Gürbüz Özaltınlı
The Turkish original of this article was published as Kaybettiğini anlamamak on 21st November 2015.
Turkey’s secularists have never been able to context and frame the AKP. They refused to try and understand it, and in the end they have failed to do so.
As power started slipping out of their hands, they were unable to digest it and reconcile themselves to it, in their haste and panic giving way to all kinds of extreme reactions. First, they saw any and all references to Islam as a great menace, thereby embracing a discourse about how modernity in Turkey was supposedly coming to an end and a dark age was opening. Then, they belittled the AKP’s reformism; at the same time, they exorbitated the defensive policies it adopted in the face of illegitimate attempts to overthrow it into further charges of “escalating fascism.” There were even those who compared current political life with the years of the 12th September [1980] military intervention, and went so far as to say that they actually preferred the latter.
Such demagogical histrionics are going on even today. Media corners and columnists, disinformative headlines, party spokesmen going through their exercises in rhetoric keep giving vent to the idea that democratic rights are being trampled on, that all kinds of liberties have been suspended, that we are living under a heavily oppressive régime, and that the government is becoming more “pro-religion” by the minute.
Neither have they been alone in this overblown campaign. They have also received support from some active power loci in the West. That Western world had taken fright at where the Arap uprisings were heading. Their Middle Eastern strategy of cooperating with moderate Islam had been abandoned especially after the Egyptian example, and they had markedly taken their distances from all political formations tinged with Islam. And Erdoğan, too, had been blacklisted because he stood out as a leader openly opposing the West’s outlook at this crossroads,
The AKP adopted policies of looking for regional power and seeking to change the existing power equations in Turkey’s favor, all of which came to irritate various global powers.
There was really nothing surprising about the emergence of a growing collaboration between those who were losing power inside the country and those who saw Turkey as threat in the region for the sake of getting rid of the AKP government. This was what actually underlay all the propaganda that attempted to present the AKP government — and especially Erdoğan — to both domestic and international public opinion as a “religious dictator/ship.”
Don’t be surprised if you relapse into solitude
Now, when IS is posing a lethal threat to the security of Western metropolises, can this situation endure? As our bigoted secularists keep pressing ahead full throttle with their disinformation operations, for example about “here are those who booed [the Greek national anthem] and here is the [AKP youth] organization [behind it]” [as the daily Cumhuriyet recently headlined], are they going to find Western power-centers by their side yet again?
As the streets of Paris lie bleeding from acts of terror committed in the name of Islam, as yet another Muslim political figure what will be Erdoğan’s position in Western reason? Is he still a “religious dictator,” or a peaceful politician of note, who is highly representative of the downtrodden, and who expects respect for his legitimate power and national interests?
For obsolete secularists who keep clamoring and agitating in domestic space while imploring the West for “help,” the golden age may already be over. The roads and streets of Western cities, which are not any more secure than the road and streets of this country where they “no longer want to live,” are perhaps an intimation that henceforth they could be alone in their intense Erdoğan hatred.
As Syria keeps falling apart; as Putin’s soldiery enters the field while the Coalition cannot count on any kind of social support except the PYD, which of course is anathema for Turkey; and at a time when Erdoğan has recaptured an indisputable weight and superiority through the November elections, to keep attacking him as “IS supporter” or “dictator” is likely to seem clever and persuasive only to the likes of the Gülen Congregation’s “live Can [Dündar] bombs.”
We cannot say that Turkey’s task is going to be easy. But neither is Turkey a country to be thrown into a corner in calculations covering the entire Middle East, or to have its government rendered manipulable through a few simple operations. It is a country whose importance keeps increasing as Syria comes unraveled and IS administers shock after shock to the West
It would be useful for secular oppositionists to wake up from all the illusions about the “dictator” that they have succumbed to. Facing them, in the most democratic country of the entire Islamic world, is a government that has earned its right to rule through the most legitimate means imaginable.
A reality-check is in order.