The accursed share

The coup itself is immoral enough. It contains every kind of lie and trickery, every kind of theft, injustice and murder. But let us admit that in our country coups have so far been carried out with greater skill.

Many minarets were stolen in every coup, but no minaret's sheath was neglected. We may even say that sometimes extreme care was taken over the sheaths required for the stolen minarets. Preparations for the 12 September coup began years in advance, 5000 people were killed, but in none of them, in the first determination, could a trace of the junta be detected. The traces of the junta could be proven only much later.

We understand that preparations for an Ali Kalkancı figure, who held an important place in a 28 Şubat operation, began years earlier. Kalkancı, recruited from his own market, though he had no connection whatsoever, was taken on an Umrah, made to memorize the jargon, then given a solid CV within the Siirt madrasa milieu, and then brought and installed in Istanbul, at Bab-ı Ali, as a sheikh. And as for the preparations of the Aczmendis, that is a masterpiece of fine craftsmanship.

Our people firmly believed that pulling the wool over people's eyes is very important, that securing the public support necessary for the coup is an integral part of the coup, and always made their preparations accordingly.

In Egypt, too, all the preparations of the coup are, in a way, taken by following the same models. But let us admit that it is done very crudely and with no care at all. The staging that legitimizes the coup is prepared before everyone's eyes; that is, the back of the stage cannot be hidden from the audience. This is expected to make the putschists somewhat embarrassed as they defend their lies or, on the contrary, to make them thoroughly more insolent. The Nobel-winning putschist Baradei showed that he could not remain within such a crude art of the coup, and resigned. Had the coup been able to proceed more decorously, of course he would have felt no problem, and would have had no objection to the immorality the coup contains in the first place.

Yet they were able to keep the world for a while from calling the coup itself a coup, but killing some 2600 people and wounding over 10,000, by opening fire in the most savage and merciless manner on people, without distinguishing unarmed women, children and elderly, in order to suppress the utterly peaceful objections to this coup, is a concrete reality, and there is no way to show it otherwise even to Westerners who are ready to believe you.

After the demonstrations on Friday, those who took refuge in the Fatah mosque to escape the fire opened by the police together with the baltagiya were besieged and trapped in the place where they had taken refuge by the police and the baltagiya. The crowd, made up entirely of demonstrators and including my valued friend Metin Turan, TRT's Cairo representative, after being trapped for a day, agreed to come out, and nearly all of them were arrested. More serious still, as the police took them out, they were subjected to lynching attempts by the crowds of baltagiya gathered at the mosque exit. One of the most important plates to look at when analyzing this coup, and indeed the Egyptian deep state, is these baltagiya.

The baltagiya who appear right beside the police interventions in all the anti-coup demonstrations and attack the demonstrators under their supervision, since they are civilians, can be presented in the Egyptian media, when desired, as if they were demonstrators, through good media or photographic craftsmanship. Thus they supply plenty of material for the lie, aimed at the Egyptian people who are being taken for fools, that the demonstrators were armed.

But one thing they forget is that very similar images can be recorded by others, untampered with. Yet this does not matter very much. From the criminals who, while dispersing Rabia Adawiya Square, the square that was the scene of 46 days of peaceful demonstration, set about defending even an intervention that cost 2600 lives by saying "the demonstrators fired first," anything can be expected. And there will surely be those who want to believe, and they believe.

The Arab journalist and writer Wael Kandil describes, in the following words, how the baltagiya, who took the stage both in the attacks on demonstrators together with the police and soldiers and during the evacuation of the Fatah mosque, swell the coup plotters' criminal file far beyond even the coup:

"We know the separation of powers: it means that the legislative, executive and judiciary work autonomously without dominating one another. Let us also recognize, with all its legality, the autonomous structure of the media as a fourth power. But these baltagiya seem to be a recognized fifth power in the Egyptian system. Look, they even have the authority to carry weapons, to fire on crowds, to kill people, even to arrest people, and their numbers reach tens of thousands."

The coup is a sufficiently dirty and immoral act. But the coup in Egypt both has blood on its hands and is carried out with the most disgusting intrigues and dirty deeds. Apart from those who directly support this coup, the natures of those who hesitate, in the name of conjuncture, to call it a coup, and who, by also staying silent over its massacres and crimes, are already ready to reconcile with this filth, are utterly nauseating.

In the face of the world's having unraveled so quickly before such open oppression and disgusting plunder, whatever calculation it relies on, the stance Turkey has displayed is, in a word, consoling and a source of pride.

Especially the rational foreign policy minds that are being recommended in the face of this dirty coup are of no benefit whatsoever to Turkey. These minds encourage us not to hold back from plunder, from the haram share.

Yet that share is a cursed share, and those who keep reminding us of that share are only inviting Turkey to abase itself.