Gezi in Turkey, Tamarrod in Egypt: the message given to Erdoğan through Morsi

They could not bring themselves to execute Muhammad Morsi. Nor could they bring themselves to kill him quietly in prison, in his solitary cell, away from prying eyes, and announce his death from there. They feared the likely consequences of killing Morsi in either of these ways, Morsi whom they had held captive for 6 years in a manner befitting a terrorist organization that recognizes no rules. Of course, as long as Sisi had this hypocritical support from AB and ABD, he had no qualms on their account. He could stuff his longest spears into whatever sack he wished. Whether they fit or not did not matter much. It was enough for his friends to see the tip of the spear in the sack.

But they feared that killing Morsi in this way would make him even more of a hero in the face of coup regimes and turn him into a powerful symbol of revolt. Morsi, for whom they could find no way of executing, they killed as though he had died a natural death, in full view of everyone, achieving a result they had prepared in advance.

Yet this way of killing him, of doing it so ostentatiously, brought upon their heads more than they feared. Just like the Khashoggi murder. Morsi became not merely the hero of the people belonging to his own community or party in Egypt, but a symbol of every kind of resistance against tyranny all over the world.

They prevented even his own fellow villagers from attending his funeral in Cairo. Yet the funeral prayers in absentia performed for him brought together tens of millions of people all over the world, first of all at Al-Aqsa Mosque and in Turkey. It laid bare all the inhuman dimensions of the unfathomable coup regime in Egypt, together with those who supported it and those who turned a blind eye to it. Whatever it was about what Morsi represented that they feared, he now continues to represent it even more.

In fact, our President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan too represents, to a great extent, the very same things that Morsi represented. Erdoğan is a Morsi whom they have not been able to overthrow. Morsi, on the other hand, is an Erdoğan whom they overthrew in Egypt in 2013. That is why those who constantly remind Erdoğan of Morsi as a threat know very well where they are speaking from and on whose behalf they are speaking. This matter is by no means merely a relationship Erdoğan has forced into being.

If we go back to the beginning, the Tamarod movement that overthrew Morsi continued throughout the whole of June 2013 with its rhetoric, its preparations and its efforts to shape public opinion. In that same June, the well-known Gezi events were continuing in Turkey at full intensity. Personally, in those days I had the opportunity to follow both the Tamarod movement and the Gezi events closely. When I said, while in Cairo, that the aim of this movement was a coup, the Egyptian intellectuals of liberal tendency whom I knew, who were supporting the Tamarod movement in Egypt, objected strongly. They said, "There can never be a coup in Egypt, because the Egyptian army would never turn against its own people." Moreover, they accused this talk of a coup of being simple arguments the Morsi supporters clung to in order to fend off criticism.

In the television programs and newspaper interviews I took part in in Cairo in those days, I listened in amazement to the arguments that those who voted for Morsi were ordinary people, that they were uneducated, and that the equality of the votes of the educated and the votes of the uneducated was a dilemma of democracy. Of course, I had my answers to these as well. "I too think that the vote of a shepherd and the vote of a professor who sees himself above the people should not be equal. If possible, the vote of such a professor should be annulled," I had mocked, in my own way, but I had also said that these arguments were precisely the arguments of coup-makers.

Only a month passed. We witnessed that those arguments had been laid down as the paving stones of the road over which the coup would quickly pass in Egypt. Comparatively, I was seeing in the most vivid way that similar stones were being laid on the road by the same arguments and the same propaganda tools in the Gezi incident in Turkey as well. I had even asked in one piece, "Can a Road Lead from Taksim to Harbiye?", and the answers and reactions I received were as though imported from Tahrir Square, which had been stolen by the Tamarod people of Cairo. Perhaps passed through a little Turkish translation: "What coup, my dear, in this day and age, would there be a coup in Turkey?"

There were even those who felt like bursting into laughter as soon as they heard the word coup in Turkey, in this day and age. Yet the aim was the same. They simply could not achieve in Turkey what they achieved in Egypt. That there is indeed a coup in this age, we saw in Egypt, and then we saw it in Turkey too, repeatedly. The democratic acquis and level of development that dazzle the eyes of some in the world have neither the function nor the desire nor the inclination to prevent coups anywhere in the Islamic world. Turkey's market integrated with the world, its NATO membership, and whatnot: that none of these are mechanisms that protect Turkey against coups, we saw in Gezi, in 17-25 December, and on 15 July.

The only mechanism that protected us against coups was none other than the Turkish people's unparalleled national stance against foreign interventions, coups and occupation. On the contrary, our NATO membership and our relationship with the Western world, it turns out, have been bringing coups to our country, to our village.

In the Gezi events of 2013, the aim was both to overthrow Morsi, who was showing signs of becoming a second Erdoğan, and to overthrow Erdoğan as well, as his main source of inspiration, so that there would be no chance of such a person emerging again. Erdoğan was giving them enough trouble already; they could not have tolerated a second Erdoğan.

They overthrew Morsi, they could not overthrow Erdoğan. But from that day to this they have not held back from any effort to overthrow Erdoğan, to harm him, to weaken his government. It is very natural for this subject to come up today with all its components because of Morsi's killing. But with every way they bring it up, they are in fact at the same time revealing once again their own treacherous perfidy, their hypocrisy and their cowardice.

They think they have killed Morsi, but a person whose funeral is feared is not a person who has been killed. They thought they had killed him, but his death continues to give stronger inspiration to the Moseses who will bring down their own Pharaonic order.

They could not bring Erdoğan down from the first day either; now they are eager at least to begin by uprooting him from Istanbul, which he governed for 25 years. This eagerness is the eagerness of all of them.

In short, a municipality is not merely a municipality, and our vote is not limited to today. From the square we keep away from today, sulking at one and offended at another, there emerges a homeland to which we are driven together with those we are offended by and sulking at. By then there will be nothing left anyway to be offended or to sulk about. Do not say it cannot happen; look at Egypt, and see.

Istanbul is the 4th holy city of Islam after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. Even if the others have fallen, the deliverance even of them begins from Istanbul. But if Istanbul has fallen, then unfortunately it would be futile to expect a voice from anywhere else.