The Arab Spring and the coup and revolution in Turkey

We cannot see the coup attempt launched in Turkey on 17-25 December 2013, which later failed again on 15 July, merely as an event taking place within Turkey's own internal history. Of course, we were witnessing the attempts of a power, accumulated by a movement that began organizing in Turkey from the mid-sixties, with its own particular goals, style and religious understanding, by infiltrating and organizing at all levels of the state and society, to seize the entirety of a government formed by democratic means. It is also possible to read and follow the story of FETÖ, as the perpetrator of these coup attempts, within this course limited to Turkey. However, when considered together with the events unfolding in the region simultaneously with these coup attempts, it becomes much clearer who was trying to do what, in which role, and in cooperation with whom.

The Arab Spring was a process with sociological roots that began to crack and bring down a century-old status quo based on colonialism, a Zionist strategy and despotism. The conspiracy theories that immediately kicked in behind this process tried to perceive and present these social explosions as steps of a new arrangement, again taking place within the plan of the global mind. Though the counter-revolutions that hastily kicked in soon after were enough to show how much of a dry delusion these conspiracy theories were. While these counter-revolutions expressed the effort to restore the old order, they made the new despots of the re-established old order more merciless than before, more sensitive and more brutal toward democratic developments.

The sensitivities of this process also established a new cold war order encompassing many countries of the world. This cold war order created new poles between a world that looks after democracy, human rights, independence, and the dignity, welfare and rights of peoples, and a status quo that resists it. Among these poles Turkey was of course seen as the center of the former and became the target of all attacks. Therefore the series of coups that began on 7 February 2012 with the prosecutors' summoning of the MİT Undersecretary to testify, and later continued with Gezi, 17-25 December, 7 June and the 15 July coup attempts, also formed a very important link in the counter-coup attempts launched against the Arab Spring first in Syria and then in Egypt.

The movement known as Tamarod, launched against the first properly elected President in Egyptian history, was simultaneous with the Gezi events, but simultaneity was not their only connection. Let us also recall that Gezi was described by some as a Turkish Spring, and that the language of Tamarod was served up as if cooked in the same kitchen. When we said that a road from Taksim to Harbiye was being sought, those who saw this as a conspiracy theory and said the event was nothing but a democratic demonstration did not see how the same-model so-called democratic demonstration, that is, the Tamarod movement, turned in Egypt into a coup completed with a merciless, savage massacre. Because the revolution was at its outset, a smoke; the first revolution was in the intoxication of first excitement. Exactly in line with the role the coup-plotters had written for them in their own scenarios.

Until then, the Turkey model had a seductive effect across the entire Islamic world on Muslim peoples' demands for democracy, human rights, freedom of expression, good governance, development, welfare and human dignity. Arab despotic regimes and the Western countries tutoring them found it hard to cope with these demands. Therefore it was necessary to start with the country that by its mere existence and practice had a seductive effect on the demands for democracy, human rights and welfare: Turkey.

In fact the first counter-revolutionary step against the Arab Spring was taken in Syria. Repelling the demands for democracy and freedom in Syria once and for all, no matter how many people's lives it cost, and corrupting the demands for change with arms and blood, played a decisive role in turning the Arab Spring into winter. Then, with direct coups in Egypt and Yemen, the peoples there were virtually made to regret a thousand times that they had asked for democracy and human rights.

In Turkey, after the Gezi events, organized simultaneously with the Tamarod movement in Egypt and with the same logic, ended in failure, the coup attempt came this time on 17-25 December in an utterly unexpected guise. By skillfully creating the image that the government, virtually with all its ministers, was drowned in corruption, through a judiciary-police-media collaboration...

To stand against a coup engineered in such a guise, on such a pretext and through the hand of the judiciary was in fact close to impossible. Everything was thought out and calculated down to the finest detail and staged step by step. Such a coup attempt would be far more effective and far higher in legitimacy than an ordinary military coup attempt. No one would even be able to characterize it as a coup. Because behind it stood the judiciary, which has acquired an almost sacred standing all over the world. The irregularity, immorality and corruption in the fact that these members of the judiciary had embarked on this by staging a coup, through a junta-style organization, against the judicial hierarchy would somehow have escaped attention in the commotion.

Frankly, I always find the 17-25 December coup attempt, and coups of this kind carried out through the judiciary and media, far more dangerous than normal military coups. The latter has to go to great lengths to establish its own legitimacy, because the only legitimizing point it rests on is its military power, and this power is in fact not persuasive but only suppressive and silencing.

Yet a coup that comes through the judiciary, if accompanied by a good media campaign, which on 17 December was more than the case, can be withstood only with a leadership of exceptional courage, prudence, skill and insight. We must not forget that this both reinforced Erdoğan's leadership and that it was thanks to that very leadership that we got through such an insidious coup attempt.

Meanwhile, if we see that in many countries of the world unnamed coup orders engineered through the judiciary, with no one's soul sensing it, currently prevail, what nightmares can we imagine about the kind of world we might be living in, God forbid, had 17 December been pulled off.