward?

Hours after the Turkish government declared a state of emergency, the German Foreign Ministry took the astonishing step of criticizing the Turkish government for the action. Frank-Walter Steinmeier’s comments revealed how ignorant he is about Turkish affairs. Germany’s neighbor France has been under a state of emergency since November 2015, and has just extended that state of emergency for another six months. The German Foreign Ministry has not said anything about that. Then two days later, in a case of grotesque and horrific irony, Germany itself had to declare a state of emergency when an assailant in Munich killed a number of civilians.

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).