Diyarbakır in letters of gold

In Diyarbakır, without doubt, a very important page of history, one that will serve as a reference for Turkey and the region, was written in golden letters. In that picture there is light, there is happiness, there is peace and brotherhood, there is a future, there is trust and sincerity, there is a standing upright, with a will worthy of a human being, before the chronic problems imposed on people like fate.

In a way, that picture is one about which speaking would be superfluous; it expresses itself sufficiently and leaves the commentator little room anyway.

As soon as Prime Minister Erdoğan's heart-touching speech ended, my phone rang. The caller was an old friend from the nationalist circles with whom we are close. There was a tearful, excited emotionality in his tone of voice. "Hocam," he said, "for the first time I have felt the prime minister so close to me. As someone who had always met his steps on the opening with worry, for the first time I felt the Diyarbakır he showed me today so much like my homeland. Moreover, in doing this he did not offend me at all as a nationalist. May God be pleased with our prime minister!"

There is no doubt that, in the face of this picture, a great difference of angle has formed between Bahçeli's characterization of it as a "2nd Habur" and the perceptions of even his own base.

Frankly, this perfect masterpiece of a picture is entirely the work of the prime minister's political mastery. This work of his period of mastery is a very important and brand new example of his political style. At the very moment we think we are farthest away in politics, the Prime Minister has shown how an environment of resolution is in fact at a distance that we can reach out and touch with our hands. He has reached out, touched, and changed the whole atmosphere at once. Within a few days he has rendered void all the grand analyses that had been made on the resolution, the Kurdish question, the terror problem and other matters, and has shown them all a new horizon.

Without doubt, for a newspaper and for a columnist, what has happened in Diyarbakır over the last two days is the subject that must be seen first. To deal with another subject on such a historic day would put one in the position of those priests who debated the gender of angels while Istanbul was being conquered, as the famous story goes. But as I expressed in my last piece, these days the one and only agenda item of the Zaman newspaper and the Samanyolu broadcasting group is the prep schools. This has not changed over the last two days either.

It is quite normal for a very important subject to be on a community's agenda, but do the readers, said with pride to number one million, really have no other concern? One finds it hard to believe. Can one be this detached from the agenda of Turkey and the world, let alone from the spirit of history? Especially on such a day? Is this broadcasting group, I wonder, aware of what kind of perception it creates by locking itself onto such an agenda to the point of exhausting even its own audience?

If they are not aware, let them hear it from me as a friend: one is sick and tired of this agitative style of broadcasting.

To lend credibility to the claim that the prep schools are being closed, and to the claim that this is a great catastrophe, disinformation is sold at a thousand for a penny.

The essence of the entire broadcasting campaign is presented under a wrong headline: "Prep schools are being closed!" First of all, there is no situation that can be summed up under this headline; the MEB's preparation is entirely different, to which we shall come shortly.

Meanwhile, a religious-symbolic or civil meaning is practically being loaded onto the prep schools, and this procedure is being presented as a new tutelary attitude of the AK Parti. Meanwhile, there is a draft text said to be relied upon in the news texts. Yet different reports come from separate drafts, all presented as if from a single draft. None of those drafts, as drafts, has even gained official status; they probably consist merely of proposals coming from various consultative bodies.

The last thing that could be attributed to Undersecretary Assoc. Prof. Yusuf Tekin, whose life has been spent struggling against every kind of tutelage, is probably to be the architect of a regulation that would establish or increase the MEB's tutelage. On the contrary, Tekin's whole quest in the preparatory work is to take steps that will end the existing tutelage too. This can be better summarized not as the closing of the prep schools but, on the contrary, as the removal of the MEB tutelage that still exists over them.

Perhaps it needs to be recalled that the prep schools are currently under the MEB's tutelage and supervision within the scope of private educational institutions. Everyone knows what this official tutelage of the MEB led to during the February 28 process. Everything in the prep schools, from dress to curriculum, was supervised by the MEB, and for this reason, in the period when the headscarf was banned, headscarved staff could not be employed in the prep schools either. The MEB's final draft on the prep schools, which is again not yet complete, in fact amounts to ending this relationship between the MEB and private educational institutions. A situation is at hand in which the MEB does not officially recognize them and therefore even renounces any authority to have a say over them. That is, it is not a tutelary step; on the contrary, a step is being taken that ends the MEB's tutelage. In fact, with this the MEB is limiting itself and saying that it will no longer interfere with the prep schools.

How is it that a step that will restrict and limit the state's tutelage in general is presented as the state's interference in the civil sphere? Or is what is wanted the continuation of the tutelage? Is the continuation of the tutelage found more beneficial? Are there privileges thought to be produced by this tutelage, and are those what is wanted to be protected, or what is it?

The MEB's policy toward prep schools in general does not contain an expansion of authority that would close them; on the contrary, it involves actually reducing the need for prep schools already, through means such as raising the quality of secondary education and increasing the number of universities and their quotas. Considerable ground has already been covered in this regard, and more is being covered.

Meanwhile, what is repeatedly said in the Zaman and Samanyolu broadcasts about the reading and study halls being closed also comes across as odd. Odd, because the MEB has no authority to close them anyway, because it does not recognize them; they are not within its sphere of authority. These halls are not official institutions recognized within the scope of private educational institutions, and the MEB does not even have an authority to close them.

That is the truth of the matter. In fact, if one were just a little calm, the matter would be understood, but the noise of these broadcasts leaves nobody in a state to think about the matter coolly. Or is precisely this what is wanted? Amid this abnormal noise, is the Camia, in which an intense sense of victimhood has been aroused, being cut off from the truth of the matter and steered, as a whole, toward some place in the approaching elections?