How and when will Bahçeli fulfil what he promised?

The coalition is a result that the 7 June elections have made inevitable for all political parties. The picture emerging from the election result leaves no one room to speak in a radical, radical way. No one has the luxury of saying, "I have to fulfill everything I promised the people," and in any case, looking at these results, the people too do not expect such radical politics from anyone.

Everyone knows that these results require a coalition and that a coalition means compromise, and the people of course know it even better. And a voter who votes for a party wants his own party to come to power alone, but even if not alone, he wants it by all means to hold onto power from one side or another so as to fulfill what it promised him.

This being the case, what does it mean for Bahçeli to step aside, as soon as the ballot boxes were opened, saying "Our people have given us the task of opposition"? Where does he get the idea that the people gave the task of opposition to him and not to the others? In fact, what the roughly 7 million voters who voted for him expect of him is quite clear: to fulfill what he promised in the election square. Those voters do not give up their demands just because he could not come to power alone. They expect you to embrace the opportunity to represent them in the best way and to fulfill, if not everything they want, at least some of it.

The towels Bahçeli has thrown into the ring by putting forward absurd conditions in order to meet the expectations of the 7 million people who voted for him, and thereby making the job uphill, are of the kind that could knock a politician out several times. And the expression "withdrawing into a glass dome," which he attributes to the President, utterly ends the legend about his statesmanship. In the eyes of his own voters, such expressions are read as an expression of a rapid flight from responsibility and of burning bridges.

NOT A DEBATE BUT AN OPERATION

The writers of the Zaman newspaper have reopened the file on Islamism. It appears they are trying to dig up from its grave and kill once more the Islamism that we remember them having killed the last time. We had taken the earlier Islamism matter for a real debate and tried to make a contribution of our own, but it soon turned out that the matter was not a debate but an operation. The valuable and sincere sentiments of debate are openly being used as instruments in an operation conducted with the intent of making someone fall, by openly casting baits.

In the operation, the side saying "Islamism is dead" would, by meaning that this death also signified the death of all the good values attached to Islamism, place a responsibility on the AK Parti; while the side that would join the side saying "No, it has not died, it is still alive" and produce arguments would be preoccupied with proving that the AK Parti is political Islamist, and thus would supply the "confessions" that the Zaman-era writers needed to denounce the AK Parti to the world.

There were also those who, though aware of such an operation, assumed that what was happening was a debate and rushed to reply. Although I could not reconcile it with my good opinion, in my humble view I had regarded the Islamism at issue between the two writers as like someone writing "ox" for some illiterates. Whether they were trying to show each other the ox or trying to take the reader for an ox, accounts vary on this. It was quite clear that both had a flippant side in their assessments of Islamism. Since they are not so illiterate as to be unable to write "ox" in Latin or Arabic letters, it would not be right to assume that they completely do not know what Islamism is. What remained could only be a disrespectful attitude of taking those who read and watch for carp.

At the point we have reached today, it has become clear that behind that disrespectful attitude toward the reader there is not so much the enjoyment of an intellectual arrogance as the trapper's stealth of a witch hunt whose every dimension was revealed together with 17 December. Because of this operation, whose new phase they are now trying to stage, many of my readers ask whether I will respond to this debate. I say: there is no debate here, there is an operation. There is no use in trying to argue to those carrying out the operation whether Islamism is alive or not. If Islamism were alive, they would not get a share of it. If it had died, they would not be grieved.

Such a debate has a dignity of its own, as a deliberation and reflection.

Those who deserve it, or who do justice to it, and are interested in the Islamism debates we have continued while preserving this dignity can follow them in the recent issues of the Tezkire journal, which we have been publishing since 1991.