While making half-baked dramas out of UAVs, the real dramas being ignored

When it comes to fighting terrorism, Europe and America forget all the set patterns they know about human rights, democracy and freedom of expression. They fight terrorism in whatever way it needs to be fought most effectively. At the slightest terrorist attack, they can immediately declare a "state of emergency".

America, on the grounds that its laws within its own borders are not suitable enough, can institute a practice of concentration camps like Guantanamo, where its laws do not operate, in order to deprive people it has seized without questioning, trial or inquiry of their liberty under the harshest inhumane conditions. That is not enough; with interrogation planes, it can carry out its torture-laden interrogations in international airspace.

Against all these practices, they are not even subject to any proper criticism in their own media. Because these practices have an excuse that stops flowing waters, like "the fight against terror". Because terror is, in the full sense of the word, a crime against humanity.

Türkiye, for its part, for years conducted its own fight against terrorism within the very democratic limits that Europe and America expected of Türkiye. It is now better noticed that the democratic standards being encouraged had dimensions that increasingly served terror. In fact, democracy of course does not need to support terror or serve it, and one must never give up democratic standards merely because terrorists abuse democratic rights and freedoms. But terrorism also has a treatment it deserves, and it is perfectly possible to deal with it within the limits of democracy.

Without prolonging the discussion in this regard, we can say that Türkiye believed for years that it was fighting terrorism, yet all we had been doing, for many reasons, amounted to merely pounding water in a mortar.

One reason that rendered this struggle futile was, of course, the treason within the security forces. FETÖ, whose command lay outside, was acting only to the extent its owners permitted, and it succeeded very well in giving the Turkish public the appearance of fighting terrorism "heroically", thereby lulling the public to sleep.

Another reason was that our defense industry was dependent on the outside more than necessary. The Herons that we bought from Israel at excessive prices did not work properly; they were out of order 11 months of the year. Even when they worked, it was not clear whether the data obtained went first to Israel, to the terrorist organization, or to other centers according to the whim of the traitors inside. The crisis we had with Israel with the Mavi Marmara affair gave us the opportunity to develop our own domestic industry in this regard. Today the UAVs and armed UAVs (İHA and SİHA) are products of that domestic industry, there is no longer any worry about the operators who command them being domestic and loyal to their state and nation, and the result is a "counterterrorism performance" that will astonish the world.

In this way our security forces display a performance incomparable with the past, and the terrorist organization today is left without any ability to so much as stir. The terrorist organization, which perceived the settlement process as a weakness of the state and fell into the greed of seizing whatever positions it could seize with this opportunity, is today bewildered at what has hit it.

The state of the terrorist organization is plain, but it is really the panic of its owners that is worth seeing. With this course of events, they are displaying, in an instructive way, the panic of being deprived of the most important trump card they have used against Türkiye for years. The PKK terrorist organization is being struck, and its cry comes from Germany, from the BBC. Suddenly, ignoring that what Türkiye is doing is fighting terrorism, the scourge of humanity, they focus on the possibility that those killed were civilians and try to produce a thousand and one dramas from there.

While attention was being drawn to these half-baked dramas together with Sezgin Tanrıkulu, who has taken on the advocacy of this cause in Türkiye, the real dramas caused by the PKK terrorist organization were meanwhile continuing to take place.

Last week, just as these debates were taking place, the terrorists who knocked on the door of the house of 65-year-old M. Salih Aslan, former headman of Kemerli village, one of the central villages of Siirt, took him fifty meters away from his house and executed him in front of his son. The only reason Aslan became a PKK target was that he insisted on remaining AK Parti and on not voting for the HDP. He had been warned repeatedly.

The PKK, trying to monopolize regional politics in this way, was also trying to intimidate in this way the few people who showed the courage to resist it in the region. When it executed Mustafa Turhan, headman of the village of Bağgöze, from the same region, just a month before the 7 June elections, it had spread very serious fear in the region.

Mustafa Turhan's only offense, too, was being AK Parti and not announcing that he had gone over to the HDP side despite all of the PKK's warnings. Unfortunately, even in his own village, where a police station was built after he was killed, the HDP's votes came out above 90 percent.

The PKK was running the HDP's election campaign, and this is how it ran it.

Interior Minister Süleyman Soylu rightly and most strikingly asked: were we going to obtain documents from Kandil proving that the terrorists neutralized by the SİHAs were really terrorists? The dramas they have caused, the funeral of M. Salih Aslan, the martyrdom of Mustafa .., the martyrdom of so many soldiers who have fallen to the earth during this period are more than enough as documents of this terrorism.

Those who seek other documents have suffered a dramatic casualty in their own humanity; let them first look for and find that, and not put forward other half-baked dramas and put themselves in even more tragicomic positions.

CONDOLENCES: I pray for God's mercy upon M. Salih Aslan, former headman of Kemerli Village and the maternal uncle of our provincial general council member Sadık Adıgüzel, the respected elder brother of the AK Parti Siirt organization, who was martyred last week by the vile terrorists. I offer condolences and patience to his son Ahmet Aslan, who never lost his composure and his resolve in the face of terror despite his martyrdom, and to his grieving family.