The last journey of the Defending Man

To God we belong, and to Him we shall return.

We are in Siirt for the fifth stop of the "Great Roof of Türkiye" meetings organized by Ekopolitik. The meetings, held earlier in Van and Hakkari as well, bring together the parties to the problem, the neutral and the concerned, from the east to the west of Türkiye, Turks and Kurds alike, and try to make their own very meaningful contribution to Türkiye's new opening process.

In the middle of the meeting, as I am preparing to write my column, we receive the news of Necmettin Erbakan's passing.

What a magnificent coincidence. The subject we were going to write about today was directly about him anyway. On the 14th anniversary of February 28, and on the 10th anniversary of the February 21 crisis, we were going to write about the cost of the postmodern coup to Türkiye. Writing about any other subject today would truly not have been permissible.

The February 21 crisis, which took place on the 4th anniversary of February 28, was a direct result of the February 28 postmodern coup. It was inevitable that a political degeneration would unavoidably bring economic degeneration and catastrophe. February 28 is the name of a political degeneration. It was a process carried out by a fellowship of criminals, in which the soldier, the politician, the businessman, the jurist, the scientist and the journalist each degenerated their own field and betrayed their own profession and area of duty.

Like all coups, this coup too rested on a concentrated coexistence of every sort of shameful crime. An alliance of greedy forces that did not hesitate to set the whole of society, with its present and future, on fire in order to cook their own eggs. A process in which nobody did their own duty, in which everyone attempted jobs that were none of their business and trespassed on other fields. Thus, as the natural result of the process, since nobody did their own job, every job was smeared, and the country was dragged into an environment of extremely bad governance... An act of treachery that set the entire country against each other in order to establish their own rule and dissolved the cement of society...

In this period, according to the United Nations World Values Survey, whose data recur every year, Türkiye turned out to be the country with the lowest recorded trust index. Türkiye had entered a complete crisis in which nobody trusted any institution or anyone. The February 21 crisis was a social explosion as the direct result of this crisis of trust. As much as the cost of this explosion to Türkiye, it also later had very positive consequences, as a moment in which Türkiye hit rock bottom.

February 28 was the name of an immoral regime, and the symbolic name, the victim, the hero of this day was Necmettin Erbakan. Every blow he was subjected to during the process wounded the hearts of broad social segments and fed a resentment that would later turn into a powerful politics. Those who tried to dismiss him with their bird-brains and cheap insolence were etching their own true place indelibly in the hearts of those segments.

When he went to the Constitutional Court to make his defense in the case opened in the middle of the process to close his party, the phrase "We love you, the man who defends!" that Ahmet Taşgetiren put as the headline of his column expressed in a pithy language a perfect "testimony" of the world's victims and oppressed about Erbakan's life and politics. Whatever he may have done afterwards, nothing would damage the nature of that testimony. He had settled onto his unshakable throne as "the Man Who Defends," which he deserved.

Necmettin Erbakan was undoubtedly one of the most interesting, most prolific and most creative figures in Turkish political history. He was a decisive name in the formation of all the politicians or intellectual figures who today give Türkiye's political life a new direction. His death will bring to light all at once the ongoing charities (sadaqa jariyah) made up of such deeds of his, and the testimony will be given by those for whom testimonies carry value: We knew him as one of the righteous; we forgive him what we are owed, and we ask God for mercy and forgiveness for him.