After 25 years, 28 February

A full 25 years have passed since the most cautionary coup in Turkish history, the one said to last 1,000 years. In fact, within those 25 years we have lived through many things that eclipse the gravity, the evil and even the cautionary character of this coup. Let alone a thousand years, it could not survive even five. Ten years later, choosing 27 April, it reminded us of itself by a different path and a different attempt, but after 15 years it was etched into minds as a great crime, a great shame, that no one could defend. Today, a quarter century on, we recall that twilight zone once again.

We must indeed recall it, because what happened is being forgotten, who stood on which side and what schemes they ran alongside whom.

Coups are evil at their core, whoever carries them out, whoever they are carried out against. We have lived through many coups in our history. The Janissary Corps had made staging coups one of its habitual occupations. They had no difficulty finding pretexts. They could use even a cut in the butter for their hoshaf as a sufficient pretext to overturn the cauldron. The history of coups in the Republican period is made to begin with 27 May, but the Takrir-i Sükûn, the Progressive Republican Party closed down on the pretext of the Izmir Assassination, the closure of the Free Republican Party on one pretext or another, were in essence the practices in which the first foundations of a tutelage regarding coup-making as a right were laid and consolidated.

FOR THE PEOPLE, DESPITE THE PEOPLE: THE COMPELLING MOTIVATION OF COUP-MAKING

The Single Party period, which was carried on with the notion of "for the people, despite the people" and which insistently kept its distance from the people, is in itself the name of a de facto continuing coup order. There is no visible coup there, because there is already a government carried on despite the people.

Even if between the coups of 9-12 March, 12 September and 28 February the army left government to civilians in Turkey, this does not mean that the coup took a break. What misleads us here is the assumption that coups were always and only carried out by the military. Yet the initiator of the idea of a coup, and in the last analysis its beneficiary, is never the military. Behind all coups there are shares established on the basis of a political economy. Among these shareholders there is, of course, a section of the military with its junta organization, but the real actors are business circles, certain NGOs, the judicial bureaucracy, university administrations and political parties that harbor no hope of coming to power by election.

The soldier appears on the stage only as a deterrent, frightening threat, but those who get the job done are others. And of course it is the army that is worn down. Seeing the role assigned to it as the leading role, it becomes so busy with the security and operations side of the job that it forgets its real job entirely. If coup-making has become an army's actual profession, it is impossible to expect any good from that army, either for the country or even for itself. That is why, in the periods when it was occupied with coups, the TSK could not effectively fight even terror at home, let alone conduct operations abroad. Being worn down and losing prestige in the eyes of the people was a bonus.

Yet in recent years

the TSK, rid of coup business, has taken its exceptional place among the armies of the world.

THE ISLAMOPHOBIC CULTURE

What distinguished 28 February from other coups was not only that it had a "postmodern" character, in the words of its perpetrators. It also had a serious Islamophobic delusion and ideological obsession. With the witch-hunt it conducted against the headscarf, Islamic educational institutions, communities, foundations, NGOs, Islamic symbols and language, it displayed without hesitation a thoroughgoing "enemy of Islam" stance. It had no search for legitimacy among the people on this score, no attempt to prove its rightness in the eyes of the Muslim populace in any case. Had there been such a search, there would have been dialogue, and perhaps it would have reviewed its stance and thought of making some concession to the people. Yet the Muslim people and their feelings were of no concern to them. The uncompromising hostility to the headscarf, which today, when it occurs in Europe, the US or anywhere in the world, is openly described as "Islamophobic" and counted as "enmity toward Islam," was displayed in this period.

The claim of a 1,000-year lifespan by the actors of 28 February, who aimed to uproot Islamic educational institutions, merely reflected their ignorance. It showed how low their consciousness of history and of the world was.

While 28 February displayed this hostile attitude toward religion, it unfortunately took the 17-25 December and 15 July coup attempts for the information to come out that FETÖ-ist police chiefs were behind the postmodern perception operations that were attempted to be built on cases such as Müslüm Gündüz and Fadime Şahin. It was already known that FETÖ was the real beneficiary of 28 February, despite all its attitude against religion, but it also became clear that a vitally important investment had been made in the coup share in order to secure this benefit.

28 FEBRUARY'S MILLENARIANISM IN THE INTOXICATION OF POWER

The 28 Februarists, who calculated lasting a thousand years with all their injustice and lawlessness, had another weakness they shared with their predecessors: thinking, with visions narrowed by the intoxication of power, that they could rule both their society and history.

History and society give those who fall into this thought the answer it deserves, and it is a very painful one. The enemies they foresaw coming to power if no precaution were taken came to power alone, perhaps thanks to the very precautions they took, five or ten years earlier than they foresaw, and still continue to govern the country. The defeat of 28 February came about through its own prophecies being confirmed by themselves.

It left behind a unique accumulation of experience to look back on with admonition and to draw lessons from. And when we look at the sum of this experience, what we see, with all its ups and downs, its courage and its ignorance, its honor and its wretchedness, its dignity and its abasement, its drama and its tragedy, is only the human being.

28 February is a trial a person can always encounter. It must be understood that those who showed a positive attitude in one period cannot, with this positive attitude, receive a title of "goodness" until the end of their lives. Evil comes to us in other guises, in very simple disguises.