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15 July: beyond a day and a coup
Eight years after the 15 July coup attempt, we see that even an event of this scale and importance is beginning to take its place in memory as an ordinary occurrence within the political vise of Turkey. When we speak of historical and social memory, we are of course speaking of a diversity, of a phenomenon. That night, very few people perceived any difference as to the nature of the event. It was as if everyone knew very clearly what was going on. As if a verse had come down from heaven and, according to this verse, everyone had to determine his side.
It was that lack of hesitation, that clarity, that perception of plain obviousness that filled the avenues, streets and squares with masses certain of where they were going, and drove them to shield tanks, jets and guns with their chests. With a national excitement and motivation that can truly rarely be found in the history of a nation, the coup attempt was thwarted at the cost of martyrs. Again, in a way rarely found not only in the history of Turkey but in world history in general, a people were mounting such a harsh and effective reaction in order to defend an existing government against coup plotters.
In the routine of coups, there is the claim of protecting, rescuing the people from the existing corrupt, incompetent, irresponsible government officials, and it generally rarely meets any opposition from the people if it does not always find support from them. There are always enough sections of the people to support such coups.
In the heat of the event, even between the government and the opposition, an alliance, a meeting, a common stance rarely seen in history came about. As far as I remember in Turkey's political history, there has been no other event that has so spontaneously brought the government and opposition blocs together in this way. The opposition, perhaps in the first month, did not voice any doubt about the nature of the event, about what was going on; there was no context in which it could have done so. Had it done so, it would at the very least have been tasteless, would have closed its eyes to a reality that everyone was living through together, would have been engaging in denialism. There was no room for doubt in anyone about what was going on, about who the enemy or friend was. For that reason, to develop an opposition in the first period to the national consciousness and alignment that formed around 15 July was something that neither reason, nor conscience, nor intellect could accept.
In fact, for all the segments of a country to have such a ground of consensus on certain subjects could have been a great opportunity, a great gain for a country. One could have gone to a very good place on the basis of this ground of consensus. However, this ground of consensus could not remain as solid for long. After the coup plotters recovered from the first shock of their failed coup, their starting to make people say that this coup was a script soon opened a breach both in politics and in the consensus against the coup. That those who have fallen into a trap of their own making turn around and say "who set this trap for us?" is one of the routine phases of such conspiracism. But of course it is not as simple as that.
In fact, it would become clear with time that the breach had been opened to some extent from the inside. FETÖ had failed in the coup but had never been completely destroyed. The very different alliances it had built before and after the coup, its plans B, C, D, had begun to come into play. The power needed for these alternative scenarios to work can be explained by the greed inside the opposition, and by more than that. But somehow it worked, and the ground for the first consensus that emerged against the coup attempt to turn into a push for national independence, democratization or development quickly vanished.
15 July was of course not a coup attempt only within Turkey and simply against some government. It was an international movement that pushed against a government that had been in power for 14 years up to that day and that, during its time in power, had been advancing step by step toward full independence. That night, after the TBMM was bombed, I was connected to Aljazeera TV from the Parliament's mosque and was saying that this coup was not a coup limited to the ambition of a simple cadre or junta to seize power, but an "occupation attempt." Indeed, our people had perceived it as an enemy occupation and had stood against this occupation as an independence movement.
Turkey, with Erdoğan's leadership, was the inspiration of all of the Arab Spring processes, which began as an independence movement against the colonial powers and their local collaborators. In all of them, these revolutionary processes had been stopped with coups. Turkey too had been attempted to be stopped by the same counter-coup processes, through the Gezi operation and the 17-25 December attempts, but none of them had been able to succeed.
15 July also constituted the last and destructive step of the order of resisting the Arab Spring with coup processes. That was one dimension of it, of course, but another dimension was that it was a step to establish the order that the Zionist international order, in its delusion of the Promised Land (Arz-ı Mev'ud), deemed fit for Turkey. The 15 July operation had another channel that did not come up for discussion enough but was at the same time advancing in its own course. A completely different order was being established through legs such as the trenches dug in our southeastern provinces and self-rule. With the openly reason-defying, logic-defying support of the USA, which proceeds contrary to the law and the code of international relations, the PYD-YPG would have cast their nets, which they had been weaving for years, a little wider and more effectively that night. The lands in Turkey that the PKK has made its cause are also within the scope of Israel's Promised Land project, and Israel and the USA openly support the PKK. Is it not clear enough what this means?
On the night of 15 July, Turkey was saved not from a coup but from an occupation. But it should not be thought that this salvation was a salvation from a danger that is absolute and will never recur. Today we are commemorating 15 July in an environment in which Israel's genocidal aggression against Gaza has reached its 10th month. The danger continues as the same danger, and this time the breadth of the front and the friends and enemies on this front appear somewhat more clearly. The event is not limited only to the day of 15 July 2016, nor only to a change of government in Turkey. 15 July' cannot be said to have been understood unless it is grasped by us as a subject of history of the breadth it deserves and of a consciousness of friend and enemy.