The inevitable partnership of coup-makers and occupiers

"Coups are terrorist movements that have succeeded," we had said. We said it taking the example of Israel, but it is a rule that can be extended to all coups if desired. Indeed, all the coups in Turkey too were carried out with terror as a pretext, but the big secret that everyone knows was later exposed with all its evidence: that it was the coup plotters themselves who staged all the terrorist movements so that they would constitute a pretext for their own coup.

Unlike ordinary terrorist activities, the coup plotters did not manfully own up to their own actions; along with terror they also plotted intrigue. Behind the armed terrorist acts before the May 27 coup were the junta members who would carry out the coup. By the time we came to September 1980, behind all of the terrorist acts and organizations that had begun to take 15-20 lives every day were the September 12 coup plotters, who were successively preparing the ground for the coup. Kenan Evren later said openly in an interview that "in fact they had thought of carrying out the coup earlier but the conditions had not yet matured." The conditions waited to mature were in fact under their own control.

The aim was to usurp the administration with a coup; terror was a pretext. If there was not a sufficient pretext, that pretext had to be created. That too was a requirement of the coup process. Indeed, when on September 11, 1980 there was a complete picture of civil war in the country, and one day later, on September 12, not even a pistol went off, did that not explain everything sufficiently?

The February 28 plotters did the same in another way. With the reactionary terror they stirred up, they carried out a coup that appealed to secularist sensitivities. September 12 and February 28 were thus the days of victory of the terror stirred up by the coup plotters.

With the terror it carried out on Palestinian land, Israel prepared the ground not so much for a coup as for an occupation. Ultimately, the state of Israel completed its occupation and declared its state by creating a fait accompli with acts that, by all measures accepted in the world, would fall into no category other than terrorism.

If the world had had the slightest sensitivity toward terror and occupation, toward the right of a people on its own land, a state called Israel would not have been recognized, but it was recognized. Because today's world order is not an order that categorically rejects terror, occupation, injustice. Let no one say this is universal international law. World international law does not have to be like this. There is surely an alternative to it, there was in the past indeed, and there will be again. Muslims exist to remind of this law and, when the time comes, to establish this law in its place.

In Egypt too, the military coup was carried out not against the Ikhwan but against the Egyptian people itself, who stood up for their own will, freedom and dignity. But there too the coup plotters again laid the ground for their coup with terror. Before the coup they used all the cards in their hands to drag the country into instability. The head of the military, who was charged with ensuring security, by keeping the security gap as wide as possible in order to create a legitimate ground for himself, ensured that an image of chaos in the country ripened. When he carried out the coup, he opened fire on the civilian people who objected to it and criminally massacred thousands of unarmed, civilian, innocent people. But because he has succeeded, there is no political authority to call this terror to account. The international order, for its part, avoids describing this successful terrorism, let alone as terror, even as a "coup." As if this were not enough, Egypt's coup plotter can shamelessly brand everyone who objects to him as a terrorist.

All of these coup plotters, who are at war with their own peoples, are on very good terms with Israel. The countries that support the coup made against the Egyptian people, and those who made the coup, are competing with one another to normalize relations with occupier Israel and to stay on good terms with it. They seek the legitimacy they lost before their own peoples, or rather never had, from occupier Israel and the US that supports it. Once they secure legitimacy at that level, they do not care at all about their own peoples. It is not at all surprising that the Egyptian coup plotters and their supporters also call Hamas terrorist, which occupier Israel calls terrorist and which has done nothing other than exhibit the most rightful resistance against the occupation of its country. Because coup and occupation are acts that come from the same root. A people who care about their honor see a coup as an occupation too. They distinguish the occupying will and collaboration inside the coup.

Indeed, the first to give a salute to all the coups in Turkey have been the international powers that wanted to take the will of the Turkish people captive. The May 27 people, the September 12 people, the February 28 people and the July 15 people alike, with their coups, turned Turkey into a field of intervention for imperialist powers and attempted to hand them the key to the country.

Perhaps in the case of Turkey, compared with previous coups, this aspect of July 15 weighed far more heavily. God forbid, July 15 would have taken its place in Turkey's history of coups as a direct, not indirect, attempt at occupation.

That those in solidarity with the Egyptian coup are at the same time entering a race of solidarity with Israel is because all of them are, in effect, an occupying force against their own peoples.

Because occupation and coup are two faces of the same process in today's Islamic world. The occupiers conduct their business in Islamic countries through coups. And the coup plotters cannot have any support other than the occupiers. Because their own peoples are enemies to them. Because they themselves are enemies to their peoples.