The Rabaa massacre will of course be held to account

Today is the 4th day of the blessed Feast of Sacrifice that we are observing, the 18th anniversary of the founding of the AK Parti, and also the 6th anniversary of the Rabia massacre in Egypt, one of the most savage massacres that modern human history could witness.

Each of these special days has acquired meanings that call for saying a great deal today.

With each year that passes, a great event acquires a new facet, together with the somewhat more special, different meanings it has gained over that time.

History is rewritten every moment, in the light of new developments, with the new meanings that new events add. That is why, on the 18th year of an event that we have commemorated in a different context in each of its 17 years, it becomes possible to say very different things.

The AK Parti is a very original example in terms of the contributions it has made and is making to Turkey's political history and development, and to the history and debate of the development of democracy in the Islamic world and in the world in general. Every event lived in each of the 18 years added other dimensions to this contribution. Since its 18th year coincided with the Feast of Sacrifice, the anniversary events of the Central Headquarters have been postponed to next week. Leaving our broader assessment to next week, let us dwell today more on the Rabia massacre.

We have said it before. The fact that the Rabia massacre coincided with the anniversary of the founding of the AK Parti (its 12th anniversary) is a coincidence of very great symbolic meaning, even if not intentional. For the AK Parti has had a function in the Islamic world of reminding people of the people's will and suggesting that it exists and is possible.

This function inspired the Arab peoples, who for a century have lived almost wholly in captivity, to claim their own will and to demand independence, freedom and a dignified life. This was of course not the only cause of the process called the Arab Spring, but this source of inspiration certainly had a symbolic effect. Of course the nature of a symbolic effect is that while inspiring peoples, it also arouses other feelings in the owners of the established order.

That is why the circles disturbed by the Arab Spring process did not merely organize counter-revolutions in order to stop it; they also worked, and continue to work, hard to strangle in its place and destroy the Turkish example that inspired these revolutions.

That is also why, simultaneously with the Tamarod movement that prepared the ground for the coup against Muhammad Morsi, the only elected President in Egypt's history, the Gezi uprising was organized in Turkey with the same pretexts and the same media communication tactics and rhetoric. What was achieved in Egypt could not be achieved in Turkey. But the grudge of this fight against the AK Parti and its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who remind Arab peoples that they are free, that they deserve to live a dignified life, and that they can do so, has not ended.

In this regard, on 14 August, precisely on the 12th anniversary of the founding of the AK Parti, they opened volley fire on the crowds who displayed their resistance to the coup in Egypt in the most peaceful way, by sitting in the square, and massacred 3000 people in the most savage manner.

What is Karbala? The Rabia massacre is an incident in which 3000 people were cruelly slaughtered, each with the tragedy of a Karbala.

The modern world also stands out with its skill of making one live thousands of Karbalas, one on top of another, side by side, in a single day. Moreover, it is notorious for an impudence that begrudges even the right to compose an elegy for the Karbalas it makes one live, that makes them forgotten in a short time, and that does not withhold esteem from its own Yazids.

In Rabia, soldiers and police carrying the state's weapons committed the greatest cruelty a state can commit against its own citizens, both killing many people by taking aim, with sniper skill, and firing randomly into crowds with volley fire against unarmed people. Afterwards, bulldozers entered over the tents in the square where the bodies of the dead and the wounded had been gathered, and the bodies were torn apart; some were stuffed into pits and covered over in that state, and some were set on fire and burned together with their tents.

Those who deserve to be tried in international courts for every single life in that massacre were accepted in the international community as if nothing had happened after this event. With the courage they found from this, those they had not managed to kill at Rabia they threw into dungeons, and many of them they killed in these dungeons through torture and ill-treatment, and those who still could not die they went on to try in show trials and slaughter by execution. The death sentences of hundreds of people were read out in a single session without any proper trial, and dozens of people were executed on the basis of statements established to have been taken under torture.

In the midst of all this, last February, on the day after the very day nine of these young people were executed, the leaders of the Arab League and the European Union did not shrink from posing together, having answered the invitation of Sisi, the sole person responsible for these massacres, in Sharm el-Sheikh. On top of that, Sisi, looking each of them in the face, commanded them to accept that this disgusting democracy and human rights situation in Egypt is normal "in Egypt's own particular conditions," and they listened to these words submissively...

Today Egypt is in such a bad state in terms of human rights violations that it is enough to make us ashamed of the age we live in. With tens of thousands of political prisoners in dungeons under conditions of severe torture, with its opposition and press completely suppressed, Egypt unfortunately also represents the model that Westerners want to see for the Islamic world. Because, as far as can be understood, what Westerners want for Islam is not democracy, advanced human rights and freedoms, but precisely such an example. Even if their tongues say otherwise, this is what they say in practice on every occasion.