Do the coup-makers know what everyone knows?

After the revelation of every coup plan adorned with mind-boggling scenarios, everyone is seized by a consolation: "In this day and age there can no longer be a coup, there cannot be, because the world conjuncture can no longer tolerate coups."

Yet when you read the details carefully, when you delve a little into the mental world of those who make these scenarios, you understand that even clinging to this consolation must be considered excessive optimism. The coup plotters take no account of the fact that the world has changed and is no longer the world of single-channel radios, that there is the internet, polyphonic media, a country thoroughly integrated with the world, an economy intertwined with international trade and investment, and a considerably risen level of education. The Sledgehammer fantasies have shown quite well what they can bring themselves to risk once they set their minds on a coup. For everything we think could stop them, the coup plotters have a precaution and a plan of action. They can take everything into account. What are multinational companies, what is an integrated economy, what is the stock exchange? You seize them all and that's the end of it; who would dare to utter a peep? As for money, the paper mills and green ink supply all the raw material needed anyway; what need is there for the Central Bank's long and tedious procedures?

And what of people with such a high level of education? You gather two hundred thousand of them in a stadium, put them through the education they deserve, straighten out their twisted heads, and if you see that they won't be straightened, is there no remedy? Were they given by number? You deploy a thousand and one techniques of annihilation...

In this mental world, the way of realizing utopias is no different from what Pol Pot tried earlier in Cambodia. What had Pol Pot done? He had massacred thirty percent of his own people (three million human beings) within two and a half years for the sake of a lofty aim of his own, cleansing them of every kind of contamination. The first he killed were those who knew foreign languages, those who wore glasses, those who had passed through any kind of education.

If you look at what our coup plotters can bring themselves to risk, Pol Pot's path is not at all a distant one. God forbid...

That the time for a coup has passed does not mean that the time for harboring the intention of a coup or attempting one has passed. For this mentality, which regards holding on to power as its sole right and regards its own people as the enemy or as an extension of enemy forces, the time is not the time in which the world lives but its own time. Wherever the world may have gone, it goes on reading what it knows. If it thought that the time of coups in the world had passed, it would do what is necessary: it would withdraw to its own borders and truly grow stronger as a soldier, by doing what the profession of arms requires. Yet, being busy with these affairs, its soldierly ability is also gradually atrophying.

We all know that we are not millet, but here is a question: do the chickens know that we are not millet? We know that there can no longer be a coup in the world we live in, the world knows it, but let's see whether the coup plotters know it.

All they know is whether the war means at their disposal are sufficient to intern the enemy. They trust their crude force enough to think of handling the Kurdish question by taking Israel's conduct as an example, yet they are so indifferent to the world that they do not even see the helplessness Israel has fallen into vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

In the coups carried out so far, international support or conjuncture may have been taken into account. This only shows that even the earlier coup plotters were more realistic than the present ones. Yet, looking at the plans that have emerged over quite some time, one sees that the new generations of coup plotters have considerably corrupted the coup culture they inherited from the old ones. They regard the coup as a natural right they can use whenever they wish. In a way, this also points to a serious decline in the quality of coup-making. Coup plotters who, without regard for the sustainability of a coup, try to patch together its domestic and foreign support with crude reports: on the grounds that such a conjuncture is lacking today, there is no need to dismiss the possibility, if not of a coup, then of an attempted coup...

This possibility always stands as a potential risk within a constitutional order that has granted certain military and judicial bureaucracies their present powers. The way to reduce this risk to a minimum lies in removing at least the statutory bases that feed the coup-mindedness that some soldiers have turned almost into an everyday-life culture. Even if the relevant article of the Internal Service Law contains nothing of the sort, if the soldiers who attempt such things can see it as a justification to some small degree, then this justification must be removed at once.

Likewise, the EMASYA Protocol, which provides some soldiers with more than an excuse for meddling in matters outside their remit, can be terminated by a unilateral decision of the Interior Ministry. This termination would be, for the time being, the first way of telling some of them emphatically that they themselves must now change, even if they do not notice that the world has changed.

It is certain that you are not millet, but if the chickens really see you as millet, we must begin by effectively explaining some things to the chickens as well.