Ennahda's revolutionary vigil in Tunisia

After the Mauritania leg of the workshops organized by the Institute of Strategic Thinking and supported by the Prime Ministry's Presidency for Turks Abroad and Related Communities, the Public Diplomacy Coordinatorship, and the Foreign Ministry's Center for Strategic Research, we are moving on to Tunisia.

What is going on in Tunisia these days is the kind of film we have watched many times over in Turkey. In that respect it may not seem very interesting to some. Of course, the same cannot be said for those who take a special interest in the same film being shot again with only the names and locations changed, but with the same scripts.

Two opposition party leaders fell victim to unsolved political murders, for example, one in February and the other in July. Before the funerals of the victims had even been lifted from the ground, in both cases the opposition, as if waiting for a bell to ring, flooded into the streets, held the government responsible for the situation and called on it to resign. The streets were the scene of protests against the government for days.

The model is like a copy of the political murders that set secular sensibilities in motion in Turkey and made it possible to put conservative circles as a whole in the crosshairs. In the latest example we lived through, the Council of State raid in 2006, everyone, from the president to the high judicial bodies, from the opposition to the affiliated civil society organizations, ran to the duty written for them like forces ready for a campaign. Thank God that day the killer was caught red-handed and the codes of the murder were deciphered in a short time, so that the kind of benefit obtained in previous examples could not be gained. In Tunisia too, the opposition wanted to pin the murders immediately on Nahda, the major partner of the government, but although the killers were not caught, thanks to the political prudence Nahda displayed, the matter exploded in the hands of the secularist circles.

In Tunisia the opposition presents a monolithic appearance against Nahda, and regarding the rewriting of the constitution after the revolution and the renewal of the electoral system and going to elections, they are trying to settle on formulas by which Nahda, if possible, could never win and could be kept away from power. Those who pass themselves off as secular, liberal and Westernist, while continuing the national dialogue on the one hand, on the other refrain from no manner of trickery to sideline Nahda through non-political means, if possible a military coup.

That there is no movement within the political spectrum other than Nahda that stands on concepts such as democracy, the ballot box and the will of the people is truly a lesson. Tunisia confirms that the distance of those who defend leftist, liberal, secular and Westernist values in the Islamic world from the practice and philosophy of democracy is not an exceptional situation. Because now the same typology appears in examples such as Turkey, Egypt and Yemen as well. The Tunisians of this typology, too, instead of taking a lesson from the military coup in Egypt and staying away from this disgrace, are doing everything they can for the same thing to be repeated in their own country. They are mobilizing the streets, trying a general strike, protests.

While listening to all these events from one of Nahda's senior officials, Hakan Albayrak, his heart darkening, could not restrain himself and burst out, "Don't you have any good news to give us?" and the Nahda official replied, "What I have told is bad, true, but I am telling it to show how, despite so much evil, by God's grace it ended up well."

Indeed, while all these parties together could gather at most 60-70 thousand people at the rallies they held, when Nahda gathered 350 thousand people into the squares in a counter-move, they had to lower their sails.

The workers' and employers' unions and civil society organizations, which until now had constantly sided with the other political parties against Nahda and which correspond to our "five horsemen" of 28 February, having not found on the streets what they hoped for, recently stepped onto the stage with a claim of neutrality and tried to mediate between the political parties. But as a mediation offer they put forward a package that gave priority entirely to the opposition's proposals, that is, the government's resignation.

Even so, Nahda's wise leader Rashid al-Ghannouchi, although adopting an extremely conciliatory attitude without any complex, seems to be causing the opposition's unyielding intransigence to expose itself on its own. Through the conciliatory maneuvers he makes, he lets the opposition's intransigent nature, which refuses to compromise, come fully into view. In this way all the opposition's maneuvers come to nothing.

The opposition, which went into expecting a coup right after the political murders, has exhausted the ways other than dialogue thanks to the cool-headed stance of Nahda under Ghannouchi's leadership. But at the dialogue table too they try to display all their skills and to show unity against Nahda at the table. They are mistaken in assuming that this unity guarantees them the vote shares they got in past elections, because they do not see that the merger of parties does not always mean the merger of their bases. The interesting thing is that Nahda too has adopted this assumption.

Meanwhile Hakan Albayrak wrote "Saudi's Leftists."

Indeed, the rumors in Tunisia about the support Saudi Arabia gives to leftists, liberals and secularists have now gone beyond rumor into the open. That Saudi Arabia leans toward leftists rather than Salafis may seem surprising at first glance, but in fact Salafism appears to be the first support Saudi Arabia has lost in its recent foreign policy choices.

Not only Saudi Arabia: it has become public that the United Arab Emirates too, just as in Egypt, is preparing a coup in Tunisia. The statements of the UAE Police Chief Dahi Khalfan revealing that he is behind the recent protest demonstrations were published on the Media Plus website. In this statement Khalfan demands back the money he had counted out to the leftist and liberal organizations in Tunisia, because they failed to deliver the success they had guaranteed in demonstrations that would topple the government.

To tell the truth, this news was enough to cheer all of us up.

I wish a Feast of Sacrifice in which the signs showing by what kind of upheaval the oppressors will be overthrown multiply on this occasion, a feast in which we draw closer to God and His friends and the oppressors move away from our lives.