Whose memory loss is Kılıçdaroğlu counting on?

The headscarf issue, which had not been on our agenda for some time, has been opened to debate again because of the election discussions. To today's 18-year-olds we can recount as a historical event left in the past that, only 7 years ago, women could not enter universities wearing the headscarf, and until only 5 years ago they could not enter Parliament.

Without doubt, what they hear about this has a very different effect from what those who lived through these events felt. The wheel of fortune turns together with its own emotional and mental atmosphere. The dark days that were thought never to pass do pass. The black clouds thought never to disperse do disperse; the oppression thought never to end does end. At last God's promise is fulfilled, the wheel is turned among people, and the trust of the next era is entrusted to the oppressed of a thousand eras. Oppression ends, the oppressed find relief, and the subject drops off the agenda, so much so that people bind the wounds of this oppression and forget their pains too.

Human memory is afflicted with forgetfulness. Things that must not be forgotten are forgotten, or are assumed to be forgotten. It is the oppressors of the previous era who count most on the human memory's being afflicted with forgetfulness. Indeed, relying on this forgetfulness, within a short time they can venture to write an entirely new history.

Both CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Muharrem İnce, now a presidential candidate, were among the most reckless defenders, and the political parties responsible, of the headscarf ban, the shame of Turkish history. The CHP was a party that had almost dedicated its existence to resistance against the headscarf. They put in a desperate effort as if they had sworn not to let a single headscarved woman through the university gates. This struggle had deep roots. However afflicted with forgetfulness my memory as a human being may be, I cannot forget how desperately the CHP members of that day (then called the SHP) tried to block the arrangement that ANAP under Turgut Özal's leadership wanted to make on the headscarf in 1989. What kind of rancor against the headscarf was that, I felt it to my very marrow.

It fell to Kenan Evren to apply to the Constitutional Court (AYM) to annul the law that had passed Parliament that day. Opposition to the headscarf was one of the most important things uniting Kenan Evren and the CHP members.

The persecution of the headscarf by the February 28 people received its greatest political support from the CHP and the DSP. It was again the CHP that took to the AYM and had annulled the arrangement made in 2008, stating that "no one's right to education can be obstructed for any reason" and adopted with 411 votes. What in this statement could possibly be objected to? For the sake of hostility to the headscarf, the CHP found a way to object to this statement and was able to make the AYM accept it. Because in those days the AYM was like the CHP's backyard. Most of its members had been appointed by either Demirel or Sezer, and all of them were CHP-connected.

Today Kılıçdaroğlu can say "I solved the headscarf problem." It is like a cold joke. How much time has passed since the headscarf bans? Let us say those who are 18 today may not have been exposed to the traumatic effect of the tensions, but what will you do about people over 18? Have they forgotten too? Relying on what kind of memory loss, in which segment of the public, can Kılıçdaroğlu say this?

Frankly, I had assessed İnce's or Kılıçdaroğlu's voicing today of discourses 180 degrees opposite to their past statements on the headscarf from its positive side, that is, by attributing it to the educating effect of the presidential system. After all, no one who has to seek the votes of 50+1 percent of the people can remain trapped in his own narrow, marginal discourse. That is why it is quite normal for someone who will govern the country as President not to embrace such bans, but everyone has the right to expect him to honestly face up to his past statements for that. The problem with both İnce and Kılıçdaroğlu is not that they have adopted or changed to a different stance today from the past on the headscarf ban; in fact, such a change, if declared and confronted, could even be regarded as a virtue.

The problem is that they are trying to write the past otherwise for us, that they are knowingly distorting a history we all lived through together. What good for the future can come from those who distort historical facts like this?

İnce does not prove that he has no obsession with the headscarf by bringing his own headscarved sister onto the stage. Probably, when he went on his headscarf hunt, that same sister was also headscarved. Her existence was no obstacle to İnce's uncompromising hostility to the headscarf. Yet if, instead of presenting his sister in a headscarf to the public, he made an honest self-criticism about his past, it would be far more convincing, and he would have done what is better for the sake of our democracy, our freedoms and our social peace.

By the way, if you like, let us return to the actual story of how Kılıçdaroğlu solved the headscarf. The CHP members, who had found a way every time to block all the arrangements made in the name of the headscarf, in Parliament or by hiding behind coup threats, or, if that was not enough, by taking them to the AYM, finally stayed silent about an arrangement the AK Parti made after 2010.

Afterwards, that is, after the wheel had turned, Kılıçdaroğlu writes a history that suits him today with "we approved it, so it passed." Yet the situation is this: when, with the constitutional amendment made in 2010, the cadres they trusted in the AYM changed, they understood that no decision supporting their ban-mongering would come from there, and they gave up. Had they received a positive signal from the AYM, have no doubt that Kılıçdaroğlu and İnce too would have continued their desperate anti-headscarf struggle until the last second. Now he can seize the opportunity to reap the rent of not having done something that he could not do that day because he had no power.

May God never give them such an opportunity again. May He not make us forget what must not be forgotten. There is no guarantee that they will not do the same when they have that power. If we forget this potential in them, we will have deserved what befalls us.