The turn of fortune of reason

Reason too has an interesting and instructive turn of fortune. We see that a mind that tries coup plans emerging one after another, and executes in the public conscience, instantly, any intentions and discourse in this direction, has gradually begun to prevail.

The words Prime Minister Erdoğan uttered on the program Enine Boyuna broadcast on TRT1 marked the agenda throughout the week. His assessments on EMASYA on Monday were followed, before a week had passed, on Thursday by Interior Minister Beşir Atalay's announcement that the protocol had been repealed in agreement with the Chief of General Staff.

The prime minister's statement, "we knew what was going on," made in a speech somewhere when the Balyoz action plan first came to light, is taken up on the one hand for its news value, but on the other hand people begin to question why the prime minister did not do what was necessary though he knew it. Just like the criticisms directed at Hilmi Özkök, who is said not to have done what was necessary though he was aware of the coup preparations.

From where to where? Things have come to a point where it can be criticized why there was silence against these coups. Yet we all lived through these events together, and the so-called public opinion that these coup attempts prepared was dragging along at a point where a soldier attempting a coup saw his right to a coup as an acquired personal right, let alone entertaining such a criticism.

Indeed, in those days an atmosphere had been made to prevail in which even reason worked differently. An approach in which nearly ninety percent of the people were regarded as potential enemies through the developed national security threat discourse could hardly seem reasonable to a normally working mind. Yet, because of the concepts of irtica and separatism that were valid in the 28 February days, nearly the entire people had been made, in one way or another, part of a chain of hostility. The judiciary's and university rectors' immediate adjustment of themselves to the situation through the briefings they attended was undoubtedly the most important factor that made this situation ordinary. It was clear that this ordinariness was very conjunctural, that sooner or later this irrationality would be exposed in all its nakedness, and that a healthy mind would come into play to try those responsible. One did not have to be acting on revanchist feelings to see this.

Things have not yet reached that point, but the legal violations followed in the headscarf ban are also the work of a recklessness that will oblige those who applied them to render account, and sooner or later this too will happen. We read in the newspapers that day, too, that Emine Hanım could not visit Nejat Uygur because of her headscarf, but today it has become more manifestly clear how insolent an attitude this incident was the work of. In fact it was manifest that day too, but not everyone could see it in the same way.

Again under the conditions of the 28 February days, it was envisaged that if two inspectors, on the basis of false and misleading testimony, determined that someone was a mürteci or a separatist, he would have his public service terminated without question or inquiry. When this legislation, equal to Nazi persecution, came out of the assembly, the media, let alone trying to show how irrational and unlawful a law it was, had already begun determining and exposing how many mürteci and how many separatists there were in various universities.

When the turn of fortune comes, it is inevitable that reason works differently. We have begun to get so used to generals appearing before courts like equal citizens that today we can ask why the prime minister did not take measures against the Balyoz plan of which he was aware. Today nobody can see as normal an outlook in the National Security Policy Document that codes the vast majority of its citizens as the enemy. Yet when the threat concept was declared to be "irtica" in the MGSB, while the media or civil society organizations, representing the citizens, should have rebelled en masse, everyone, under the influence of the reason valid in those days, had set out on a hunt for mürteci.

Today the prime minister declares what is normal. It is not possible for a state to regard its own citizens as a threat. No citizen, whether mürteci, separatist, Alevi, communist or atheist, can be regarded as an enemy of the state. This is what is normal, but a normal from which we have been far since the Republic of Turkey was founded... The process lived from an approach that sees its citizens as a threat toward an understanding in which the concept of internal threat does not exist signifies a radical change. We can see that we have far more friends than meet the eye, and live the blessing of this change.

Correction: In my last article on the Alevi Workshop, I shared with you a ghazal that Prof. Hüseyin Hatemi wrote during the workshop. Out of concern solely for the aruz meter, the professor asked that the word "zira" in the last line, "Zira hammda türkü söylemenin zevki tâm olur," be omitted and corrected as follows: "Hammâmda türkü söylemenin zevki tâm olur"