The century passed like a moment…

Slavoj Žižek, one of the most original philosophers of our age, made, some eleven years ago, an interesting observation drawing attention to the Balkans in the debates on multiculturalism, cultural tolerance or coexistence brought to the agenda by the events of 11 September. According to him, there was a possibility that the fact that the recent history of the Balkans is today remembered with conflicts misleads us. In his observation, which taught a lesson to those who think that we are experiencing the consequences of the Ottomans having left behind an extremely problematic area after ruling these lands for centuries, Žižek presented the fact that we are experiencing these problems today as proof of how strong a relationship of justice and consent the Ottomans themselves had governed with.

Today these problems stem from the fact that different cultures were able to live together in this region even in this age. When the Ottomans withdrew, the balance order that would hold these differences together again within the same atmosphere of peace was also lost, and no one has been able to establish this balance again. Yet a condition for these problems not being experienced today might perhaps have been for the Ottomans, in a manner similar to what other European countries did in their time, to carry out cultural homogenization through genocide or mass deportations.

Yet the Ottomans did not do this, and managed to hold society together in a mosaic. Undoubtedly, to blame the Ottomans for this failure (!), as many Orientalists do, would be a great injustice. What should really be condemned is that Europeans were able to achieve a similar balance order only through cultural and demographic purges and liquidations.

At the beginning of the last century, because of the increasing interventions of the Westerners and nationalist incitements, the Ottomans no longer had the means to hold this cultural diversity together. At the end of the 1912 Balkan war the Ottomans had to withdraw from this geography, which they had ruled for more than 400 years, leaving behind great suffering that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the deportation of millions of people.

The year 2012 is the hundredth anniversary of the Ottomans' being forced to withdraw from the Balkans. The Balkans, brought to the agenda on this occasion, are in fact very important in drawing attention to the model dimensions of the five-hundred-year Ottoman experience. The Balkans are an extremely rich and powerful occasion for what Turkey will say to the world today. To this end, the activities that TİKA has directly organized or supported in various centers of the Balkans on the occasion of the hundredth year of the Ottomans' withdrawal from the Balkans are very meaningful in refreshing memories and in making use of Turkey's own resources in its new civilizational journey.

Within the scope of these activities, I took part as a speaker, in recent days, in an event in the city of Novi Pazar, in the Sandžak region of Serbia, where mostly Bosniaks live. Avdija Salković, the director of the City Library who organized the three-day event, educated in Turkey, with his excellent Turkish and incredible positive energy, is in complete Ottoman raider mode. His grandfather having been an Ottoman officer, all the members of the family lived the trauma they experienced after the Ottoman withdrawal to the end with all their being.

Avdija takes care not to call the Ottomans' departure from the Balkans a "withdrawal". For him it should rather be a "going away". He explains the difference between the two as giving up or not giving up hope that the Ottomans will one day come back:

"Because we never gave up hope and believed that they would surely come again one day. It seems those days have come; Turkey, as you say, has experienced its own 'Arab spring', raised its head and begun to rediscover its children around it. Because of that sad waiting of ours, for us 'The century passed like a moment...' We suffered many pains, but Turkey's rising again has become a source of morale, love and honor for us. Since the beginning of this year I had wanted to commemorate the Ottomans, to say a prayer worthy of them, and to have the people living around me taste the same feeling was my greatest wish. Thanks be to my God, that wish of mine too came true; as you also saw, there was a very beautiful sparkle in the eyes of the people in the hall listening to you. That I call a sparkle of hope and pride, even if it lasted only an hour or two..."

Avdija has almost made it a mission to carry Turkey's political and cultural agenda to the Bosniaks. Earlier he translated Mehmet Niyazi's book on Çanakkale, and now he has translated and published Hüseyin Besli's book titled Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: Bir Lider Doğuyor. At the event these two books and the book titled Arap Baharı Yazıları, which Avdija compiled and prepared from İbrahim Karagül's writings of the past year, were distributed to the audience.

Novi Pazar is Europe's youngest but also Europe's most unemployed city. The economy is very bad; 80 percent of the young cannot work. But Avdija and his friends say "we are patient, this is a test, it will pass, good days will come", and together with many of those who watched the talk they send greetings to Turkey.