28 February: neither the first nor the last evil to befall us

On its fifteenth anniversary, 28 February is being talked about more than on past anniversaries. In fact, last year too there had been extraordinary interest in 28 February, because Necmettin Erbakan, who had been subjected to the 28 February coup, died one day before the anniversary of that historic day. Indeed, the fact that Erbakan's death coincided with this day suddenly sent the already rising anti-coup sensitivity to its peak. One could almost feel the traces of a divine message in the timing of the Hoca's death. The timing itself seemed to deliver, on its own, the verdict on who was right and who was wrong in the 28 February process.

This year too, 28 February is being talked about so much probably because what a nightmare the process was is much better understood today. That after 15 years not a single servant of God is left to defend it is, quite literally, a cautionary state of affairs. And yet, in its fifth year, the chief of the general staff of the day was saying that the process was a state policy that would last a "millennium."

Looking from these two moments, we also see how pitiful, how ignorant, how comical the situations are that a human being can fall into. 28 February is in fact an example of thousands of instances of power-madness lived in human history and in countless geographies of this globe. Those who, deceived by the might they imagine in a position of power, forget their own mortality, and who, imagining that might to be greater than it is, begin to dream of immortality and invincibility, are in one respect truly pitiful. History is full of stories of the helplessness, desperation and wretchedness into which such people ultimately fall.

In periods of tyranny, time moves very slowly. How long the time they lived through must have seemed to those who lived as victims of the event. These days we hear and read plenty of first-hand testimonies about the process, about how long it lasted. Yet it lasted only 5 years in all. Perhaps some of its consequences still continue to affect our lives, but it did not take that long for even the coup plotters to start pretending not to know one another and to start selling one another out.

It was a pitch-dark process that seemed it would never end, with no ray of hope visible on the horizon. Yes, but the darkness lay in that hopelessness itself. It was perfectly normal for those who ran 28 February to imagine their own tyranny to be lasting, but for those who know that history and time have an owner, everything was unfolding within a divine circle. Those days would pass and better days would come in their place, but those good days too pass, and then worse days come again. Periods of tyranny are a trial, and so are periods of freedom. Today, as we recount the evils of 28 February, we rejoice at how great a disaster we have left behind, but do we really understand 28 February?

It is always said that coups cannot happen in Turkey without external support. Yet whoever provides that external support, they do not invest in a coup without finding enough skilled, ambitious, immoral, usurping, thieving collaborators inside. Unfortunately, in Turkey there is a sufficiently broad segment that has turned the coup order into a culture. Besides those that succeeded so far, there were many coup attempts that the perpetrators smeared all over their own hands and faces. Is it because these did not fit external support or the world conjuncture enough that they could not carry out the coup?

Are we going to attribute the failure of the 27 April intervention solely to foreign investments in Turkey or to NATO's not allowing it? Let us go further back: was the reason the 27 May coup could not be prevented that NATO or foreign powers were behind it? Or could it have been prevented in advance with an appropriate political stance, whoever stood behind it?

Dwelling on how the past might have developed differently may seem futile, but there is no harm in resorting to this path in order to identify certain responsibilities and for the sake of taking heed. In this respect, thinking that coups cannot be prevented leads to no other door than a lack of faith in politics. Precisely for this reason, what prevented a new coup from succeeding on 27 April was not the absence of NATO or foreign connections behind it, but politics itself. When politics stands against a coup, which at the right moments can make even law and logic work from its own point of view, logic and law return to their normal course and catch all the immorality and helplessness of the coup in all their nakedness at once.

The 28 February plotters, who were calculating how to last 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. Both history and society give a very painful answer to those who fall into this thought. The enemies whom they foresaw coming to power if no measures were taken came to power on their own, perhaps thanks to the very measures they took, five or ten years earlier than they had foreseen, and are still governing the country.

The defeat of 28 February came about through their own fulfillment of their own prophecies. It left behind a unique accumulation of experience to be looked back on with heed and from which lessons are to be drawn. And when we look at the sum of this experience, what we see, with all its ups and downs, its courage and ignorance, its honor and wretchedness, its dignity and degradation, its drama and tragedy, is only the human being.

In sum, 28 February is neither the first nor the last evil to befall this human being.