Where and what position we have reached after 7 years

Today is 15 July. It is the anniversary of a coup attempt, but, in my view, more importantly than that, it is the 7th anniversary of a people's epic stance, resistance and repulsion against such a coup attempt, of a kind rarely found in world history.

God forbid, it could have been like the earlier ones. As with the earlier coups, the people could have been afraid, shrunk back, thought "heaven forbid, the matter is circulating among those who govern, it does not concern us," and stepped aside. After all, in 1980, the great majority of the people, let alone standing against it, had even greeted the perpetrators of the 12 September coup as saviors, as a solution to the ongoing instability.

The people's being made to want the coup plotters in this way was already part of a coup plan that began long before. The people take the first coup against their perceptions of reality, their thoughts and even their feelings. In the first stage the coup plotters open their own way, form the foundations of their legitimacy, prepare their justifications. This path, tried on 27 May, was tried more successfully on 12 September. On 28 February the coup was carried out by trying much more complicated, in the term of that day, "postmodern ways." Because society was relatively more urbanized than before, the world was more interconnected, the number of people who had to be persuaded had grown. In 1960, 66 percent of the people still lived in villages and there were only 5 universities in the whole country. Coup-minded desires are never fully extinguished, but the country's conditions of development oblige the coup plotters too to apply more complicated techniques.

At the panel organized for 15 July at SETA Foundation's Ankara headquarters, Prof. Cemil Koçak, comparing the 15 July coup attempt with the earlier ones, underlined an interesting point in precisely this context. The 15 July attempt had a number of participants in the army far beyond the juntas on which the earlier coups relied. The 27 May coup was the successful operation of very few junior officers, but it was as much against the great majority of the army as against politics. The 12 March memorandum had in any case come out of turmoil within the army. The 12 September was carried out in a very organized way, within military hierarchical discipline, but within this military discipline there was no way to determine who gave support willingly and who reluctantly. FETÖ, which attempted the coup on 15 July, had within the army a power, spread and number that none of the earlier coup juntas had reached.

But perhaps one of its greatest mistakes was to suppose that once it had this number in the army, no obstacle to the coup would remain. Yet what was left behind was a society no longer with the old behaviors and reflexes. Its temperament and behavior, its culture, its political stance were not a society as they imagined. Perhaps much more would have been needed to pull off that coup; they were not in a state to think of that much.

Perhaps the greatest weakness of a junta that had reached such a number of soldiers was that every detail was managed from the center in Pennsylvania. According to the picture that emerged later through confessions and investigations, the operation could not be set in motion without every detail of its plan being approved by the ringleader. This is an organizational structure that left no initiative even to its staff generals. The organization, which tried to make room for itself by selling the claim of Erdoğan's dictatorship, was acting with the most despotic, most absolute one-man rule that can be seen in world history. Thank God, this was one of the reasons for their botching it.

According to the perception of society that this mindset drilled into them, society, upon seeing a bullet, would look for a hole to flee into. This was the word of one of the know-it-alls who, that night, while calling on the people not to resist and to surrender, was at the same time giving his friends the good news that the coup had succeeded. Let alone looking for a hole to flee a bullet, that night the people did not even refrain from making the joke of head-butting F-16s.

What happened seven years ago was less a coup than a people's claiming their state, but at the same time bringing their state down to earth, redefining it, rather than as a transcendent, divine power, as a partnership of which they are the owners. The state was no longer a power that would act as a dictatorship over this nation, rule the nation in spite of the nation, be alien to the nation, and from now on it could not be so.

15 July satisfied, reminded, even taught the whole world a dimension, a condition, claimed about democracy but never proven. Of course, to the extent that anyone could learn.

This stance, this resistance was a sign of the real level reached by Turkey's democracy. Martyrs were given for the sake of this fusion of state and nation.

In fact this stage also provided a perfect founding opportunity for a restructuring. Although we can say that this opportunity was made use of in many areas, it is very hard to say that it was made use of in many other areas.

Unfortunately, in the atmosphere that formed after 15 July, in the President's words "where the horse's track got mixed with the dog's track," the brokers of the struggle against FETÖ, the warlords, those more royalist than the king, gained quite a lot for themselves from the situation. It is impossible not to agree with the complaints of my dear brother Aydın Ünal, with whom we stood together under the bombs in the TBMM on the night of 15 July: "A balance of crime and punishment could not be established. While the lower strata of the organization served sentences, the cream fled and began to live in luxury abroad. The 'FETÖ Stock Exchange' allegations upset us. While the organization was being fought, the mentality was not fought, and the Gülenist mindset continued to rule. Those who did not see the struggle against FETÖ as their own cause behaved negligently in influential positions. They arranged praises for Fetullah, and to cover their own faults pinned the FETÖ label on this and that person, and watered down the struggle..."

Even today, we witness that the clever ones of every era use the friend-enemy categories formed on the night of 15 July recklessly for their own extraneous lusts, without our seeing any clear stance of theirs at any turning point.

A carelessness, a negligence, an inattention: the price is paid by justice. And justice, even if everything else is lost, is the only thing that will revive us, and the greatest virtue to be manifested not always against one another but especially in our attitudes toward those we regard as enemies.

In its 7th year, of course, beyond the panegyrics to the 15 July resistance and victory that we must never neglect, the gratitude and elegies for our martyrs, and the cursing of our enemies, we need to look for ways of reviving this virtue.