A short tour of history towards our present and our tomorrow

The waters in our region are boiling again. Perhaps one may ask, "When did they ever settle?", which would not be an unjustified reaction at all. But this time's boiling and bubbling is exposing certain orders and schemes established since after the First World War, camouflaged and covered up with other covers and veils, and is forcing us to confront them and settle accounts with them. The order established that day was legitimized with a thousand and one lies, tricks, ideologies and stories.

Many collaborator rulers installed in power were promoted as heroes who saved their countries from occupation, and the orders that were established were made accepted by their peoples as orders worthy of the glory and honor of their peoples, nations and ulus, and as their work. It is of course no coincidence that the flags of all the Arab regimes established by severing their ties with the Ottomans are identical to one another. Not even the trouble of producing a more original flag for each was taken.

The differences, which consist of nothing more than the changing places of the colors of the three stripes and the triangle at its head, arise from the fact that all of them emerged as serial implementations of the same project, from the same head, the same kitchen. One of these stripes or of the stars stuck in the middle must surely symbolize liberation from Ottoman imperialism.

Those who made the Arabs memorize these stories also made us memorize the story that the Arabs stabbed us in the back and abandoned us. This is a case that has gone over to the classical, and conversely today also to the counter-memorization.

Yet before the Arabs abandoned us, we, withdrawing from the Palestine Front, leaving behind us Nablus, Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, do not even look back at the fact that we had abandoned. As a result of our withdrawal within 40 days from these lands that we ruled for 500 years (and before that too, in the Abbasid and Seljuk periods, we were again one and together), Jordan, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq and Syria ceased to be Ottoman lands. Everything happened precisely within these 40 days and through our withdrawal as the Ottomans. Of course, at the end of these 40 days, the war, which had already reached the point of ending, moved on to the stage of the armistice agreement.

When this history is looked at closely, the clearest thing to be seen is that the Arabs did not abandon us; on the contrary, we abandoned the Arabs. Had our retreating armies stopped at Homs and Aleppo, had fidelity been kept to the Misak-ı Milli cause and Kirkuk and Mosul not been given up, Turkey today would have a very different fate, geography and demography. This is worth dwelling on, but unfortunately, however aware of it we may be, it is not enough to change the realities in which we find ourselves today.

The Baath regime imposed on the Syrian people is on paper an Arab nationalist, even an Arab racist regime. But this regime, which is Arab racist, is not approved by 90 percent of its own people, who are entirely Arab; it is a regime that stands at the head hostile to that people, in spite of that people, by force and deceit. These are the regimes that the colonial countries that invaded these places after the Ottomans withdrew thought fit for them. Their only mission is to prevent the re-establishment of a political union between Turks and Arabs, indeed even among the Arabs themselves.

The matter is in fact truly neither Arab Nationalism nor Turkish Nationalism. The only mission of both is to isolate each of them, to make them lonely, and to drown them in their own narrow channel. If Arab nationalism had a real counterpart, a union that could form among the Arabs, who today number 500 million, would change the world's balances in its favor. If it had a counterpart, there would be no state called Israel today, and even if there were, it would not have dared this genocide against the Palestinians who are also, in one aspect, Arab.

If Arab nationalism had any value, the Syrian events from which we suffer today, to say nothing of the Palestinian issue, would not have come to this point. The 12 million Arabs deported from Syria by the oppression of an Arab nationalist regime are being subjected, all over the world, to a life of humiliation, being shoved and pushed around, in abasement. In fact, every kind of treatment that Syrian asylum seekers or refugees are subjected to all over the world directly destroys the ground on which Arab nationalism rests. Every Syrian, every Egyptian, every Tunisian, every Yemeni, every Iraqi who has had to flee Syria and to take refuge in other, non-Arab countries cries out to the Arab countries that never let go of nationalism, in the words of the Lebanese artist Julia Boutros, "Where are the millions, where is Arab Honor!"

Though not entirely the same, let us think of a similar case for the Turkic world as well. What excuse could the Turkic presence, numbering 300 million today, have for not having been able to turn its so strong nationalist feelings and discourses into stronger political and economic cooperation and solidarity? If this power had a real counterpart, would it not today have an effect that would change the course of the East Turkestan cause against China, let alone the effect it could produce through other solidarities to be entered into with Muslim countries?

Are the Arabs and Turks aware of their power, or are there other powers that prevent them from using that power?

If nationalism does not lead to a unity of power and action in the way of protecting and looking after the people of one's own nation and making them feel strong in the world, where does it lead?