The 16th year of the AK Party's founding, the 4th year of the Rabaa massacre

The commemorations and events marking the founding anniversary are, for the AK Parti community, not only an occasion for celebratory enthusiasm and joy but also, once again, an occasion for "reflecting on itself and self-reckoning." The role, mission and duty that the AK Parti represented for Turkey on the day it was founded 16 years ago are the same role it plays and the same mission it continues to fulfill today.

The AK Parti is the name of the meeting of the nation and the state, and in the 16th year of its founding and the 15th year of its government, it also found the opportunity to show the whole world the power of this union and integration against the most comprehensive attempt at occupation and betrayal the country has ever experienced. There is no doubt that it has followed successfully so far its understanding that regards success in politics not as a stroke of luck but as a responsibility like a shirt of fire. This nation has confirmed that there is no doubt 12 times at the ballot box during this period.

On a ground in Turkey where state and nation were divided, politics was conducted not in the name of the nation but in the name of the state. And that state was alien to the nation; it virtually looked after the priorities of other countries, powers and centers. That is why politics that approached the people was within a short time sidelined by coups, by military, bureaucratic or oligarchic tutelage centers. The mechanism before us was in a way simplified by calling it "the state of the era." We still see, with the new faces it presents at every juncture, that it is not so simple.

While struggling with this structure, the AK Parti has at times, through intricate forms of relations, also remained under the influence of this structure, and to the extent that it could understand and interpret them, it has also tried to overcome the effects of that power one by one. Let us know that the power before us is not a plain, unitary power run from a single center. This power is sometimes a pattern of behavior, sometimes an inertia that we can produce within ourselves as well, an entrenchment of power or status, a level of human relations. Accounting for that is a separate matter; in the 16th year of its founding the movement's leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan draws ample attention to this point.

In fact, what Turkey accomplished together with the AK Parti constituted an ideal model for overcoming the current state of state-nation disconnection in the entire Islamic world. The most important thing imposed upon all the states that were to be established over the Islamic world, which was torn to pieces at the end of the First World War, was not to rely on their peoples.

The "compatibility of Islam and democracy" debate that Westerners constantly repeat, as if cooking boza on the neck of the Muslim world, is an extremely fraudulent debate and question. The only reason for the development or non-development of democracy in the Islamic world is that anti-democratic regimes, distant from the people and alien to their peoples, have received encouragement and support from Westerners. Westerners have not supported, up to now, any development that is an alternative to these dictatorships and opens the way to state-nation integration.

It is possible to see these roles everywhere, but one of the latest and most striking examples is Egypt. Mohamed Morsi, perhaps the only democratically elected president in Egyptian history, was in effect also testing for Westerners how ready they were for the meeting of Islam and democracy in the Islamic world. They could not endure this meeting in Egypt even for a year. The failure of Westerners in this test has been tragic in the full sense of the word.

On 3 July 2013, the Muslim democrat leader Morsi was overthrown by a savage military coup on the grounds that during his one-year presidency he had not solved Egypt's thousand-year-old problems and was unwilling to share power with the opposition. The masses who objected demonstrated for about a month and a half in all of Egypt's squares against the military coup, defending the will of the people, that is, legitimacy, that is, democracy, that is, values that from a Western point of view would readily appear as "Western values," and took up positions in the squares. But, again tragically, these places were turned into graves for exactly three thousand people on 14 August 2013, the 12th anniversary of the founding of the AK Parti, which had earlier realized, successfully and in a model-forming way, the fusion of nation and state and the will of the nation. The putschists, seeing that there was no way other than spreading blood and fear to bring to its goal the military coup that the great majority of the people did not approve in any way, opened fire at random on the people gathered in the squares and massacred exactly three thousand people without batting an eye, without regard for any human value.

Although the government was subjected within a year to a barrage of criticism from Western circles for not sharing power, such a military coup, with its crazed perpetrators of massacre, was preferred over the most democratic government Egyptian history has seen. Not the slightest meaningful criticism has been made from the West so far of the Sisi administration, which began with such a massacre, no stand has been taken, and no serious sensitivity has been shown regarding the human rights violations in its prisons, where 60 thousand political prisoners are subjected to every kind of torture.

Whatever anyone says, the preference of Westerners in Egypt and in the entire Islamic world is not democracy but dictatorship, not human rights but fascism and torture. With the Rabia massacre we have in fact witnessed also the suicide of Western values. Exactly the same insensitivity we saw from the West when there was a massacre against Turkey's democracy and the will of its people on 15 July, we saw in Egypt.

Many European countries, Germany first among them, are today opening their arms to everyone who engages in terrorist activity to slaughter Turkey's democracy, on the grounds that Turkey is moving away from democracy. FETÖ, whose coup and terror crimes have come out in broad daylight, the PKK, the DHKP-C, the PYD, all of them are supported by Germany. Evidently the Europeans' preference against the democracy in Turkey that they do not like is directly terror.

That the Rabia massacre coincided with the anniversary of the founding of the AK Parti is a coincidence of great symbolic meaning, even if not intentional. May the founding anniversary of the AK Parti be blessed; while wishing to live the same beauty ourselves, may God's mercy be upon those who were martyred in the Rabia massacre, and our greetings to them.